So Ban Ki Moon arrived in Haiti and declared that it is was the "worst humanitarian disaster in decades". That struck me as an extremely profound statement. Lets say that "decades” means 30 years, for the sake of argument; that got me thinking…that’s pretty bad. There’s been some spectacularly awful disasters in the last 30 years.
In reality, when it comes to enormous humanitarian disasters, we don’t have to look much further than the last couple of years. Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, The Chinese Earthquake - three of the worst disasters I can think of just off the top of my head (2008 alone saw both the Sichuan earthquake and the Indonesian – both larger than the 7.0 magnitude Haitian quake). These three alone were catastrophic, heart wrenching and harrowing to witness even from the comfort of your living room – but not as bad as Haiti is right now.
Then there are several other uber-earthquakes in immediate recent memory in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - but not as bad as Haiti is right now. The Honduran Hurricane in 1998 or the recent Samoan Tsunami also spring to mind – all awful at the time and now “superseded” in awfulness. Then there’s various man-made disasters such as Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and the countless African Civil Wars and Famines all of which were humanitarian disasters beyond comprehension when you’ve no experience of these things. Then, think about those random catastrophes such as the Bhopal Chemical disaster of 1982 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster and of course Chernobyl. But not as bad as Haiti is right now
Naturally the web has no end of useful – albeit macabre – resources on this vain, including an exhaustive list of the deadliest earthquakes. But its worth visiting Wikipedia’s list of the ten worst natural disasters of all time to see that according to it, none of them have occurred since 1975 – just outside my own personal understanding of “in decades”.
Just what constitutes a humanitarian disaster is no doubt defined somewhere, and what criteria is used to judge which ones are worse than others is probably also a scientific classification performed by an extensive team at the UN. They say that the reason Haiti is in such an appalling state is that the infrastructure wasn’t in great shape as it was, and now what did exist has been destroyed. Also that the buildings were so poorly constructed and that law & order is tenuous at the best of times.
In a world where something terrible on this scale seems to happen at least every 12 months, its kind of helpful to be jump-started out of your TV de-sensitised complacency into a suitable level of shock and sympathy.
Everything is – as they say – relative. Bottom line = whatever you can remember, its not as bad as Haiti is right now.