Bush dismisses claims US tsunami response 'stingy'

CRAWFORD, TEXAS - United States President George W Bush said on Wednesday that a US$35 million ($49.7 million) US pledge for victims of the Asian tsunami was only the beginning and any suggestions America was stingy were "misguided and ill-informed".

In his first public statement since the tsunami struck on Sunday, Bush did not announce an immediate boost in aid but said the United States was forming a new coalition with India, Japan and Australia to co-ordinate relief efforts.

Critics have faulted Bush, who has been on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for not making a public statement sooner on the cataclysm in which nearly 80,000 have died.

The toll could top 100,000, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

Bush promised to stand with the affected countries as they provide relief to victims and rebuild. He added that he had spoken by phone to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia.

"I assured those leaders that this is just only the beginning of our help," he said at a briefing with reporters at an airport hangar near the ranch.

He showed pique at a comment by a United Nations official that rich countries had generally been "stingy" in aid to poor nations.

"I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed," he said.

"In the year 2004, our government provided US$2.4 billion in food and cash and humanitarian relief. ... That's 40 per cent of all the relief aid given in the world last year," he said.

The UN has for decades pushed for rich nations to give away 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) every year in development aid. The US gives 0.13 per cent of its GDP.

But this amount excludes aid to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as food aid, where the US is the biggest donor but does not attach a monetary value to its contributions.

Jan Egeland, emergency relief co-ordinator for the UN, pleaded on Monday for rich nations to respond generously and quickly and said the level of their aid contributions in general had been "stingy".

Egeland said his comments had been misinterpreted to apply specifically to the tsunami and said governments across the board had been "very generous" in their response.

Some called the Bush administration's early reaction to the disaster in Asia a missed opportunity to show leadership at a time when the US has been trying to build support for its "war on terror".

"I think politically they've done poorly," Derek Mitchell, an expert in Asian affairs at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said.

Mitchell said the administration initially announced a contribution of just US$15 million and said officials did not do enough to make clear that much more likely would be coming to help meet needs expected to reach into the billions.

Some members of Congress urged a stepped-up effort.

In a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, called for the US to drastically increase foreign aid to the region.

He suggested attaching a measure for it to a supplemental package for Iraq the administration is expected to request in Congress early next year.

Arizona Republican Republican Jim Kolbe, who is in charge of House spending on foreign aid, said another possibility was to redirect unused Iraq reconstruction money to tsunami victims.

At the briefing, Bush said he would consider a German proposal for a debt moratorium for Indonesia and Somalia.

Asked if the US was adequately protected with tsunami early warning systems for residents of the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii, Bush said he was asking government agencies to look into such things.

"I think that our location in the world is such that we may be less vulnerable than other parts," Bush said.

"But I am not a geologist, as you know."

White House spokesman Trent Duffy later said Bush had asked US Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Interior Secretary Gale Norton to look into American preparedness for tsunamis.

- REUTERS