PERSPECTIVE ON RELIEF : First Aid for a Suffering World : Disasters keep arising anew with urgent claims on humanitarian aid--a task the U.N. was once ready to take on.

Imagine Los Angeles with a volunteer fire department. Imagine California not requiring skyscrapers to be earthquake-resistant. Imagine south Florida with no hurricane emergency evacuation plan.

Now, imagine a world racked by emergencies of unprecedented scale with no disaster prevention and response capacity. For the people of Rwanda, as for the people of Somalia and Bosnia, Haiti and the Sudan, there is no need to imagine the result: The unnecessary deaths are all too real.

The drumbeat of major human disasters that accelerated several years ago should have put the international community on notice that it is time for a systematic, preventive response to large-scale emergencies. But rather than responding with visionary, forward-looking programs, the United Nations and its leading member countries--the United States, the European community and Japan--continue to respond in an uncoordinated, delayed, ad hoc fashion. This collective failure to take action to save lives borders on the criminal.

This was to have changed two years ago with the creation of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs within the United Nations. The DHA, created partly in response to U.S. pressure, was supposed to become the global mechanism for emergency coordination. Its director was appointed by and would report directly to the U.N. secretary general. The DHA would bring order out of chaos, providing early warning information, mobilizing donor governments for emergency programs and coordinating the various U.N. and government agencies that respond to distress.

To date, the DHA has been a failure. Even though Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was instrumental in the conception and creation of the agency, he has not provided the financial and institutional support required to fulfill its mandate. In the Somali emergency, it became evident quickly that DHA had no power and that the U.N. agencies normally involved in emergency response--the World Food Program, UNICEF, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees--could avoid DHA coordination without sanction. In recent crises, including Rwanda, the agency has been virtually invisible.

There is also a United Nations Disaster Relief Organization. Its main functions apparently are to issue information bulletins and hold conferences.

International non-governmental organizations tend to have more advance warning of disaster, work much more effectively through indigenous institutions in the affected communities and devise more creative programs than either the United Nations or governments. But their collective capacity is far too small to mount the required comprehensive response. As for governments, they tend to act unilaterally in emergency situations, with the timing and the content of the response driven by domestic political considerations rather than needs on the ground.

In a world in which major humanitarian disasters occur frequently, the international community can no longer conduct itself as if emergencies are an aberration. Corrective action is imperative.

The secretary general, with support of the leading industrialized countries, must invigorate the Department of Humanitarian Affairs, giving it the staff and budget necessary to carry out its core functions: planning for long-term disaster prevention and coordinating the international response to acute emergencies.

A re-empowered DHA will need permanent resources. Concrete initiatives should include prepositioning emergency supplies (food, water-supply equipment, oral rehydration salts, tents, blankets, latrines) in DHA-managed warehouses in logistical hubs in disaster prone regions. The agency must staff these disaster units with trained personnel, permanently equipped with transportation and logistical materials.

When not responding to an immediate emergency, the staff of these units would engage in training for local governments and non-governmental organizations in disaster preparedness. They would also function as the ongoing human early-warning system for the United Nations and the international community, alerting the appropriate powers to looming emergencies and taking initial preventive measures.

This approach would link humanitarian response to long-term peace and development. Every recent humanitarian disaster has had a political dimension. Mass suffering is inextricably tried to political failure. The weakness of the United Nations in the area of peacekeeping is also acute, as we have seen in Rwanda with hundreds of thousands of deaths after the withdrawal and subsequent failure to reintroduce U.N. peacekeepers.

As the world focuses appropriately on the disaster in Rwanda, serious food shortages are looming in the Horn of Africa and the south, with as many as 7 million people potentially at risk from drought. Humanitarian problems of this magnitude are a regular feature of life in the global community for the foreseeable future. Absent a significant investment in disaster prevention and response, images of suffering will continue to assault the world with depressing regularity.

The failure to respond in time is not the result of compassion fatigue or lack of media attention or funds--the usual excuses--but of incompetence and failure to address a critical systems failure in the international humanitarian system. The United Nations, with active moral and practical leadership from the United States and the other industrialized countries-- must take on this effort as its responsibility to the vulnerable members of the world community.