I was just listening to Alvin Hall’s documentary on BBC Radio 4 . Hall is an African-American, native NO-nian, now working as a financial journalist for the BBC.
He went back to talk to his family and friends, post-Katrina, and to hear the views of Black NO residents on the reconstruction ethnic cleansing effort. Hall is no liberal but was deeply shocked by the stories he heard. Definitely worth the 30 minutes of your time, listen here.
Then, serendipitously, Attaturk at Rising Hegemon spotted this:
USA Today has another story of just how large the death toll will certainly rise:
The whereabouts of 6,644 people reported missing after Hurricane Katrina have not been determined, raising the prospect that the death toll could be higher than the 1,306 recorded so far in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to two groups working with the federal government to account for victims.
Most of those who remain listed as unaccounted-for 12 weeks after the storm probably are alive and well, says Kym Pasqualini, chief executive officer of the National Center for Missing Adults. She says they are listed as missing because government record-keeping efforts haven’t caught up with them in their new locations.
However, Pasqualini says those counting the victims are particularly concerned about an estimated 1,300 unaccounted-for people who lived in areas that were heavily damaged by Katrina, or who were disabled at the time the storm hit. The fact that authorities haven’t been able to determine what happened to them suggests that the death toll from Katrina could climb significantly.
Jesus wept. 7,000 people unaccounted for? Why? I can only suppose it’s because nobody gives a shit. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials say body retrieval has always been a state or local responsibility, while state officials maintain they believed the grim task belonged to FEMA. So nobody does anything. Thus is New Orleans ethnically cleansed.
It’s very easy to throw around potentially inflammatory phrases like ‘ethnic cleansing’, and I don’t use that expression lightly. When you have a large group of, primarily, one ethnicity using their military and financial clout to remove, permanently, another smaller ethnic group from a given geographical location, then to co-opt the properties those people own, and not even bother to count the dead – then I fail to see what else you could call it.
