Japan dithered over UK aid offer

An emergency rescue team from Britain has just arrived in Kobe but it was invited too late to be of much help, a spokeswoman for the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) of the Foreign Office in London said. Though promptly dispatched from Britain, two relief flights have only just reached the quake-stricken area, and with the death-toll now over 5,000, hopes of finding any more victims still alive under the rubble are slim. The rescue work was interrupted yesterday by three sharp aftershocks, at 4.2, 4.3 and 4.5 on the Richter scale, which caused buildings to sway and raised fears that more buildings could collapse.

One British aircraft brought a 15-member group from the International Rescue Corps (IRC) with thermal- imaging and ultra-sonic sensing equipment to locate buried victims. Based in Stirlingshire, the IRC has experience of 15 dangerous missions around theworld and aims "to mobilise a self-contained rescue team within 24 hours (overseas), within minutes (UK), of a request, " according to one of its notices. Instead, after the earthquake, the IRC was kept waiting for days while Tokyo considered the offer.

"When they told us on Saturday they had received a `request' from Japan, we said `great', and gave them our backing. On Friday, there had been news that the French were on their way, and that the Swiss were already there. It was by then extremely late," the ODA spokeswoman recalls. Other British offers to dispatch relief volunteers were either unanswered or politely rejected.

The French government has similar complaints of Japanese bureaucratic delays which have almost certainly cost many lives. A 60-strong team with three sniffer dogs from the Special Unit for Emergency Relief of the French Ministry of the Interior did not arrive until Saturday.

"We gave our offer to help on Tuesday night, and the first reaction was on Wednesday. They were very grateful, but said they didn't need any help. After that, they asked if they could have only the dogs and 10, not 60 people. Finally, they accepted our original offer on Friday afternoon, while apologising for the general problem of getting a decision," a French Embassy official in Tokyo said.

Yesterday, while the Prime Minister, Tomiichi Murayama, was defending himself in the Japanese parliament against claims of incompetence in handling the earthquake disaster, his most senior diplomat admitted to confusion within the government during theemergency.

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