After the deluge

ASIA
The tsunami

Jan 6th 2005 BANGKOK
From The Economist print edition

The world is responding generously to the emergency needs of Asia's shattered coastal communities. But rebuilding will take more than money

THE waters have receded; the tragedy is mounting. Almost two weeks after a towering tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean, the death toll is some 150,000 and is still climbing. Yet attention must now focus on the survivors of the cataclysm. United Nations officials estimate that about 500,000 have been injured and millions more left homeless. Providing them all with food, water and medicine is proving difficult enough. But the hardest-hit communities will need not just temporary succour, but near-total rebuilding—if, indeed, they can be revived at all.

It took the first-aid shipments over a week to reach some of the most remote devastated areas. Along the western coast of Aceh, at the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, many roads and ports had been completely washed away, forcing relief workers to deliver aid by air. When the first helicopters, dispatched from an American aircraft-carrier, arrived over some stricken villages, surging mobs of famished people prevented them from landing. Other villages had been obliterated entirely. After visiting the ruins of the city of Meulaboh, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's president, complained that the relief effort had been too slow and asked for more aid.

The full extent of the tragedy, as many have said, will never be known. In Aceh, a decades-old insurgency has prevented the authorities from holding a reliable census for years. Many bodies were washed out to sea, or buried under debris, and will not be counted, let alone identified.

Even in relatively rich and well-organised countries like Thailand, thousands remain missing.
But as relief efforts gathered pace, a crude picture of the calamity emerged. As suspected from the outset, Aceh, the region closest to the epicentre of the earthquake that caused the tsunamis, suffered the most casualties: almost 100,000 killed, at the last count, and many more injured or left homeless. Some 30,000 perished in Sri Lanka, and thousands more in India, Thailand and elsewhere.

Relief workers have now reached almost all areas, save parts of Aceh and some tiny, remote islands. The secretive and incompetent military regime in Myanmar caused concern by refusing aid, insisting that only 59 people in the country had died. But it eventually relented and admitted representatives from various aid agencies. One of them, from the World Food Programme (WFP), found nothing to contradict the government's death toll, but estimated that up to 30,000 Burmese may need handouts of food. Some doubt also remains about the fate of tribesmen—indeed, entire tribes—living in India's Andaman and Nicobar islands. However, a hail of arrows, shot up from the forest of one tiny island at an Indian coast guard helicopter hovering above, suggested that there were at least some survivors.

By far the biggest concern, however, is the state of the survivors. Millions were left without food or shelter. Thousands have broken bones and appalling lacerations from their pummelling by the waves. Many have pneumonia, thanks to long stints in cold water. Fears remain that unsanitary conditions amid the ruins, and a lack of clean water in particular, could lead to outbreaks of disease.

Even places where the death toll was relatively low are in dire need of help. The tsunami killed only 82 people in the Maldives, for example. Yet they washed over the entire archipelago—where the highest ground is 1.8 metres (six feet) above sea level—destroying most buildings and contaminating water supplies. Seventy-nine of the country's 199 inhabited islands no longer have safe drinking water, says the government. Fourteen were so badly damaged that their entire populations have been evacuated. Some 60,000 people—a fifth of the population—are short of food.

The world chips in

Money, at least, does not seem to be a problem. Donors have already pledged over $4 billion, and have offered to stump up more if need be. Germany alone has pledged $674m, followed by Japan with $500m, Australia with $380m and America with $350m. These government grants do not include weighty sums donated by private citizens around the world. Ordinary Americans, for example, have already stumped up over $100m. George Bush has asked his father and another ex-president, Bill Clinton, to promote a campaign to raise yet more. Gordon Brown, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, has also proposed debt relief for the countries affected by the tsunami.

That leaves logistics as the main challenge facing the relief effort. Infrastructure in the most ravaged areas, including Aceh and the southern and eastern coasts of Sri Lanka, was never great in the first place. The tsunami has made matters much worse. Roads are being hastily repaired and ports and airstrips cleared to ease the delivery of aid.

There simply are not enough trucks in Sri Lanka to handle all the supplies arriving there, according to Anthony Banbury, the regional head of the WFP. The organisation is trying to import more, he says, and is also on the lookout for barges, hovercraft and planes small enough to land on tiny airstrips. As it is, the WFP has had to rely on outside help to transport many of its provisions. The Australian navy and American helicopters have ferried rations to remote corners of Aceh, for example. Inevitably, bureaucratic rows and bottlenecks have slowed the distribution of aid. India has turned down most foreign help, to the dismay of many commentators.

Rumours are already spreading of greedy Indonesian officials pocketing goods intended for the victims. Heavy rains have brought further chaos to eastern Sri Lanka. The main airport in Aceh was closed for half a day after a plane hit a water buffalo that had strayed on to the runway. The buffalo survived, but the plane could be removed from the runway only with special lifting equipment rushed in from Singapore by helicopter. Even better off and more accessible countries are suffering from specific shortages: Thailand says it needs not money, but help with storing and identifying bodies, which are rotting in the tropical heat.

Nonetheless, most victims now have access to food, water, shelter and basic medical attention. The WFP is feeding half a million people. India has provided temporary accommodation for 380,000, while camps for another 500,000 are being built in Aceh. Medical teams have arrived in many remote areas, while some of the injured have been evacuated to relief centres. The United Nations Children's Fund is even inoculating against measles hundreds of thousands of children displaced by the tsunami.

In some areas, a semblance of normality has returned. Children went back to school on the west coast of Thailand earlier this week, and are scheduled to do so in southern India soon. The governments of Thailand and Sri Lanka are at pains to emphasise that business is going on as usual in most parts of the two countries, for fear that tourists will stay away and thus compound the economic damage wrought by the tsunami.

How to rebuild?

Officials in the affected countries are already turning their attention to longer-term planning. On January 6th, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) convened a summit in Jakarta to discuss what needs to be done. Many regional leaders attended, along with such dignitaries as Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and Colin Powell, America's secretary of state. Mr Powell offered American help to set up a system to provide advance warning of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, similar to the mechanism already in place in the Pacific. For the most part, however, discussion centred on the problems of reconstruction.

They are many. Given the huge sums of money available, it should eventually be possible to rebuild ruined houses, repair infrastructure and replace damaged goods. But the process will be enormously complicated and time-consuming. According to Derek Staples of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), some 80% of the fishing vessels along Sri Lanka's coastline have been damaged—half of them irreparably. The poor fishermen who use them have no money to pay for repairs or replacements, or to feed themselves while they wait for help to arrive. Millions of people throughout the region are in the same state.

Moreover, those few fishermen who still have vessels may find that there are far fewer fish to be caught. The FAO has received several reports of reefs smashed by the tsunami or buried under silt. The same applies to large areas of mangrove forest and reed beds, breeding grounds for fish. Since there have been no tsunamis of comparable size in the Indian Ocean in living memory, no one knows how badly fish stocks will be affected or how long they will take to recover.

The outlook for coastal farming is equally bleak, according to Gamini Keerthisinghe, an agricultural expert at the FAO. He says that seawater has penetrated up to three kilometres (1.9 miles) inland in some places, killing crops and contaminating wells. But it may well have leached further underground, or into the water table. In theory, farmers could restore their fields by flushing them with fresh water. But many of the necessary irrigation channels were themselves destroyed in the tsunami, while the water sources that feed them may also have been contaminated. Mr Keerthisinghe tells of one Sri Lankan farmer who drained a contaminated well five times after the tsunami had receded, only to find seawater seeping back.

The business of conducting tests to see how widespread such problems are is expected to take six months or so.

Tourism, too, will suffer. The tourists themselves may be willing to return to the region quite quickly, as they did after an outbreak of SARS, a respiratory disease, in East Asia in 2003. But the facilities to receive them may take longer to repair. Nineteen of the Maldives' 87 resorts are said to be severely damaged. Hotels in southern Sri Lanka fared even worse. Since tourism, fisheries and agriculture are the three main industries in the affected areas, the unemployed have no alternative livelihoods to fall back on. Mr Annan has declared that it may take as long as ten years to set all this to rights.

Some spots may never recover. It makes little sense to reconstruct an entire village from scratch amid contaminated fields close to depleted fishing grounds for a greatly diminished population. Already, officials are talking about moving settlements away from the shore, changing building codes, introducing new crops and amending fishing regulations. Some environmentalists argue that the clearing of mangroves to make way for shrimp ponds exacerbated the damage. They want to set up reforestation projects. While such debates grind on, impoverished victims of the tsunami are likely to drift to cities or abroad seeking employment.

Political reverberations

Much will depend on how the governments concerned handle the reconstruction. Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister of Thailand, has already ordered state-owned banks to lend to the rebuilding effort. He has also eased visa requirements for tourists in an effort to stem departures. Thais seem to like this can-do attitude: Mr Thaksin's ratings have jumped since the tsunami struck. All this may boost the ruling Thai Rak Thai party's fortunes in a general election scheduled for February 6th. At the very least, the crisis seems to have distracted attention from the continuing insurgency in southern Thailand, which the authorities have been battling for a year with little success.

Mr Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, has also cut a dash during the crisis. His predecessor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, shrank from public appearances and delegated most work to her ministers. Mr Yudhoyono, by contrast, flew to Aceh from the opposite end of the country as soon as news of the tsunami reached him.

The tragedy may even help to change the course of the long-running separatist rebellion in Aceh. Many Indonesians dismiss the province as a puzzling and troublesome place. Yet the tsunami has prompted an unprecedented rush of interest and sympathy. It has also forced the government to admit aid workers and journalists in great numbers for the first time in several years. The army's conduct will be subject to greater scrutiny, while the guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement will find it hard to stage any attacks without looking callous.

The relief effort is also doing wonders for Indonesia's foreign relations. America suspended all military co-operation with Indonesia in 2001, in protest at the Indonesian army's conduct in East Timor. But American soldiers have been working side-by-side with their Indonesian counterparts to deliver aid. Australia, too, is lavishing aid in an effort to patch up ties that had been strained by its government's recent talk of unilateral strikes against suspected Indonesian terrorists.

Indeed, the catastrophe has provided all manner of diplomatic openings. India, although itself afflicted, has sent aid to Sri Lanka and the Maldives to cement its standing as the primary power in the region. Its rival, China, is also loosening its purse-strings. Within Sri Lanka, the government and Tamil separatists appear to be co-operating in the relief effort. The goodwill generated by these gestures may ebb when the crisis recedes, of course. But for the time being, it is one of the precious few reasons for cheer.

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