Italian Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso

The Italian government on Monday distanced itself from remarks by its special envoy to Haiti, Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso, who described the international earthquake relief effort there as ”pathetic”.

On a state visit to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini underlined that ”the Italian government does not stand by that assessment”.

Frattini granted that ”Bertolaso has made some important recommendations to the Haitian government regarding sheltering orphans and conducting evacuations”. But he stressed that Bertolaso was not speaking for the Italian government when he slammed the international aid machine at work in Haiti, which is largely being directed by the United States.

During an Italian TV broadcast from Port-au-Prince on Sunday, Bertolaso was asked to describe the situation there two weeks after the Caribbean nation was devastated by an earthquake estimated to have claimed as many as 350,000 lives.

The civil protection chief, who headed up the relief effort after the April 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, responded with a broadside against the lack of central coordination among the various relief agencies present.

”A lot of them are more interested in parading in front of the cameras than rolling up their sleeves and going to work to find survivors,” he said.

”It’s like the bonfire of the vanities”. Bertolaso also said the US had done a poor job of spearheading the relief effort, sending too many troops and not enough people trained in disaster management.

”What’s really needed here is a person like (President Barack) Obama to come and take charge of the emergency”. ”Instead, they sent in a bunch of starlets,” he said in an apparent reference to a handful of celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn, who have made their way to the island over the past week.

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