Empire Notes

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.