I once met a High Court judge in London who complained that as the criminals before him seemed to commit more and more brutal acts, he was having increasing difficulty knowing how to describe his outrage when it came time to sentence them. "What am I supposed to do?" he asked. "If I were being honest, I would have to say something along the lines of 'This is the most horrific offense that I have encountered since, well, last Tuesday.' Obviously, I can't do that. But sometimes mustering the requisite hyperbole that the case before me is uniquely horrible can be a bit difficult."
Humanitarian relief workers must often feel the same way. At least, one hopes they do. Here is Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), speaking in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, 2010. "This is a historic disaster," she said. "We have never been confronted with such a disaster in the U.N. memory. It is like no other."
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The problem with such over-the-top rhetoric is that it requires a willful suspension of disbelief and no small degree of historical amnesia. Was the Haitian earthquake really a greater challenge and a deeper tragedy than the refugee emergency in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide or the 1990s famines in North Korea -- both of which involved the relief arms of the United Nations? Perhaps a moral philosopher could adjudicate the hierarchy of these horrors, but surely it is above the pay grade of an international civil servant like Byrs or, for that matter, a writer like me.
Taken individually, such assertions are bad enough. Worse still is that in almost every natural disaster, famine, relief emergency, or forced movement of people, there is always an aid worker, journalist, U.N. official, or some political figure to say that what is taking place in country A, B, or C, is the worst example of its kind that the world has yet known. The world "biblical" is usually a dead giveaway (at least when employed metaphorically rather than, as fundamentalist Christians sometimes do, in the literal sense of God's wrath made manifest). It was used by British journalist Michael Buerk when he reported on the Ethiopian famine in 1984, and it was used by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to describe Port-au-Prince in 2010, and any number of times in between.
But even hyperbole must be undergirded by something -- and in the world of what are conventionally, if somewhat misleadingly called humanitarian emergencies, it is almost always the brute number of people killed, shelters destroyed, services unavailable, and livelihoods ended. That was certainly the case in Haiti, where the earthquake was estimated to have killed somewhere between 200,000 (the lowest NGO estimate) and 318,000 people (the official Haitian government figure) and left 1.5 million people homeless, of whom, in the spring of 2011, some 680,000 were still said to be living in resettlement camps.
Perhaps this is why last month's leaking of a report prepared by business and development consultancy LTL Strategies that questions all these figures -- instead estimating a death toll of somewhere between 46,000 and 85,000, an initial displacement of 895,000, and a population still living in camps of 375,000 -- has caused such consternation in official Washington, not to mention on the part of many mainline relief NGOs working in Haiti today, as well as the Haitian government. Ironically, the report had been commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though for now at least the agency is not willing to vouch for it. This has led Timothy T. Schwartz, the report's principal author, to write on his blog of the U.S. government's "effort to discredit a survey that it commissioned and for which it reviewed and approved the methodology."
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