In every life, there are a few indelible
dates: the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a national tragedy such as
9/11.
An indelible date for me is September 19,
1985.
اضافة اعلان
I was an 11-year-old boy living in Mexico
City, in a car on my way to school, a few minutes after 7am. Suddenly the road
began to sway. The car swerved from one side of the road to the other. It felt
as if we were flying. This went on for nearly three minutes.
At school, a rumor had spread that the
downtown had been flattened. My father liked to get to his office there around
7am. I spent the morning in a panic.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 8.0. It
killed at least 5,000 people, though the real death toll was probably much
higher. A terrifying aftershock the next day measured 7.5. For comparison, the
1994 Los Angeles earthquake was a 6.7 and lasted less than 20 seconds.
The quake that shook Turkey and Syria on
Monday was a 7.8 and did not stop for about two minutes.
The scenes emerging from Idlib, Aleppo,
Hatay, Iskenderun, and other devastated cities are awful. They are especially
emotional for those with their own memories of major quakes.
Twenty years after the Mexico City
earthquake, I went to Pakistan to report on the US relief effort for the 2005
Kashmir earthquake, in which an estimated 86,000 people were killed.
On my first night in Islamabad, a minor
quake that lasted a few seconds jolted me awake in the middle of the night, and
I jammed myself under the bed. As I lay there, in a sweat, memories of Mexico
flooded back.
The scenes emerging from Idlib, Aleppo, Hatay, Iskenderun, and other devastated cities are awful. They are especially emotional for those with their own memories of major quakes.
The next morning, I got a ride in a
Pakistani helicopter to what had once been a small city called Balakot, in the
North-West Frontier province. From its population of 50,000, it had lost 16,000
in an earthquake that lasted less than a minute. It looked like pictures of
post-atomic Hiroshima; only a few buildings remained standing among the
flattened ruins.
The human side of natural disastersEarthquakes are always said to be “natural”
disasters. It is a misleading term. The real disaster is almost always human-made,
often in the form of poorly constructed homes and buildings with insufficient
rebar and other structural supports, followed by incompetent crisis management
in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
In Pakistan, the shoddy construction was
mainly a function of poverty. In wealthier Mexico, which on paper had stringent
building codes dating back to the aftermath of previous quakes, the reason
tended to be government corruption.
After the quake, it became impossible to
ignore that privately built office towers and homes stood unscathed while
government-built and operated hospitals, ministries and schools lay in ruins.
The quake exposed the rot, structural and moral, at the heart of Mexico’s
quasi-dictatorial, development-oriented regime.
Shaky political foundationsIt also did not help that the Mexican
government refused foreign aid in the critical early hours after the disaster.
Nationalism and false pride have no place in a disaster. The government’s
incompetence enraged many Mexicans previously resigned to keeping their
distance from politics. That rage led to the creation of civil-protest
movements, and campaigns for better governance. It is not simple to place the
origins of Mexico’s transformation into a true democracy, but September 19,
1985, may well be the right date. Good things can emerge from the most tragic
circumstances.
The real disaster is almost always human-made, often in the form of poorly constructed homes and buildings with insufficient rebar and other structural supports
Maybe that will be true for Turkey as well,
particularly if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responds to the emergency with
his usual ham-fistedness and paranoia. He faces crucial elections in the spring
and was already presiding over a country facing a nearly 60 percent inflation
rate. It will not be surprising if he uses the three-month state of emergency
he declared to bully his way to yet another term. If the Turkish government’s
response is not efficient and effective, if Erdogan seems out of touch, the
quake could be his downfall, too.
I have even fewer hopes for Syria, where
there is no limit to Bashar Al-Assad’s measures to keep himself in power.
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations said all aid must be funneled through
the government, which should be a nonstarter given Assad’s reputation for
corruption. Other means will be needed to help devastated Syrians.
A final earthquake memory: In Balakot, I
had a chance to listen to some of the schoolkids who had survived the quake but
lost their families. It was hard to hold back tears in the face of their
composure. Now I think of the children who this week lost their parents — or,
just as heartbreakingly, parents who lost their kids.
Even in the age of Ukraine and other
disasters, can we still muster a sustained sense of charity and compassion to
help, intelligently, in the long recovery that lies ahead?
Around noon on that September day in 1985,
my mother came to my school and took me home to my dad’s embrace. To this day,
I think about how very lucky we were, and ache for so many who were not.
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