AT PRESS TIME, 225,000 people had reportedly been killed in the tsunami-ravaged Asian countries. But the death toll from the December 26 earthquake off Indonesia’s Sumatra island and the tidal waves it unleashed on the Indian Ocean coastlines is no longer the crux of the problem. The ongoing catastrophe lies in the hundreds of thousands of survivors displaced, homeless, hungry and ill who have now become the whole world’s responsibility.

The third worst natural disaster in the past century took the world by storm, setting in motion the largest United Nations humanitarian relief operation in history. Unaware of the magnitude of the disaster, nations initially offered meagre amounts of relief. In an emergency donor conference held in Geneva two weeks later, Jan Egeland, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, announced that $717 million had been secured for immediate relief efforts covering the next six months the largest amount ever to be collected in such a short time.

A total of $9 billion has been raised in government and public pledges for the rebuilding of the worst-hit countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

This unprecedented show of compassion and solidarity did not, however, come without fears that Herculean promises would relapse into phenomenal disappointments when the dust settled, as was the case with other “forgotten emergencies” like Bam, Darfur and the anti-AIDS campaign in Africa.

In Geneva, Egeland assured international donors that he would do everything possible to ensure accountability and to investigate any allegations of mishandling of funds. He announced that the UN is preparing an improved real-time online financial service to record the flow of money from the instant it is received to its disbursement.

PricewaterhouseCoopers audit and consultancy firm promised to offer its services pro bono to make the information available to the public and to donor governments.

Peter Dejong/Associated Press

The race to out-give started with Australia in the lead, with a promise of $764 million, including loans and grants. Germany followed with $668 million, Japan with $500 million and the US with $350 million (having pushed its pledge up from an initial $15 million after being accused of penny-pinching). In addition, The International Monetary Fund pledged $250 million.

As for the oil-rich Gulf countries: all of them together offered a paltry $85 million: $30 million from Saudi Arabia, up from an initial $10 million; $10 million from Kuwait, up from an embarrassing $2 million; $20 million from the UAE; and $25 million from Qatar. A Saudi telethon elicited $82 million alone in one night from private donors.

An editorial in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas by editor Waleed Nusif was the first to ask the question: Why were the Gulf countries being so stingy when Saudi Arabia, for instance, makes six times as much as it gave in crude oil revenues daily?

“If the tragedy was presented as a ‘Muslim tragedy’ you could have found a stronger response,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera. “Some would even go as far as saying what happened was God’s wrath on people who deserved it. Unbelievable.”

Gamal Abdel Gawad, analyst at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS), however, begs to differ. “The image of the Gulf countries as steeped in dollars is wrong in itself. Economically speaking, Saudi Arabia for one is drowning in debt, and the GDP of all the Arab countries put together is equivalent to that of Spain alone.”

The real crisis, continues Abdel Gawad, lies elsewhere. “The emotional reaction to the disaster is what was lacking. The Arabs’ ability to empathize with humanity at large is less than their ability to sympathize with each other. Our concept of humanity is still weak compared to our ethnic feelings as Arabs and Muslims, despite the fact that most of the victims were Indonesian Muslims. The truth is, Southeast Asians are not perceived as Muslims in the Arab world.”

Arabs, he believes, continue to confine themselves to a narrow vision of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and refuse to regard themselves as part of the rest of the world. He dismisses claims that the size of the pledges was a result of the post-9/11 freeze on Islamic charities, stressing that had these charities still been active, they would have proven his point that even the few large-scale charity organizations based in the Gulf are mobilized to help what they perceive as Muslim communities, not the needy wherever and whoever they may be.

Abdel Gawad’s disappointment is shared by Director of the ACPSS Abdel Moneim Saeed, who believes that the quantity of the relief offered by the Arab countries as a whole has been small, not only from states, but also from individuals. “Even the media coverage of the disaster is not as was expected. Attention, money and organization have been lacking. The Ahram envoy was only sent recently, and reported that even the international efforts have been badly organized.”

Refusing to single out the Gulf countries, Saeed is disillusioned with the rich in all Arab countries, who, he believes, should contribute out of a moral and religious obligation. As for laying the blame on the

post-9/11 freeze on charities, he says that this is not entirely true for Egypt and Morocco, for instance, and compares the reaction here to that of Muslim organizations in the US, which worked hand in hand with other faith-based charity groups (Christian and Hindu) to set in motion a massive donation drive.

In Egypt, Africa’s largest telecom operator, MobiNil, was the first to mobilize contributions from the Middle East and North Africa, three weeks after the disaster occurred. Joining hands with UNICEF as part of the UN body’s corporate alliances program, it activated the number 1482 for donations from MobiNil users in the country, with plans to double the amount raised by the public and offer it as part of UNICEF’s recent appeal to raise $144.5 million to help the 1.5 million children caught in the disaster zone.

Our concept of humanity is still weak compared to our ethnic feelings as Arabs and Muslims, despite the fact that most of the victims were Indonesian Muslims.