WASHINGTON, 7 January 2005 — Two weeks after the tsunami devastated areas of South East Asia, Americans have begun questioning why the State Department, which has received over 24,000 calls inquiries about missing family members, remains reticent in revealing information about US citizens still missing in the area.
While the State Department tries to locate over 2,600 Americans who are still listed as missing, it remains unclear how may of these people are missing due to the disaster that killed nearly 150,000.
“I don’t know how long it will take us to work our way through the list,” Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, told CBS’s “The Early Show” yesterday. “What I can guarantee you is we will not stop until everything that is knowable is known to us.”
But many Americans are growing impatient with such bureaucratic remarks.
Disaster experts, however, understand the Department’s reluctance to speak.
Asked about mounting suspicions over information not being released to the US public, James Jennings, president of Conscience International, an aid organization sending medical and public health teams to Indonesia, said the delays are due to “incompetence and understaffing, rather than any malfeasance.”
“If you are familiar with US embassies and consulates abroad, you generally find that they are not very responsible and helpful. But I think this is based on the fact that there is a relatively small staff to handle huge amounts of contact with the public, and huge amounts of data exchange with Washington,” said Jennings in a phone interview today. “The bureaucracy is choking itself.”
Jennings said two issues could explain the phenomenon between of the number of bodies and the number of missing: “Firstly, Americans don’t necessarily tell embassies their whereabouts when they’re in a foreign country. And unless there’s a crisis they wouldn’t normally contact the US Embassy. Secondly, so many relatives in the US panic at the first mention of the name of a country where their loved ones are expected to be. So if they were anywhere in Thailand, their relatives think they were on the beach at that moment, which is not necessarily true.”
As for the expatriates in the country, Jennings said, “They seldom think — if they’re in the capital — that anyone would worry about them. So it has to do with the atmosphere of fear that has been created by the US administration in their so-called war on terror. And the media hypes any story which is a disaster.”
Jennings said another problems is that many Americans have an abysmal ignorance of foreign countries and geography. “If their relative is anywhere in Asia, they are going to call the State Department, so I suspect that most of those claimed to be missing, are not really missing at all.”
Jennings said that even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is currently touring the region, “has hinted that there’s a lot of confusion about the numbers, so I think all of this explains the confusion on the ground.
“If you compare the military budget with the diplomatic budget in the US, it’s a shameful range of funding,” said Jennings, whose organization also worked in Darfur, Sudan, and with victims of the Iranian earthquake last year.
Televised photos of the cataclysmic tsunami resulted in a staggering loss of life has horrified people worldwide. Immediate footage of the disaster was dominated by video, much of it taken by amateurs, depicting the terrible spectacle of onrushing water and the devastation it created. When professional TV crews arrived, the cameras focused mostly on the physical destruction — buildings splintered, cars and boats flung along city streets.
Many networks decided not to focus on the bodies of victims who perished in the disaster. “What you want to do is show the horrific nature of what happened but do it in a way that you don’t cause disgust among the viewers, particularly during the dinner hour,” said Chuck Lustig, who coordinated ABC News’ coverage on World News Tonight and other broadcasts, recently told journalists.
