Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable (which I’ve just started and which is shaping up to be very good) has an interesting observation on her blog about disaster behaviour during the Mumbai attacks. She starts by quoting a New York Times article on the attacks as follows:
As the city faced one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in the nation’s history, many ordinary citizens…displayed extraordinary grace….[At] the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, a sous chef named Nitin Minocha and his co-workers shepherded more than 200 restaurant diners into a warren of private club rooms called The Chambers. For the rest of the night they prepared snacks, served soda, fetched cigarettes and then, when told it was safe, tried to escort the diners out through the back. They wanted to make sure their guests, many of them Mumbai’s super-elite, were as comfortable as possible. “The only thing was to protect the guests,” said the executive chef, Hemant Oberoi. “I think my team did a wonderful job in doing that. We lost some lives in doing that.”
As Ripley observes, the interesting thing here is that,
In catastrophes, human beings tend to hold fast to the roles they held before anything went wrong. Hotel guests, like airplane passengers, tend to play the part of the passive, obedient victims. Employees–even ones earning poverty level wages–tend to feel a profound sense of responsiblity for the guests they were serving cocktails to just moments before. A study of the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire found that about 60% of the employees tried to help in some way–either by directing the guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17% of the guests helped. People were remarkably loyal to their identities, and so it was in Mumbai.
Her conclusion:
Imagine, just for kicks, if our culture pushed everyone to have an identity as someone who helped, who took action in the face of terror and confusion, who was responsible for the safety of others. Imagine how crowded the trenches would be.
I’m taking part in a roundtable on community resilience, 4&5GW and the decline of the state. The aim of the roundtable is to bring together individuals from a range of backgrounds to challenge current thinking and assumptions in our present political and societal systems. Two presentations which I’ll be live blogging on will be Chet Richards on Mindsets and Character and John Robb on Community Resilience. There is no set agenda for the conference. This afternoon we will be running a series of open sessions… one of which is likley to be on community resilience.
If you have a question for Chet or John send me a tweet. Update: Thanks for the questions – answers will be tweeted soon.
Update: Notes from John Robbs’ presentation after the jump + MP3 of Chet.
This may have escaped people’s attention (it did mine), but Ukraine and Georgia were told they couldn’t join the NATO club this week, and Georgia was given a bit of a ticking off for its abrupt and dumb escalation of the North Ossetia conflict in August.
The NATO communique said: “we remind all parties that peaceful conflict resolution is a key principle of the Partnership for Peace Framework Document.”
As Liz Fuller writes for Radio Free Europe:
“Translated from diplomat-speak into plain English, that reads “The use of heavy artillery against civilians asleep in their homes in Tskhinvali just hours after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced a unilateral cease-fire was a crude violation of our basic ground rules, and one we cannot overlook.”
Fuller adds:
“Equally, if not more damaging to Georgia’s NATO aspirations was the spectacular ineptitude of its armed forces, which proved anything but battle-ready. The country’s two crack U.S.-trained brigades were serving as part of the international peacekeeping force in Iraq during the August war. According to a new International Crisis Group report, “the [Georgian] armed forces and military infrastructure sustained heavy damage during the Russian invasion, revealing flaws in planning, supply, coordination, air defense, and combat communications systems which contributed to quick demoralization of the troops,” who abandoned the strategic military base in Senaki without firing a single shot.
In an extraordinary twist to the Mumbai attrocities, Pakistan’s Dawn News is reporting that Pakistan prepared for war after their President – Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widow – received a call, as the crisis raged, from someone who claimed to be the Indian External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee.
Whether it was mere mischief or a sinister move by someone in the Indian external affairs ministry, or the call came from within Pakistan, remains unclear, and is still a matter of investigation. But several political, diplomatic and security sources have confirmed to Dawn that for nearly 24 hours over the weekend the incident continued to send jitters across the world. To some world leaders the probability of an accidental war appeared very high.
It all started late on Friday, November 28. Because of the heightened tension over the Mumbai carnage, some senior members of the presidential staff decided to bypass the standard procedures meant for such occasions, including verification of the caller and involvement of the diplomatic missions, and transferred the late-evening call to Mr Zardari. The caller introduced himself as Pranab Mukherjee and, while ignoring the conciliatory language of the president, directly threatened to take military action if Islamabad failed to immediately act against the supposed perpetrators of the Mumbai killings.
As the telephone call ended many in the Presidency were convinced that the Indians had started beating the war drums. Within no time intense diplomatic and security activity started in Islamabad. Signals were sent to everyone who mattered about how the rapidly deteriorating situation may spiral out of control. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was advised to immediately return to the capital from Lahore, and a special plane (PAF chief’s) was sent to Delhi to bring back the visiting Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi early in the morning on Nov 29 even when he was already booked to return by a scheduled PIA flight the same evening.
