Flooding in Pakistan

[Hachimitsu]

Just thought I would start a thread on this.

About one fifth of Pakistan is or has recently been under water. Millions upon millions have been left homeless and it seems donations have not been keeping up.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for starting a thread on this, Wilma. One of the worst natural disasters ever, but people just aren't responding the same way they did to things like the Haitian earthquake or the Asian Tsunanni. There are a number of reasons for that, I think. One is that a flood doesn't seem as immediately dramatic as an earthquake or tsunanni. And it so remote that it is hard to get information. But I think the biggest thing is that people or very ambivalent about Pakistan; they can't quite figure out if it is our enemy or our friend. Plus I think people just think the money will get sucked into the corrupt government without going to the people who are suffering. So people just aren't contributing.

[Primula Baggins]

Western media may also be unwilling to risk traveling into the affected parts of Pakistan. Images of damage and suffering do seem to increase people's willingness to help. It is a shame.

And that is a valid point about the government siphoning off the aid. That and outside relief organizations being, again, afraid of the risk of traveling into remote areas in Pakistan make it difficult to find a reliable way of ensuring that aid ends up with those who need it.

It's enormously frustrating.

[nerdanel]

I read this Economist article over the weekend. I thought it accurately articulated the reasons for the slowness to help: http://www.economist.com/node/16846266

Relevant excerpts (emphasis added):

To begin with, the memory of previous aid triumphs is highly selective: the initial response to Haiti was chaotic and not all that promised cash arrived. The flawed arithmetic of disaster response tends to equate need for aid with the immediate death toll. Although some 20m Pakistanis may be affected, the official count of those known to have perished is 1,475. Roughly as many were killed by recent landslides and floods in north-east China. The figure is less than 1% of the numbers killed by Haiti’s quake or by the Asian tsunami (over 220,000 in each case, most of them as disaster struck).

Nor has Pakistan made itself an easy place to help. Its president, Asif Ali Zardari, went on with a tour of Europe partly to promote his son’s political career as the floods swamped ever larger swathes of his country. He left his prime minister to oversee flood relief, claiming to be raising awareness overseas of Pakistan’s plight. At home, however, rage has been building among flood victims. The armed forces, rather than civilian politicians, took the lead in rescue efforts and in organising tours for the camera crews whose pictures prick consciences.

Some donors still have bad memories of an earlier disaster, in 2005, when an earthquake struck the Pakistan-run bit of Kashmir, killing nearly 80,000 people. Foreign governments and charities promised some $6 billion in aid, to be spent by Pakistani officials and by local and foreign NGOs. Some, inevitably, was wasted or stolen. More troublingly, some local charities, such as Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which had links to extremists, ended up claiming credit for the relief work. And that is before taking into account the credible worries that Pakistan’s spies support elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan and have done too little to rein in Islamist terror directed at India.

It does talk about and emphasize the need for assistance, as well as ending on a hopeful note. But private donors appear to have plenty of justification for being slower to pull out their checkbooks.

[Pearly Di]

British people have donated a huge amount to aid - we do have a strong British Pakistani community, of course, but the giving of the nation as a whole to this disaster has (apparently) even outstripped the donations to the tsunami disaster of 2004.

But the scale of this flood disaster is unimaginable.

Why must people suffer so ...?