Washington — In the wake of cyclones that devastated Mozambique, it appeared for a moment that a storm of another kind was about to sweep across Africa, the United States and Europe.
Gracia Machel, former minister of education and widow of Mozambique liberation leader and first president Samora Machel, sharply criticized the West, the Organization of African Unity and the Southern African Development Community for their slow response.
"There'll always be a question why people took so long," she told the South African Broadcasting Corporation in Maputo March 7. "Always, we have to be dying in thousands," said Machel, When we are dying in thousands then they come running. It's always too late."
Meanwhile rain continues to fall steadily across Southern Africa and will continue for at least another month and probably longer, according to weather experts. In Madagascar, just off the Mozambique coast, storms this month have killed more than 100 people and left over 10,000 homeless. It is the wettest rainy season in more than fifty years.
"We are taking a regional approach that includes Botswana and Madagascar as well as Mozambique," says Tom Dolan, the USAID official in charge of the Southern African Flood Response Team. President Clinton ordered the team's creation March 1 as cyclones and tropical storms lashed Mozambique. It draws participants from agencies across the U.S. government.
Saying "we can do more" than the $12.8 million that USAID had already been committed to relief efforts, President Clinton on March 1 announced creation of a Department of Defense Joint Task Force that would deploy C-130 support aircraft and heavy lift helicopters to assist in search and rescue operations. He authorized a "drawdown" of $37.6 million for the task force.
By then two cyclones had swept across Mozambique and meteorologists were warning that another might be on the way. Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, while expressing gratitude for the assistance provided, said his nation needed much more from the United States and Europe.
"Mozambique became 'urgent' that week," says House Africa Subcommittee minority staffer Mark Clack. "We had been talking about the situation among ourselves. And the British had made a big splash over the issue ahead of us. South African pilots were flying rescue missions. At that point we really didn't have much of anything in the region or Africa that could help out."
As a part of stepped up activity on March 2, officials from the State Department, USAID, the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration briefed members of Congress on the situation in Mozambique. A second briefing on March 9, this time led by Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, along with National Security Council Africa specialist Gail Smith, gave a more detailed report and analysis. "Members saw that some actual thought had been given to the problem and became more interested in helping out, " says Clack.
Meanwhile in South Africa, Air Serv International helicopters leased by USAID began flying rescue missions on March 2, and a Dade County Florida Search and Rescue Squad sent over by Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater began water rescue operations with rubber rafts.
Stung by criticism suggesting that they were slower to react to an African crisis than they would have been if a similar crisis had occurred in Europe, officials on the U.S. response team and throughout the Clinton administration argue that they reacted with amazing speed and efficiency, given the logistical demands and climatic uncertainty they faced. While a second cyclone - Eline - hit Mozambique February 22, "It was not until February 25, when a second surge of water caused the rivers and the dams to overflow, that the disaster became worse than anyone had anticipated," USAID Administrator J. Brady Anderson said.
Government officials - and even some non-governmental organizations that have been critical of the speed of the U.S. response - agree that just about everyone was caught flat-footed by the immensity of Mozambique's flooding. "Floods are not like earthquakes," says UNICEF spokesman Alfred Ironside. "They are generally slow moving, then suddenly they catch up with you."
And Hugh Parmer, administrator of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Response (BHR), referring to the renewed flooding that engulfed Mozambique February 25, said that from "the time the rains began to fall heavily in Zimbabwe to the time that the water level began rising in Mozambique occurred within about a 48-hour period. One of our problems was we didn't have any assessment personnel on the ground in Zimbabwe. There just wasn't much coming in the way of reports. Almost the first that we knew [of the seriousness of the Zimbabwe flow] was, as the water stopped receding and began rising down the Limpopo and the Save rivers. Should we have posted someone upstream in Zimbabwe to watch the rainfall? Maybe so."
[For allAfrica/Africa News Service reporting on the flood crisis that had already swamped Mozambique by mid-February see "Mozambique hardest hit as rains pummel southeastern Africa."]
Although the dramatic film and video coverage of a flooded Mozambique seen on television in late February and early March have come to define the disaster, Mozambique and the region actually began going under water at the beginning of January, when rains came earlier and fell more heavily than anyone remembers. In four days at the end of that month, Mozambique received almost as much rainfall as it gets in a normal year. Southern Botswana received 75 percent of its annual rainfall in just three days.
Then over the weekend of February 5 and 6, Cyclone Connie hit and concern began rising in Washington and other capitals. The focus in Washington was on assisting local relief efforts. Almost no thought was given to the possibility of water pouring into the flat plains of Mozambique from waterlogged highland regions in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana, administration officials say.
A BHR assessment team arrived in Mozambique on February 12. It reported, however, that while cyclone Connie's damage was "serious," local resources could handle what U.S. Ambassador to Mozambique Dean Curran had officially called a "disaster." Reports to Washington by the team "consistently indicated that, although the flooding was of a serious nature and there were people at risk, the Mozambican and South African and regional resources available for search and rescue operations were adequate for the conditions that existed there at that period of time," says BHR Administrator Hugh Parmer.
Just five days before the BHR team's arrival, tourists trapped by floodwater were evacuated from Kruger National Park in South Africa. Hundreds of thousands were now homeless in Mozambique's Gaza province, and thousands, especially those in slum housing, fled their homes in the capital city Maputo as water washed in. Damage to Maputo alone was estimated at over $15 million, with rail lines washed away, harbors swamped and industrial areas submerged.
Sections of the main highway linking the nation's north and south were under water and impassable. The Christian Council of Mozambique and the governments of both Mozambique and South Africa warned of worse to come, with the rivers feeding Mozambique's waterways still rising and Cyclone Eline approaching. Mozambique made urgent appeals to the international community for emergency supplies and for equipment to rescue people already trapped without food or clean water.
In those circumstances, Washington's failure to act in earlier remain inexplicable to critics. Mozambique Foreign Minister Leonardo Simao told a reporter that it seemed to him that his nation's problems were just not considered urgent by most nations with the resources to assist. "I believe the inertia of bureaucracy is evident," Simao was quoted as saying.
"It's hard to look back and fine tune the discussion," said one official speaking on background, explaining that decision-making about how to respond was driven by reports from the official team on the ground in Mozambique. "The level of flooding was unexpected and our response was proactive. The reporting [of our team] coming out of Mozambique was the determinant."
For most of February, Washington continued to try and determine what the situation in Mozambique was, according to officials in several government agencies.
On February 18 a 12-person Department of Defense Human Assistance Survey Team (HAST) arrived in Mozambique to assess conditions. Though it called Mozambique's situation "difficult," like the BHR group that preceded it, this military team also reported that it felt local resources could handle the problem. South African helicopters were now flying rescue missions. The team reported that rain had slowed and floodwaters seemed to be receding. USAID's response unit breathed a sigh of relief. "We had dodged a bullet," is how Hugh Parmer characterized the response.
The relief was short-lived. "Do I wish I had an ability to know and see forward and to see that that second wave of water was going to come out of Zimbabwe?" Parmer asks. "Do I wish I had committed some United States resources, put those search and rescue boat teams in the week before? Yes, I do. Do you, in this humanitarian response business deal on the basis of reports that you get from the field rather than some kind of gut instinct? Yes, you do. The reports we got from the field from two independent United States government sources were the same."
With the new disaster that swept across Mozambique on February 25, rescue from the rapidly rising rivers replaced relief as the paramount immediate need. But with virtually no U.S. resources in Africa, what could be accomplished immediately was limited. Says Parmer: "It was clear to us that the capacity of our civilian response would not be adequate to meet the scope of the disaster, and we called upon, as we always do -wherever it might be where a massive disaster occurs - our friends in the Pentagon to provide additional assistance."
On February 28, with criticism of U.S. inaction mounting, USAID announced that $1 million would be made available to pay for search and rescue and air transport operations in Mozambique. On March 1 a C-17 carrying 85,000 pounds of supplies became the first U.S. military aircraft to fly relief into Mozambique. Three days later, two C-130 cargo planes - "the workhorse" of the Air Force's airlift fleet - left the Ramstein Air Base in Germany for Beira, Mozambique. Five other C- 130s followed them a few days afterwards.
By March 7, 247 DOD task force personnel were in Mozambique and South Africa. Three HH-6 helicopters had arrived and three more MH-53 helicopters were on the way. Named to head the operation was Major General Joseph H. Wherle, based in Maputo to be close to United Nations headquarters and non-governmental organizations in the capital. Most helicopters and fixed wing aircraft operated out of Hoedspruitt air base in South Africa and Beira, in the middle of Mozambique, where congestion was less than in Maputo, according to Pentagon spokeman Ken Bacon.
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Asked about the lag time between the obvious need for rescues and the dispatch of aircraft, a Pentagon official responded "the HAST team didn't get out there until February 18, and their job was to figure out what sort of assistance was needed. We never want to do anything unless we're sure what needs to be done."
Interagency meetings also slowed the process of rapid command and execution. Daily exchanges took place in a variety of ways: face to face, by telephone, and sometimes through video conferencing. "The ambassador's disaster declaration made interagency cooperation necessary [among]State, USAID with the NSC sort of chairing," said the official. "It wasn't really a working group but we were trying to pull together."
While U.S. officials reject allegations that their response was too slow, discussion is now underway inside the administration about to act more speedily and effectively in future disasters. The United Nations reports that the number of catastrophes worldwide has trebled over the past 10 years.
Another important post-flood analysis centers on the African response. Although South Africa was able to render substantial assistance in air rescues - for example, plucking thousands of people from precarious perches in treetops - and Malawi also deployed a helicopter, neighboring Zimbabwe did not. Although Zimbabwe has a sizable air force, most of its helicopters were supporting the besieged government of President Laurent Kabila in Congo.
In an editorial, Uganda's New Vision newspaper wrote, "The Mozambique tragedy offers a lesson to the developing countries especially in Africa. It is imperative that disaster preparedness is given consideration in development plans." The Namibian newspaper reported that the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an alliance of 12 nations in the region, "which has been under fire for sitting idle as an organization, has now put in place mechanisms to work as a unit to address problems brought about by the floods."
Virtually all observers and experts agree that the task of reconstruction in the aftermath of the flooding is enormous. Costs are estimated to be as high as $250 million. Mozambique - which until the storm's destruction last month was the fastest growing economy in the world, according to Britain's Economist magazine - may have been set back a decade. President Chissano has called on creditors to cancel all of Mozambique's foreign debt, which has been draining $1.4 million in payments from the country's treasury each week. Even without the floods, Chissano said, debt forgiveness is a critical necessity in the fight against poverty for the world's poorest nations.
