HUMANITARIAN HYPOCRISY

Humanitarian Hypocrisy

International response to floods fails Pakistani citizens

“Everywhere I travel, I see the same story,” Hamid Mir, a GeoTV Pakistani journalist, says in a recent news broadcast. “I was here during [the] 2010 [floods], when aid was still successfully reaching people … but now reaching people has been impossible for NGOs, governments, and the media.” Mir stands against a backdrop of makeshift tents, next to what seems like a boundless lake—but in fact it is land that has been completely submerged by the catastrophic floods in Sindh, Pakistan.

According to satellite images taken by the European Space Agency, a third of Pakistan seems to be completely underwater. As of September 30, approximately 7.9 million people are assumed to be displaced, around 1,693 killed, (a third of whom were children) and around 13,000 injured. Two million houses have been damaged, nearly 800 thousand of which have been damaged beyond repair. Thousands of kilometers of roads and hundreds of bridges have been destroyed, preventing aid workers from reaching affected communities and displaced people from traveling to safety. Pakistan has faced flood calamities every year for the past few decades; in 2010, the nation faced one of comparable proportions that impacted approximately a fifth of Pakistan’s total land area, claiming thousands of lives and displacing millions from their homes.

National and international NGOs, nonprofits, community actors, government agencies, and other humanitarian actors are attempting to control what is quickly looking like an irreversible disaster. However, most of these responses have been inadequate due to scarce funding that barely reaches the most affected populations. Meanwhile, powerful actors in the Global North refuse to acknowledge their culpability in this crisis—namely, environmental injustices toward the Global South, neocolonial narratives around international aid and funding, and systemic issues within the international humanitarian aid industry itself. Pakistan and its people continue to suffer while receiving next to no reparations from these wealthy actors, who shamelessly dismiss them as ‘helpless victims’ of Nature and its forces.

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Around mid-June of this year, flood reports from the four major provinces of the country— Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh—started pouring in from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in Pakistan. By mid-July, there were already several hundred reported casualties. Bridges and roads had all but vanished under the ravaging floods, and entire kha’cha homes and villages had been swept away, disproportionately impacting hundreds of rural, immigrant, and low-income communities.

Only after July 28 did the Pakistani government finally spring into action, according to The Express Tribune, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif forming a federal committee to assess flood damage, raise and distribute aid funds, and guide relief efforts across the country. Around the same time, the international humanitarian sector slowly began to take notice, with the Red Cross Red Crescent society and some members of the Pakistan Humanitarian Forum deploying response operations across the country. But by then there were already more than a thousand casualties, several million people displaced, and the infrastructure, agriculture, health, and economic prospects of an entire population were in critical danger.

The 2022 floods have been particularly catastrophic, with the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan receiving nearly eight times the normal amount of rainfall and the entire country receiving more than triple normal levels, which are themselves relatively high. Heat waves exacerbated by climate change have caused glaciers in Pakistan to melt at an unprecedented rate, leading to extreme flooding.

Floods in Pakistan, though, are not in themselves “unprecedented” disasters. In the past two decades, the densely populated South Asian country has experienced several devastating monsoon floods. Floods of smaller yet still-fatal proportions occur in the same period of July to September every year, and the Global Climate Risk Index of 2021 has called Pakistan the eighth most-vulnerable country to climate change in the world—even though Pakistan emits less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. When Pakistanis are not dealing with floods, they are dealing with severe droughts and extreme heat waves. Long-term recovery from such a disaster takes years, and when the recovery period keeps being interspersed with more disasters, recovery almost becomes a distant dream.

Consistent climate catastrophes layered in with the incompetency of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s administration, a growing immigrant population, and rising food and fuel prices from global supply chain disruptions and the Russia-Ukraine war have made the impact of these constant floods deadly for Pakistani citizens.

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None of this is news to the Pakistani government. Even worse, none of it is news to governments like the U.S. and the U.K., to the humanitarian sector at large, or to West-dominated international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For years, the world has been aware of the fact that Pakistan and other postcolonial countries in the Global South suffer the consequences of untold levels of consumption and emissions in ‘developed,’ industrialized countries in the Global North. After each flood Pakistan has faced, these very institutions and authorities have come up with numerous reports and ‘action plans’ which aspire to better their ‘disaster preparedness’ capabilities in Pakistan and make vulnerable communities more ‘resilient’ to such floods.

It seems that these numerous promises and plans received no follow-through. Every time a new disaster in the Global South catches enough international media attention, humanitarian actors swoop into the area with different ‘clusters’ involved in distributing food, building shelters, providing WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) facilities, and protection services. Several reports, articles, and spokespeople are deployed by international humanitarian agencies, each dominating the spotlight and claiming to reach affected communities. Meanwhile, smaller local groups and individuals are actually in those communities, doing the bulk of the actual response. Organizations like the Women’s Democratic Front, the Balochistan Rural Support programme, and the EHSAR foundation are attempting to reach survivors with cash and in-kind assistance, and set up makeshift shelters and medical camps across affected areas. Despite being under-resourced, unlike their international counterparts, these groups have been far more impactful; they have been a part of these communities for years already, delivering needs-based assistance to households.

The Pakistani government’s response to the floods has been too little, too late, especially for marginalized communities and regions in the country. Balochistan is one such region, where an armed insurgency against the Pakistani state has been going on for several decades now. The government has also ignored citizens in rural communities and informal urban settlements in cities like Karachi and Islamabad, where floods pose more danger. The first few reports of flood casualties were those of citizens belonging to these communities and regions, and they continue to be the most heavily impacted.

As long as people who have been historically ignored by the state were the ones having their lives and livelihoods taken away, the situation was just another normalized ‘natural’ disaster. Only after the floods started moving into urban and financial centers of the country, like Karachi and Islamabad, and began impacting the upper middle class, did the Pakistani government spring to action.

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Moreover, international agencies, especially whose executive control rests in the Global North, often assume that ‘beneficiaries’ of a response all have the same basic human needs. As long as these needs are met following the disaster, the perception is that humanitarian workers are doing their job. What is now slowly being recognized, however, is that people belonging to systematically marginalized groups, like women, gender minorities, people with disabilities, people belonging to minority religions, communities, castes, etc. often have different needs during humanitarian emergencies.

For example, “gender-sensitive” response plans for the Pakistan floods only include women and perpetuate a reproductive or ‘helpless victim’ narrative. Gender is mentioned only in terms of pregnancy and health, menstrual health and hygiene, or gender-based violence. This not only ignores other gender minorities completely, but also ignores the impact on the social, economic, and political lives and realities of women after a disaster. For example, during such humanitarian emergencies, the nature and quantity of care and domestic responsibilities, the distribution of these responsibilities, and the time and effort they require to be fulfilled undergo significant changes. These conditions can lead to increased labor, vulnerability, trauma, and negative coping mechanisms (dropping out of school, quitting the workforce, decreased food intake) for care providers, who tend to be women and girls in most societies.

Overlooking these essential facets of an individual’s experience during a disaster and ignoring the impact of an emergency on intersectional identities can actually cause long-term harm for communities which have already been historically marginalized. Thus, when humanitarian actors just come into a country and do what they assume is needed for the affected population, the aid itself becomes a significant part of the population’s experience and trauma of the disaster—and has tangible long-term impact. Such agencies gradually leave once it seems like the disaster has sufficiently blown over, which can take years, and they take their funding with them. Meanwhile, what is left is a recovering population that must rebuild entire lives, families, communities in the wake of huge physical, social, economic, and psychological damage.

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The kind of reach and response needed for a calamity of this magnitude requires a much higher level of funding and resources than what is currently available in Pakistan, despite the amounts Western countries, the UN, and the World Bank are announcing in donations. But if such floods and natural disasters in Pakistan are now an annual occurrence, then shouldn’t funding and response systems already be in place?

Most of these systems are centered around the narrative of victimized ‘helpless’ Pakistani citizens, putting the onus on them to be ‘resilient.’ They comprise the usual band-aid solutions of temporary shelters, food provision, health assistance, etc., as opposed to actual systemic solutions.

While these systems recognize that Pakistan has become increasingly vulnerable to climate change despite being a negligible contributor to it, none of them seem to address the core issue: the dumping of climate crisis consequences onto nations like Pakistan.

The humanitarian sector, the international nonprofit sector, and Western governments would rather brush their own actions under the carpet, blaming the economies, consumption patterns, emissions, and political leadership in the Global South for consistently facing disaster after disaster. No one seems willing to address the uncomfortable truth: that these industrialized authorities and consumerist economies owe reparations to the South—climate reparations.

Pakistan will take years, maybe decades, to recover from these floods. The agricultural sector of the country is now under even heavier strain, with irrigation systems and acres of crops going under water, implying dire food insecurity for at least 8 million people in the country in the coming months. On top of this, several affected communities are already dealing with contagious flood-borne diseases, while having virtually no access to health support systems, implying further loss of lives and livelihoods in the future. Pakistan needs funds and resources to pull itself out of this, for the sake of preserving its present and its future.

Meanwhile, these so-called ‘developed countries,’ with their higher levels of wealth and supposedly stable political institutions, are barely contributing to the recovery from a disaster that they have essentially caused, while the Pakistani government, already resource-constrained, has contributed the bulk of all recovery funds, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In fact, even recent international aid has self-serving economic agendas underlying it. In early September, international media hailed the fact that Pakistan was “able to secure” IMF funding for the flood response. What is left unsaid is that this funding was conditional: the Pakistani government had to repeal protective food and fuel subsidies it had passed earlier this year in response to soaring inflation. Now, even if the funds do help Pakistan initially recover, the population faces rampant inflation during a fatal emergency.

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Earlier this year, the intense international coverage and discourse around the Russia-Ukraine war and the blatant disregard of loss of life in Palestine already showed the world that the lives of those living in the Global South, the lives of people of color, have always mattered less than those in the North. Even now, Queen Elizabeth II’s death has been dominating media discourse for the past month, while Pakistan has barely been mentioned. Why should we bother talking about the Pakistan floods, the water shortage in Jackson, Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico, or the feminist political movements in Iran? Why not focus instead on an extremely elaborate and overpriced funeral of a 96-year-old white woman who was the face of imperialism for most of a century?

Meanwhile, videos of rushing volumes of water swallowing up entire houses, bridges, and villages, satellite before-and-after images of different districts completely submerged, and videos of affected people attempting to ‘escape’ to safer grounds, have been circulating all over the internet. The ‘developed’ world idly watches on, with social media users and major news anchors remarking on the brutal and destructive force of the floods, or marveling at the ingenious ways Pakistani locals are avoiding the water (like a recent trending video of volunteers creatively using a bedframe for rescue). Rarely does such media incite discourse in regular conversation.

The Global North has simply cast aside the floods as it does with all other such disasters in the South—normalizing these occurrences altogether while entire communities are uprooted. As if all of this is just trauma porn, occurring in a different world altogether, and not connected to every one of us on the planet. Local Pakistani journalists however—such as Hamid Mir from GeoTV—have been risking their lives traveling directly to affected areas to provide full flood coverage and amplify Pakistani voices. Still, the most widely shared ‘content’ about the situation is coming from white creators and western media channels based in the U.S. and the U.K., while the people like Mir have been confined mostly to South Asian echo chambers.

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The damage caused by the floods in Pakistan includes not just the quantifiable losses of life, property, and socioeconomic prospects for the country, but also tangible and intangible losses of generationally owned land and livelihoods for entire communities, alongside immeasurable grief for an entire nation. What is happening in Pakistan is a catastrophe caused and worsened by a plethora of systemic failures: climate injustice, neocolonialism, racism, global inequality, and willful ignorance. Unless these systemic issues are acknowledged and addressed in time by power holders within these structures, disasters like the Pakistan floods will continue to exponentially ravage the Global South until they finally reach the North. By then, it might be too late.

ANUSHKA KATARUKA B’24 cares about debt to the Global South.