Sorry Pakistan.

Not that long ago something terrible happened in Pakistan. Like you probably all know, a big part of Pakistan flooded. Almost fourteen milion people are homeless, and it costed approximately 1.400 lives. Horrible ofcourse. I think we can’t even imagine the scale of such a disaster.

Because of all that misery there was a big media campaign last week in The Netherlands, aiming to raise money for the Pakistanis. If you realize that we collected 208 million euro (268 million USD) for the tsunami-victims five years ago, and 83.4 million euro (107 million USD) for the Haitians earlier this year, it’s a brilliant idea! Unfortunately we only raised 20 million euro (26 million USD) for Pakistan. I have to admit that there are days I don’t have that amount of money in my wallet, but still.

The cause of this isn’t really clear. First of all this disaster just isn’t visual enough. We all saw the same images of water and.... well, more water. And that’s it. There just wasn’t more footage of ripped buildings and swimming donkeys. The reason why is really simple. I mean, when was the last time you wanted to go on holiday in Pakistan? Exactly, there just weren’t big, fat Americans with cameras or iPhones screaming ‘Oh my gosh!’.

The second reason is the same reason why I didn’t gave money to Pakistan. Honestly, I feel really guilty about it, but it just doesn’t feels right. I’ll explain it to you. Each year Pakistan receives 1.5 billion USD (1.16 billion euro) from the world, for aid. I don’t have a problem with that so far, because they really need it. But at the same moment Pakistan is spending 5 billion USD, that’s 5,000.000.000 dollars (3.9 billion euro) on defense. They bought lots of weaponry, armor and even an atomic bomb. Obviously you won’t have any money left to build dikes and sluices.

I realize that the Pakistanis can’t help this and that they’re the victim of their own government. But that’s the problem in all of this. When I’d donate money it eventually would go to the Pakistani government and that makes the vicious circle complete. And even if it didn’t, I still won’t want to donate money. Besides the fact that only 70 cents of your euro/dollar will be used over there, I don’t want to be responsible for their failing government. I know it’s easy to say for me that they have to stand up against their government, but I’m not responsible for that. 

As long as this kind of countries won’t be able to take care of their own people I’m not in the mood to help these countries, and that includes the people unfortunately.

I don’t want to say that we have to solve this ‘American style’, by bombing everything and build Burger Kings on every corner, but I think the UN needs to intervene. Because if they won’t, thousands of people will die every year because of this kind of natural disasters.

J&R