Thoughts on tsunami relief

Some people are annoyed by all the attention currently being paid to tsunami relief. How come tsunami victims get all the attention but not victims of [insert person's pet cause]?

I've certainly wondered why some crises get massive public attention and others don't. One theory I have is that natural disasters get more attention than disasters perceived to be man-made.

In natural disasters, there are only innocent victims (at least by most people's standards). So sympathy is easy to give.

In disasters perceived to be man-made, such as wars or genocide, people's sympathy is complicated by the urge to apportion blame. Some people get caught in the 'both sides are committing atrocities' trap. 'Both sides' usually doesn't take into account civilians or the possibility that one side is committing 95% of the atrocities and the other side 5%.

The more interesting case is disasters that are man-made but aren't perceived to be. A great example of this was the huge refugee crisis in eastern Zaire (now DR Congo) that gained much attention in 1996. The refugee crisis was caused by the Rwandan genocide and civil war. The subsequent humantarian crisis provoked by millions of refugees include cholera and other horrible diseases.

The crisis was exacerbated by the fact that Hutu militias (the side that committed the genocide but lost the civil war and fled) had effective authoritarian control of the refugee camps. The militias compelled relief agencies to distribute aid through them... and they surely took a nice cut. A few agencies quit Zaire in disgust, rather than collaborate with genociders. However, most relief agencies portrayed the cholera and general miserable conditions in the camp as a 'humanitarian crisis.' This is a much more neutral term than, say, 'politically- and militarily-provoked humanitarian crisis.'

Another example is in Darfur, eastern Sudan. Aid agencies typically refer to Darfur as a 'humanitarian crisis' because it implies something that simply happened out of the blue. Human rights groups, the US government and anyone else offering a wholly truthful assessment refer to Darfur as a 'genocide,' because that's exactly what's going on.

Aid agencies don't refer to Darfur as 'genocide' because they know that any such usage will immediately degenerate into a pointless academic debate over whether it's legally genocide going on or if it's 'merely' ethnic cleansing, war crimes or other supposedly isolated atrocities. People won't donate money to something associated with controversy, to a disaster where everyone isn't seen as pure and innocent. So they wisely use the more neutral 'humanitarian crisis.' This nuance originates from the fundamentally different roles played by humanitarian relief organizations and human rights advocacy groups.

This article from The New York Times demonstrates why I don't object to the attention paid to tsunami relief, even if I prefer to support less celebrated causes such as War Child (who works to rehabilitate child soldiers).

In reality, the attention to tsunami relief will fade in a few weeks, but the problems will remain for years. Do you remember the flooding a few years ago in Mozambique? Last year's huge earthquake in Iran? Hurricane Mitch's devastation in Honduras? Those were all crises that galvanized the world's attention every so briefly in recent years.

As The Canadian Press reported: Amy Barry of Oxfam said on average countries pay only 50 per cent of their pledges. An Oxfam statement said that even in high-profile disasters like hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998, less than a third of the promised $11 billion Cdn [about US$9.2 billion] materialized. "In Afghanistan in 2004, the United States delivered only $200 million of the $450 million it promised," it said.

That's why I was pleased to hear on the BBC World Service that the UN will occassionally release lists of how much donor countries have pledged to tsunami relief and how much they've actually donated. Often times, amounts actually donated to such causes fall far short the amounts pledged. Because, after all, a pledge does nothing in and of itself.