The monstrous tsunamis: Humanity, battered, triumphs

A woman and a little girl wait at the site of where their home used to be two weeks after a tsunami hit the city of Meulaboh. Concerns remained 09 January that an unknown number of tsunami survivors in Indonesia's Aceh province have not received any aid, two weeks after the disater killed more than 104,000 people in the country. PHOTO:PHILIPPE DESMAZES AFP

Suddenly disaster struck. Monstrous tsunamis lashed the shores, shattered the idyll, and forever changed the lives of millions. Near the Sumatran shore, the earth shook, the sea bed rose, and the sea swelled, sending out waves of vast quantities of water at force far greater than a typhoon's. The waves grew in height, reaching several metres in places, before crashing over the coastlines, wreaking unimaginable havoc. The catastrophe left over 155,000 people dead, injured over two hundred thousand, and left perhaps five million people without shelter, food, water, or medicine.

Loss of life of this magnitude is not unprecedented. In 1970, a cyclone and the tidal waves that followed killed three times as many people in Bangladesh, a small nook in the north of the same region. What makes the devastation of the tsunamis of 2004 stand out among the worst natural disasters in history is that it took its toll of death in so many countries, and the destruction was so widespread. Some towns and cities in Sumatra were just about obliterated and death took its toll not only from among Indonesians, Indians, Sri Lankans, and Thais, but also among visitors from as far away as Scandinavia and America. It looked like disaster had struck the human race.

The scale of the destruction wrought by the tsunamis is horrendous. In many of the coastal cities and villages hit by the waves, hardly anything remains standing. The town of Meulaboh in the Aceh province of Sumatra was almost totally destroyed and what remains resembles Hiroshima after the bomb. Banda Aceh is an unending mountain range of debris that was once houses, shops, schools, and hospitals. In Sri Lanka, a railway track is a zigzag of twisted metal. A train was lifted off its tracks and hurled hundreds of feet, killing most of its eight hundred passengers. Thousands of fishing boats were lost or destroyed, along with the livelihood of thousands of fishermen. Hospitals filled to capacity with the injured. Makeshift morgues filled with corpses. Many of the dead had to be buried in mass graves.

The days that followed unfolded countless stories of destruction, bereavement and suffering, as well as courage, love, and compassion -- many of them captured on video and television cameras, and in newspaper reports and photographs. As the first waves lashed the shore, a woman grabs her two little boys, takes them to higher ground, then comes back for the third child only to find it was gone, and was then herself swept to her death.

You see the picture of a father grieving over the body of his dead child. Fishermen come back from their fishing trips only to find the coasts strewn with bodies and their homes and loved ones gone. Women in tears are searching in vain the ruins of their houses for survivors. A little girl, unforgettable with her large, liquid eyes, waits for food at a relief camp. An injured little girl who has lost her entire family wipes her tears at a hospital. A forlorn, hungry little boy has only coconuts for meal. You hear the story of a father losing his grip on his two-year old son as a wave crashes through their hotel wall, and never seeing him again. Two sisters caught in the rushing waters try desperately to save one another and only one survives. And in a miscellany of stories of the will to live, you see the picture of a man on a floating tree trunk a hundred miles off shore ten days after the tsunamis had struck. Compassion was writ large in the picture of an injured child clutching a medico carrying him to safety.

The first response from the rest of the human race was slow, partly because the scale of the disaster took time to sink in. The early offers of assistance have been called stingy, and rightly so. But then things changed dramatically. Never in history has a natural disaster been followed by such overwhelming world-wide support for its victims. Help from foreign governments rose from its shameful initial paltriness to unprecedented proportions. Private donations poured in from literally millions of eager donors from all over the world. Dozens of warships and scores of helicopters were in action to save lives. A great international effort was under way to bring relief to the suffering people and help them rebuild their lives. It was a victory of human compassion over narrow factional interests and ideologies of which there are far too many in the world.

One day, as the extent of the disaster became clear, Europe from Stockholm to Paris to Rome, stood in tearful silence in remembrance of all those the cruel tsunamis had carried away in another part of the world. In Phuket, candles burned in memory of all those the world has lost. That was the moment when humanity finally triumphed.

The writer is a former United Nations economist