From Sparta to Nicaragua, disasters alter political history

"Disaster diplomacy" was forestalled, however, in the wake of another earthquake - the one that leveled the Iranian city of Bam in December 2003.

Washington sent aid to Tehran despite its status as a member of the "axis of evil," and for a few days it appeared as though Elizabeth Dole might lead a high- visibility American delegation to Bam that could have smoothed the path to more substantive diplomatic contacts.

The Iranian government, however, turned down the visit with President Mohammed Khatami, cautioning that "humanitarian issues should not be intertwined with deep and chronic political problems."

Ilan Kelman, an expert at Cambridge University in England who studies the political implications of natural disasters, says that the Turkish and Iranian cases both suggest that "disaster diplomacy cannot work on its own. There has to have been some precedent or diplomatic activity."

Sometimes, he worries, "disaster diplomacy" may actually set back reconciliation by raising public expectations and hopes so high that they prove too great a burden for fragile relations. Such was the case, he suggests, with long-term enemies India and Pakistan in the wake of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's offer of help to Indian victims of the Gujarat earthquake in 2001.

Within six months, that gesture led to the first-ever meeting between an Indian and a Paki- stani leader, but their summit made little headway, and a year later the two countries were at the brink of war again.

Ancient and modern history offer many examples of the political impact of natural disasters, says Mr. Zeilinga de Boer, who teaches earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. For example:

• An earthquake in 464 BC that destroyed much of the city of Sparta, and a slave revolt soon afterward ("social upheavals often follow geological ones," says Zeilinga de Boer) significantly weakened the militaristic city-state in its rivalry with Athens. The quake "triggered Sparta's decline," he argues.

• An earthquake and tidal wave that killed 40,000 people in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 - the most catastrophic in European history - prompted the French philosopher Voltaire and others to question the dominant philosophy of optimism on which the ancien régime was founded. The earthquake contributed to the intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

• The manner in which Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza - along with his relatives and cronies - stole much of the international aid sent to rebuild the shattered capital, Managua, after a 1972 earthquake, fueled the sputtering Sandinista revolution that triumphed in 1979.

• In 1902, it was almost certain that the Central American canal linking the Atlantic with the Pacific would be built in Nicaragua. Work had already begun.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3