Media Alert-Dwarfing the Tsunami

January 12, 2005



"Civilisation exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice." (Will Durant, historian)

Festive Depression

Curious things happen to the British public around Christmas. The weeks and months leading up to December 25 are characterised by a manic focus on consumption, materialism and unrestrained hedonism. The Season of Good Will actually sees more alcohol-fuelled violence on our streets, more family strife, and raised levels of suicide. One in two people suffer from "festive depression" after Christmas, the Guardian reports, with 51% of Britons suffering in some way following holiday excesses. ('A merry Christmas - but not such a happy new year,' Sandra Haurant, The Guardian, December 9, 2003 )

For many Westerners, then, the tsunami of December 26 struck at an extraordinary time and place. A catastrophe that left millions with nothing occurred exactly as Westerners were over-indulging in everything. The waves that killed 150,000 brought hell on earth to many of the places we think of as paradise.

Empathy for the victims was doubtless increased by the dramatic, televised nature of the disaster, the involvement of large numbers of Western tourists - a number of journalists were themselves holidaying in the area at the time - and by the fact that these are indeed much-loved tourist destinations. Indonesia, in particular, is also a major economic and military ally of the West.

Certainly no one should imagine media corporations are suddenly guided by selfless altruism. Jacques Steinberg reported in The New York Times:

"In mounting their public-relations campaigns, however quietly, the networks were mindful that whatever the drop in network television viewership in recent years, people tend to flock back at times of crisis. And this story, like the Sept. 11 attacks or the capture of Saddam Hussein, offered that rare chance to try to recapture their interest." (Steinberg, 'Reporting Live From Hell: TV Scrambles for Glory,' The New York Times, January 10, 2005)

Likewise, leading British and US politicians - in actuality war criminals still at large - eagerly swooped on the chance to divert public attention from the ongoing, man-made catastrophe in Iraq, and to recast themselves as humanitarians bringing aid, fair trade and justice to the Third World.

The claim might be taken seriously if political parties and powerful popular movements were moving to reform a corporate system programmed to maximise profits at any cost - costs that have for centuries included the mass exploitation and immiseration of the poor, and even the demolition of the environmental life support systems on which all life depends.

Nevertheless, governments around the world +have+ been shamed into matching and leapfrogging the generosity of their own people. With promises of aid touching $2bn, Japan heads the donor list with a promise of $500m. But, again, realism is required.

After an earthquake killed more than 40,000 people in the Iranian city of Bam in December 2003, the international community pledged $1 billion in aid. Of this money Iran received some $17 million. The streets of Bam are still filled with mounds of rubble. Tens of thousands of people remain packed into prefabricated housing. (Ginger Thompson and Nazila Fathi, 'Earlier Disasters - For Honduras and Iran, World's Aid Evaporated,' The New York Times, January 11, 2005)

In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America, killing 9,000 people in Honduras at a cost of more than $9 billion in damage. The international community pledged $9 billion to rebuild Central America - most of the money was never sent. Three years after the hurricane, 20,000 people were still living in temporary shelters.

Selective Compassion

The current response to the tsunami, we are told, will be different. Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, is certainly impressed: "The compassion has never ever been like this." ('Record aid operation, but progress slow,' Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, January 3, 2005)

But as dissident writer Harsha Walia noted on ZNet Asia:

"Compassion has become morally and politically appropriate, as it should be. What is inappropriate is the ability to decide which images are worthy of those emotions. What is inexcusable is when those images are a direct consequence of policies waged by our governments and corporations for which we are culpable, we seem to exhibit compassion-deficient syndrome." (Harsha Walia, 'The tsunami and the discourse of compassion,' ZNet Asia, December 30, 2004)

Indeed, the admirable outpouring of media and public compassion for the victims of Asia's natural disaster makes the near-total indifference to the suffering of Iraqi civilians under Western attack even more stunning. Who would believe, looking at the images of devastation from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, that Britain and the United States are responsible for bringing a comparable disaster to a single country, Iraq? While the US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m, the US has spent $200 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn.

Simon Jenkins writes in The Times:

"To me the greatest disaster of 2004 was not the Indonesian tsunami but the continuing conflict in Iraq, the bloody endgame of the 9/11 disaster. The upper estimate of deaths in Iraq, 100,000, is eerily similar to that for the tsunami.

"While the one disaster rates as an act of God and the other an act of man, to whit the President of the United States, to the hapless Iraqis the difference must seem notional. They must feel as impotent in the face of falling bombs and the continuing tidal wave of destruction. The bodies of their loved ones must seem just as dead." (Jenkins, 'In the absence of God, blame has become our prevailing religion,' The Times, December 31, 2004)

But Jenkins is wrong - the upper estimate for deaths made in the only serious scientific study to date is 194,000. Professor Richard Garfield - one of the authors of a report conducted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Iraqi casualties published in the Lancet science journal - has said: "The true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate <98,000> than on the low side." (Email sent to Media Lens reader, October 31, 2004)


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