Re: Can Singaore survive a magnitude 7 quake
i guess singapore cannot survive.
but lucky we do not have too much earthquake recorded in history of this little red dot.
From The Times
January 14, 2010
Haiti and its 200 years of tragedy
How did you feel when you heard the news of the earthquake?
Martin Fletcher
As I heard reports of the Haiti earthquake yesterday morning my mind flashed back to a day in September 1991, when I hitched a lift from Miami to Port-au-Prince on a tiny plane chartered by a US TV network. We were the first journalists to reach Haiti after the coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a fiery priest elected president nine months earlier. What we found was heart-rending.
Haiti was once the jewel of the French empire — a lush Caribbean island. In 1804 the world’s first successful slaves’ revolt won its independence. Since then it had been downhill all the way, culminating in the terrifying reigns of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, sustained by their Tonton Macoutes death squads. Haiti is the western hemisphere’s poorest nation, its once fertile hills stripped as bare as its coffers.
Aristide was no saint, but for the first time in 200 years Haiti’s oppressed masses had elected their own champion and he had been stolen from them. Heavily-armed goons, known as “attachés”, patrolled the slums of Carrefour and Cité Soleil. The people cowered in huts flanked by open sewers, full of fear and drained of hope. Each night corpses appeared in alleyways to discourage rebellion.
It is easy to turn on the Today programme, hear news of conflicts, massacres or natural disasters in small and distant countries such as Haiti and forget about them over your toast and coffee. It is less easy if you have been to those places and witnessed the people’s suffering.
Haiti was my first such experience. More recently I have seen how Robert Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe, how Ethiopia’s US-backed invasion of Somalia wrecked its best hope of peace in a generation, how millions of Iranians saw their hopes of freedom dashed in last year’s stolen presidential election. In each case the wickedness of a small elite translated into real suffering for real human beings and I felt real anger.
Journalists are often accused of callousness, but it is not true. We do become emotionally involved in stories. I felt angry again watching Alastair Campbell tell the Chilcot inquiry on Tuesday how “incredibly proud” he was of the Iraq invasion. They were the words of a man who had seen that country only cocooned in a prime minister’s entourage — not in the aftermath of suicide bombs, bodies floating down the Tigris, the unbearable grief of the bereaved and displaced. Yes Saddam Hussein was evil, but there had to be a better way.
Haiti’s earthquake was a natural disaster, but it compounded 200 years of man-made suffering for the gentle people of that wretched land. My sadness long outlasted breakfast.