There were somber memories Saturday as 14 Asia Pacific countries marked the fifth anniversary of the devastating tsunami in which quarter of a million people perished. On Dec. 26, 2004 a subsea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra was measured at 9.3 on the Richter scale. As a result of the massive disturbance in the ocean floor, a tidal wave was formed which swept outward from the epicenter toward the millions of unsuspecting people on coastlines hundreds of miles away.
The Indonesia province of Aceh was the closest and therefore the first to be hit. The wall of water that arrived was the height of a six-story building. The devastation in coastal cities such a Bandah Aceh was almost total. Pictures taken shortly afterward show ruin on such a scale that it is still almost unthinkable that anyone at all survived. Some 230,000 of the dead were in Aceh where half a million were made homeless. Equally remarkable is that in the aftermath when ruined neighborhoods in India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Indonesia and Thailand were littered with corpses and clean water was at a premium, disease did not spread on such a scale as to boost significantly the number of victims.
The international response to this catastrophe was immediate and generous. But though the United Nations did its best to coordinate the substantial flows of aid that quickly arrived, there was inevitable muddle — too much help arrived in some locations and too little in others. Some shattered communities crying out for assistance were understandably angry that they had somehow been overlooked. Nor was all the misallocation of aid a result of error. Wrecked Tamil coastal communities in Sri Lanka simply did not receive the international aid flown into Colombo, because the authorities chose not to try and distribute it. This decision hardened Tamil attitudes and may have reinforced the Tamil Tiger rebellion. It also damaged Sri Lanka’s international standing.
Exactly the opposite happened in Indonesia where the tragedy led to the ultimately successful peace talks between the government and the Free Aceh movement, ending 28 years of bloody rebellion.
Important lessons have been learned. A tsunami early warning system is now in place but work still needs to be done to ensure alerts reach right the way down to communities at risk, rather than simply being sent to governments. More importantly, despite UN-run tsunami drills such as that mounted last October, a question mark still remains over how effectively the organization can coordinate future flows of aid from all around the world in the wake of the next tsunami or similar major natural disaster. Of particular concern must be the planning of the initial rescue in the golden hours after a catastrophe, when communities will have been overwhelmed.
The UN that already runs peacekeeping missions really needs to be thinking of creating standing forces drawn from international disaster rescue and recovery specialists. Properly trained and equipped, these people could be sent in immediately and almost certainly make the difference between life and death for thousands.
