Staying focused on the future
Simon Montlake
Three years ago, a towering wave swept aside the flimsy home of A.
Muttama in Nagapattinam, India, and stole away her three children.
Together with her husband, Selvaraj, a fisherman, she turned her back on
the sea. After two years in shelter, they moved to Madras, where he
found work as a rickshaw driver.
|
Trail of destruction: tsunami of 2004 |
The memory of that day still brings tears to Ms. Muttama's eyes, but
the horror of the past is yielding to thoughts of a better tomorrow.
"The wounds were deep, but life doesn't stop for anyone," she says.
Across the Indian Ocean, where a Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami scoured
coastal communities and displaced 2 million people in 12 countries, an
unprecedented aid effort has repaired much of the physical damage. The
world dug deep into its pockets and pledged $13.6 billion for the
survivors of a disaster that claimed 230,000 lives.
That money has fed, housed, and employed the afflicted, while
governments and humanitarian agencies focused on rebuilding schools,
houses, and hospitals and restoring shattered ports and waterlogged
farms.
Some countries have moved forward: Resorts in Thailand are packed
this season with foreign tourists seeking winter sunshine. Several
low-key ceremonies to remember the dead will be held there today.
In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where Muttama lives, more
than 1,800 self-help groups have sprung up to grant small loans to
survivors and give them better access to jobs, education, and
healthcare, in some cases for the first time among underprivileged
groups.
Other nations have grappled with tensions that predated the tsunami
and became woven into the recovery effort. Insurgents in Aceh, the
Indonesian province at the tip of Sumatra Island, signed a landmark
peace deal and were elected to office.
For survivors, it's been a long road. But massive aid has mostly
reached its target, defying skeptics who foresaw roadblocks to
delivering services to marginalized communities in graft-ridden
developing nations.
The next major challenge, say aid workers and government officials,
is to avoid a hard landing as the reconstruction winds down. The fear is
that economies fueled by aid dollars will deflate after international
agencies pack up. Indonesian officials have warned of mass layoffs in
Aceh in 2009 when BRR, the donor-funded national reconstruction agency,
is due to close.
A government survey found that at least 40,000 may be left jobless by
the drawdown in foreign aid.
"A lot has been rebuilt, but what will happen when all the money has
gone?" asks Yusuf Irwan, a self-employed mechanic in Banda Aceh, the
provincial capital and aid hub.
Another challenge is preparing coastal communities for possible
future natural disasters. A UN-led multidonor effort has begun to
install tsunami warning systems in the Indian Ocean, similar to those
used in the Pacific Ocean. These include undersea sensors and buoys
linked to national centers that can issue warnings and share data with
other countries.
Had a warning system existed in 2004, authorities would have had time
to evacuate coastal areas. Today, countries are better prepared to cope
with a tsunami, says Orestes Anastasia, a project manager for USAID,
which supports the UN initiative.
That was borne out by a deadly Sept. 24 earthquake in West Sumatra
that damaged thousands of homes and triggered a small tsunami.
Indonesian authorities issued a tsunami warning within five minutes of
the 8.4-magnitude quake, allowing coastal villages to respond ahead of
the waves.
To avoid a post-aid bump, planners in Aceh are looking to investors
to help revive a private economy that was based on agriculture, fishing,
and revenues from a depleted gas field operated by ExxonMobil. But
investors are waiting for signs that a landmark 2005 peace deal with the
armed Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, that has devolved power to the
province, won't sour.
The deal ended three decades of fighting and led to the
demobilization of thousands of combatants and the election of a GAM
member as provincial governor. Many Acehnese fear a return to conflict
as GAM fighters turn to petty extortion and factions battle over the
spoils of peace, warns the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based
think tank.
That view is shared by Iqbal, a farmer and drugstore owner who spent
two years living in a refugee camp. "Nothing's changed," he complains.
"Rebels still ask for money."
Yet such gloom overlooks the sense of renewal in Aceh, says Damien
Kingsbury, an associate professor at Deakin University in Melbourne,
Australia, and an adviser to GAM on peace negotiations.
Acehnese are finally exercising political freedoms in a post-tsunami
atmosphere of opportunity, despite hardships. "The people of Aceh appear
to feel as though they have recaptured some of their pride. They have
survived a devastating tsunami and a horrible and destructive war and
have come out on top," he says.
A sense of renewal is also palpable in Tamil Nadu, though the pace of
rebuilding is slow and dogged by controversy over where survivors should
live. Of the 53,323 houses due to be built during the first phase, only
29,446 have been completed, and thousands of families are stuck in
temporary relief camps.
Much of the new stock is going up away from the coast where survivors
made their living. State authorities have designated a half-mile
exclusion zone from the sea on grounds of safety. Some aid agencies call
this a ploy to grab beachfront land for resorts and hotels.
"Removing people from their original habitation will negatively
impact livelihoods of people," says Babu Matthew, director of Action Aid
India.
"The safety of people can be assured through better early-warning
systems and other disaster risk-reduction measures."
Other countries have backed off similar proposals. In Thailand, that
spurred hoteliers to rebuild resorts. The province of Phang-Nga, where
foreign vacationers were among more than 8,000 dead, expects tourist
income to return to pre-2004 levels within three years.
In Aceh, 100,000-plus homes have been built, along with 1,240 miles
of road, 800 schools, and 600 hospitals and clinics, according to the
agency BRR. But some 3,000 families still live in shelters around Banda
Aceh, and some international agencies have drawn flack for building
substandard houses. In areas, homes stand empty as recipients have gone
elsewhere, a symbol of wasted resources.
Christian Science Monitor
|