The world today remembers the tsunami, when the sea rose up that Sunday morning one year ago and after just eight minutes had swallowed hundreds of thousands of lives in one of the worst natural disasters in memory.
Fatality tolls in this age of news saturated with figures of death and wounded often fail to move a desensitized world public, but even they were taken aback by the astounding statistics. At least 216,000 people were killed, according to an assessment of government and relief agency figures. The United Nations puts the number at 223,000 or more. The true toll probably will never be known. Many bodies were lost at sea and in some cases the populations of places struck were not accurately recorded.
As the world watched on TV, the images looked surreal but in fact they were horribly real, of course mainly to the people directly in the tsunami’s path. Entire villages were swept away by one surging wall of water after another. According to the UN, Almost 400,000 houses were reduced to rubble and more than two million people left homeless. The livelihoods of 1.5 million people disappeared.
Ironically, the tsunami did have a few positive effects. For one, it brought many of the world’s ordinary people together in a huge, largely spontaneous act of help. Within hours, and in the weeks to come, the international aid community came together to respond with donor pledges of an astounding $13.6 billion.
Where did all this money go? Toward a huge relief operation in one of the biggest emergency-assistance programs in history. Concerns linger about the pace of rebuilding. In many places the landscape is still one of devastation. Many refugee camps are still full and residents relying on aid handouts to survive. But there is no doubt that tremendous progress has been made to return the hardest-hit regions and the lives of their people to normalcy. One year later, the tsunami is testament to the successes that can come from billions of dollars in aid money.
And from this calamity of epic proportions emerged opportunities for political peace, some taken and some lost. The devastation wrought by the tsunami resulted in a cease-fire between the Indonesian government and guerillas that ended a decades-old separatist conflict in Aceh. No such progress has been seen in Sri Lanka, though, where disputes over aid delivery and a recent upsurge in violence blamed on separatist Tamil Tiger rebels dashed whatever hopes there were that the tsunami would end a long-running civil conflict.
Amid the mourning across the region, there is also some relief that early warning systems are now either in place or are being perfected so that this enormous disaster can be avoided should land beneath water rumble once more.
There have been many natural disasters this year other than the tsunami: namely the Pakistan earthquake and the US Gulf Coast’s Hurricane Katrina. They serve as harsh reminders of the fragility of people in the face of nature’s wrath, in both East and East.
