The pattern of events is all too depressingly familiar. A terrible natural disaster hits a poor country. There is panic and chaos. Television pictures beamed almost instantly round the world show suffering on an unimaginable scale. The world tries to rally. But days later there are still people buried in rubble; still survivors without food, water and medical help; still suffering unalleviated. Then frustration turns to anger and blame: couldn’t more have been done to help?
So it has been with Haiti. Tuesday’s devastating earthquake came out of the blue. It wasn’t that the country, one of the poorest in the world, did not know the risks of disaster. It sits on a fault-line between two continental plates where earthquakes are just waiting to happen. But there had not been one for two hundred and fifty years. There was no reason to expect that one would hit the capital during a late weekday afternoon when buildings were full of people ending their day’s work and the streets were crammed with those already making their way home.
No one can know yet how many people have died but the number will be in the tens of thousands. It is estimated that a third of the country’s people will have been directly affected, either killed or injured or by losing their homes or places of work.
Nearly three days later, though, the images of continuing chaos, of bodies piled up in the streets, of survivors still having no water and food, have left the impression that the rest of the world, for all its genuine shock and concern, is failing to do what it declared at once that it wanted to do: help. But is this fair?
There are many reasons why help is taking so long to become effective. The government of Haiti itself was a pretty ineffective force even before disaster hit. The United Nations, always the body to which the world looks in such circumstances, was already a big presence in the country but it too was the victim of the quake. So all real help had to come from outside.
In the first instance that has meant the big regional superpower, the United States. No one is accusing President Obama of dithering or being indifferent as was the case when his predecessor, George Bush, was faced with a natural disaster in his own country, Hurricane Katrina. Mr Obama rallied the full force of American power, including the military, straight away. But political resolve cannot itself overcome the simple, intractable, practical problems that slow even the most willing help.
These problems are many. Haiti’s airports are too small to take the number of aid flights that are needed at the speed they are required. Cargo handling is largely manual and therefore slow. There is not enough aviation fuel to refill planes so that they can take off quickly enough to let other planes land. American aircraft carriers, sent to the area so that air-delivered aid can be got to the country more quickly despite this, can themselves get in place only as fast as aircraft carriers can cut across the sea. And so on.
No doubt there are things that could have been done more quickly. No doubt there are lessons to learn, as there always are. But, however well we learn them, it’s clear enough that the natural world has a destructive power that remains far greater than the human capacity to deal swiftly with the suffering it causes. Our anguish is that that suffering is more visible to us and more quickly than at any time in our history.
Perhaps what we should think about is not just how well-equipped we are to deal with natural disasters of untold power that hit poor countries like Haiti. Perhaps we should think too about the suffering of such countries caused not by natural disasters but by the way we humans run our world. That, however, is a different story.
