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Why?
Michel ODIKA

War in Brazzaville (Congo) (1).

War Philosophy: Cogito ergo… boom (Susan SONTAG)

Before else, there is no waste of time in life like that of making
explanations. However, it is no waste of time to remember some things of
crucial importance. Especially noteworthy is the fact that “forgotten is forgiven”,
according to Scott FITZGERALD.

WARNING – It is not catastrophes, murders or diseases that kill – it

is the way people believe and think (Virginia WOOLF, novelist).

NO MORE WAR
War has become a luxury only small nations can afford (Hannah
ARENDT, philosopher).

Not only does war settles nothing, but to win a war is as disastrous as to
lose one (Agatha CHRISTIE, novelist).
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War is never a solution – it is always an aggravation (Benjamin

DISRAELI, statesman).

It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when

violently excited. Violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate
men from each other, but tend to reduce them to the same state (Thomas ELIOT,
poet and dramatist).

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a
crime (Ernest HEMINGWAY, novelist).

Force and fraud are in war two cardinal virtues (Thomas HOBBES,
philosopher).

War must never be praised as ennobling mankind, for war is bad in that it
begets more evil than it kills (KANT, philosopher).

War is only a cowardly escape from peace-induced problems (Thomas

MANN, novelist).

War does not determine who is right – only who is wrong (Bertrand
RUSSELL, mathematician and philosopher).

Peace is not mere absence of war, but a virtue that springs from a state of
mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice (SPINOZA,
philosopher).

HOPE MESSAGE – Believe in life! Always human beings will

live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life (William DUBOIS,
novelist).

1. Photograph by David LUTTENBERGER (American

photographer, Associated Press) – Cover illustration of a
French-written book I published a few years ago: Michel
ODIKA, Au plus près de Brazza, éditions Harmattan (2004),
Paris.
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Mainstreaming Large-scale Disasters

Michel ODIKA

Mainstreaming disasters basically means addressing the causes and effects

associated with emergency and crisis situations, so as to mitigate, rather than
to exacerbate, their environmental and medical impact. For the most part, it
consists in combining and coordinating three approaches, that is: facing the
facts, building a critical mass of capacity for safety, and keeping up
momentum on prevention.
What needs to be done in terms of mainstreaming disasters, ultimately, is to
grasp things at the root, with a constant view to securing the future.

Building a critical mass of capacity for safety…

What needs to be done to go beyond a paper exercise? When dealing with
emergency situations, the best we can do is to think about things as they are, not as
they are said to be. In practical terms, only those who are acquainted with facts can
make a continual addition to their stock of knowledge and experience. That’s in the
last resort the price to pay for preparing the ground and thereby breaking some
potentially dangerous and poisonous myths.
Prior to all crisis management, please let us have no illusion that, one fine day, the
world will be permanently preserved from disasters. No, disasters simply rewrite
the rules. And to prevail we too must rewrite these rules. However, the foundations
exist to mount responses commensurate with the challenge of better controlling
adverse events facing the world.

Keeping up momentum on prevention…

Each plan and programme established must become the building block for
sustainable strategies to free us, not of disasters as such, but of the damaging
consequences resulting from disasters. At the same time, we have to make this
conceptual leap in our actions and interventions in order to move from the reactive
to the preventive. Success is in sight, but securing it will require that we have the
will, means and knowledge needed to make real headway.
In matter of large-scale disasters, prevention may be best defined as the ability and
willingness to envision the future, so that we can unite connecting and converging
elements to make the years to come as safe as possible. Thus, the global response
to acute environmental disorders must be transformed from an episodic and
“crisis-management approach” to a thoughtful and long-term response that
emphasizes the use of evidence-based principles.
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Facing the facts…

What does it mean to “mainstream” large-scale disasters? In short, mainstreaming
disasters is “the process that enables free individuals and responsible citizens to address the
causes and effects of acute environmental disorders in an efficient and sustained manner, so as to
mitigate, rather than to exacerbate, their impact as much as possible”. The point, then, is to
demonstrate a strong sense of preparedness for what can possibly lie ahead. Why?
In many respects, both little anticipation and slow reaction contribute to exacerbate
the impact of catastrophes. Besides being damaging to individuals’ health and
destructive to human lives, large-scale catastrophes radically differ from what most
people believe. In concrete terms, acute environmental disorders basically stand as
a continuum – instead of emerging from somewhat a vacuum – of latent pre-
existing background problems. In other words, evident and violent growing
difficulties of the moment must be dealt with anyway. But permanent underlying
difficulties are originally difficulties of every moment… Clearly difficulties must be
divided in as many parts as is necessary and useful to overcome them.

As a result of lessons learned from major catastrophes across the world, greater
emphasis is now placed on lack, or simply absence, of any appropriate prevention
policy when required. Another fact to be aware of is that humanitarian emergencies
do not in themselves generate problems. We should rather assume exactly this: as
well as revealing and/or worsening background problems, major emergencies
degenerate in exacerbated troubles, since they are no more than amplified and
intensified reflects of the global environment in which human beings live. Still,
their magnitude tend to increase in inverse proportion to the quality of prevention
strategies implemented in “normal” time.

What else? What we call health, whether in “normal condition” or in “exceptional

situation”, is nothing else than the precarious attainment of balance and relevance
in intensely mobile flux to which things human are permanently subject. Such is, in
summary, the key message to promote in order to better control violent
environmental fluctuations once they happen…

Doctor Michel ODIKA

Contact e-mail: michel_odika@hotmail.com