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MORE than a week has passed since Nepal was hit by a devastating earthquake. As the rubble is cleared and the extent of the devastation revealed, there has been only bad news. The death toll as of now stands at more than 7,000 people, with nearly 15,000 believed injured. The capital city, Kathmandu, is a pile of rubble and ruin. Many are still living under tarps, the luckiest in tents, and many structures, known and revered for centuries, are no more.
In the years leading up to the earthquake, the economy of Nepal owed a sizeable chunk of its earnings to foreign tourism. The most lucrative of this sector has been the one catering to foreign climbers who come to scale Mount Everest, using thousands of dollars to hire local sherpas to carry their loads and ease their path up the mountain.
In the Western desire for conquest thus, so metaphorically defined by the scaling of a mountain, some Nepalis have found their livelihood. Without the yearly arrival of the climbers, local economies that depend on them would be left bereft and without business. On Westerners eager to scale, the irony that they were preceded by hired humans who cleared their path is mostly lost.
Post-disaster aid agency initiatives can further distort power relationships between the state and the people.
Privilege dictates much in the world; so it is in the case of natural disaster. After the earthquake struck last Saturday, an avalanche went through the base camps on the mountain. About 20 people, climbers and sherpas, were killed instantaneously. Several hundreds of others were left stranded on the mountain in Camp I and Camp II. Those who were injured were taken away by helicopters that flew in through gaps in the clouds. They returned on Monday to airlift another 100 people who were trapped on the mountain.
The story sounds good and even heroic, and so it would have been if an article in Foreign Policy magazine had not pointed to a little known fact: Nepal has pathetically few helicopters and after a disaster that killed thousands of its own, its few helicopter airlift resources had been put in the service of saving foreigners who had been searching for mountain-climbing conquest.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of Nepalis remained stranded, often with nothing to eat and no potable water. In one story narrated in the New York Times, a man reported travelling hundreds of miles on foot from Kathmandu to his village in the mountains. He carried with him a tarp, some apples and grapes. When he got to his destination, his house was one of the only ones left standing; everything else in the village was gone.
In hundreds of other villages throughout Nepal, villagers complained of the problem of dead bodies that had not been buried or cremated. There was often no one left to carry out the last rituals. For these thousands of hapless people, no magical helicopter appeared through a gap in the clouds to carry them to safety.
Unsurprisingly, the magnitude of the disaster has left the Nepalese government flummoxed. The government in any developing country is hardly ever flush with cash; the misfortune of natural disaster (and Pakistanis will recognise this) exacerbates all of its flaws and failures. Transnational aid agencies, those international arbiters of post-disaster benevolence, swoop down — their own operational rules and regulations taking precedence over those of any particular context.
The task is, of course, getting help to the suffering, and issues of sovereignty should not matter. The Nepalese government was not so sure and the tension talked; to extract some revenue, it imposed a duty on just about everything coming into the country. Aid agencies balked and blamed bureaucracy for the condition of stranded supplies whose excise duty was being calculated. This, they said, was only making Nepal worse.
What should a country like Nepal do in a condition such as the post-earthquake mayhem that it faces today? Everyone knows that the deaths of Westerners attract far more global attention than, say, those of Nepalese natives; if the public narrative of disaster is to be well managed, can helicopters really be refused to stranded Westerners atop mountains? It is indeed quite likely that if any of them died awaiting rescue, Nepal’s reputation as a mountain-climbing capital would be ruined for the future. It is a vexing dilemma with no easy answers: annoying the Western wealthy can doom the future of the natives left living.
Similar questions surround aid initiatives. At one point, the Nepalese government encouraged foreign agencies to simply deposit money with the government. This was not popular for expected reasons. Money handed to governments does not usually come with guarantees of good use and so it was with this strategy. What remains unaddressed is how governments such as that of Nepal (or really any developing country) can maintain their fragile hold over governance in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
On the one hand are the pressing and urgent needs of thousands in the throes of suffering, on the other is the fact that post-disaster aid agency initiatives can further distort power relationships between the state and the people. Neither is a frivolous concern and there are cautionary tales to boot: following the earthquake in Haiti, the UN Peacekeepers deployed there brought with them a cholera epidemic that the local population in that country had not been exposed to the disease.
In poor countries especially, it seems that politics does not pause for natural disaster. The troubling dynamics of the plenty that aid organisations have to offer and the poverty of this or that government unfortunate enough to be afflicted with catastrophe leave the latter with little choice other than to bow to the dictates of those that promise respite. So it was for Pakistan and Haiti, so it seems it will be for Nepal.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2015
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