The water came slowly, masking its power with sluggishness. But Farooq Tariq, a human rights activist long accustomed to helping hapless civilians through Pakistani disasters, knew it meant trouble.
“The water accumulated with the passage of time; it went up not in one hour or two hours but in weeks,” he said, recalling the disastrous days in July when the Indus River system flooded millions of hectares of farmland in Pakistan.
The flood plunged the deeply troubled nation into a humanitarian crisis that is likely to set back its development two generations.
Worse, help was equally slow in coming, Tariq said. There was no sudden rush of aid dollars to help flood victims, most of whom lost everything.
“Pakistan was left rather alone in the most devastating flood in its history,” he said.
It was difficult for activists like Tariq not to look back at how the world had responded to the other major catastrophe of this year — the devastating earthquake that flattened much of Haiti and killed an estimated 250,000. The floods killed far fewer people, perhaps 2,000, but the number of people affected, who now need food, shelter and clothing to face a harsh Pakistani winter, was 20 million. The entire population of Haiti, by contrast, is fewer than 10 million people.
Five weeks after the Haiti earthquake, 48 aid groups polled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy had collected three-quarters of a billion dollars. Five weeks after the flooding in Pakistan, a similar poll found 32 aid groups had collected just US$25 million.
In all, US$3.4 billion has been collected for the victims of the Haiti earthquake as of last month, with more than US$1.1 billion coming from private donations, according to figures compiled by the UN. Close to US$1.7 billion has been pledged for Pakistan, but less than US$300 million came from private donors. The US government pledged almost one-third of the total.
Humanitarians have long struggled with this paradox. The number of dead, along with the swiftness and drama of their demise, trumps almost any amount of agony among those who survive a disaster, particularly a creeping one.
“Donors use the number of deaths as a barometer with disasters,” said Randy Strash, strategy director for disaster response at World Vision. “When you have a slow-onset disaster, like the flooding in Pakistan, which accumulated for three weeks and sustained for much longer, you don’t have that same shock value.”
The needs in Pakistan remain dire, aid groups said. As winter approaches, more than 7 million people are homeless, according to Oxfam International. Malnutrition is rising. As schools reopen, families sheltered in them will again be on the streets.
However, pledges of aid amount to just 40 percent of the total required, according to the UN. The World Food Programme may have to cut rations for many of the displaced unless the pace of donations picks up. The WHO may have to pull back disease surveillance teams, crucial for detecting outbreaks of cholera and other deadly illnesses in camps.
The sluggish response to the floods led to some fretting that individual donors in the US were reluctant to give to Pakistan out of mistrust of its government and the growing perception that Pakistan is the epicenter of global terrorism.
“No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin,” the Middle East academic and blogger Juan Cole wrote. “No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases. It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans.”
Indeed, the response to the floods suggested to some that Western donors, by ignoring the floods, were working against their own vital interests in a region where 130,000 NATO troops are waging a deadly battle against a resurgent Taliban.
SECURITY CRISIS
“Coming at a time of widespread unrest, growing Taliban extremism and increasingly shaky civilian government, the floods could lead to the gravest security crisis the country — and the region — has faced,” the prominent Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote in a blog post on the Web site of The New York Review of Books.
“Unless the international community takes immediate action to provide major emergency aid and support, the country risks turning into what until now has remained only a grim, but remote possibility — a failed state with nuclear weapons,” he wrote.
History provides little support to the hypothesis that Western donors are indifferent to Pakistani suffering. The earthquake that devastated the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir in 2005 drew a broad and generous response. In the first month after that earthquake, aid agencies raised US$570 for every person affected by the disaster.
So far, they have raised just US$40 per flood victim, according to an analysis by Oxfam.
While the earthquake killed far more people than the floods, about 70,000, caring for its survivors was a less daunting task because there were fewer of them. Kashmir is a much smaller and much less densely populated area than the wide swath of Pakistan inundated by the floods. The total damage caused by the floods is twice that of the quake, according to estimates by the World Bank.
But if mistrust of Pakistan does not explain the shortfall in giving, the alternative is some ways worse, experts say. The fact that individual donors have seemingly irrational reasons for giving to one disaster and not another demonstrates how counterproductive the current methods of raising money for humanitarian relief are.
“It is a little bit like funding your local fire engine by rattling a tin on the street every time a fire breaks out,” said Peter Walker, an expert on humanitarian aid at Tufts University.
What is more, the giving public perceives natural disasters as sudden shocks that require an immediate infusion of cash to get life back to normal, and that once the initial shock is over, the affected country continues on the same trajectory, Walker said.
This might be true for wealthier countries — the earthquake in Chile, for example, caused widespread damage, but was unlikely to alter its overall future.
In poorer countries like Haiti and Pakistan, however, a major disaster fundamentally changes the equation, and their needs are both immediate and long term.
“For countries low down on the development scale, these disasters can drastically change the development curve,” Walker said.
The result is a long-term need for the kind of humanitarian aid that the public gives only in the teeth of a major disaster.
About two-thirds of humanitarian spending currently goes to “crises” that have been going on for more than five years, Walker said, places like Sudan, Congo and Afghanistan, and now Haiti and Pakistan.
It is not always the case that slow-moving disasters escape world attention. Some, like the crisis in Darfur, have attracted widespread news coverage and large-scale humanitarian aid. However, activists and some aid groups have portrayed the crisis in Darfur as genocide, a fast-moving cataclysm perpetrated by a cruel state against its own people, rather than a more traditional internal conflict.
Congo, by contrast, where millions of people have died, mostly of hunger and disease, in the last decade, is widely seen as a bewildering conflict in which the perpetrators and victims are hard to distinguish from one another.
Politically potent disasters can attract a huge response. The plight of the people of the eastern region of Nigeria that tried to secede in the late 1960s and create a nation called Biafra won the attention of celebrities all over the world. Airlifts were organized at great expense as newspapers carried photos of children with matchstick limbs and grotesquely swollen bellies brought on by kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that comes with severe malnutrition.
However, even as Biafra drew huge donations and media attention, a quietly devastating tragedy was unfolding nearby, in the arid Sahel region of West Africa, where 200,000 to 400,000 died in famines brought on by drought. It drew scant attention. Millions of livestock, the lifeblood of many communities, perished, too.
The blameless victims of climatic variation simply did not merit attention, said Michael Glantz, a political scientist who has studied the famine and its lasting impact.
A similar dynamic is at work in Pakistan, he said.
“Once in awhile you get the flood that sets back development 50 years,” he said. “When you hear these kinds of things you tune out. You think, ‘My US$20 is going to do nothing there.’”
Attention from the news media, particularly TV, is another crucial driver of donations, experts said. Pakistan did not get nearly the kind of coverage that Haiti did. Earthquakes create apocalyptic landscapes easy to capture on television. Haiti is a short flight from New York, where most major television networks are based. There is little of the danger associated with sending staff members into Pakistan, where they might be targets of kidnapping.
NEWS COVERAGE
“With Haiti you had 24/7 coverage for days on end,” Strash said. “With Pakistan you had some mention, but it was quickly obscured with the coverage of what was happening next door, the killing of the 10 aid workers in Afghanistan.”
Eventually, news coverage of the Pakistan flood picked up, and donations also rose, aid groups said. Still, the urgency was more difficult to capture.
“The images coming out of Haiti were highly compelling,” Strash said. “Children screaming for their mammas, people with awful wounds, these buildings just pancaked. With Pakistan you saw a few people wading through ankle-deep, maybe knee-deep water.”
The tone of the news coverage matters, too, said Jennifer Tierney, development director at Doctors Without Borders.
In Pakistan, “the tone of the news was more talking about the political side of things rather than the direct and immediate focus on human suffering,” she said.
In Haiti, some aid organizations were collecting more than they could possibly spend responsibly. When officials at Doctors Without Borders saw the volume of donations pouring, they began to worry about this.
“We started to encourage people to give more generally because we were getting saturation in terms of earmarked funds,” Tierney said.
That allowed the organization to redirect general funds to more pressing needs that did not draw as large a response.
Aid groups say that the emotional outpouring that prompts giving to a cause like the Haiti earthquake is useful because once individuals begin donating for humanitarian aid, they are more likely to give more regularly.
Doctors Without Borders examined the flood of new donors after the Indian Ocean tsunami and compared them with the new donors who gave to Haiti. Haiti donors were more likely to give a second gift, they found. People with a longer history of giving to the organization, however, were more likely to have given to Pakistan.
“It is really exciting that people are opening up to the work that we do more generally, and trusting us more generally,” Tierney said.
Overall, officials at Doctors Without Borders said, the response to the Pakistan floods has been generous.
Indeed, people in Pakistan working on the aid effort said that while the initial response was slow, it grew over time.
Small groups, particularly in Europe, have been raising cash to help flood victims, Tariq said. A group of artists in Norway raised 100,000 kroner (US$17,100), a community in the Netherlands raised 10,000 euros (US$14,000). Trade unions in Australia and England have responded, he said.
Americans should join that effort, Tariq said, forming small groups to help Pakistan rebuild and improve human ties between the two nations.
“The flood is gone, but people are still on the streets,” he said. “People are still in camps. It is really taking long to rebuild. This is a time when the American people can really make a difference and show a different side of America.”
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