Open Letter to the United Nations
November 21, 2013
HIS EXCELLENCY
BAN KI MOON
Secretary General
The United Nations
UN Headquarters
First Avenue at 46th Street
New York, NY 10017
USA
Dearest Secretary General Ban:
Our warmest greetings!
Kindly please understand, I had seriously debated on whether to send this communication to you or not. I decided on going through with it since I believe that the result would turn out for the better. Nothing that transpired in the past has diminished nor degraded my respect and love for the UN. I have no intention in demeaning anyone's position or creating anything negative between myself, my group and the UN even if that can't be helped, but this has to be done, and I shall humbly embrace the consequences of my act.
After tropical cyclone Haiyan aka Yolanda, not a surprising lot of relief organizations are now helping in Tacloban, in the towns of Leyte, Samar, Cebu, Bohol, Capiz, Aklan, even parts of Mindanao. Entire states committed volumes of resources to come to the aid of the Philippines. As published in the media, the Philippine Government stated that the affected areas include nine (9) Regions in the entire archipelago that consists of seventeen (17) Regions, with three (3) Regions being small and newly created divisions that were fairly recently separated by Special Law (CAR, ARMM and Caraga). It is presumed that all of these relief organizations and representatives of their own countries are operating out of the goodness of heart and the desire to be of sincere help to the people of Tacloban City, the municipalities of Leyte, Samar, Cebu, Bohol, Capiz, Aklan, portions of Mindanao. Although some are at a loss to convince others of their intentions: "just wait... in due time we are convince you of our legitimaty."
Some of these relief organizations are part and parcel of the United Nations organization. Be that as it may, most or all of these organizations anyway, under the principle that all states are municipalities embraced by the founding charter of League of Nations that is now the United Nations, are governed under the auspices of the august body that you head. The people of Tacloban City and the rest of the areas affected by the tropical cyclone Haiyan aka Yolanda, are grateful for all of the help of the UN, the honorable member states under it and the public sector as well as private relief groups that are now helping.
Now allow us to come to the point of this letter. Nearly five (5) years ago today, after tropical cyclone Ondoy struck, we increased the level and pace of our twenty one (21) year advocacy for disaster preparedness. At the time, we painfully discovered what we, and many of us, have known all along, that the best kind of preparedness is foreknowledge and forewarning of events that will befall upon us. In the beginning, we began simply with the goading of Philippines Department of National Defense (DND) to adopt a modernized system incorporating the Geographic Information System (GIS) into the framework of its operations. That was in 1991-1992. On record, our paper was even used by the DND to brief Malacanang (at the time, headed by the late Madame Corazon Cojuangco Aquino).
Among the other relevant actions we undertook are the following:
1. We pushed for the creation of Philippines public sector satellite information management agency
2. Heeded the order to write up and then submitted a full blown justification for the reinstatement of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Forest Ranger Battalion
3. We pushed for the creation of a decently sized defense intelligence agency thinking that if the defense community has a functionally working national intelligence office, it will be forced to modernize its decrepit systems
4. We promoted the study and suggestions of a German scientist to undertake seeding the top of the mountain ranges bordering Eastern Pangasinan, Pampanga, Tarlac, Zambales so that the sprouting vegetation that will ensue will hold water and portions of the hundreds of billions of ash that up to this day lay dangerously still in those higher grounds overlooking parts of Pangasinan and large areas of Central Luzon.
5. We pushed for the Philippine Government to establish a United States-type National Command Center war room operations system to enable the national leadership to have a handle on what is going on at the ground with the flick of a finger on a keyboard.
6. As a small, but key part of our advocacy, in 1992 our group encouraged the Philippine Government to adopt the concept of the installing of Public Warning Systems (PWS), of which Germany at the time had among the most advanced and efficiently working systems that integrated the frequency of the control console to the simple overhead loudspeaker to the television and radio frequency if the time to use that feature was necessary, as in a natural disaster or a man-made catastrophe. This is no longer a new thing today, but in the Philippines, as in hundreds of other countries, this kind of simple technology is not even known, much less has been installed in large part or as a nationwide project. Atty. Duque of the Office of Civil Defense, DND herself considered setting up the system was remarkable but that she said the government is constrained by budgetary limitations.
7. At the risk of breaking our relationship with then Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jose C. De Venecia, we went ahead with opposing the project to build a super bridge-breakwater that will connect Batangas and Bataan but will block the mouth of Manila Bay. At the time, we were still part of the Private Sector representation in the Presidential Task Force on Red Tide and were in coordination with Undersecretary of Defense Campos.
8. On overtime and overdrive while still at the defense department, we fulfilled the tasks of consolidating damage reports from all government agencies and even committed the grave sin (I could actually go to jail for this) of bloating by more than just tenfolds, the rehabilitation and reconstruction funding requirements for the victim towns and cities just because of the painful knowledge that much of the money coming down to the victim areas will be stolen by all the people from top echelons down to the lowest rungs of both government and their conspirators in the private sector. What the real needy victim areas and the people thereat will be getting will be just the measly crumbs remaining from the thieves' looting. We were also hoping, that with a bloated budget, somehow, somewhere along the way, the beneficiaries will also engage in some kind of capacity building activities to make their communities more prepared for disasters in the future.
These are only very, very few of the things that we have done prior to making our initial communications with you about the suggestion to hold in the Philippines, a Conference on disaster and environmental hazards called the Hazards Mapping and Environment Summit (HMES), in 2009 after typhoon Ondoy. Our dearest hope, Your Excellency, was that in one way or another, the United Nations will become our big brother and help and guide us as we go through with rallying as many people to support us in the holding of the HMES gathering in Manila many months after Ondoy - in the following year of 2010. That is why up to this date, you will find our efforts posted all over the internet as HMES 2010.
If you will recall Your Excellency, in our letter and in succeeding brief narratives in the publications that we made, our real focus are only simple: relocation, forecasting and comprehensive preparations.
Over the years, the entire gamut of society have developed technologies that will make earthquake sensing, tsunami forecasting, hurricane forecasting and similar other activities much easier. It will just be matter of coordinating the sharing of the scientific data and the technologies that we envisioned to do in that conference.
Over the years, there is nothing new anymore about preparation for disaster response. It is known everywhere and by mostly everyone in the concerned government agencies, even relief organizations or other groups and insitutions concerned with past, current forthcoming calamities. Some relief organizations are even too practical that they prepare in advance of disasters, such as the International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC) and the various national chapters such as in this case, the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC).
Over the years, the United Nations through the International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) has trumpeted the call for strengthening of Community Resiliency (CR). This campaign has spanned the whole world and the United Nations has spent not a little bit of money for this kind of campaign.
However, coming to their own senses, two years later following our communication to you, and even at the height of the UN campaign for Community Resiliency, the people of Fukushima and Sendai, realizing that it was not in their best interest to lie within the path of disaster, decided, even with difficulty in raising the full amount of the money required from the Japanese national government, to relocate their entire coastal human settlements to much, much higher ground. They will experience in advance, what the people victimized by Yolanda, will experience in the future. And now that experience led to thousands of death and billions of losses.
The same experience was gone through by the people of Cagayan de Oro a few years from our communication with you and they also suffered the same fate as the people of Tacloban and the other areas affected by Yolanda. For their habitat was in a island that was impractically situated in the middle of the Cagayan de Oro main river near the mouth of the sea. Like the people of Sendai, Fukushima and others affected by such flooding or overhead surges of huge amounts of water, they were directly in the bull's eye of the disaster and inevitably will be hit, whether they supported the idea or not of being allowed by people like us who knew, to just lie in the path of extreme danger.
In that period in the past, Mirja Peters, Craig Duncan and Matthew Conway made direct contact with the organizers of the Conference. After the initial contact by email, nothing happened anymore. Craig and Metthew had emailed and asked if we could coordinate with Ms. Elaine Bautista (now Mrs. Horne) who was UNISDR's coordination point persons in the Philippines but nothing came about with Ms. Bautista. During Christmas, I receive an emailed Christmas Card greeting from the then UNISDR head, Ms. Margareta Wahlström. That is all Your Excellency, including announcements of various kinds. None at all about the conference or our advocacy. On the other hand, mapping experts from all around the globe who read our invitation in preventionweb wrote to us and we wrote back to them, sending them detailed information about the project.
Your reaction was similar to that of the government, then under Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cold.
I wrote an email to Ms. Babcock of the United Nations in the Philippines attaching my letter to you, but their response, is a bit quirky. When I called her office, it was relayed that Ms. Babcock will need to be given a hard copy of our letter to you because an emailed letter won't suffice. I did not call Your Excellency's Representative anymore.
From our part, the delay in the our holding of the Conference could have been caused by the fact that the brother of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is the CEO of CIMB Bank of Malaysia, may have been in error when his bank asked to be considered to be inadequate to fund our bank instrument from the Banco Central of Venezuela, but on hindsight, it could be possible that our own fund partners might have also been remiss in complying with all the due diligence procedures required in both Malaysia and in CIMB Bank.
We are not concerned with the delay in the holding of the Conference, Your Excellency. Although as far as we know, every minute that the Conference is postponed from happening, there is a danger that another super disaster like Yolanda will strike once again in any part of the globe. We have decided to switch funding partners and are now prepared to enter into a venture with another partner.
Your Excellency yourself, is having some bit of a difficult time with the heated debates on the furtherance of the policy decisions, fine tuning of UN body Resolutions on Climate Change, and imposing the sanctions under the signed treaties and agreements on hazardous emissions upon both states and members of private commercial industrial enterprise. But what will really stop Your Excellency from considering that a decent approach to the proposals we are selling through the conference is needed? These are simple things:
1. Gather people with the data (the conference)
2. Map out areas with extreme vulnerability (for instance the Marikina West Valley Fault System that is now lined with tall skyscrapers, malls, condominiums and call centers, ditto with the Pasig River banks - that fortunately until now has not yet been converted by the DM Consunji Construction into a miles-long Boardwalk with hundreds of commercial establishments therein)
3. Draw out Conference Resolutions that will urge the UN to promulgate its own resolutions pertaining to: (a) compelling member states to undertake more vigorous disaster preparedness planning, submission of these to the UNEP-OCHA- cluster and implement these plans; (b) commemorate a full month for Disaster Prevention - Preparedness Awareness all over the world; and, (c) commit the entire might of the member states to avoiding similar post-Yolanda episodes by undertaking massive - even if costly - selective relocation and social, environmental re-engineering in high vulnerability areas.
4. Draw out a Special Resolution to encourage the international financial community to help and coordinate with their host governments to fund the disaster preparation activities, relocation programs and create special products that will enable all the projects to be funded and accomplished as soon as possible
5. Undertake symposia, workshops on related topics as well as tackling of impromptu suggested subjects relevant to the conference
6. At the end of the conference, to hold a fund-raiser event to fund the continuance of the Hazards Mapping and Sustainable Environment campaigns and to give to victims of at the time, the recent destructive typhoon
In all of the time that had passed between our initial attempt at a contact with Your Excellency, a huge number of similar Conferences have been conducted in many parts of the world. Some were even also, like ours, called Summit on Mapping. What our intentions were in 2009, remain up to this date; however, if anyone of those that held those replicate Conferences and Summits have been successful, let it be said Your Excellency, that some form of mitigation could have been made in the case of pre-Yolanda, pre-Fukushima and Sendai tsunami, pre-Haiti earthquake, among too many others and that the casualties of the magnitude that we are seeing today might truly have been less.
The reason why these replicate Conferences or Summits never really succeeded in coming to a point of helping policy regimes to change, is that they were never intended at all to do that. If, for no reason at all, Your Excellency and the whole might of the United Nations cannot do anything to convince its municipalities under its suasion to adopt more serious disaster preparedness programs, how many more disasters will there be that will kill from thousands, to hundreds of thousands (Aceh Indonesia, Bangladesh, etc.) to millions of innocent people caught unaware by three storey-high raging waters or intense earthquakes that we are unable to predict with more sensible accuracy and with a decent time frame for issuing serious public warnings? Are we prepared to accept the loss?
Is it really cute and wonderful, making us teary-eyed and totally so relieved that there are millions of people now involved in relief organizations - some being sprung from just a few hours ago, some a decent five days ago? That just because, with the public sector and the private sector businesses as well as these relief organizations, we shall now close our eyes to future disasters? Will we actually be extremely pleased that from the lowly people in the street to the hyfalutin and the nobility in all parts of the world, the buzzword is relief organization this and relief organization that? After the conduct of relief, humanitarian aid-assistance, everyone comes back to their senses and forget about forecasting, foretelling and forewarning. So what is it to be Your Excellency, when Yolanda dies down, Your Excellency will also forget that there are really a few little nitpicky questions that we have to answer, but that the affairs of the United Nations are too significant that the lives of future victims will not really matter?
Even if the topic about Yolanda dies down, I will not forget. I did not forget Ondoy for these past five years. More so now, because I am also a native of Tacloban. I am just fortunate not to have been there, but my own brother and his spouse nearly were and now I have a really clear view of the place and it is not so good Your Excellency that even Your Excellency yourself will be moved, even if South Koreans - who number in the hundreds of thousands in the Philippines now - were not killed by Yolanda here in Tacloban City by the thousands like our fellow natives of this country.
Kindly please tell me the answer yourself if you are willing to gamble sharing the time of the United Nations to accomplish this project of pushing through with the hazards mapping and environment conference, Your Excellency in your own free time, either as a Secretary General, as a private citizen. If that is not possible within your tenure, even after you retire from that job just tell me what was wrong that our team and the UN cannot work together. I can wait that long, after nearly five years that you gave this issue the snub. Even if our brothers and sisters keep dying; it's just that I am intrigued what kept you from being so cool about the matter.
My email address is asiacommunications@msn.com and info@hazmapping.com. I don't have a way to let my skype program function at its best so don't skype me. My functioning telephone is +6325058107 and my mobile is +6329212261611. Your Excellency's reply letter and / or call and especially your help to make the summit proceed, I can take.
Thank you for so much as even reading this letter.
Faithfully yours,
HMES
Her Excellency Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
Margareta Wahlstrom UNISDR
His Excellency Ban Ki Moon UN
#Yolanda
#YolandaPH
#Philippines
#disaster
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