Rahul Mahajan on the Tsunami

[Michael Hoover <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Date: 5 Jan 2005

Rahul Mahajan on the Tsunami


It's been difficult to figure out what to say about the horrific events
of December 26, in which a massive earthquake and the tsunami it
generated killed over 150,000 people in a dozen different countries,
including about 100,000 in Indonesia.

In general, it's hard for the left to talk about natural disasters. So
far are we from power that of necessity a lot of what we do takes the
form of criticizing the work of others. There's always plenty to
criticize, but it's particularly in circumstances like this that such a
role seems inadequate and frustrating.

No human situation is beyond politics; even in the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, there were two armed organizations, not one, because of
political differences. Certainly, the tsunami was not, from the
preconditions that made so many vulnerable to the lack of proper warning
to the scope and nature of the global response.

There are many things I'm angry about, but before that it's necessary to
express the deep sadness and horror at the extent of the devastation.
There have been worse natural disasters in recent history, from the 1970
cyclone that killed 500,000 in Bangladesh to an earthquake in China in
1976 that killed similar numbers, but this is the worst one in over a
decade.

No matter the response to the earthquake, no matter the policies
implemented beforehand, huge numbers would have lost their lives. Those
in Indonesia and in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, hit by the tsunami
just minutes after the quake, would have died no matter what. To prevent
that would have required the rewriting of centuries of history.

That said, I am angry. I'm angry that there was no warning system for
tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. I'm angry that, even with hours to work,
bureaucratic inertia made it impossible to get warnings out to residents
of coastal areas in India and Sri Lanka, where even a perfunctory
warning might have saved tens of thousands of lives.

I'm angry that, when Jan Egeland, director of crisis relief for the UN,
took the opportunity to criticize the Western nations for their
stinginess, the first reaction of the Bush administration was to claim
instead that the United States is vastly generous. In light of its
recent increase of pledged aid to $350 million, it's very odd to think
that officials from Andrew Natsios of USAID to Colin Powell were jumping
to proclaim that first $15 million and then $35 million ($40 million
will be spent on the inauguration gala) represented tremendous
generosity. It's worth noting as well that Japan, with half the GDP of
the United States, has pledged $500 million.

I'm angry that the total of $2 billion pledged, $400 each for the
estimated 5 million survivor/victims, while enough to provide for them
for the short term and perhaps even to stem the spread of disease in the
next few months, provides nothing for rebuilding infrastructure, for
providing a livelihood for the victims or really for any of their
long-term needs.

I'm angry that, according to a UNICEF official interviewed on PBS, the
U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the umbrella
for all the humanitarian organizations of the UN, will have a mere 90
people working on the ground in Aceh. This is not the fault of the UN
Secretariat, but of the United States, which for 20 years has fought to
cut budgets of vital organizations like UNICEF and the World Health
Organization. Between 1975 and 1977, the WHO led an effort to eradicate
smallpox worldwide; there has been no campaign like it since because of
lack of funds and vision.

What I'm angriest about is this. People the world over are giving for
disaster relief, and they should. They do it because it's easy to see
that the victims are not at fault, that it's not their own laziness or
lack of enterprise that is the cause. Those same people find it far more
difficult to see that endemic poverty generated by a history of
imperialism, or World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs are
human-made disasters that are almost as difficult for many of their
victims to oppose as the natural kind, and that those victims are just
as little at fault as the victims of the tsunami.

Rahul Mahajan is publisher of Empire Notes <http://www.empirenotes.org>.
His latest book, "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20>,"
covers U.S. policy on Iraq, deceptions about weapons of mass
destruction, the plans of the neoconservatives, and the face of the new
Bush imperial policies. He can be reached at rahul@xxxx

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