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November 29, 2005

Perils In Pakistani Earthquake Relief, Parallels to Katrina

Pakistan is more than just a U.S. ally in the war on terror – it’s also an eerie doppelganger of hard core Republican economic strategies, according to Afiya Shehrbano, a sociologist in Pakistan who points out ‘scary affinities’ between the how the Bush and Musharraf administrations handle disaster relief.

“In fact, [the Musharraf administration’s attitude] is eerily reminiscent of the kind of hard-core Republican strategy that is shaping the reconstruction process in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans. First of all, disasters are not indiscriminate, as the fatalists like to believe. Class, race and gender play integral roles in the nature and extent of damage, as do the flaws of rural housing and inadequate infrastructure,” she writes for The News of Pakistan.

The disaster clean-up after Katrina, she writes, is moreover a warning of both what to expect and what to avoid in Pakistan post quake.

She argues for example that, like FEMA, the ranks of Pakistan’s Relief and Reconstruction Authority have been stocked according to the calculus of patronage and profit, rather than skill and merit. Relief efforts should be conducted with a view toward ecological considerations and the needs of the affected people, not lining the pockets of the military, “who have become notoriously involved in real estate as side-businesses in every part of this country,” she advises.

“Note also the likeness in 'optimistic' conservative economic agendas that the Bush administration promised New Orleans victims and which our administration is pushing after the earthquake. Both have pledged to make the affected areas into capitalist utopias through free trade pacts,” Shehrbano observes, concluding, “It is really the right moment for civil society to step in and organise its efforts towards a meaningful, people-oriented rebuilding of the affected communities.”

David Montero, a freelance journalist in Dhaka, Bangladesh, covered the Pakistani earthquake for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications.

Posted November 29, 2005 11:27 AM

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