No one could have foreseen a disaster of this magnitude. When the great waves appeared on the horizon, no one knew what to think. No one knows what the final death toll will be, but as contact is re-established with the outlying areas, expectations are that current figures will continue to rise.
Meanwhile the UN is busy launching its biggest relief effort ever and, only last night, Britain sent off a large shipment of tents. What a thoughtful gesture — and how nice, too, that someone saw fit to send five (or was it six?) empty jets out to the area to bring back stranded tourists. Imagine how they must feel. One minute they’re sunbathing, and the next, their dream holiday is lying in tatters at their feet. Some even lost their luggage!
As they stagger out through customs at Heathrow, they seem stunned to be met by cameras. They tell their stories as best they can, though it is clearmost are still in shock. It’s a comfort, though, to see the great waves of empathy. The whole world has taken notice and so it should! It is imperative that we work together to make sure that a tragedy of this proportion never happens again...
Forgive my sarcasm. I’m sorry, I just can’t help it. I’ve watched this charade too many times. The platitudes turn my stomach. And I dread what comes next. The story will run for a few more horrified days, gaining more coverage than it might have done had it not occurred during the downtime of Christmas. Then it will cease to be a story, and we’ll forget about it, except, perhaps, when we’re sitting on the beach, gazing at some turquoise horizon or other, and think: What if that wave out there were to be a tsunami?
There was a time when I was at one with the rest of the disaster—viewing audience. I watched aghast as the people of Bhopal succumbed to poisonous gasses and as the people of Ethiopia starved. I gave what money I could afford to the right charities and bought the right records, and I remembered the ghastly images of suffering long, long after they vanished from our screens. But it was hard to stay as concerned as I’d been at the outset, because there were so many new disasters superceding it.
Then I found myself at the wrong end of the telescope. Five years and a half years ago, my family and I were asleep in my sister’s house in Istanbul when the city was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter Scale. The epicenter was in the outlying industrial suburbs to the east of the city proper, but the death toll, when the official taxi meter stopped, was still 18,000, with some unofficial estimates doubling that figure. It took quite a few days for a clear picture to emerge.
Like most of our friends and neighbors we spent those days frantically tracking down those we knew to have been in the hard-hit areas (my sister being one of them). It wasn’t easy: The roads to those areas were either in pieces or clogged with rescue traffic, the mobile phone networks were down, and there was also an oil refinery on fire that would, if it exploded, ignite the propane gas and fertilizer depots that some insane entrepreneur had placed next to it.
The rescue efforts were equally chaotic. The army, itself hard hit by the earthquake and further hampered by its failure to have anticipated — or planned for — a disaster of this magnitude, took a long time to materialize. The rescue teams coming in from abroad (not just from the wealthy, giving West but two of Turkey’s most fervent traditional enemies, Armenia and Greece) often had no idea where to go or how to get there. Even so, there was a strong sense of communal purpose.
And it was a comfort to know the rest of the world cared, too. Because it was clear to those of us who’d experienced the earthquake at first hand that this disaster was man—made as well as natural. Had there been a tremor measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale in the same place 40 years earlier the death toll would have been a tiny fraction of what it was in 1999. The epicenter was in one of the new urban industrial centers to which millions had flocked from the countryside in the second half of the 20th century in search of work. We see this pattern through out the developing world and in the same areas we see another pattern — shoddy buildings thrown up by unscrupulous construction firms taking advantage of the boom.
In the weeks that followed the August 1999 earthquake, there was a great deal of anger directed at these criminal builders. Some came close to being lynched. Many went into hiding. Architects and lawyers and outraged citizens gathered together to try and bring them to justice. Others formedgroups to make sure a tragedy of this proportion never happened again. This was a large proposition, because it soon emerged that most of the buildings in the city were unsafe, and that an earthquake along the same fault and closer to the city centre would bring down most of them. But surely, the best place to start was with the city’s schools, hospitals, and public buildings.
Five years on, this fine project has yet to see the light of day. Why?
Well, the will isn’t there and neither is the money. Meanwhile the criminal construction firms have mostly avoided being brought to justice. Shoul this be a matter of international concern? I think it is. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that — especially now, with the fast, often unregulated, development the IMF promotes so vigorously in the world’s weaker economies
The right to safe housing ought to be viewed as a basic human right. But it’s not going to happen. Perhaps if we rephrased it as the right to safe holidays?
An earthquake is impossible to predict. But some things we know. First: the death toll in this tsunami is higher than it might have been had it happened 40 years ago because the population along the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean has grown so fast in recent decades. This is not just down to higher birth and lower infant mortality rates: There’s a development story here, too, and that is a drama in which we in the West have figured as more than innocent sunbathers.
Second: Two-thirds of those who perished in this tragedy could have been saved had there been a warning system like the one in place in the Pacific.
Only last year, the nations around the Indian Ocean decided not to invest in this expensive technology, on the grounds that a tsunami was unlikely.
Now, of course, we see it differently. Does that mean we’ll do anything about it?
The will to help is there — as I found out myself when many readers of this paper responded to an appeal launched by my sister and her colleagues to help rebuild a school in the town of Golcuk, close to the epicenter of the 1999 quake. But it’s hard to respond to things you don’t hear about. Disaster stories are by definition short and sharp. They end with the last living baby rescued from the ruins, and the longer, subtler, but (to me) far more urgent story — what we do and do not learn from these tragedies,.
