Italian quake supremo slams US effort in Haiti

The man who masterminded the Italian response to the L'Aquila earthquake last April has launched a broadside against the way relief efforts in Haiti are being handled.
 
Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's civil protection service, said the response so far amounted to little more than a "show of force" on the part of the US military, who now have 13,000 troops in the devastated country.

He condemned other countries and aid organisations for taking part in a "vanity parade" designed to emphasise their own importance.
 
Bertolaso (above) arrived in Haiti on Friday and made the comments in an interview with Italian state television on Sunday. "We are missing a leader, a co-ordination capacity that goes beyond military discipline," he said.

"The Americans are extraordinary, but when you are facing a situation in chaos, they tend to confuse military intervention with emergency aid, which cannot be entrusted to the armed forces."

Bertolaso won widespread praise for his co-ordination of the relief effort in Abruzzo. However, the two quakes are beyond comparison: the L'Aquila tremor measured 5.8 on the Richter scale, against an earthquake of 7.0 in Haiti on January 12. The death toll in the medieval town of L'Aquila was 307. The death toll in Port-au-Prince alone is believed to be over 150,000.

Most important, the level of looting and other crime being reported from Port-au-Prince makes a security presence paramount. This was not an issue in L'Aquila.

The Italian government has reacted with dismay to the comments from Bertolaso, who appears to have learned his diplomacy skills from his friend Silvio Berlusconi.

As chance would have it, Italy's foreign minister Franco Frattini is in Washington to meet Hillary Clinton. He said the Italian government "dissociated itself" from Bertolaso's "head-on" attack. ·