Over the last two years the world has had a surfeit of disasters. Everywhere one turned there were new photographs of bodies lined up so relatives could come and claim them. In October 2005, the images of covered corpses, stunned faces,
keening mothers, tumbled homes and nature gone awry resulted from the South Asia earthquake. In August, the global tragedy was Hurricane Katrina, where the bodies the world saw weren’t under rubble but floating in New Orleans’ toxic flood.

In July, the casualties were British; grainy cell phone photos carried viewers into the very moment that terror struck the London transport system. In December 2004, the sprawled bodies in awkward, disconcerting color were the child and adult victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Three months earlier, in September, the translucent
corpses of children were from the school siege in Beslan. And virtually every day—
should one have troubled to look for them—one could find photographs of the human and other wreckage of another suicide bombing, or three, in Iraq.
But not all of the crises of this past year or so have equally commanded the attention of the world and its cameras. Some disasters have had the bad luck to occur at a moment when a more telegenic disaster was already capturing global attention. The worst tragedy in Iraq in 2005 occurred on 31 August. At the same time that flood waters were sweeping over New Orleans, up to one million Iraqis walking to a Shi’ite shrine in Baghdad stampeded when the rumor that there was a suicide bomber in their midst swept through the crowd. Almost a thousand people died and nearly five hundred more were injured.

Susan D. Moeller

Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2006, vol. 59, no. 2.
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