NOLA eclipsed by Mozambique

[Guest guest]

New Orleans shames America

By Andrew O'Hagan

 

(Filed: 30/08/

I went to New Orleans a week after Hurricane Katrina

struck and I'll never forget the pungent smell and the

high hopes for a grand recovery.

 

It never occurred to me then that the smell would last

longer in the streets of that famous, spirited place

than the hopes, but that indeed is what has happened.

A year on, New Orleans is a horror zone where the

people's belief in a full recovery has vanished along

with the 1,500 people who died and the hundreds of

thousands displaced.

 

I remember standing outside a hospital at the edge of

a completely submerged downtown street. A man was

wading through the water looking for his mother.

 

" They'll find everybody, won't they? " he said. " My

mother loves this town. She'll want to help clean up.

They're gonna get us back to how it used to be, huh? "

He never found his mother, and the city has never

found itself as it used to be, either.

 

The world should be crying out

about this lack of progress.

I happen to have witnessed relief operations in places

as far from Washington as Sudan, Mozambique and

Calcutta, and I can tell you that the American

attitude to rebuilding lives is something new, and

much more degraded.

 

The people in Mozambique whose communities were

devastated by floods are now proud of their new health

centres, built with the help of Unicef.

 

But in New Orleans, in a city that is part of the

biggest power on earth, there are still people

wallowing in mud and struggling to rebuild, while

their government averts its eyes or trains them on

foreign wars.

 

This will become one of the terrible stories of

misgovernance in our time. The Bush people made a hash

of it a year ago and they are doing even less well

now: what happened to the money, the billions of

dollars, that were supposed to flood into the city for

reconstruction? It hasn't reached the streets, that's

for sure.

 

There seems, in fact, to be no intellect being applied

to New Orleans. On the one hand, there is the federal

government failing to put passionate words into

concerted action, and, on the other, there is Ray

Nagin, the city's mayor, who seems to have no notion

of civic planning whatsoever. This is a man who

appears to spend his entire time forging slogans to

throw at racists, while himself failing the most basic

requirements of his office - to serve the people of

New Orleans.

 

George W. Bush and Mr Nagin seem to agree on one

thing: that the market will put everything right in

the devastated city. But that is a view as blind and

as indiscriminate as Katrina itself. The governments

of east Africa could tell them that the market will

not right humanitarian disaster - it will only exploit

it. The people of Thailand and Sumatra will tell them

that capital aid that is properly managed and applied

will lead not only to human recovery, but the recovery

of the market, too.

 

Messrs Bush and Nagin have spent the past year getting

it wrong - back to front and upside down - and the

people suffering in New Orleans would, I'm afraid,

have done better in many a Third World country.

American politicians often behave as if sustainable

communities were just figments of some electoral

imagination, when, in fact, they are real and require

the brightest application of governmental thinking

(and feeling) to make that reality bearable.

 

When I was there a year ago, I think the first

reaction to the crisis shocked us, and we should have

seen the potential for huge long-term negligence.

Mr Bush and his advisers immediately saw what was

happening in New Orleans not as a humanitarian issue,

but as a law and order issue. And Mr Nagin saw it only

as a race issue, which presumably helped him get

re-elected. When I went out with the American

military, I was amazed by their inefficiency and

unwillingness when it came to helping people.

 

" Darn right, " said one of the youngest to me at the

edge of a devastated street. " Just gotta make sure

these people ain't out stealing what they can. "

 

Poor New Orleans. An act of God is one thing, but the

inaction of government is another. George W. Bush

stood amidst the rubble one afternoon 12 months ago

and said the people would once again have their city

back. That was simply a lie and the money has not been

spent.

 

For those who have followed the botched

" reconstruction " of Iraq,

it is a horrible and powerful irony that these two

locations - Baghdad and New Orleans - are now like

partners in a story of neglect that might never end.

 

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