From a Land Far Away, Help for Katrina Victims

Anne C. Richard, a vice president at the IRC and the author of the report "Role Reversal: Offers of Help From Other Countries in Response to Hurricane Katrina" said the federal government initially fumbled, resisted and mishandled some offers of international help. For example, 500,000 meals-ready-to-eat sent by the British government were never used because the U.S. Department for Agriculture blocked them out of concern about mad cow disease.

The report, primarily based on interviews with key U.S. government officials and international experts and diplomats, said the Bush administration, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, maintained that international help was not needed. When the State Department reversed its decision, it took more than a week to set up a system to vet offers and donations.

While the federal government has been widely criticized for its response to Katrina, Khalifa is a defender, saying the disaster reached "biblical magnitude."

"People think governments have a magic touch; they can say, 'We will do things' and it will happen," he said.

"Personally, I didn't think the damage was as much as it was until I myself went to New Orleans. There were no human beings, while a few months before there had been more than 200,000 people. It is like I wake up one morning and my people are not in their homes."

He described a scene where some houses had been thrown hundreds of yards and others were full of sand. "I put myself in the position of people who were there; it must have been so frightening," Khalifa said.

Such scenes compelled the international community to help, as described by the IRC report. The Netherlands and Germany sent water pumps and expert teams to help empty the floodwaters from New Orleans, the Canadian military and coast guard came to work with their U.S. counterparts, and Japan and China sent generators.

The French sought to protect the Gulf Coast's culture with a program to bring jazz, Creole and Cajun musicians to France for concert tours, while the Hungarian ambassador's rock band, the Coalition of the Willing, held a fundraising concert at the House of Blues in Cleveland.

"I think most Americans have little understanding about the extent to which other countries were moved and concerned," Richard said.