On Monday, the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Center) received assistance worth 10 million euro (US$11 million) from the European Union to increase its capacity and operational capabilities in disaster monitoring and emergency response.

“We want to learn from the EU […] in terms of facilitating ASEAN collective response outside ASEAN region,” AHA Center executive director Adelina Kamal said after the grant’s launch in Jakarta on Monday. “Let's say there's a bushfire in Australia […], it has been the intention of ASEAN leaders in the past few years for ASEAN to collectively respond to incidents outside ASEAN.”

Such a collective response, she said, would bring a stronger impact than the one under bilateral mechanism — an approach used by some ASEAN member states in responding to disasters outside the region in the past.

In September 2016, ASEAN leaders signed a declaration of One ASEAN One Response, which specifies that AHA Center, at an appropriate time in the future, will facilitate ASEAN collective response outside the region.

“It's not that we don’t have many disasters within the region, we do; but it is also part of returning the favor because many of these countries like Australia or those in other parts in the region have actually been the friends of ASEAN and they have come forward and providing support to ASEAN member states,” Adelina said.

Southeast Asia saw large-scale natural disasters — including earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons and floods — between 2004 and 2014, causing more than 50 percent of global disaster mortalities. This prompted the AHA Center to become the “center of gravity” for all international assistance to the region.

EU Ambassador to ASEAN Igor Driesmans said the project consisted of an undisclosed amount of direct grant to the AHA Center, as well as capacity-building programs by civil protection agencies of EU member states, namely the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and the Estonia Rescue Board.

“Preparedness is as important as adequate responses in order to limit human casualties; we need a two-pronged approach to minimize casualties and losses,” he said.

The project is expected to also leverage the expertise of the EU's Emergency Response Coordination Center, which operates under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism and has a similar scope of work in the EU as the AHA Center does in ASEAN.

“The EU is one of the most successful regional organizations in terms of being able to respond outside the EU and we'd like to learn from them. We'd like to understand how they did it to the civil protection mechanism and to the humanitarian assistance mechanism,” said AHA Center deputy executive director Arnel C. Capili.

In 2018, amid numerous pledges of international assistance, AHA Center was one of the first humanitarian agencies to arrive in Palu, Central Sulawesi, after it was hit by earthquakes, a subsequent tsunami and soil liquefaction, claiming more than 2,000 lives and displacing tens of thousands of people. That year, the agency responded to as many as eight major large-scale disasters in the region, including Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines and a massive flood caused by a dam collapse in Laos.

The agency received last year the additional responsibility of providing assistance and advice on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are facing religious persecution, forcing them to flee the country.

Adelina said her agency, however, was only responsible for providing assessments and not for facilitating peace and reconciliation “because that’s not our mandate and expertise".

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