South Asian Earthquake: Don’t care… or don’t know?

“Donor fatigue” doesn’t explain the relative silence of media that normally thrive on disaster. The few reports trickling in from the earthquake zone remain blips in the overall media radar. Despite stunning

photographs and excellent reporting on how precarious life is without tents and aid, these reports are mostly buried in the inside pages. Compare this to the sustained and prominent reporting on the Tsunami and Katrina.


My 9-year old daughter Maha knows about the earthquake that devastated northern Pakistan and India on Oct 8, but she keeps saying, “…hurricane, …sorry, I mean, earthquake”. Hardly surprising – our arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts from Karachi, Pakistan on August 27 coincided with Hurricane Katrina building up to smash into Louisiana. Television was full of the threat and then the devastation as Maha began school the following week. Like her classmates, she contributed to her school’s hurricane relief drive. For weeks she’s pounced on all the small change from grocery shopping and deposited her pocket money into the ‘hurricane jar’ in her classroom.

The earthquake that struck Kashmir in northern Pakistan on October 8 has already claimed over 79,000 lives. That’s the official figure; unofficial estimates put the number closer to 100,000. If this figure doubles, as is likely with winter setting in, it will dwarf even the 150,000 casualties of the Indian Ocean Tsunami last December.

Katrina left some 1200 people dead and displaced half a million.
‘Misery links victims of quake, hurricane; Scope of Pakistan crisis much larger, however,’ is how the Baton Rouge Advocate headlined Robert Tanner’s report from Battal, Pakistan (Oct 22). Tanner had also covered the aftermath of Katrina. He said that the earthquake’s aftermath was “much crueller”.

Those wounded in the mountains have far nastier injuries than those hit by a hurricane or tsunami. Much of the earthquake area is accessible only on foot or by helicopter (these have often been grounded by bad weather as winter sets in). With scant medical facilities, doctors are being forced to carry out amputations without anaesthesia, even on children.

The earthquake left over 3.3 million homeless, three times more than the million and a half homeless after the Tsunami. And the earthquake victims are shelter-less in sub-zero temperatures.

Aid workers call this place more difficult to work in than even Darfur. Unicef calls it “the children’s catastrophe" because of the large number of children who are homeless and at risk – between 1.6 and 2.2 million. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls it worse than the Tsunami.

But compared to the generosity witnessed after the Tsunami, the world’s response has been miserly. The Tsunami catalysed 10 billion dollars in disaster relief for its victims – about what the United States Senate proposed for Katrina’s victims, $10.5 billion (to which President Bush committed a further $51.8 on September 7.)

In contrast, Pakistan has received only $630 million so far, of at least 5 billion dollars urgently needed. The press talks about “donor fatigue” with disaster after disaster this past year. There may also be unease about giving money to a nuclear-armed, military-led nation unable to contain the religious militancy breeding within its borders. There are also concerns about help not reaching those that need it most, a concern not helped by reports that the already over-extended armed forces are not allowing non-government organisations a free hand in distributing tents and other relief.

There may be more Western corporate interests in the tsunami areas, but this still doesn’t explain the relatively little corporate aid to the earthquake -- India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan receive about the same percentage of foreign direct investment, one percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Whatever the case, the scale of the human need demands that governments and donors work out, and work out fast, how to bring aid to those who are suffering so.

“Donor fatigue” doesn’t explain the relative silence of media that normally thrive on disaster. The few reports trickling in from the earthquake zone remain blips in the overall media radar. Despite stunning photographs and excellent reporting on how precarious life is without tents and aid, these reports are mostly buried in the inside pages. Compare this to the sustained and prominent reporting on the Tsunami and Katrina.

Do Western media lack interest because the earthquake struck an unfamiliar, far-off area?

Katrina struck the USA itself. The Tsunami hit popular tourist destinations during peak holiday season, directly affecting hundreds of Westerners; survivors gave the media great eye-witness interviews.

“There are no Westerners in Kashmir,” says David Ropeik, an Instructor in Risk Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We don’t know that area, and can’t identify with the earthquake victims. The feeling is that this doesn’t affect ‘us’.”

Might this change if the media played its due role? That’s the hope of the organisers of an online petition called “Save lives by urging media to provide coverage for earthquake in South Asia” (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/448983019). And in an effort to highlight the issue, an umbrella group of concerned organisations (www.saquake.org) organised a world-wide vigil on Nov 8, the one-month marker of the earthquake. Held in 30 American cities, besides Amsterdam and Lahore, the vigil did generate some media attention. Many of those involved plan to continue their efforts to bring the earthquake to public attention.

Meanwhile, the donations jar in Maha’s class, recently re-labelled ‘earthquake relief’, remains nearly empty. “They don’t know about it enough,” she figures. They don’t know that more 15,000 children died when their schools collapsed over them during the earthquake, and that 10,000 children may well die from hypothermia in the next two weeks from, unless the world wakes up… now.