The nightmares remain
2008-05-16 11:30
Tim Sullivan
Associated Press New Delhi Bureau Chief Tim Sullivan covered the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. After the cyclone in Myanmar and massive earthquake in China, Sullivan reflects on natural disasters, and what happens when the world moves on.
New Delhi - Long after the waves had ripped through her life with the force of a jet, long after the rubble had been cleared away, the woman sat in her half-built house and talked about what had become of her family, her village, her idea of community.
Sriyawathi Malani Gunathilaka lost her only son when the 2004 tsunami pulverised Peraliya, the small Sri Lankan fishing village where she still lives. Nearly 250 others also died. "It looks so much better now," she said in 2006, "but everything is different."
Now the world was watching new tragedies unfurl in China and Myanmar. On Wednesday, Gunathilaka reflected and said she didn't believe her village would ever recover. "All the good people are dead," she said.
Tragedy is local. The world may remember the tsunami, but its individual stories - the Peraliyas, the Gunathilakas and the countless other villages and families - have been largely forgotten by now, left to lingering nightmares and, all too often, little more than the battered remnants of their former lives.
So it may be soon with the Myanmar cyclone, which the Red Cross says may have killed 128 000 people, and with this week's earthquake in China, where the death toll of more than 19 000 appears likely to grow far higher.
The tsunami rewrote the coast of Sri Lanka and killed about 40 000 people. But there was no full-scale change in the island's society. The government did not fall. Corrupt officials did not keep their hands from the overflowing humanitarian cash box.
And while the tsunami struck at both sides of the island's bitter ethnic divide, leading many to hope the tragedy could help end years of civil war, those hopes died quickly. Today, the war is far more violent than before the waves came.
When disasters strike, when a cyclone tears at Myanmar or an earthquake pounds China, Pakistan or Turkey, when survivors are still being pulled from rubble-filled streets and the death toll ratches up by the thousands, it can seem inevitable that much will change.
Because how can it not? How can the deaths of so many people not at least bring the solace of some sort of wholesale reform: A more responsive government, perhaps, or at least better building codes? An end to the untiring tragedy of civil war?
But to find places where that has happened, you need to look hard.
It didn't happen in Pakistan, where the unpopular regime of President General Pervez Musharraf was barely shaken by its often-slow response to the deaths of nearly 80 000 people in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.
Or in Sri Lanka, where the tsunami did little to foster the peace process - and where disputes over aid distribution actually helped fuel deteriorating relations between the government and the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Or after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where thousands are still fighting for promised aid.
There have been a handful of more encouraging examples:
In Nicaragua, anger over the tepid government response to a 1972 earthquake helped galvanise opposition to dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was eventually driven from power.
And the same 2004 tsunami killed an estimated 167 000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province - but there, it also pushed the government and rebels toward a peace agreement that ended a 29-year separatist war. The two sides said they wanted no part of any more suffering.
"We can point to large (natural disasters) that impact on political regimes that are already in a state of flux," said Mark Pelling, a professor of human geography at King's College in London. "But this is not the norm. The norm is that the status quo reasserts itself."
When a child dies, it can cripple a family with grief, and draw friends and neighbours into the pain. But what if the child lives in the next town over? Or in another state? What about when 1 000 children die in a country you've never visited?
In a world of 24-hour TV news channels battling for dominance, empathy only lasts so long.
So when a powerful earthquake hit China on Monday, levelling towns and leaving at least 19 000 people dead, it was front page news across the border in India.
But when a series of co-ordinated explosions hit the Indian town of Jaipur one day later, killing 80, quake coverage was quickly shoved aside, and the bombing headlines dwarfed stories of rising Chinese death tolls.
Often, people can't even agree on what counts as a serious death toll.
Bitter disagreements have broken out over the death toll in Sudan's Darfur region: Is it 200 000 dead? Or 400 000? Does it make any sense to parse numbers so immense anyway?
And what would the people of Darfur think of the United States, where one child's disappearance can become a national phenomenon?
Then there are the more mundane deaths - or at least the deaths that can come to feel mundane because they are so commonplace.
Every year, more people die in the United States in motor vehicle accidents than died in Sri Lanka during the tsunami. In 2006, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that number was 42 642. That was a comparatively good year: It was down two percent from 2005.
Around the world, the UN World Health Organisation estimates the total of motor vehicle deaths at 1.2 million. Every year.
That's five tsunamis. Or at least nine cyclones in Myanmar. Or, depending on the final death toll, more than 60 Chinese earthquakes.
- AP