One of the biggest victims of the tremendously disastrous earthquakes in the 21st century, Haiti has suffered immeasurably. Responding to the extremely destructive January 12th earthquake, members of the international community-nations and institutions—have been struggling to reach the victimized areas as soon as possible with a keen desire to operate rescue operations aiming at rescuing trapped people and providing the victimized with essential services. However, the rescue work is not very easy because there are various other difficulties involved in the process.
Usually, humanitarian rescue operations address the urgencies of the time. But thousands of such earthquakes have killed millions of human beings in different millennia; centuries and decades of the human civilization. As far as the preventive strategies are concerned, the human society has remained extremely dumbfounded and helpless despite expensive and financially lucrative projects and programs in the UN as well as the member nations.
The nations with multi-sided advancement have to extent adopted preventive strategies that are likely to reduce losses while most of the developing nations are completely empty-headed and unprepared regarding the crisis. It would not at be surprising if other nations face the tragedy that Haiti has faced at present.
Most of the developing nations are unable even to feed their citizens to the degree of essential nutrition. The largest portion of their national budgets and resources go to re-strengthening their status quoist rule contrary to the need of political and socio-economic transformation in their society. This situation exacerbates their conflicts.
While political forces in the developing countries are indulged in power-grabbing gambles aimed at supremacy and vulpinously luxury-minded rule, the long-term strategies for sustainable development cannot be devised. Sustainable development strategies in a real sense are necessary to cope with natural disasters, including the earthquakes. Although no magic formula exists to escape such a disaster, loss-reducing preventive measures are possible should the human society be able to reduce the extreme political, socio-economic and technological disparity in existence.
Ending or even reducing such huge disparity among human beings is not a joke, especially in the context of worldwide trends of criminalization of political institutions and state mechanisms trained to maintain class supremacy and ideological intolerance by obstructing any progressive movement and changes. Particularly, war-mongering political practices in the name of peace and democracy have become a chief barrier to the creation of an equitable society. No matter how long pro-social justice forces have been struggling to transform their society, multinational arms producers and dealers with the closest nexus with ruling elites worldwide have been able to operate their multi-billion business through the industrialization of violence and civil wars.
Thus, barriers to the mission of creating an equitable society makes most people vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural disasters.
There are no housing policies in most of the developing countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh and India. The working class people even do not have a proper shelter. Therefore, donor-based disaster-reduction projects confined to paper work and seasonal revenue generation opportunities do not mean much to the working class people struggling with hand-to-mouth concerns.
To conclude, ‘democratic’ political forces, if they are real democrats—whatever their ideologies—need to brainstorm into long-term strategies to cope with the earthquakes and other natural disasters. This will be possible only with the transformation of lives at grassroots levels, not with morally bankrupt gamble-like political exercises.