Making contact

By Ismail Khan

Amidst the mayhem of disaster reporting, want of information from far-flungareas becomes suffocating

The first jolt was a distraction. I was checking and responding to emails when the quake careened and swayed the office building from side to side. At first, I thought this was one of the usual fleeting shocks that usually occur in this part of the region. But it was not. Soon enough, the shocks grew in intensity, the floor started moving back and forth, glass windows started rattling, and the wall behind my desktop and work table developed cracks.

It was time; I decided to move out, along with my staff.

The exit stairs were already overcrowded of the 11-floor building where Dawn’s office is located. But briskly and in files, we managed to move out. In the relative safety of the outdoors, I saw the tall building swing back and forth in all its majesty. The aftershocks were still continuing. This was scary; I thought the building would come crashing on us all standing in the open.

Whoa! That was the most severe earthquake I had experienced in my life.

As the jolts stopped, I rushed back inside the office. The cellular phone networks were down. I wanted to call my family and friends and those of my colleagues who were still out. Landlines also didn’t seem to work. My anxiety grew. The editor sent an immediate message checking if we were all ok. Thankfully, we were.

Peshawar

The second and most important task was to find out the intensity and location of the earthquake and check with our correspondents and others what happened in their part of the nook. As colleagues started coming in, we discussed who was going to do what. A colleague, who covers health was tasked to check with hospitals and rescue workers to know if there had been any fatalities.

Zulfikar, our senior reporter, holding his notebook, was already on the job, checking with the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, district and tribal correspondents the extent of the damage caused by the deadly earthquake. Another colleague was checking with civic bodies and rescue workers to know if their response to the emerging catastrophe was immediate. A female colleague was looking at human angle of the devastating earthquake.

If 2005 had taught us anything, it was to piece together information and accounts from far-flung areas. Peshawar has a way of surviving calamity — natural or manmade — but it is usually areas without access to emergency healthcare or even a telecommunications network that are worst-hit. Breaking news of calamity in these districts often takes on greater significance since the magnitude of death and destruction is also higher, and therefore, the needs of these areas takes precedence.

Even in the absolute madness of reporting a natural disaster, those who weren’t in Peshawar occupied our thoughts. They still do, because they are larger than any “so-many-dead-and-so-many-wounded story.

The writer is Dawn’s Editor KP

The sum of all parts

By Danish Karokhel

In the absence of a strong government and military, the Afghan media has stepped up to fill the information vacuum

It was 1:39pm in Kabul when the 7.7 magnitude earthquake rocked our city. When it happened, we were in a meeting, discussing ways to develop media ethics, but soon, all journalists wanted to finish the session as soon as possible. There was much chaos awaiting us in our newsrooms and we needed to be with our teams.

Having rushed to work, I found that our editors and reporters were already busy trying to collect and collate information.

Related departments such as photography and social media too were very active. In Jalalabad, a colleague’s house had been severely damaged, but when I checked on others, they were all safe.

Communication lines had been affected, so reaching out to people was not easy. But the advantage that we at Pajhwok have is that our network of regional editors and reporters is spread across Afghanistan. If we could get in touch with them, we’d have our information. And we did.

It was our regional editors’ job to start assessing the extent of damage and start cross-checking facts and figures. On the first day, the government was reporting a figure of around 25 deaths, but we had been reporting 70. I received calls from government officials asking how we had tabulated 70 deaths; we duly provided the information we had.

But it was also on the first day that Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Abdullah Abdullah directed the authorities concerned to deliver emergency aid to the people affected by the massive earthquake. Chairing a meeting of the Emergency Response Committee (ERC) on information collection and aid delivery, Abdullah said emergency measures should be taken for aid delivery to those affected.

Kabul

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani late in that evening, in a televised speech shared his sorrow with the people of Afghanistan and tasked all the provincial governors not to leave any stone unturned in delivering aid to those affected and identifying the casualties figures.

It is in this meeting that commissions and committees were constituted to provide first information and to carry out needs’ assessment in various areas. Through an official mechanism, we are now trying to marry the information received by the media with official information. Together, we are piecing various parts of the jigsaw to find out the true extent of damage and destruction.

The media has also emerged as the foremost platform for rescue and relief information. For example, Pajhwok has been printing updated emergency helpline contact numbers as well as any government desk contact numbers for the common public. Then there are donation campaigns that are exclusively being run through the media, since there is no other way of providing information or awareness.

We had been sending reporters from Kabul and other city centres to check up on communities who live in close proximity to the city. Much of the reported damage and destruction is from areas where some communication lines are still open. We also understand very well that access to healthcare is very weak in provinces, and therefore, many of the injured had to be brought to the cities.

But the big worry is rural areas, especially with the onset of winters upon us. The key concern here is reconstruction, since it’ll start snowing soon in some districts. For rural and impoverished areas, this spells disaster because there will be no shelter for many of the under-privileged.

In editorials and reportage on the third day since the quake, Afghan journalists have been pushing our government to start reconstruction as soon as possible. The debate today is either to reconstruct on war footings or to shift the vulnerable populations to temporary shelters.

The writer is director and editor-in-chief of Pajhwok Afghan News, Kabul, Afghanistan

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 1st, 2015

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