OPINION:The expectation of 'animalistic' behaviour was wide of the mark as survivors helped one another after the quake
HURRICANE KATRINA hit New Orleans on August 29th, 2005. Just under two weeks ago a magnitude seven earthquake pulverised Port-au-Prince and much of Haiti’s Tiburon peninsula.
Despite the multiple differences between these two catastrophes, they share one deeply disturbing common point – unsubstantiated reports of survivors descending into what Ray Nagin, the then mayor of New Orleans, described on US television in 2005 as an “almost animalistic state” of pillaging and murder.
Most journalists and visiting leaders remarked on the calm patience of Haitian survivors, often emphasising their almost surprising degree of human dignity. Bill Clinton reminded the BBC that “these people haven’t slept for four days, haven’t eaten and have spent their nights wandering the streets tripping over dead bodies. I think they’ve behaved pretty well.”
Much was made of the risk posed by the 4,000 prisoners who escaped from Haiti’s ruined jails by journalists who seemed unaware that the majority of these were being held on remand pending their trials.
The alarmist reports actually put peoples’ lives at risk, as security fears delayed aid distribution and helped convince US forces to prioritise the arrival of armed troops over aid flights during a couple of crucial days.
We had seen exactly the same syndrome at work after Katrina, producing exactly the same effect whereby restoring order became a precondition for mounting search-and-rescue operations. The syndrome was repeated despite the manifest differences between the hurricane and earthquake catastrophes.
About 1,900 people were killed by Katrina, while about 120,000 perished in the Haitian quake.
The hurricane was expected, but it is still impossible to predict the timing of earthquakes. The best warning came from the March 2008 Caribbean Geological Conference, which considered a 7.2 magnitude earthquake probable “over the next 40 years”.
Most of New Orleans’s agony came from flooding as levees and pumps failed, leading to a steady, if rapid, rise in water levels over several hours. Haiti’s earthquake caused most of its damage and fatalities in under a minute. As the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière later observed: “I didn’t know that sixty seconds could last so very long.”
The earthquake struck one of the world’s poorest countries, devastated its capital, and decapitated the UN Minustah mission.
If it took the world days to grasp the US needed help in 2005, the understanding of Haiti’s need was instantaneous. A Mexican military field kitchen, naval vessels and helicopters would eventually deploy to assist Katrina survivors. Iceland’s world-renowned urban rescue team flew into Port-au-Prince less than 28 hours after the earthquake.
If the overwhelming majority of those who died in New Orleans were the city’s poorest residents, many of the dead in Port-au-Prince came from slightly higher up the social scale.
Almost everybody with a car, and the money to buy petrol, had fled New Orleans before the hurricane struck. Conversely, those Haitians forced to live in flimsy single-story shantytown constructions had a much better chance of survival than slightly wealthier citizens in concrete houses, or who were in offices and schools when the quake hit.
No international media had correspondents based in New Orleans, while there were already several correspondents in Haiti, and others quickly arrived. Twitter and Facebook, now universal, were still on the drawing board in 2005. Haiti’s erratic electricity and telecom networks meant that the presence of generators and satellite connections was considerably more widespread than it had been in New Orleans.
Despite these differences, the reports of society breaking down, of widespread looting, rape and mayhem, were remarkably similar.
Mayor Nagin had told Oprah Winfrey of “hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping” in his city’s superdome and its neighbouring convention centre. The US government would send a refrigerated truck to collect the 200 bodies it expected to find.
Ten bodies would actually be recovered from both sites. Seven had died of natural causes, one of an overdose, one had committed suicide and there was one possible homicide out of the 45,000 people who had been stranded in both buildings.
Looting can be a question of perspective. Taking food from a flooded or collapsed shop to feed yourself and your children could just as easily be called survival. Edna Harris, one of the refugees at the New Orleans Convention centre, observed that “ladies with babies” had to depend on people breaking into shops to “bring them milk”.
Elias Abraham, owner of a “looted” Haitian supermarket told the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t care. God bless them. If they need the food, take it.”
Some commentators seemed to operate on the basis that human beings only behave decently when compelled to do so. Does such an expectation of “animalistic” behaviour flow from a fundamentalist biblical interpretation of “Original Sin” which predisposes us to evil?
Could it be that poorer and less well educated people are expected to be more prone to savage behaviour? Moreover, that poor black people are even worse?
Some people undoubtedly behaved irresponsibly in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake.
Some of them held machetes. Others had microphones.