No nation is an island

WHERE MONEY TALKS

No matter what Iranian President Mohammad Khatami might say now, his country's relations with the United States cannot relapse into the earlier chilliness after the earthquake crisis is over. But, of course, the US must not swamp Iran with eager relief workers or demand immediate political advantages. Impetuousness would be fatal.

If the Americans display finesse, however, Iranians will soon come round to appreciate that help means more than dollars for the suffering.

The human touch of President George W. Bush's prompt condolences and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armstrong's call to Iran's United Nations representative, Mr Mohammed Javed Zaref, is bound to be reflected in future exchanges between the "Great Satan" and a leading member of the "axis of evil".

If tragedy of this magnitude can be said to have a silver lining, it is the impetus it gives to international cooperation. "No man is an Island, entire of itself ..." wrote John Donne, the English metaphysical poet. So, too, with nations. Hence, the office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (UNDRO), set up 32 years ago, and the newer Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

But shoestring budgets prevent these organisations from fulfilling their potential. Since the world's rich see little dividend in alleviating distress, relief organisations are chronically underfunded. They are also burdened with too many humanitarian problems "" refugees, women's rights, peace processes "" to concentrate only on disasters that lawyers term acts of god.

These shortcomings are of special concern to the Asia-Pacific region which accounts for 85 per cent of deaths from nature's savagery, 95 per cent of them caused by earthquakes, typhoons and floods.

Some 20 major natural disasters kill about 83,000 Asians annually, and destroy property and crops worth $4 billion. Nine of the world's 10 most disaster-prone countries are in Asia. The Philippines, China and India head the list.

Yet, Asians can be intensely xenophobic. Iran rejected foreign doctors, relief workers, blood supplies, sniffer dogs and clothes during the 1990 earthquake when 36,000 people perished and 100,000 were injured. Flood-ravaged Bangladesh once sent back Indian relief helicopters. India itself has been traditionally wary of Western relief agencies, especially of those connected with the Church.

However, no country was more exclusive than China, which sent air force jets to shoot down swarms of Taiwanese balloons "" each containing a 180-kg load of relief material "" during the 1976 earthquake that levelled north-eastern Tangshan town and wiped out a quarter of a million people.

Refusing the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's offer of emergency aid, Mao Zedong urged people to "dauntlessly plunge into the struggle to fight the effects of the earthquake and carry out relief work." It sounded like another war of liberation.

The former Soviet Union was similarly callous. Under Stalin's orders, not a whisper of the 1948 earthquake which buried alive 100,000 people and nearly wiped out Ashkabad town near the Iranian border was allowed to rustle the pages of Pravda. Forty years on a Soviet spokesman admitted laconically that the Armenian earthquake (80,000 dead) was not his country's worst.

Significantly, attitudes mellowed with economic reform and consequent political relaxation. Asians became less suspicious of outsiders and less touchy about slurs on their own competence.

China welcomed international help after the 1988 earthquake and even accepted $100,000 from Taiwan for flood victims five months later. Bangladesh no longer spurns Indian support when cyclones hit it, and India sought global assistance when earthquakes ravaged Maharashtra and Gujarat in the last decade.

Mr Khatami, too, now invites help from every nation under the sun, even the "Great Satan" and Egypt, with which Iran has had no ties for about 25 years. He draws the line only at Israel.

This openness can, however, be counter-productive unless it is skilfully managed. As UNDRO warned, "the impulsive generosity of governments, organisations and individuals alike can cause as much chaos and confusion as the disaster itself."

That was evident during Armenia's last earthquake when foreign relief planes crashed into mountains, mounds of unsolicited material from abroad clogged pipelines, and stranded foreign helpers who spoke no local language had themselves to be rescued. The International Red Cross calls such crises the "second disaster".

A reinforced and streamlined OCHA that focuses unambiguously on natural disasters would avoid not only such fiascoes but also bungles like Singaporeans giving neckties and swimsuits for Indian earthquake victims.

Well-meaning donors sometimes send woollies to the tropics, canned meat to vegetarians, the wrong drugs or too much of the right one. The world needs a single resourceful organisation with a detailed database to coordinate relief, send a rapid deployment force to crisis spots and supervise emergency evacuation.

It should operate storm tracking systems and monitoring and early warning devices for floods and earthquakes. Itself lashed by cyclones, the US alone can provide the financial, technological and organisational thrust.

The help it is pouring into Iran indicates reassuringly that the US accepts that globalisation is not only invasion and instant human rights. But the help would be counter-productive if the US tries to press its advantage and demand an immediate resumption of the Geneva talks on Afghanistan and Iraq that were suspended in May when the US accused Iran of complicity in the Saudi Arabian bombings.

A return to normalcy will take time. Meanwhile, Iran's ordeal is a poignant reminder that globalisation also means a positive response to what Malthus called "the perpetual struggle for room and food". Adversity makes brothers of us all.