Melville CookeBEWARE: STATISTICS lie ahead. Somewhere between Saturday, September 18, and Sunday, September 19, 2004, the hills around Gonaives, Haiti's third largest city, moved. Tropical Storm Jeanne, wandering her destructive way across the Caribbean, found the greenery-stripped Haiti a good place for her water to turn to mud, with devastating mudslides the result.
By early October, the people who overthrew elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (they are not a government, interim or otherwise) gave as close as they could get to a final death count 3,006 persons dead in flooding across Haiti, 2,826 of those in Gonaives, Haiti's third largest city with a pre-tragedy population of 250,000. Of that number, 200,000 lost their homes and everything they owned.
Gonaives is also, incidentally, the place where Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent of France on January 1, 2004. On December 26, 2004, an underwater earthquake the most powerful in 40 years occurred off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The resulting tsunami killed over 150,000 persons in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India (south-east coast, as well as Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Thailand, Maldives, Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and the Seychelles. Of course, the true death count is undoubtedly higher and will never be known.
DIRECTLY AFFECTED COUNTRIES
Indonesia, with a total population in July, 2004, of 238,452,952, has lost close to 105,000 persons confirmed so far, making it the hardest hit of the directly affected countries. The CIA world factbook estimates the Haitian population at 7,656,166 in July, 2004.
Working out the percentage of the population killed in the mudslides of Haiti and in Indonesia due to the tsunami is pretty simple and are both roughly the same 0.04 per cent of the total population. However, the percentage killed of the total population of the countries directly affected by the tsunami is far India alone had an estimated 1,065,070,607 in July, 2004 far, far less. And I could, at a stretch, include the populations of countries like Sweden which lost citizens in the disaster. But that would be stretching it. After all, tourists from 36 countries were among the dead in Thailand.
So, if the mudslides in Haiti killed, as a percentage of the total population, the same number as in all of Indonesia and much, much more than the overall population of the directly affected countries, then why has the tsunami been engraved so deeply in the public consciousness, while the mudslides of Haiti have been forgotten? Tennis players and cricket teams are playing for the tsunami victims; the relatively little and proportionately insignificant aid for Haiti seems directed more to holding up the sham and shambles of a government than providing relief for those affected by the mudslides.
There are those, of course, who have waded through this numbers-heavy piece thus far, who will give the programmed response of a black person to another black person putting tragedies involving us into the wider perspective of how similar situations involving other races are treated. There will be angry demands, so why dem haffi always affi mek it look sey a black people alone can suffa? There is also the knee-jerk, so him no business bout de odda people dem?
To the latter, my response is, as always, not as much as I care about my own race. To the former, my response is, as always, to see the standing or lack of it black people have in the way those who really run the world operate, simply look at the response to similar situations involving other races, especially as programmed by what passes for the worldwide media.
Speaking of that, it is interesting that hardly anything has been heard about the tsunami's effect on the continent of Africa, with the merest mention of it hitting East Africa. That East Africa catch-all, in this case, translates to Somalia (300 killed, over 1,000 homes destroyed), Tanzania (10 killed) and Kenya (one killed) on the continent, with the Seychelles (one killed) off the coast (figures from BBC website, updated Tuesday). Small numbers in the big count of things, but certainly significant to me, as the closer people look to me, the more emotional attachment I am naturally disposed to feel to them (so that takes care of the bleachers).
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
