Politicizing Disaster?

Record amounts of aid are being promised to help those affected by the massive tsumanis which wrecked havoc on SE Asia last week. It has now become, for all intensive purposes, a race to see which country can promise the largest amount of relief aid.

Disregarding the international political maneuvering for a moment, the amount of personal contributions is also staggering. A BBC News website estimates the total amount of money pledged, a dizzying array of government and public donations, to be over three billion dollars. And the contributions continue to rise along with the scope of the disaster. The amount of media coverage is staggering.

But in the end, how much of this promised money will actually ever make it to the area, to the people affected? We might take a cue from Iran’s recent earthquake to answer this question.

The earthquake occured a little more than a year ago, in Bam, Iran. It measured in the high sixes on the richter scale, and left anywhere between 30,000 to more than 45,000 dead. It also left more than 100,000 people homeless, destroying approximately 80% of the city.

International relief also poured in at that time – more than $1.1 billion, from various countries and organizations. More than 1,600 aid workers arrived from 44 different countries, and an official US delegation landed in Iran – a first since the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.

But still, more than a year later, most of the suriving residents of Bam live in prefabricated temporary housing, awaiting new buildings. This is a sad situation, but not necessarily surprising in and of itself. An earthquake of that magnitude on land, so close to a large city, is bound to create lasting damage which isn’t easily rebuilt. The surprising part comes, however, in seeing how the international aid, promised so freely following the disaster – never appeared. Iranian officials say that of the $1.1 billion promised internationally, only $17.5 million has arrived so far. Most of the reconstruction has been payed for by the Iranian government, according to ABC News.

This begs the question – what happened to all of that money promised in the beginning? Once the story slid from the headlines, what made sure that the aid governments promised initially ever became a reality?

Nothing. There is no international organization dedicated to overseeing and tracking the amount that governments actually send in these instances. At the end of the day, there is no guarantee the victims of this latest disaster will see even a fraction of the hundreds of billions promised seperately by Germany, Japan, Australia or the US. Or the hundreds of billions from other countries and the general public worldwide.

It will truly be interesting – if anyone remembers to – to look back at this event in a few years, and see how much of the three billion promised will ever arrive to the nations affected. And it will be interesting to see how much actually gets to the victims. We can only hope that the necessary aid for the victims of this latest natural disaster will continue to arrive, even after the media turns their cameras elsewhere.

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NATURAL DISASTERS
2004 Asian quake disaster – toll so far exceeds 110,000
2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran – official casualty figure is 26,271
1976 Earthquake in Tangshan, China, kills 242,000
1970 Cyclone in Bangladesh kills 500,000
1923 Tokyo earthquake kills 140,000
1887 China’s Yellow River breaks its banks in Huayan Kou killing 900,000
1896 Tsunami kills 27,000 in Japan
1815 Volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Indonesia’s Sumbawa Island kills 90,000
1556 Earthquake in China’s Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan provinces kills an estimated 830,000