Dr Syed Mansoor Hussain

In a world where many wars — small and large — are going on and the threat of terrorism is an all pervasive fear, it does take a natural calamity of this magnitude to make us realise how insignificant and petty our national and local conniptions against each other are

Haiti! How much more unfortunate can a country be? Just as I, like many others in Pakistan, were adding up our woes from the years gone by, along comes a devastating earthquake in a country that has already suffered incredibly over the last few decades. This makes our troubles in Pakistan seem so insignificant in comparison.

The capital city of Port au Prince was literally levelled; hospitals, homes, roads, power and communications infrastructure, the UN headquarters and even the presidential palace were destroyed. Casualties are still uncounted and are expected to go above 100,000. More than the dead, it is the wounded and the homeless that make the suffering of this country so poignant. There are just not enough trained personnel or facilities to take care of those that need help and need it urgently. The world has come out in a big way to offer help, but by the time the help gets where it is needed, many more will have perished from wounds and deprivation.

In a world where many wars — small and large — are going on and the threat of terrorism is an all pervasive fear, it does take a natural calamity of this magnitude to make us realise how insignificant and petty our national and local conniptions against each other are. This, despite the fact that mankind has reached a point in scientific development that we can wipe ourselves off the face of this earth with our stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Haiti is a unique country. It was the first country to fight off its colonial masters more than 200 years ago. It was the first country where transplanted African American slaves along with the indigenous population gained emancipation as well as independence. But since then it has had a sad history. For many of us, more recently Haiti was the country of the tyrant Papa Doc Duvalier and his personal enforcers, the Tonton Macoutes and of course it was the home of voodoo and the zombies.

In the early ‘90s, Haiti returned to democracy and a priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the presidential election with an overwhelming majority, but was soon forced out of the country. Since then Haiti has been on a roller coaster with things getting progressively worse. Today, besides being one of the poorest nations around, it is also a country that has been particularly ravaged in recent years by hurricanes, floods and now this massive earthquake.

True believers of all faiths shall invoke the Supreme Deity and look for a divine justification for what has happened. The less religiously inclined will talk of grinding poverty worsened by corruption and cycles of violence that created a country without the rule of law and, as such, without building codes, or infrastructure that could withstand some of the horrors of this earthquake.

Personally, I think that if we wish to take the divine plan idea one step further, then perhaps the poverty, corruption, lack of governance, dictatorships, repeated military coups, foreign interventions and the repeated natural calamities must also be included in the divine plan. So I hope I will be forgiven if I stick with human frailty and random natural calamity as the cause of the disaster unfolding before us in Haiti.

Many of us in Pakistan remember the earthquake that devastated parts of the northern areas. There is much in common in what happened then to what is happening in Haiti right now. Buildings that were built poorly collapsed and that included almost all government buildings; the rudimentary infrastructure vanished and access to the victims was hard, as was bringing in heavy equipment required for search and rescue operations. But the aftermath of that earthquake in Pakistan was a great example of how the country came together and how foreign aid came in and helped out. Even though the reconstruction efforts are no longer being talked about, it does seem that things are not that bad today and perhaps buildings and roads were rebuilt to be able to withstand future earthquakes better.

Once the immediacy of widespread human tragedy is behind us, international help will allow rebuilding of the infrastructure and other vital services, but ultimately it will be the people of Haiti who will determine whether this is a chance to rebuild not just the brick and mortar but also the very basis of what their country is and could be.

Pakistan was fortunate that in its major earthquake, the area involved was only a small part of the country but in Haiti the entire capital has literally been devastated. It seems almost heartless to say so, but I will repeat the rather overused cliché, that in every major crisis there is also great opportunity.

Perhaps the wealthy countries of the world led by the US, which has spent untold billions of dollars in wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, can put together a credible effort to rebuild this country, not through dole and intermittent aid but through a sustained and mutually respectful partnership with the people of Haiti.

I realise that it is probably a pipedream, but I would like to believe that a country like Haiti can indeed be helped to recover and rebuild and, as a consequence, become a self-sustaining member of the world community rather than just another country labelled as ‘one of the poorest’. Let that, then, become the new ‘Obama Doctrine’. The US is not only a destroyer but also a builder. And it will help rebuild Haiti not for strategic but for humanitarian reasons.

For us in Pakistan, the disaster in Haiti is also a lesson. When the state withers away and anarchy sets in, random natural disasters are transformed from limited calamities into widespread tragedies that can unravel the entire national fabric.

Finally, as human beings we must accept the simple reality: we are all in this together.

Syed Mansoor Hussain has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com