‘Where are the supplies?’ survivor wonders
Squabbling parties have weakened economy, making rebuilding harder
An Ottawa woman found safe, but injured, after the devastating earthquake in Nepal says not enough is being done to help the victims of the disaster.
“Where are the helicopters? Where are the supplies? Please spread the word — The survivors of Langtang area are suffering,” Faye Kennedy, 32, wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday. The post has so far been shared almost 3,000 times.
Kennedy was hiking in Nepal’s popular Langtang National Park, about 130 kilometres north of the capital, Kathmandu, when the devastating quake struck on Saturday. The official toll so far is more than 4,600 people dead, with another 9,000 injured. Both of those figures are expected to rise.
She was with two friends, but because she was injured Kennedy was airlifted to Kathmandu for treatment ahead of her companions. The injuries were minor, according to a release from her brother-inlaw Justin Piché.
Her friends, Erland Nylend of Norway and Nisha Nudha of Nepal, were still waiting above Langtang village, “which has been absolutely flattened by the avalanche.”
And Kennedy said there are hundreds of foreign and local casualties with them.
“There have been 6 helicopter evacuations of 6 people at a time. The helicopters have brought nothing to the survivors waiting to be evacuated — firewood and food is running out, there is no roof and hypothermia will set in soon if supplies are not brought in. They are in a desperate situation,” she wrote.
A military aircraft carrying a Canadian Disaster Assistance Response Team and other personnel was expected to arrive in Nepal on Wednesday, said Defence Minister Jason Kenney. But it would depend on the condition of the airport.
In Ottawa, Zaphod Beeblebrox will host a benefit concert on May 8 for victims of the quake. “All proceeds from this benefit will go to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Canadian Red Cross,” the popular nightclub’s Facebook post says.
Another Ottawa man hiking in Nepal, Sam Caldbick, is safe for now, according to a tweet from a friend, Cody Walter of Sudbury.
Meanwhile, the family of Gatineau man Eric Lauzier continued to wait for news.
Lauzier’s father Robert said he last heard from Eric on Friday, via a Facebook message.
He believes his son was travelling not far from Kathmandu at the time.
A Facebook post on April 16 showed him in the Annapurna region, about a seven-hour drive from Kathmandu.
Even in the aftermath of Nepal’s devastating earthquake, which killed thousands and displaced countless more, it has been difficult to come to grips with the scale of the calamity.
Days after the quake rocked the capital, Kathmandu, destroying irreplaceable heritage sites, rescuers and response teams still struggled to reach the country’s remote outlying districts, where whole villages are feared to have been wiped off the map.
The natural disaster, as many have noted, did not come out of nowhere. For decades, there have been studies showing how prone Nepal is to such temblors, but little was done to prepare for a quake of this magnitude. Experts point to the country’s endemic poverty as a reason for its particular vulnerability. The vast international relief mission that has whirred into motion has reinforced the image of a seemingly helpless Nepali state, dependent on outside aid.
In the minds of many outsiders, Nepal remains a romantic Himalayan destination. Kathmandu, famed for its ancient palaces, is just a gateway to trekking adventures in the shadow of Mount Everest or some of the country’s other epic ranges.
But this picture-perfect postcard obscures the sweeping, traumatic changes that have racked the country over the past two decades. Parallel to Nepal’s active geological fault lines are very volatile political divisions.
In the 1990s, a Maoist insurgency sprang up, aimed at toppling the century-old monarchy and upturning the history of entrenched ethnic and caste inequity that radiated from Kathmandu’s palaces. The Maoist rebellion ended only in 2006, with at least 12,000 Nepalis killed and much of the nation’s countryside ravaged. A peace process overseen by the United Nations was supposed to transform Nepal, a constitutional monarchy, into a secular, federal republic.
That sort of happened. Nepal’s Maoist guerrillas swapped their jungle hideaways for plush offices in Kathmandu and became stakeholders in the country’s multiparty democracy. Elections led to the formation of a transitional government and an assembly tasked with drafting the country’s new constitution. In 2008, Nepal’s century-old monarchy was formally abolished. By 2012, Maoist fighting units had been integrated into the Nepali army, once a bitter enemy.
But the past decade has also seen Nepal lurch from one crisis to the next, the national interest held hostage to the quarrels of feuding political parties. Successive legislatures elected to pen a new constitution have failed at their main task. Simmering tensions between the Maoists, royalists and more-centrist political parties have led to coalition governments forming and swiftly collapsing, while protests and strikes paralyze the country.
“The sole purpose of the political class has been centred on survival,” says Prashant Jha, author of Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal and a New Delhi-based reporter for the Hindustan Times. “The average tenure of each government has been so short-lived that no one has focused on building up the state’s capacity.” Even the country’s bureaucracy is deeply politicized, Jha says.
Years of political turbulence have left the Nepali economy in the doldrums, and the Nepali state woefully unable to cope with a tragedy of this size in a country where the infrastructure — from a lack of airports to a shortage of paved roads — is notoriously poor.
“We don’t have a political culture where there’s a home minister who has spent years developing the means to handle this sort of disaster,” Jha says.
“After a decade of conflict between the government and Maoist insurgents, Nepal’s politicians have been too busy battling one another, most recently over constitutional reform, to treat disaster preparedness as a priority,” Kunda Dixit, a prominent Nepali journalist, wrote in The New York Times. “There have been no elections at the district, village or municipal level for almost two decades, and the committees that run local councils aren’t organized to coordinate emergency assistance.”
As was the case after a devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, non-governmental and international organizations will have to manage despite the government’s failings.
To be sure, Nepal’s political dysfunction isn’t just the product of incompetent, short-sighted elites. Reshaping a nation of Nepal’s bewildering complexity — its roughly 30 million people belong to more than 100 specific castes and ethnic groups — is no easy task, especially when it has to happen in a democratic process.
There are genuine ideological disputes between, say, the Maoists and other political parties over how to redraw the country’s political boundaries and create a new federal system that better represents some of its more marginalized communities.
The tragic irony, though, is that as Nepal’s leaders war over an ideal future, the present has grown gloomy. A staggering proportion of the country’s population has been compelled to make a living overseas.
And despite talk of decentralization, Kathmandu has only grown in prominence, with the instability of years of war prompting a significant spike in rural migration to the valley where the teeming, overcrowded capital sits.
“We are almost a one-city state,” Jha says. “All the country’s opportunities, its good medical facilities, its main places for education, its administrative centres, everything is in Kathmandu.”
This makes the challenge of coping with an earthquake that flattened whole swaths of the capital all the more difficult for Nepal’s government.
Many may hope that, as Nepal literally picks up the pieces, its political classes will have learned some lessons from their country’s ruin.
The past decade has also seen Nepal lurch from one crisis to the next, the national interest held hostage to the quarrels of feuding political parties.
It is gratifying, to be sure, to see the Canadian military’s Disaster Assistance Response Team wheeled promptly into action in the international effort to prevent Nepal’s catastrophic earthquake, its worst in eight decades, from becoming an even more devastating humanitarian calamity. Canadians rightly want to help, and want the government to be seen to help.
If only global disaster response generally, encompassing the wellmeaning efforts of governments, militaries and private agencies the world over, Canada’s included, weren’t such a shambolic, chaotic, wholly inadequate mess.
To watch the response to Saturday’s Nepal quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and has left a country already desperately poor in ruins — with many thousands dead, thousands more hurt and half a million homeless — is to see coming into focus an agonizing, slow-motion replay of the Haiti earthquake response in 2010. Only this time, if anything, it will be worse.
As in Haiti, transportation in Nepal even before the earthquake was basic. But unlike Haiti, Nepal is landlocked. This makes largescale shipment of aid impossible. And the state of the one international airport at Kathmandu is unclear. Even if large transport aircraft such as those now en route from Canada are able to land, there’s no reason to believe the unspooling of aid to where it is needed will proceed any more quickly than it did in Haiti, where it took days, weeks and months.
If there isn’t already, then there will soon be a bottleneck in Kathmandu, as there was in Port-au-Prince, with private aid teams and aircraft from around the world queued up like dominoes at the airfield, waiting to move.
Delays will be exacerbated by the logistical difficulties presented by Nepal’s geography. Across most of the country there are no roads, even before the earthquake. Many villages are accessible only on foot. The country is all cliffs, ravines and valleys, every path punctuated by steep staircases, meaning even all-terrain-vehicles are of limited use. The very qualities that make Nepal a mecca for hikers and climbers make it impossible to service in a disaster.
The paved road between Kathmandu and Pokhara, Nepal’s second city, was a harrowing, narrow cliff-side marvel of engineering pre-earthquake, and reportedly is impassable now. There are small airstrips in Pokhara, Jomsom and Manang in the western Annapurna region, and Lukla in the east, toward Mount Everest, which should be accessible to military aircraft that can land and take off in short distances. Helicopters, more than any other conveyance, will save lives.
Here again the challenge will be co-ordination. Given the haphazard way in which an international relief effort of this kind comes together, particularly in a developing country with no effective central control, it is impossible for there not to be major overlaps and gaps. With each passing day the casualties due to lack of emergency medical care will mount. At higher altitudes, exposure to the intense cold will take a toll. And then will come the wave of waterborne disease, as people with no other option drink fouled water to stay alive.
The patchwork of private disaster-relief agencies is both a testament to the best in human nature and the shortness of our attention spans. The Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Global Medic, World Vision, Save the Children and many others have teams either in Nepal or en route. The Canadian government has established a Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund, private donor contributions to be matched dollar-for-dollar by the government until May 25, which it will disburse to aid agencies it deems worthy.
The reality, however, is that the deliverers are effectively competing with one another for donor money, particularly during the days immediately following a disaster, when international media coverage is at its peak. As coverage wanes, donations drop off — so there is a rush, again with mainly noble intentions, to be first on the ground, brand on display, to prompt the generosity that will pay for aid later, after fickle popular attention has moved on. This puts the agencies effectively at cross purposes, when they could be working more closely together.
The remedy? If it were obvious, or easy, it would already be happening. But surely the wealthier nations of the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the G-20 or some combination thereof, should have the wherewithal to field a co-ordinated disaster response that would be global in scope, and equal to the task of getting there fast, with the lift capacity, emergency medicine, potable water and shelter that are the pillars of disaster relief.
NATO’s bulked-up Response Force, to comprise 30,000 troops, is primarily an answer to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. But it is also expected to have some disaster-relief function. Perhaps it’s too idealistic to imagine a significant share of NATO’s vast military heft being deployed just to save lives. That doesn’t prevent a person wishing, though.
Surely the wealthier nations of the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the G-20 or some combination thereof, should have the wherewithal to field a co-ordinated disaster response that would be global in scope … Michael Den Tandt With each passing day the casualties due to lack of emergency medical care will mount.