Tuesday, April 16th, 2019: the date of the fire
that partially burned the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Notre-Dame was
built between 1163 and 1345 next to the Seine, in the French capital. One of the most important symbols of the Catholic Church, it is a major French monument and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.
Just a few hours after the fire started,
donations from families, companies and individuals started being received in
order to restore the monument. The luxury group Kering and the Pinault family
donated €100 million. It was followed by a donation of €200 million from Bernard Arnault, the
world's fourth richest man, and his LVMH company. The Bettencourt family and its L’Oréal cosmetics firm
chipped in €200 million. Oil
giant Total gave €100 million and advertising firm JC Decaux put up
€20 million. Business concerns including French banks (BNP, Société Générale,
Crédit Agricole, BPCE), insurer Axa, and the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi have
made pledges totalling tens of millions. La Française des Jeux, the national
lottery company, is allocating its share of the
proceeds from Saturday’s Easter lotto. The City of Paris (€50
million) leads the flurry of donations from assorted levels of government
across the country. In Hungary, the city of Szeged, population 160,000, said it
would donate €10,000 in gratitude for a donation from the City of Paris after a
flood devastated the city south of Budapest killing 160 people in 1879. The
International Olympic Committee said it would give €500,000 to boost the
chances of meeting French President Emmanuel Macron’s five-year rebuilding goal,
with Paris slated to host the summer Games in five years’ time. “The objective
of completing this reconstruction in time for Paris 2024 will be extra
motivation for us all,” IOC President Thomas Bach wrote in a letter to the organizers. Donors had, by Thursday, pledged €850 million to
rebuild the 856-year-old heritage site.
March 14th, 2019:
cyclone Idai caused the death of more than 1000 citizens and 2 million
casualties in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The UN donated €250 million to help
these two countries.
January 25th, 2019, a dam collapsed at an iron
ore mine in Brazil, resulting in the death of more than 10 workers and nearly
300 people missing. Little money was was donated.
Indonesia, Madagascar, Haiti and Cuba,
among others, have suffered catastrophes, sometimes even worse than that caused by Idai,
and never have any of them received as much money as was donated for the
reconstruction of Notre-Dame…
It is wonderful to see how people
are mobilizing in order to help and support the French rebuild an important
building, but it is shameful to see what humanity’s priorities are… Disasters in
poor countries do not get so much media attention. Disasters make the poverty and inequality there even worse. The aid going to disaster areas is totally inadequate (though the UN’s first Sustainable Development Goal is: “NO POVERTY”).
The firemen said things could have
been worse: no lives were lost, no injured, and more than half of the cathedral was saved. Almost a billion euros has so far been collected to restore the structure; how many lives could have been saved if the same people had donated the
same amount to fund teams of aid workers and doctors, and to (re)build vital
infrastructure in disaster zones?
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