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| Thursday, 20 January 2005 |
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The global political fault line by Arvind Sivaramakrishnan People all over the world have reacted immediately in providing help to the victims of the tsunami. In contrast, Governments have been less forthcoming.
Responses to what is nothing less than a global tragedy have shown up a stark fault line between people and the very institutions that purport to represent, act for, and protect them. While millions of ordinary people, not for the first time, have shown that they want to help millions of other ordinary people, even if they are half a world away, the reactions of states, armed forces, and financial institutions have been slow, confused, and even curmudgeonly. People all over the world have reacted immediately. Just a few days after the tsunami, donations to the relief fund have reached Sterling Pounds 2 billion and are still rising. Aid agencies in Western Europe and Scandinavia have been overwhelmed with donations made by email and telephone. By far the greater part of the money is the shillings and pence of ordinary people. In the countries affected, it is also clear that ordinary people are doing what they can, lifting the dead, the injured, and the rubble and wreckage with their bare hands. The Chennai-based social scientist Radha Vasudevan has paused in her relief work to observe that the public are far more concerned and involved than they might have been in previous years. In contrast, governments, particularly in the English-speaking world, have been less forthcoming. It took a TV interviewer's questioning, and criticism in the popular press, to bounce the British Government into raising their initial announcement of Sterling Pounds 15 million to Sterling Pounds 50 million, and angry things are being said in the British press about the lack of warning, despite the fact that there was sufficient time for those further away from the epicentre of the earthquake to reach safety. The US Geological Survey staff and the US military have been cited as saying they did not know whom to contact, and no official spokespeople seem to have been challenged over the failure even to telephone international broadcasting organisations or the Washington embassies of the states affected. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), however, contacted the US military base in the British colony of Diego Garcia to notify them of an approaching deadly wave. Letters from private citizens to the UK press have castigated the Diego Garcia base for making no attempt to warn the littoral states of the impending disaster. Although it has emerged in public that an official in the US NOAA emailed Indonesian officials, it is not clear that the email was more than a cursory one. One commentator has said it is 'beyond belief that the officials at the NOAA could not find any method to directly and immediately contact civilian authorities in the area." The NOAA's slogan is 'Working together to save lives'. Yet reports of privately-telephoned warnings in Asia which save thousands of lives show just how many more could have been saved, and how easily. These responses, or non-responses, bring to light other issues as well. The UN has estimated the immediate need at Sterling Pounds 1 billion, and current estimates of the total cost of reconstruction stand at over Sterling Pounds 7 billion. The Democrats have pointed out that the $ 35 million initially pledged by the Bush Government is the kind of money the US spends 'before breakfast' every day in Iraq. Others have noted that previous monies pledged by the US for reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq are yet to be delivered. Another issue lies in the nature of tourism; some British commentators have been scathing about the way western tourism takes place in South and South-East Asia, with palatial seaside resorts surrounded by barbed wire, sometimes patrolled by armed guards, and a general indifference to the impact on water, the environment, and local people. Jeremy Seabrook has said that when the same locals "appear in the west, they become the interloper, the unwanted migrant, the asylum seeker, who should go back to where they belong." The issues facing states are not confined to those in the West. States affected by the tsunami will have to consider sharing information far more widely and publicly, and that could mean being far more open about what the military know and when they know it. The world's armed forces are legitimated and paid for by the world's publics, and have untold billions spent on them, but continue to be obsessively secretive and indifferent to the implications of information they hold and which could save millions of lives if made public. The British press have already noted the Indian Government's unwillingness to allow access to the Andaman and Nicobar islands, on the grounds of military sensitivity. The full consequences for the relations between states, between states and peoples, and between peoples and the world's financial institutions, will take time to emerge, and there will be enormously powerful interests doing all they possibly can - entirely behind the scenes, of course - to block any kind of change. Nevertheless some changes are already on the way. For example, in Thailand, a former director-general of the Thailand Meteorological Department, who has been ridiculed for a decade for advocating a tsunami warning system - his evidence was a tsunami disaster in Papua New Guinea - has now been appointed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to coordinate the establishment of just such a system. The new appointee, Smith Tumsa-roch, points out that the $30 million cost can easily be met by his country. In India, this newspaper has carried news that George Mason University in the US State of Virginia has informed Indian government agencies of the immediate risk of further aftershocks, including some on the Indian mainland. Those developments could well be the harbingers of fresh approaches by states to the questions involved and to the mutual dependence of human beings on one another. It remains to be seen if our states and those who claim to lead them have what that takes. (Dr. Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in politics and law at Tuantons Colleges, Southampton, United Kingdom) (Courtesy: The Hindu) |
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