The Asian Tsunami - not just a natural disaster World Revolution - January 2005 The horrific scale of suffering caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster has shocked the world. As we go to press, there are over 150,000 dead and some 5 million homeless in 11 countries. Many are still vulnerable to exposure, water-borne diseases, malnutrition and even starvation. What the final toll will be is difficult to predict.
Over 80,000 of the Indonesian dead have been counted, though in some parts of Aceh they stopped counting the bodies. As one survivor told the BBC, "The dead outnumber the living." In Sri Lanka official figures record 28,729 killed and about one million people driven from their homes. In India, the government records 9,067 deaths along the east coast as confirmed but nearly 4,000 more missing in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, just north of Sumatra. Many fishing communities have been wiped out. In Thailand the government announced that 4,985 people died, including 2,230 foreign tourists. Even in Somalia, farthest from the epicentre, coastal communities were ravaged and at least 200 killed. Compared with man-made disasters such as the war in Iraq, where 100,000 may have perished since the war began, this tragedy has been (rightly) covered in great detail by the Western media. The reason for this difference is simple. In the case of the tsunami, nature can be blamed. The same imperialist statesmen - George W Bush and Tony Blair - who have murdered nearly as many Iraqis as the tsunami can pose as the very personification of humanity and compassion. Yet even when it comes to such natural disasters the scale and destructiveness of them, the degree of havoc that they cause are far from being unconnected to social and economic, indeed class realities. Last year many commentators noted that when the Caribbean and the neighbouring countries were struck by extremely destructive hurricanes, the numbers of dead were many time higher in the poorest states of central America and the islands than was the case in the southern United States. The peasants and fishing villages of these countries suffered differentially greater casualties than their northern neighbours as a direct result of the poor condition of their housing and infrastructure. These in turn are the result of the fact that the USA is an imperialist country exploiting Latin America and preventing its development. The same applies - indeed, even more so - to the poor farmers and fisherfolk of South East Asia. Their poverty stricken villages with their precarious and flimsily built houses were easily swept away. But in addition to this there is the question of the complete lack of any warning. Certainly the tsunamis advanced with great rapidity, reaching the speed of a passenger jet. But it is simply not true that it was physically impossible to give any warnings. At least some of this death and destruction could have been prevented or reduced with a system of seismic monitoring buoys such as exists in the Pacific. Officials in Thailand and Indonesia have said that a rapid public warning could have saved many lives. But there simply is no international system to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Such a system would be not be expensive or difficult to install. The USA itself has had such a system for more than half a century. In the Pacific six buoys called tsunameters are equipped with earthquake sensors and measure small changes in water pressure. The meters cost only $250,000 apiece and are programmed to automatically alert the USA's two tsunami-warning centres in Hawaii and Alaska. American scientists actually wanted to place two more tsunameters in the Indian Ocean, one near Indonesia, but the plan was dropped through lack of government funding. The reason why no warning system exists in the Indian Ocean is thus obvious. In the Pacific two mighty imperialist countries, the USA and Japan are threatened by Tsunamis. In the Indian Ocean it is "only" poor third world countries which face devastation. The same horrible double standards can be seen when we look at the sums raised for disaster relief. Of course it is admirable that millions of pounds have been raised from public appeals. This shows how ordinary working people around the globe spontaneously feel for those in terrible need. But when the resources available are considered, the donations from the major imperialist powers have been miserly - so far (doubtless the response of ordinary people will shame them into improving on this somewhat). When you compare the figures spent on a real humanitarian cause with those spent on establishing the new world order and assuring profits for Big Oil, Halliburton or Bechtel the picture becomes clear enough. A week after the event two billion dollars had been subscribed to relief operations by both private appeals and states but this figure is both woefully inadequate to the task at hand and shamefully little when the budgets of the major imperialist countries are considered. As of writing the US government has donated a paltry $350million. Yet the Iraq war has cost the United States $151bn so far, and is running at an average monthly cost of $5bn. In fact there would be no need for governments and western banks to send money to the countries affected, if they would only agree to stop receiving money from these countries: in the form of interest payments on their massive foreign debts. Indonesia, for example, the country nearest to and hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami, has a staggering foreign debt $132.7 billion (CIA handbook estimate for 2004). Not only have the Indonesian people repaid these loans many times over through steep interest rates, they never benefitted from them in the first place. On the contrary, the vast bulk of the loans went on arms expenditure to prop up the pro-Western dictator Suharto! Indonesia is a country where between one third and one half of the population, are living below the poverty line. The small amounts of aid flowing in are nothing compared with the interest flowing out to the western banks and the profits flowing out to their multinational corporations. Of course it is vital to send money, rescue equipment, medical aid to those in desperate and immediate need. We should do all we can to force our miserly billionnaire rulers to cough up everything that is needed to help save the lives of the survivors and restore their homes and livelihoods. But we must also fight to ensure that an early warning system, the equal of that which protects the USA and Japan, is rapidly put in place so that never again does such an event find a population so unprotected. We should redouble the campaign, right up to the G8 meeting this July to demand a total cancellation of the foreign debt of these countries, indeed all the countries of the so-called Global South. The workers and anticapitalist movement should send aid too, directly to the organisations of the farmers and fishing communities of the region so that the imperialist governments and their tame NGOs do not misuse it to "open up" their economies still more to the multinationals.. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/O.5XsA/8WnJAA/E2hLAA/BRUplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. 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