Disaster relief

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The Disaster Relief aims to of natural disasters , war , epidemics or other major loss events to enable people affected the short and medium term survival. A distinction is made here in the policy of the Federal Republic of Germany between emergency aid in the form of food aid, for example, and medium-term projects with a duration of between six months and three years (emergency aid), which are intended to lay the basis for self-sustaining development. Long-term aid is provided as development aid, which is intended to help people help themselves. The transitions between the individual measures - emergency aid, emergency aid and long-term development aid - are fluid and ideally merge into one another.

The largest international organizations providing disaster relief are the ICRC and the UN (especially the UN emergency aid coordinator and the World Food Program WEP ). The International Committee of the Blue Shield (Association of the National Committees of the Blue Shield, ANCBS) also conducts national and international coordination with regard to military and civil structures in disaster relief .

For Germany, more information on disaster relief is standardized in the Civil Protection and Disaster Relief Act .

In Germany, various aid organizations have formed an alliance that becomes active in the event of a disaster. Thanks to the presence of its member organizations on site , the Alliance of Aktion Deutschland Hilft is able to provide quick help in emergencies. The Mental Health Facilitator of the National Board for Certified Counselors is an internationally certified training course for lay helpers in the event of a disaster .

Willingness to help with natural disasters

According to some experiments, natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes) arouse a greater willingness to help than disasters of anthropogenic origin (e.g. war). According to psychologists, the cause is the opinion that the victims of natural disasters are less responsible for their victim status than the victims of disasters of anthropogenic origin. However, this assumption is seldom correct in reality.

Disaster Relief Priorities

More often, there are controversies between aid organizations or between recipient and donor countries regarding the priorities to be set for disaster relief. It is also about the implementation of political goals by means of similar activities.

In many cases, the cooperation between NGOs, governments and the military is insufficient. Even in the Operational Command of the Armed Forces in Potsdam is judged on the cooperation between the military and civilian organizations, each with their own priorities skeptical or critical, through which it z. B. come to waste of resources. The cooperation between the Bundeswehr and NGOs is so short-term that there are often only "superficial contacts and suspicious coexistence".

2010 Haiti earthquake

In the case of the earthquake of January 12, 2010 in Haiti, the focus of US aid activities was on the expansion of the communication infrastructure (which could also be used by the military) and the management of violence ( Samuel P. Huntington ), i.e. on the fight against threatened looting and gang crime Airborne military. Doctors Without Borders criticized the military prioritization list because they ran out of supplies. The French government in turn criticized the rejection of its transport aircraft with a field hospital and other humanitarian cargo at the US-controlled Port-au-Prince airport. The US military maintained order and security at the airfield, but also gave itself the highest priority. Many supplies had to be dropped by parachute and missed their target.

See also

literature

  • Thomas Henzschel: International humanitarian aid: determining factors of a political field with special consideration of the Federal Republic of Germany. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2006, ISBN 3-8334-5061-4 .
  • Dieter Nohlen (Ed.): Lexicon Third World: Countries, Organizations, Theories, Terms, Persons. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-499-61468-5 .
  • Rainer Treptow (ed.): Disaster relief and humanitarian aid. Ernst Reinhardt Verlag Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-497-01896-3 .
  • BMZ (Ed.): Media Handbook Development Policy 2008/2009. BMZ , Berlin 2009. PDF version

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Zagefka, H., Noor, M., Brown, R., de Moura, G., and Hopthrow, T. (2010): Donating to disaster victims: Responses to natural and humanly caused events. European Journal of Social Psychology, doi : 10.1002 / ejsp.781
  2. Erik Rattat, in: Rainer Treptow (Ed.), P. 65
  3. ^ A review of the military disaster relief in Haiti , February 7, 2010, online: officiere.ch