Geographies Of Disaster

Geographies Of DisasterAuthor(s): Sabir KhanSource: Log, No. 7 (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 111-118Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765093 .

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Sabir Khan

Geographies

Of Disaster

The tsunami that flattened shorelines around the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, began to unfold on television screens across Europe and the United States on what was still Christmas Day. Tourist video cameras had captured the wall of water that suddenly appeared on the horizon, the shock as it raced across beaches, and the desperate attempts of men, women, and children to outrun it. The balmy waters that had brought vacationers halfway around the world to swim, fish, and dive had become the very medium of their demise. The power of these images, now firmly embedded in the col- lective imaginary of Christmas holidays in Edenic paradise, brought the disaster home. A year later, it still commands our attention. Witness the photograph that appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine carrying the

anniversary story: a seductive abstraction, a landscape visu- alized as alternating bands of muted neutrals, blues, and

greens - once inviting, now haunted by the indiscriminate

carnage the sea could suddenly unleash. In contrast, the catastrophic earthquake that shook

northern Pakistan this past October has remained distant, locked in another geography, and prisoner to another imaginary populated with militants, terrorists, mullahs , gang- rapists, and military dictators. The scope of this disaster has

clearly failed to transcend the overheated rhetoric that sur- rounds Pakistan today: a frontline and/or failed nation-state

populated with terrorist-exporting madrassahs and run by untrustworthy military regimes. Almost immediately after the earthquake, questions were raised about the role of militant groups, dubious Islamic charities, and high-handed military leaders in relief operations. Both reporters and

bloggers fretted about donations falling into the hands of militant groups, and institutional donors raised concerns about accountability and transparency.

The images we saw recorded only the aftermath of the few seconds in which an everyday morning collapsed on top of itself. Unlike the tsunami, the unfolding earthquake eluded live-action video or film footage. What photographs and video could show was destruction and debris, recording the aftermath while the actual event escaped representation. ill



Rescue work continues at the site of a collapsed io-story apartment building in Islamabad following a magnitude 7.6 earthquake on October 8, 2005. Photo: Associated Press/Anjum Naveed.

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Debris requires a dramatic reframing in order to register disaster, and photographers tried hard to find the drama amid the rubble: a crushed car, a half-buried torso. Some of the most published photographs were of the luxury mid-rise

apartment building reduced to a pile of concrete in Islamabad. On that first day, this collapsed structure became the epi- center of media attention. The Schadenfreude was palpable, as cameras recorded efforts to rescue residents buried alive under what was one of Islamabad's most expensive apartment buildings.

For the most part, aerial photographs and videos of the destruction in the northern valleys depicted endless debris scattered across a terrain so rugged, undeveloped, and inhos-

pitable that it seemed inconceivable people actually lived there at all, and especially in such large numbers. The odd letter to the editor recounted experiences in the region (a "trekkers' paradise" of unspoiled sub-Himalayan valleys inhabited by "civil and generous" locals) and implored those in a position to support the relief effort not to give in to "donor fatigue." But by and large, the earthquake, even when reterritorialized and repackaged as the "South Asian

Earthquake," failed to shake loose its specific geography and find a place in the American or European imagination, as the tsunami had done.

The earthquake, or zulzulah , played out differently in Pakistan itself. The intense competition among Pakistan's

many new private radio and television companies put hundreds of reporters on the ground almost immediately, well before government and military officials and the state-

operated media arrived at the scene. The continuous feed

generated by these new radio, internet, cable, and satellite television channels gave a face and a voice to the disaster that

galvanized Pakistanis of all classes into action. Regional, sectarian, and ethnic divisions eased as a sense of the collec- tive geography projected by the media took hold. People still talk about the first days and weeks with awe: individuals, organizations, and institutions in the hundreds of thousands

volunteering goods, money, and services with a fervor that

suggested perhaps civil society was alive after all. In fact, three months after the zulzulah, the long-term commitment of civic and philanthropic organizations to relief and rehabilitation, independent of any government or military efforts, is a strong indication that the Pakistani body politic, especially the urban middle classes, may be healthier than the oppres- sive presence of the military and civil service led us to

imagine. m



At times, it seemed that everyone was in the mix, from retired businessmen who found a new vocation to second-

generation Paki Brits who arrived by the planeload, ready to do their bit. The zulzulah inaugurated a new public sphere in which everyone had a say: political groups festooned utility poles and building ruins in the larger towns with banners

proclaiming their contributions, commercial radio stations switched to community-radio formats, citizens questioned municipal officials, and everyone criticized the supercilious manner in which the military ran the relief effort. And, with their superior organizational networks already in place, both local NGOs and the service organizations of so-called militant groups became the crucial advance guard of the massive emergency operations of international relief organizations. Their indispensable and highly visible presence has

integrated them into the social fabric as never before. In fact, their newfound legitimacy suggests that the military- feudal establishment may not find them as easy to control, manipu- late, or vilify as it did in the past.

Reading the first reports on the earthquake, one couldn't

help but wonder at the geological irony at play in this mash- up between Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. The epi- center was located in the long-contested territory of Kashmir. One of the areas most devastated was the Neelum Valley, which runs parallel to and within a couple of miles of the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad (free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side. Given the scale of the damage in Azad Kashmir, the natural proximity of the two Kashmirs, and the shock and grief of an already divided people, might not the zulzulah shake the political players out of their intractable standoff? Could there be a chance that the Himalayan fault line might trump the geopolitical fiction of the heavily mili- tarized (and mythologized) LoC, opening the border to family members and relief goods? Could the earthquake turn out to be the mother of all Confidence Building Measures? - CBM being the diplomatic portmanteau for the carefully controlled minuets of "people-to-people contact" that India and Pakistan have been carrying out over the past few years, instead of dealing head-on with the primary source of friction between them since 194-7.

So far neither country has been able to leverage the disaster into an opportunity to reconcile this geography. It appears that neither side can conceive of this landscape as a continuous terrain. The Pakistani military cannot allow the loss of control (and perceived loss of face) that a stream

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of Indian relief goods would signify. Their Indian counter-

parts worry that the steady drip of border-crossing militants, only recently stanched, could turn into a torrent. They did, however, come to an understanding on the rather more fluid demarcations of airspace. In the first few days, Pakistani Army helicopters navigating the narrow gorges and

peaks strayed into Indian territory with some frequency; indeed, the unprecedented helicopter sorties since, involving pilots and equipment from many countries, would not have been possible without a more flexible and forgiving mapping of airspace. On the ground, however, only a few points along the LoC were opened periodically to civilian traffic. For those who walked across the river to Pakistani or Indian Kashmir, the journey was momentous. An 80-year-old woman given permission to visit Azad Kashmir to find out if her brother and nephews, whom she had not seen in years, were dead or alive could only describe her crossing by invok-

ing the ultimate journey, the pilgrimage to Mecca: "It was like going on Hajj ," she said, as a soldier steadied her hand for a photo op on a makeshift rope suspension bridge.

The emergency relief operations and the long-term plans for environmental and economic rehabilitation may yet change the political geography of Kashmir. The region has been opened up to the wider world as never before. Thousands of Pakistani and foreign relief workers are pres- ent everywhere in the region. Small hamlets that were not even on a map are being inventoried for damage and reconstruction. In the face of need, village mullahs can no longer simply declare their villages off limits to NGOs, and army officers on the ground are cooperating (and sharing their

intelligence maps) with local and international relief workers. The experience of working openly within society may yet domesticate so-called militant organizations. Almost $4 billion have been pledged in soft loans for reconstruction: the new schools, hospitals, roads, and other infrastructure will

certainly be superior to what was there before. Ensuring that the Pakistani government spends all of it within Azad Kashmir may give Kashmiris a common cause that would redraw the contours of Kashmiri self-determination.

Statistics help us comprehend disasters as much as they help politicians spin them. But the quantification of disasters

helps relief organizations plan for the logistical challenges each devastation presents. Within a week of the earthquake, it started to dawn on the veterans of prior relief efforts that the extent of this devastation was unprecedented: 87,000 dead, an equal number badly wounded, over three million

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homeless in 30,000 villages and hamlets spread over 12,000 square miles of inhospitable, mountainous terrain. Nighttime temperatures in October were already just a few degrees above freezing, and the first of the winter snows, which would block any still-passable roads until the April thaw, were only eight to 10 weeks away. What the relief effort accomplished in the face of these challenges over the past 12 weeks is impressive. But what is truly remarkable is the tenacity with which relief workers take on these incompre- hensible geographies of disaster. No accounting can do their work justice, but a glance at the blogs maintained by some of them - such as http://caseyconnor.org/pakistan/ - gives some sense of the daily reality.

Beyond the staged drama of donor conferences and the strategic appeals of spokespersons for various relief organizations, teams of professional and volunteer relief workers, along with members of Pakistani, NATO, US, and other armed forces, stitched together a relief effort that reached practically everyone affected by the earthquake. After the first helicopter sorties ferried many of the wounded to field hospitals in the lower valleys, daily relays of over a hundred helicopters airlifted 70,000 tons of dry rations to 74 distribution points in the upper reaches. The medical infrastructure set up since the earthquake is, by most accounts, better than any previously seen in the region. Almost immediately, small groups of doctors started arriving on their own, with essen- tial supplies donated by their hospitals (and transported free of charge, or for a minimal fee, by airlines flying to Pakistan). International agencies ( Médecins sans Frontieres , Merlin) and military hospital units from many different countries con- tributed to putting the healthcare network in place. More than 1,200 doctors arrived from Cuba alone. Departing at the end of November, they left behind the field hospitals they had brought with them. But the tens of thousands of am- putees, many of them children, are the legacy of a medical crisis that will continue for an entire generation.

Each disaster establishes its own discourse on shelter. This one started off with frenzied appeals for tents, despite simultaneous recognition that the tents would be totally inadequate for the coming winter. A discussion on winter- ized (or at least winterizable) tents ensued, again with the recognition that there were not enough of them in the world, let alone available to relief agencies, to supply the need. Much effort was expended on a parallel discussion of prefabricated shelter units, despite the fact that their cost and the required lead time to provide them would render

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Pakistani earthquake survivors WAKE UP AFTER SLEEPING IN THE STREET IN BALAKOT, OCTOBER 1J, 200$. Photo: Associated Press/Tomas Munita.

such solutions moot. In yet another manifestation of the architectural profession's incapacity to focus on the right thing, there were reports of leading Pakistani architects

developing designs for prefabricated houses in conjunction with representatives of the prefabricated shelter industry.

It was well into November before the idea gained a foothold that perhaps what the survivors needed most were hammers and nails, enabling them to build shelters for themselves with material salvaged from the rubble. Officials worried that the locals would rebuild in as seismically incor- rect a fashion as before: stacked stone walls, heavy timber beams with no cross bracing. But for many, especially those who chose not to leave their land and livestock for a tent in a

refugee camp, their own makeshift shelters were preferable to a canvas tent buried under a snowdrift. Had this realization come sooner, and had the emergency cash been distributed a little earlier, perhaps many of the survivors would have been better prepared for the first snowfalls in mid-December.

To be fair, individual relief volunteers did help survivors rebuild less conventionally. Blogs reveal examples of straw bale construction sponsored by Paki-Brit architecture students. The Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation

Authority (ERRA, named with a bureaucrat's proverbial 117



deaf ear to the unfortunate acronym) is now reworking building codes for urban construction. And competitions such as the recently concluded UDESIGN[ER]: Earthquake Resistant Housing for Pakistan," sponsored by Architecture for Humanity, call for structural and material ideas appro- priate for rural construction, the best of which are to be

compiled into illustrated manuals for distribution in affected communities.

The "second emergency" of this disaster is now upon us, as predicted. Heavy snowfalls in January buried tent villages and suspended helicopter flights. Landslides blocked all road access, and heavy rains in the lower valleys produced flood-

ing and mudslides. If the winter is harsher than normal, the

seven-day reserves of food supplies at the distribution points may not suffice. The demand for fuel will severely denude mountain slopes of their tree cover. And some relief groups predict that 60 percent of the more than 250,000 tents dis- bursed may need to be replaced or reinforced with tarpaulin and insulation before winter is over. ERRA's mandate is to

develop plans for urban and rural reconstruction, but that does not begin in earnest until May, at the end of what

promises to be a very long winter for untold numbers of

displaced survivors.

Sabir Khan is associate dean and DIRECTOR OF THE COMMON FlRST Year, in the College of Archi- tecture at Georgia Tech. He is CURRENTLY WORKING ON HYPHEN- N ATI ON, A PROJECT THAT LOOKS AT THE WAYS RACE AND ETHNICITY ARE ARTICULATED IN CONTEMPORARY American spaces and culture.

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Geographies Of Disaster

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