The Lasting Impact of Disasters

Published January 18th 2005
The Daily Targum

Already, news of the tsunamis that hit twelve countries in Asia and Africa on December 26 last year is taking a backseat to more recent and therefore salient reports.

I remember watching a woman in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, as she wept in front of a BBC camera and told of how she held onto her three children with one arm, and floating debris with the other, trying to keep afloat as the water swept through her village. Trying to get a better hold against the force of the water, she let go of her grip on her children for a brief moment and all three, ranging from about 18 months to five years were taken from her. She cried, no mother should have to go through this.

As countless stories of the thousands who have lost their lives or lost those close to them were published in newspapers and aired on our television screens across the world, even the hardest cynic had to concede that the sensationalism of the news media, hardly doing justice in this case to the real tragedy and loss that the victims of the tsunamis, still stirred up an impressive amount of sympathy and desire to help in the surrounding countries of Asia, as well as the Western world.

Josef Stalin, the Russian expert on the issue of meaningless death once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,” and I had come to much the same shameful conviction over the past few years as I watched disaster after disaster plague the third world and recede quickly out of the attention of a global attention afflicted with too much information and not enough recourse to alleviate the problems we’re faced with. Hundreds died and millions were displaced in Bangladesh and Haiti from floods last year alone.

This catastrophe, however, has been such a slap in the face to the entire world that it could not go overlooked. The giant ripples caused by the 9.5 Richter earthquake off the West coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, have not only taken what now approximates more than 158 thousand native lives in the countries struck by the Tsunami waves, but the lives of hundreds of tourists from Britain, Sweden and other Western nations. Estimates that around 40 percent of the dead in Sri Lanka were children, and thousands more children were left orphaned have probably elevated sympathy for the almost incomprehensible scope of the tragedy. What leaves Stalin wrong in this case is the way the media turned statistics into stories and images of the death and struggle faced by Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and others struck by the Tsunamis. Although not every story can be told, and those that are told cannot make us feel what people at the scene must feel, they make human something that facts and figures cannot.

As news broke of the disaster in Britain on Boxing Day and the following days, the British government, with its initial pledge of a meager amount of 1 million pounds (if I remember correctly) was put to shame by the amount raised by the public, which came to 33 million pounds by New Year’s Eve. Oxfam bookstores and thrift stores posted large notices in their windows asking for donations, pubs encouraged the donation of the price of one drink to funds for aid, and money poured in to various other non-governmental organizations from the British public. As of today, January 14, the British public has managed to pledge an estimated 200 million pounds, according to the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella charity group. I use Britain as an example because I was there, spending Christmas and New Year’s with my family, but other nations such as China, Japan, Western European countries such as Sweden, and the United States had their own share of unprecedented public mobilization in the face of the calamity.

National governments have also donated considerable amounts of money and aid to the cause, U.S military aircraft helping in the few days after the disaster to shuttle the collecting aid from Medan to Aceh in Indonesia, and Britain sending plane-loads of makeshift tents and tarpaulin as well as emergency food supplies to Sri Lanka’s affected areas. The United Nations has taken charge of the international aid effort, and could finally come into its own as a supranational governmental body capable of organizing efforts of such a large scope and scale.

According to the New York Times, for example, President Bush ordered that American aid to the disaster areas be increased from the initial $35 million to ten times that amount ($350 million). This outpouring of generosity came as a response to a senior United Nations official’s charge that long-term Western aid efforts had been “stingy.”

He also took the opportunity of a weekly radio address from his Texas ranch, where he was spending the week to say “Together, we are leading an international coalition to help with immediate humanitarian relief, rehabilitation and long-term construction efforts… India, Japan and Australia have already pledged to help us coordinate these relief efforts,” continuing that he was confident many more nations will join this core group in short order.

In fact, taking sheer numbers, Japan pledged far more than the United States, promising $500 million to the recovery effort. The initial figures pledged by countries as the scale of the disaster emerged also showed Britain, China and France as the largest donors, pledging $96 million, $60m and $56m respectively behind the World bank, which pledged $250m. The U.S, sixth on the United Nations list of donors, can hardly be said to be ‘leading’ the aid effort. Poorer countries, such as Nepal, Latin American countries, and East Timor, which pledged $50,000 despite being one of the poorest nations in the world, have mounted a truer display of humanity through their donations, said Jan Egeland, the UN's humanitarian relief coordinator.

But enough of that. Whatever national interests might come into the international aid effort, the result takes precedence over the motives behind it. Talk of the political gain America might gain by establishing a friendly foothold in Asia through aid efforts is making its rounds. The anti-American sentiment in Indonesia and India could be somewhat alleviated through the gratitude these nations may feel for the help offered by Big Brother. Japan’s huge aid pledge is no doubt also politically and economically motivated on some level.

What we must ask ourselves and hold our governments to, is how much of this pledged aid will eventually make its way to its destinations once the heat of the moment has died down and a new disaster takes the limelight.

According to Oxfam International, donor governments’ short attention spans are a notorious problem. The Flash Appeal in response to Iran’s earthquake a year ago was only 54 percent funded, and the Flash Appeal during the series of disasters that struck Haiti from March to September in 2004 was only 36 percent funded.

Afghanistan’s 2002 appeal was 67 percent funded, they said, immediately after the Taliban was overthrown. Two years later and the figures were even more disgraceful, with its Drought Appeal for 2004 only 36 percent funded.

So far, $717 million of the $3.4 billion formally pledged by donor countries has been secured as a concrete commitment of aid money over the next six months, according to the Mr. Egeland. That aid is 73 percent of the $977 million that UN General Secretary, Kofi Annan has requested – an impressive response given the previous response figures.

What is more important than the immediate donations flowing in from around the world – from people truly struck by the tragedy who genuinely want to help to governments that have ultimately constituted the bulk of the aid efforts – is that this concern for the people who have lost everything in this natural disaster continue over the months and years it will take to reconstruct their lives.

Money seems the most effective and easiest way to help at this stage, but traveling to Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the African countries affected in the future to volunteer whatever help we can offer should be something at least seriously considered by those of us who are able.

The media cannot, unfortunately, be counted on to keep up the scale of coverage of the Tsunami story. It will be replaced just as Iraq’s position in the news was supplanted by reports of this latest natural disaster, one of the worst in modern history. It is our duty to remember and to continue to search out information on the reconstruction efforts and what can be done long after the situation disappears from front page headlines. This, more than the immediate pouring out of sympathy and pocket change, will be the true test of our humanity and our empathy for the mothers who have watched their children swept away to their death, and the men, women and children who have been stripped of their homes and families by this senseless cataclysm.

To find out how you can continue to help, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4131881.stm for a list of NGOs involved in the relief effort.