On Sept. 28, 2001, with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan imminent, Jeremy Hobbs, the executive director of Oxfam Community Aid Abroad, issued an urgent call for donations to the group's Afghan Refugee Crisis Appeal. "Up to 5 million innocent people face starvation and death in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran," he insisted. "We must act now to prevent what could possibly be the worst humanitarian catastrophe since World War II."
A second look at the death toll from some of the world's worst disasters.
Really? Worse than Biafra in 1967, worse than the Cambodian refugee crisis, worse than the Ethiopian famine of 1984-1985, and worse even than Somalia in 1991? How could a senior official at one of the most experienced and well-respected private relief agencies in the world suggest with such confidence that the crisis in Afghanistan was likely to outstrip these tragedies?
To be fair, Hobbs left himself a grammatical out. "Up to" 5 million people might die, he said; the crisis "could possibly" be the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II. But this was the moral equivalent of the fine print in a contract you get from a bank with a Visa card. Oxfam was not just advancing a possibility; it was issuing a warning about an event that might very well occur if an emergency response was not mounted immediately -- and it was staking its credibility on this assessment.
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And it's not just Oxfam that's given to this kind of exaggeration. The world's emergency relief organizations, from other major NGOs like Care International and World Vision to the U.N.'s specialized agencies like the World Food Program and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), are always warning the public about the never-more-dire plight of war refugees, famine victims, and the latest unfortunate souls imperiled by nature's wrath. They should count themselves lucky that we have such short memories. If people actually remembered just how often their claims have proved to be overblown, contributions would almost certainly fall off dramatically. A quick search for the "world's worst humanitarian crisis" brings up a trove of competing claims: Darfur, Congo, Pakistan, Somalia. And the list goes on. Relief agencies are constantly insisting that what is about to take place in Afghanistan or Burma, Haiti or Rwanda, is nothing short of apocalyptic, only for it to turn out that these predictions of disaster are wildly exaggerated, when not simply unfounded.
Sadly, over the course of the past few decades, exaggeration seems to have become the rule in the world of humanitarian relief. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which is generally believed to have killed almost a quarter of a million people in 14 countries, is a stark example. In the immediate aftermath, NGOs and U.N. agencies were predicting that without massive aid, the death toll would double because of hunger, lack of clean water, and the spread of infectious disease. Their appeals were extraordinarily successful, raising more than $14 billion from governments, corporations, and a remarkably large number of private donors. And yet, there was little basis for such anxiety: The general rule in natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes is that most fatalities occur in the first 24 hours. The mismatch between the vast sums of money raised globally for tsunami relief and the real needs on the ground was so extreme that Doctors Without Borders soon began returning contributions, while Oxfam diverted funds to other crises. But this did not stop the U.N. from taking credit -- on what basis, no one could quite say -- for having prevented a second wave of deaths.
The culture of shameless embellishment never seems to dissipate for long. Here is Elisabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 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." Let's be clear: This is not the compassionate rhetoric of solidarity, but advertising hype. It's bigger, sadder, worse! The fact that those who dispense such misinformation mean well does not lessen the distortion.
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