Ex-presidents wrap up tour of tsunami areas
MALE, Maldives – Wrapping up a tour of tsunami-ravaged nations, former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush sat with child survivors at a temporary shelter in southern Sri Lanka on Monday and mingled with European tourists at a luxury beach resort in the Maldives.
The children danced, sang and drew pictures of their experiences.
“Some of them are still drawing about the tsunami, and some of them are drawing life as they remember it, and as they want it to be again,” Clinton said in the fishing town of Weligama on Sri Lanka’s battered southern coast. “There was a lot of emotional damage here that’s not visible to the eye. We don’t want them to be suffering from this five or 10 years from now.”
The U.S.-funded temporary houses, built of cinderblocks and iron sheeting, were replacements for homes washed away in the tsunami, which killed more than 170,000 across the region.
The purpose of the three-day tour, which included stops in Thailand and the devastated Indonesian province of Aceh, was to encourage more donations for a reconstruction process across the Indian Ocean region that is expected to take years.
“We’re going to have to stay at this for some time,” Clinton said.
President Bush asked his father and Clinton, former political adversaries, to lead the American effort to raise private funds for tsunami relief. The pair said they planned to deliver a report to the president on March 8.
“I want to be able to tell that the money we saw was well spent, and that we have done everything we could to fulfill the mandate he gave us to get a high level of American private contributions, to ease the burden on the government,” Clinton said in the Maldives, a nation of islands that suffered severe damage to its tourism, agriculture and fishing industries.
Private U.S. donations have amounted to $700 million, Clinton said. President Bush has asked Congress to provide another $950 million.
Clinton said he supports the establishment of independent auditing operations to make sure there is no corruption or mismanagement.
The two former presidents traveled from the island capital of the Maldives, Male, to the nearby Kurumba resort, where tourists in bathing suits lounged by the pool, shaded by palm trees. Bush said vacationers around the world could help the Maldives recover by returning to its resorts, repeating a similar call that he made in Sri Lanka.
Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom warned that a tsunami warning system would be of little use because his citizens had nowhere to run on their low-lying islands if the ocean struck yet again.