Students at Imperial College are not usually known for political activity. Aeronautics, composite materials and solving maths problems perhaps but politics...? With the scale of suffering in the South Asian earthquake this has changed. Students of all nationalities are working around the clock collecting money and raising awareness. Some may wonder how such work is political. The answer is simple. I define politics as managing or looking after the affairs of the people and today we all need to be politicians. The 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck on Saturday morning caused widespread devastation leaving almost 600,000 residents of Muzaffarabad to sleep out in the cold if they had not already been crushed by falling masonry. Medecins Sans Frontiers are warning of a potential water-borne disease epidemic. No one is in charge to distribute the aid so fights break out as volunteers continue to undertake what are known as 'hit-and-run' drops i.e. when clothes, food and medicine are thrown to screaming, desperate people before running away. Such aid relief seems reminiscent of Darwin's theory of natural selection where the very weakest get nothing and die out. We have all heard of the need for more helicopters to reach the mountainous areas. The truth is that the Army cleared most of the landslides within the first two to three days. The reason helicopters are still required is the lack of co-ordination. When considerate individuals, NGOs and the private sector mobilised to help there was no overview, no synchronisation and no central planning. What resulted was chaos. The mountain passes are narrow and not sturdy enough for anything but the lightest vehicles. Volunteers, unaware of this simple fact, have unwittingly blocked the roads with lorries piled high with goods. Now ambulances sit in terminal traffic jams waiting to become mobile hearses and the heaviest lorries have to be unloaded since they cannot manage the steepest inclines. Vital aid has to be unpacked and left by the side of the roads and the people are grieving, tense, angry. The same pandemonium was true during the Indian Ocean Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 when we saw what the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) called "the most expensive humanitarian response in history". Over $12 billion was raised and by the third week of January there were at least 200 agencies on the ground in Aceh.
Soon the anarchy reached epidemic levels. When medical agency Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) went to vaccinate children in one Aceh village, staff found someone else had got there before them but had left no record of which children had been vaccinated. Another example was the ten field hospitals set up in Banda Aceh where myriad surgeons had to compete for a single patient between them but elsewhere women had to give birth without medical assistance due to a shortage of midwives and nurses. Women's needs such as sanitary protection, contraceptive pills and headscarves for Muslim women were often overlooked while stacks of heavy clothing such as sweaters were sent to tropical southern India. Co-ordination in the event of a natural disaster or national crisis is key. It is central and it is critical but it cannot be the role of any but a Government. This much is clear. It is right to help and it is right to work but it is not enough just to collect money and clothing for survivors of a disaster if the aid will not reach them due to mismanagement. Of course in the midst an unqualified human tragedy it is important not to score political points but some questions demand serious answers. Apart from requesting aid from the international community what should have been the role of the Pakistani Government? Why is the Pakistani Army still so heavily committed to the War on Terror when its own people lie beneath tonnes of rubble and dust pleading for help? Why does a nation so susceptible to earthquakes (Karachi sits on an active faultline with three more faults touching its vicinities and different parts of Balochistan such as the capital Quetta are on the Chaman fault, and hence have experienced over fifty earthquakes during the last century) not prepare better? The pain is tremendous. We all feel it when we see images of a young boy unable to rescue his father trapped under what is left of his home but my advice is clear. Please don't score points. Just help.
Politicians or point scorers? 
