The representative of the major humanitarian charity in Haiti, Partners In Health, argues that the panic about a security threat is based on racism and untruth. January 2010, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, police opened fire on people assumed to be looters. The looters narrative was used to justify suspending rescue attempts while simultaneously obstructing the passage of survivors from New Orleans, the better to build up forces to impose martial law on the city's luckless captive inhabitants. Those identified as looters, it is noted, tend to be black. A panic about looters, amid a swirl of toxic rumours of rampant violence and rape by young black men, leads to white property-owners in the areas surrounding New Orleans taking up arms. September 2005, following hurricane Katrina. And at the centre of it all, a morally loaded narrative about 'looters'. Soon, the panic about social breakdown provides a justification for militarising the disaster zones. Desperate survivors scratching out messages pleading for help, seemingly getting none. But the immediate aftermath is where there is an opportunity to prevent death by disease, starvation and injury.Īnd there the tale becomes depressingly familiar. The winds, reading 195mph, tore up the previously solid streets of towns and cities, killing thousands: there is no reliable count, for who has tallied up every rotting corpse on every devasted street? Major towns were almost totally submerged in storm waters. So it is in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan. It is planned human responses, as much as the natural event itself, that produces the disaster. We have known for some time, for example, that famine is the result not simply of crop failure, but of political and market failure. All such disasters, insofar as they befall human communities, are socially constituted. It isn't just that the climate is partially manmade. At some point, the natural disaster as a category will have to be interred and obituaried.

Someone is already looting that corpse