The powerful earthquake that hit northern regions of Pakistan on October 8, 2005 killed over 73,000 people and affected more than 3 million others, completely destroying hundreds of hamlets, villages, and large sections of towns and cities in the North West Frontier Province and Kashmir. The affected area was some 30,000 square kilometres of mostly remote and mountainous terrain extending into the disputed areas of Kashmir and on to India. Destroying an estimated 600,000 homes, 6000 schools, and 500 health facilities, the earthquake suddenly left millions of survivors to face not only the utter devastation of their families, communities and livelihoods, but also the imminent arrival of the region’s freezing winter weather without adequate shelter and the means to provide for basic life sustaining needs.
It is said that nations get stronger after going through tough times and after facing challenges, as they learn strategic and important lessons from adverse conditions that in turn help people increase their resilience. Is the same valid for Pakistan as well?
Today is the first anniversary of that tragedy and still rehabilitation and reconstruction are a far cry from what they should have been. What lessons can we learn from what we did during this year? First things first, did we enquire the reasons for massive destruction of public buildings — especially schools and hospitals — resulting in the death of thousands of innocent children? Second, will we ever fix responsibilities for the violation of building bylaws that increased the level of destruction? Third, is there any answer for the absence of disaster preventing strategies and mechanisms? Fourth, what is the rationale of conducting rehabilitation exercise with a military face? Fifth, have we devised any mechanism for monitoring and evaluating rehabilitation efforts so far? Sixth, why compensation that should have been a primary right of the survivors is being provided as charity and that too not to all of them? Seventh, when will we think of conducting seismic zoning exercise of major cities of Pakistan? Eighth, why the decisions to develop Balakot and Muzaffarabad at alternative sites are being taken? Who is taking these decisions? What about the cost of displacement, both in terms of social as well as in economic terms? Last but not least, what happened to all the money donated by individual philanthropists as well as organisations and states? The list of questions like these can be unending, just like the issues being faced by the survivors of the earthquake.
Now looking at the answers, there may be plenty and some of them quite apt and justified. But even the most elaborate among them fail to tell if there had been any lessons learnt during the last year. We have a strong belief that natural calamities cannot be averted. Very true, but there should be no doubt about the fact that right policy and planning can stop natural catastrophes from turning into human disasters. In our case, this planning has been never there. It’s an even sadder comment on our affairs that we don’t have these policies and plans in place despite having made all the pious proclamations on this count for the whole last year. Should we says that we are back to square one or should we more accurately put it by saying that we haven’t even attempted to reach square one. Neither before the earthquake nor afterwards. After one year of the tragic earthquake and after losing scores of thousands of precious lives in that, there exist no prevention plans, nor there will be any until God forbid we suffer another natural calamity.
One of the reasons we do not tend to learn any lessons from our past experiences is that we have a common tendency to attribute all virtues to ourselves and to hold fate responsible for all evils, absolving ourselves from any responsibility for them and shunning any duties that they warrant us to perform. Our most common refrain after all natural disaster’s that Allah willed so is sure recipe for disaster because it holds us back from take any measure to stop the recurrence of the calamity.
I was extremely shocked two weeks ago when in one of the mosques in the United Kingdom I heard the Imam saying that Allah showed His displeasure towards people living in the quake-affected areas and punished them with the earthquake for their sins. I was totally disgusted by this sermon. Such views are totally misleading and provide an easy escape to those who are responsible for bad planning, to those who did not construct public sector infrastructure according to the strictest standard, and to those who ignored all warnings of nature by not abiding by seismic zone classifications and safe building bylaws. Sermons like these also create the impression as if those living in the quake zone had been bigger sinners than the rest of us. Giving value judgements about the collective morality of a large section of the society does not just make sweeping generalisations to evoke a collective sense of guilt but it also creates a false of sense of security: This can be roughly translated something like this: Individual piety will save us from natural disasters even if we keep ignoring building codes and other safety standards at the collective levels.
Equally importantly, most of the stakeholders and survivors are so influenced by these sermons that they never raise the issue of accountability. They resign themselves to Allah’s will instead of asking questions about the circumstances that turn a natural phenomenon into a disastrous catastrophe. They are least prepared to remind the state of its responsibility in providing social safety nets to all its citizens. The government, too, hides behind the same kind of thinking and is reluctant to fix responsibilities. This is a typical example of who the state and the clergy have always come together to help each other since the days of the Pharaohs.
Finally, on the issue of effective use of donors’ money, I have only one comment to make. Does it make any difference how much water one pours into a vessel that has a big hole at the base? In our case, the vessel does not have any holes. Its whole base is missing. This base is called cohesive policy and planning. Without an integral policy and planning, spending even an infinite amount of money will not yield any sustainable results and we will keep on blaming our fate for our faulty strategies.