On 26 December 2004, a huge earthquake off the northern coast of Sumatra triggered one of the most powerful tsunamis in living memory. Within 15 minutes, it had swept nearly 220,000 people to their deaths in the north Sumatran province of Aceh. Half an hour later, 8,000 died on the coast of Thailand around the tourist resort of Phuket. Within a further hour, another 10,000 had died along the coast of eastern India, and more than 30,000 in Sri Lanka. The scale of destruction was massive: the city of Banda Aceh, with a population of 400,000, was almost completely destroyed, one in seven of its population dead. 4,000 miles away, tsunami waves hit the coast of eastern Africa, leaving 150 more dead. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
• The US has promised $350m in aid. The cost of a F-22 Raptor fighter jet is $225m. The total cost to date of the US war on Iraq is $148bn, a daily rate of $270m, or three-quarters of promised tsunami aid.
• Britain’s promised aid has now risen to £200m. This compares to the £1bn military aid it gave to Indonesia to buy Hawk jet fighters.
• The $4bn promised by the international community in emergency aid compares to
the $44bn spent on debt repayments last year by Thailand, Indonesia and India.
Waves 30-40 feet high pulverised towns on the shores of Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand. In Aceh, mosques were often the only buildings left standing as the waters receded because they were built of stone or concrete. 800,000 are now homeless in Aceh; in Sri Lanka, 100,000 fisherman have been left unemployed as thousands of fishing boats were smashed to pieces. Tens of thousands of fishermen in Thailand are also affected, and up to 100,000 people may lose their jobs because of the impact on the tourist trade.
The dreadful pictures from Aceh, Thailand and Sri Lanka generated a huge outpouring of basic human solidarity throughout the world. In marked contrast was the response of the leaders of the two most powerful imperialist powers, George Bush and Tony Blair. The former took three days to offer any public comment on the disaster. Blair was in Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea having his customary multimillionaire-funded holiday. The leader who had taken two hours to respond to the deaths of John Peel and Jill Dando and little more than three hours to that of Princess Diana, waited four days to offer any public comment on the tsunami victims.
Hollow promises of aid
No less mean-spirited were the aid offerings from both the US and Britain. The initial US offering was a paltry $15m; when Jan Egeland, UN Under-Secretary of humanitarian affairs called this ‘stingy’, Secretary of State Colin Powell denied this and pledged a further $20m. The British government initially promised £50m; as private donations exceeded this within a few days, so it was forced to agree to match the money raised privately. But when it came to demands that the imperialist nations cancel the debt of those most affected by the tsunami, the shutters went down. Gordon Brown’s much-publicised tour of Africa in early January promising an end to world poverty was revealed as a hollow PR exercise: all that was on offer from the Paris Club was the temporary suspension of debt repayment.
These minimal levels of aid are, however, typical. In 1990, the UN agreed an aid baseline for Western countries of 0.7% of GNP. Few have met it; Britain’s contribution is 0.34%, that of the US a miserable 0.17%. As it is, aid is always used to promote the strategic interests of the donor country. For instance in the US, the 2004-09 joint plan between the State Department and USAID aims to ‘align diplomacy and development assistance’ with Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, the document which makes the case for pre-emptive wars and the need to support global intervention. Two criteria are seen as critical: ‘relevance to US national security’ and ‘greater aid effectiveness’. One outcome is that aid to Pakistan jumped from $1.7m in 2001 to $275m in 2004. Top of the list of recipients, however, is Iraq ($18.5bn); next, Israel at $2.6bn. The other criterion, effectiveness, is tested by the use of funding to support privatisation, economic liberalisation and austerity.
History teaches us that promised aid anyway never arrives in full since it is usually announced for the purposes of political expediency. Hence when Blair declared at the 2001 Labour Party conference: ‘To the Afghan people, we make this commitment…We will not walk away… we will work with you to (find a way) out of the miserable poverty that is your present existence’, his sole purpose was to gain support for the forthcoming war on Afghanistan. Yet the record is that only 3% of aid to Afghanistan has been for reconstruction, whilst 84% has been to pay for the military occupation. It is estimated that no more than 20% of promised aid has reached Afghanistan over three years after the end of the war. To date, only $29m has been spent on aid to Iraq out of the billions supposedly available.
The media and the tsunami
Once it became clear that there was huge sympathy for the victims of the tsunami, the media went into top gear to prevent it from acquiring any political character. As John Pilger says, these were ‘worthy’ victims – unlike the 100,000 Iraqis who have died as a result of the murderous onslaught on their country. Hence the press has devoted pages to pictures of the destruction of Banda Aceh – but few to the destruction of Fallujah and the 6,000 estimated to have died. The press has scarcely mentioned the 12 million children who die each year from malnutrition and other poverty-related diseases in countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Nor has it seriously described the grinding poverty that is the consequence of imperialist neo-liberal policies, or the destruction of natural defences which made the impact of the tsunami even worse: the Thai mangrove swamps that could have impeded the waves had they not been uprooted to make way for shrimp farms to earn foreign currency; or the Sri Lankan coral reefs which have been devastated by illegal coral mining, again to meet export demand. It has not questioned why millions of people had to live in huts and shacks which could be so easily swept away, or why the health services have been privatised so that they are only available to those who can pay.
Instead the media have focused on individual human stories which, harrowing though they are, do not tell us anything about the general conditions of the people affected by the tsunami, and why they are as they are. Tales fabricated by the Indonesian military about the Aceh Freedom Movement threatening to abduct relief workers have been recycled uncritically, as have stories about Tamil Tigers ‘abducting’ children from refugee camps in Sri Lanka. The reality is that Tamil Tigers have proved highly effective in organising reconstruction. When Colin Powell visited Aceh days after the tsunami, the media reported his horror, but did not tell us that aid flights into Banda Aceh had to be suspended for hours for the benefit of his security arrangements. Nor have there been reports as to the unpopularity of the Sri Lankan government’s acceptance of 1,500 US Marines to help relief work. Instead the media wants to present the story as one about the passive victims of a natural disaster who are grateful for whatever support may come their way.
The truth is that millions face even more desperate conditions than they did before the tsunami. They will be forgotten once media attention turns elsewhere. Their countries will continue to be bled dry as debt repayments kick in again. The aid they receive will be outweighed not just by debt repayments but by the unequal terms of trade. Cancelling the debt of the developing countries is therefore just the first step in ending imperialist domination; we need to join with those who are struggling against oppression throughout the world.
Would an early warning system have made a difference?
In the aftermath of the disaster, it was revealed that the principal countries bordering the Indian Ocean had decided in 2003 not to invest some $4m in an early warning system. It is not enough, however, to have the technology; more important is to have clear and practised procedures for evacuation. Cuba has shown how it can be done with the evacuations it has to organise in anticipation of the frequent hurricanes that hit the island. But these are possible because Cuba has a socialist system where protecting the lives of working class people is the first priority, and where there is as a consequence a high level of social organisation. In societies ravaged by imperialism, such procedures would be an impossibility.
Aceh
Aceh is the northernmost province of Sumatra, home to a population of four million. For nearly thirty years, the Acehnese people have fought the brutal Indonesian state for their freedom. The liberation struggle started in 1976; in 1990 casualties escalated when the Suharto regime turned Aceh into a free-fire zone. Between 1990 and 1998 at least 4,000 civilians were murdered. Torture was routine, as was the practice of leaving mutilated bodies by the roadside as a warning. There was a brief respite when the Suharto regime fell; in 1999, a million Acehnese attended a rally demanding a referendum on independence. In May 2003 martial law was imposed, foreigners were banned from the province and countless checkpoints set up; in early December 2004, Indonesian army chief General Sutarto announced that the army had killed 3,215 Acehnese in the intervening 18 months. The overwhelming majority of these were civilians.
It is not only torture and repression that Acehnese people face. Indonesian troops use checkpoints to extort money and possessions from the Acehnese people. The military also receives money from Exxon-Mobil to protect its massive gas plant in the province; this earns the Indonesian government $1.2bn per annum, most pocketed by officials in Jakarta. It is one reason why the Acehnese people are demanding their independence. The military is now hoarding aid to sell it on the open market. It is also checking refugee camps and taking away anyone suspected of being a supporter of the Free Acehnese Movement (GAM). After the tsunami, the army killed seven Acehnese at Lampook trying to recover motor cycles and other belongings from the beach. GAM has offered a ceasefire and negotiations to discuss the best way to get aid to survivors. The Indonesian army claims that GAM is threatening to kidnap relief workers and steal the aid. Indonesian President Yudhoyno assured the world that ‘the security operation conducted by Indonesia’s military and police will protect, secure the humanitarian efforts’. However, chief of the UN operations in Aceh, Joel Boutroue, retorted ‘We don’t believe relief workers are targets. I don’t see at this stage any hampering of our movements’. The reality is that the Indonesian army is determined to crush the Acehnese people and will rely on the imperialist media not to ask too many questions about its methods.
Victory to the
Acehnese people!
FRFI 183 February / March 2005
