A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  True flaws existed in the system, and the need to help the most vulnerable should not be less important than bureaucratic concerns. The challenge would be to fix the flaws once identified. Would the system accept that which Benjamin Franklin once said: “Our critics are our friends for they tell us where to improve”? Through the identification of this problem, the HRR finally acknowledged that one of the problems was poor quality senior management. Further criticisms were aimed at recruitment policies, training, and the reliance on voluntary staff.

  Criticisms began to raise the awareness that humanitarian response mechanisms are too important to rely upon ‘well-meaning amateurs’. Since humanitarian operations have an impact on people’s lives, they make decisions about who lives and who dies, quite literally, by the way they conduct the delivery of food, water, supplies or other essential items. Frankly, if one staffs humanitarian operations with ‘well-meaning amateurs’, one will see amateur responses. Amateurism, no matter how well meaning, kills people. By contrast, the HRR recognised the need for ‘well-meaning professionals’ which implies a more professional pay scale, training mechanism and more importantly, a professional recruiting mechanism in which people are hired and fired according to ability, not just nationality or gender.

  If personnel was one issue, the underlying structural faults of the system were another. Humanitarian organisations simply didn’t work well together, didn’t prepare together and had a complete lack of unified humanitarian response to all major emergencies. The victims of conflict, natural disaster or manmade disasters needed better response from the humanitarian organisations than that which had, up until now, been provided.

  When catastrophe strikes, the people of the world look to the United Nations for help. But how does a massive bureaucracy charged with peacekeeping, arms control, political dialogue between states and myriad of other tasks, realign itself for rapid onset emergencies? How do the hundreds of NGOs and dozens of UN agencies work with host governments facing a huge crisis? It’s vital to stress that the United Nations is not one single monolithic organisation with key focused goals. It has six principal organs: the General Assembly; the Security Council; the Economic and Social Council; the Secretariat; the International Court of Justice; and the United Nations Trusteeship Council (which is no longer active).

  In addition to the principal organs, there are more than three dozen funds (such as UNICEF the United Nations Children’s Fund), high commissions (such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), specialised agencies (such as the World Health Organisation or the International Labour Organisation), ‘programs’ (such as UNDP – the United Nations Development Program), many offices and departments (such as the Department of Peace-keeping Operations and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and lots of research institutes (such as the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Affairs). Each of these funds, offices, programs and commissions has their own rules, reporting requirements, mandates and methods of raising money.

  The United Nations Secretary General is in charge of the Secretariat of the United Nations, but not the agencies, organisations, funds or other components of the system that report back to Member States in very different and confusing ways. While the Secretary General has persuasive authority over organisations such as the World Health Organisation or the World Food Program, the Secretary General has no actual authority. The second thing to understand about the UN is that it is confusing, disjointed and nowhere near as effective or as efficient as it could be precisely because this is how the Member States wish it to be. The UN is, after all, nothing more or less than the manifestation of compromises worked out between the 197 or more Member Nation States.

  The third thing to understand is that when people ask for ‘the United Nations to do something’, whatever the ‘something’ is must be agreed by the majority of the Member States, or at the very least the Permanent Five members of the Security Council, Britain, France, the United States, China and Russia. As we saw with Rwanda, if one of the Permanent Five decides to block any remedial action, then the entire system becomes hamstrung. In the case of Rwanda it was the French threat to use their veto power in the Security Council to stop any action. Russia in 2012 blocked actions in Syria. China, US and even Britain have at times asserted their veto in their single national interest and consequently prevented the entire system from functioning.

  It is too easy to blame ‘the United Nations’ when there is no effective response to the Rwandan and Darfur genocides or other mass atrocities, or because ‘a coherent single United Nations organisation’ simply doesn’t exist. The UN is the manifestation of the collective will of Member States. Member States are to blame for inaction – including Australia. The truth is that for each and every one of the recent political or military conflicts, political decision-makers knew in advance, through early warning mechanisms of each new conflict. There are no surprises. Inaction doesn’t come through lack of knowledge but through lack of will. Decisions are taken either to intervene, or not to intervene. Sometimes the act of omission can have horrible results. In Rwanda and Darfur we also saw that the act of omission and inaction can be equally as devastating.

   7.

  Pakistan and the Earthquake: The Army to the Rescue

  “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyse you; they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.” – Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Pakistan has a split weekend. Friday afternoons are for prayers and non-working time. Saturday is a normal working day and a school day. Sunday is a day of rest. “Situation normal” was the right phrase to describe October 8, 2005. On that early morning the school bells had rung. Children crowded into rural classrooms in mountaintop hamlets. Impoverished towns and villages kicked into daily life.

  The earthquake hit at 8.30 am, just as the day was beginning. It measured 7.6 on the Richter Scale and hit close to the major city of Muzaffarabad and was shallow in depth. The quake shook the earth for approximately one minute, destroying 500,000 homes and damaging 200,000 others. In that one minute 2,394 km of road, 5,348 education facilities, 307 health facilities, 3,994 water supply systems and 715 government buildings were destroyed. Three and a half million people were made homeless; 30,000 square km of land was affected. Nearly half those killed were school children. A total of 75,000 people gone, twice as many again severely injured.

  The political realities were important in Pakistan. The earthquake had an impact on an area stretching from Indian-controlled Kashmir, through Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, through the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. Although the vast majority of the people killed and affected were in Pakistan’s NWFP and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, more than 1,000 people were killed in India and a smaller number in Afghanistan.

  It is very difficult for people in the West to understand the enormous difficulty that Pakistan has in asserting influence on the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is no surprise that after the War in Afghanistan following the American invasion in 2001 the tribal areas became the home of the fleeing Taliban and, before his move to Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden. Under traditional customs of hospitality the obligation fell upon local villages to protect both the Taliban and bin Laden.

  Next to FATA, when travelling east, is the NWFP, renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa though still referred to as NWFP, with its capital in Peshawar. Peshawar is the gateway to the Hindu Kush on the road to Afghanistan. It is a traditional market town with a long history and is recognised as one of the oldest living cities in Asia. It is a city with many romantic associations of frontier exploration. The smugglers’ bazaar that sits on the outskirts of town sells almost everything you can imagine that can be bought, from weapons to drugs and even people.

  The world’s three mighty mountain ranges, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram Range and the Himalayas all converge at one point
in NWFP, where the mighty Indus River flows to separate the ranges. Original parts of the ancient Silk Road can be seen carved into the side of cliffs not far from the point where Alexander the Great reached the Indus River and decided to go home. What an amazing place it is.

  Heading east from FATA through NWFP one reaches Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The Partition of India following British colonial rule brought into being the two independent states of India and Pakistan. The Hindu rulers of Kashmir chose to side with India even though the majority of the population were Muslim and perhaps would have preferred to have joined with Islamic Pakistan. This divide has led to a number of conflicts between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, with roughly one third of the territory now administered by Pakistan and two-thirds administered by India. The ceasefire line last saw active fighting in 1999, and remains tense.

  Perhaps second only to the Israel-Palestine dispute, the Kashmir conflict is one of the rallying cries for Islam. This is where the disaster hit.

  The Geology of an Earthquake Taken together, FATA, NWFP and Kashmir redefine the word “scale”. Thirteen of the world’s 30 tallest peaks are in Pakistan. Five of the 11 mountains reaching 8,000 metres are in Pakistan. K2, the world’s second largest mountain looms on the border between China and Pakistan. The longest glaciers in the world outside of the Antarctic sit in this area of Pakistan.

  It has often been said that those who love natural beauty and awesome silence should meet in these mountains and witness the wonders of the world in serene silence. It is a magical and awesome place. It is the place where you come to understand the meaning of the phrase ‘young mountains’. In geological terms the three mountain ranges are caused by the ongoing subjunction of India under Asia. The subcontinent split from ancient Gondwana during the Cretaceous period some 90 million years ago, and then drifted north before colliding with the Eurasian Plate about 50–55 million years ago. This massive collision gave birth to the Himalayan range and the Tibetan plateau.

  During a particularly difficult time in early negotiations with the Pakistanis, I joked that the earthquake was all ‘India’s fault’. This gross oversimplification intended as a joke brought the desired laugh at a very tense time. Geologically speaking, the joke is true. The Indian subcontinent, by continuing to push north-eastward and under the Asian continental plate at 5 cm per year, is the cause of the region’s considerable tectonic activity. This results in many earthquakes and an on-going pushing up of the mountain ranges, making the entire terrain unstable. Regular massive landslides and geological movements give the impression that this part of the world is still being born. The magnificent geography, unstable history and the political turmoil meant that when the earthquake hit, the word ‘devastating’ could only be used as an understatement.

  When natural disasters hit, the world usually measures the scale by the number of people who died. By that measure the Pakistan earthquake was at the top end of the scale. This is a flawed measure, however. Humanitarian workers know the cold truth. The number of dead people is not as important as the number of people who survive. To put it bluntly, dead people don’t need help; the living do. The people who need help are the survivors and the injured. In planning a response to a major natural disaster, one must measure the impact and size of the event by the number of those who have been seriously injured and survived, and then take into account circumstances in which the survivors find themselves.

  The 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami killed, on revised figures, 198,000 people and injured approximately 120,000. Those who survived the tsunami lived in mild climatic conditions. Survivors would find themselves relatively close to unaffected areas, certainly within a day’s walking distance. In comparison, the Pakistan earthquake killed about 75,000 people, injured approximately 1.4 million more and left 3.5 million homeless in highly hazardous terrain and brutal climatic conditions. Those affected would be significant distances and many days’ walk from help. If you believe the headlines of newspapers, then the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami had a bigger humanitarian impact than the Pakistan earthquake because more people were killed. The truth is the impact and challenge of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake was monumentally larger than that of the 2004 tsunami.

  In terms of scale, a larger territory was affected by the quake than that affected by the Asian tsunami. The terrain, rather than flat and coastal, was mountainous and rugged. The weather, rather than temperate and tropical, was Himalayan, threatening and lethal. The freezing winter temperatures were less than two months away. Predictions of massive second waves of death caused by infection, starvation and cold were realistic and frightening. Disease could be expected, calamity was thought to be a certainty.

  As a general rule of thumb, a poorly executed response to a natural disaster would see a second wave of deaths from secondary infection, hunger or exposure equivalent to that of the disaster itself. For Pakistan that would mean an additional 75,000 would die if the response was managed poorly. The reduction in the second wave of deaths from a potential 75,000 to as small as possible, would be the challenge. The problems faced were large, and the constraints on the planners were significant. By any reading, the impact of a natural disaster on the Pakistan scale was going to test any government, let alone a developing country government in particularly difficult circumstances. Faced with a massive catastrophe without precedent in modern times, the Pakistan government had to react, with or without help. Expectations were bleak and the task was immense.

  For six months the government led an operation that was to see the world’s largest helicopter engagement ever. More cargo was carried by air than in the Berlin airlift following the separation of East and West Berlin which marked the start of the Cold War. More than 70,000 Pakistani soldiers bravely carried huge amounts of aid up some of the world’s highest mountains. After six months, the government of Pakistan with the support of the Pakistani people, international agencies, organisations and foreign volunteers, was able to declare relief operations over and could measure themselves against the threat of 75,000 potential secondary deaths. How did Pakistan stack up?

  Not only was the second wave of deaths avoided, the death toll of 511 was a lower-than-normal death rate for winter in the same area. Deaths from the cold were fewer, no one starved to death, no disease breakout occurred. The quality of life indicators for the population had actually increased after the earthquake. Just under one million tents were distributed, nearly 400,000 emergency shelters were built, water supplies were rebuilt, and the closed areas of Kashmir were opened to foreign assistance. In less than six months the Pakistan government, with the help of the international community, was able to say, “Job well done, now let’s look to rebuild.” After 18 months of reconstruction, new schools and hospitals had been built, fundamental land reform had been achieved, and girls’ enrolments in schools had increased 50 per cent. By any measure, the quality of life for the survivors had improved during the relief effort and had been significantly enhanced in the reconstruction.

  In a BBC special Children on the Frontline, which looked at the way children responded to natural disasters and war, a father from Kashmir was interviewed about the earthquake. When the interviewer asked him, “What did you think about the earthquake?” one would perhaps have expected an answer that suggested the event had brought devastation.

  “Thank God for the earthquake. My daughter can now get the education my wife never had,” he said.

  The earthquake relief and reconstruction had done more than keep people alive and rebuild their towns and lives. It had, to use the catchphrase, ‘Built Back Better’. Pakistan had achieved some remarkable social change as part of the relief effort. This was astonishing. The story of how this all happened is a story of trust with incredible partnerships, ending in friendship, family and love.

  How Pakistan Responded In Pakistan local search and rescue operations started immediately. In any natural disaster a general rule of thumb is that 70 per cent of an emergency response is made by local people on
the ground, 20 per cent by national governments, and 10 per cent with the assistance of the international community. Pakistan was no different. The vast majority of rescues conducted in the first six to eight hours of an emergency are by people pulling friends, colleagues, sons, daughters, fathers and mothers from underneath the rubble of their own homes, well before any international response could possibly mobilise.

  People sometimes forget timelines too. When they see the first reports on international news, people often ask, “Where is the international assistance?” not realising that it takes time to assemble a team from all over the world and deliver them to the affected region, even in the very best scenario. It takes time to pack the necessary supplies and equipment. Twenty-four hours would be a rapid deployment and anything up to seven days would still be quick.

  Given that the earthquake struck and had effect in both Pakistan-controlled and Indian-controlled Kashmir, including across the Line of Control (still an internationally monitored ceasefire line between two nuclear powers) it was natural that both the Indian and Pakistani military were mobilised. Many people also ask, why use the military at all? What is the military’s “value addition” to a humanitarian situation? Don’t armies just fight wars? An emergency of this size cannot be dealt with by existing infrastructure and systems alone. With so many government structures and key personnel potentially wiped out, a rapid replacement of capacity is needed. This is why in any natural disaster of this size, a stable government turns to its military for immediate response. No one else can do it.

  The military has assets, mobility, means, organisation, and the wherewithal and can provide national, district and local coordination infrastructure for NGOs, civil society and international support. Most importantly, they can work in far-flung areas, and hard-to-reach and perhaps ‘insecure’ regions. The military, particularly if well trained, has knowledge, and the ability to think and adapt.