More Haiti
The world has watched with increasing dismay as desparate Haitian people beg for food and water from correspondents who move freely in their midst, transmitting pictures to every living room on the planet, patience has turned to despair then anger. Today the papers are coming out with words like shambles and chaos.
When this news broke I listened to our own Minister for Overseas Development, Douglas Alexander, being interviewed, when he talked about co-ordinating responses and working with the U.N, the E.U and the U.S. He repeatedly emphasised co-ordination was the key. I had a sinking feeling that this was not going to work. Because like the rest of the world I had seen the pictures on TV from the news media, heard the pleas, seen the devastation and utterly appalling conditions in hospitals with no doctors, few nurses and even less medicine. I had seen too people digging at great slabs of concrete with bare hands and makeshift tools to reach the trapped survivors for whom the clock of life was ticking ever more faintly.
There was no government, no electricity, no water, no roads, no port, no food, no communications, no transport. Just a mass of traumatised, struggling, shattered humanity. In time, yes, the big set piece response with millions of tons of everything flowing night and day would be needed. But at the beginning small units working independently, travelling on foot, communicating by whistle, some with rescue capability, some with medical and first aid skills, some with water and survival rations needed to be got in fast. Central co-ordination comes later. Immediately, self contained teams working forward and linking up, independent of centralised communications, should have had priority.
We need to learn this lesson. The tsunami was a coastal disaster leaving the interior of the affected countries and their governments untouched. Haiti is quite different . Here every element of modern life is broken or destroyed, even government. We need to learn this lesson, because if ever a terrorist group get their hands on even a small nuclear bomb, and God forbid they do, the centre of New York or Washington or Tel Aviv or Mumbai or Whitehall could be exactly the same.