January 2005   

Asian Tsunami Disaster Was Man-Made

Tsunami refugees in Calang, Aceh, in northern Sumatra Island. Indonesian
government is using disaster to tighten military control of rebellious province.
(Photo: Tyler Hicks/New York Times)

At about 8 a.m. local time on December 26, a massive undersea earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean to the west of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Registering 9.0 on the Richter scale, it was the fourth largest earthquake worldwide since 1900, releasing the energy equivalent of 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. This set off giant waves (tsunamis in Japanese^*), which raced across the Indian Ocean at speeds of up to 500 miles an hour, striking Thailand in 30 minutes, sending 30-foot-high waves crashing into Sri Lanka an hour and a half later and hitting Somalia on the east coast of Africa, some 2,800 miles away, more than ten hours after the quake. Whole villages were swept out to sea in some places. The tsunami is now estimated to have caused at least 225,000 deaths and the number keeps growing as the missing are counted. It is already judged to be the deadliest tsunami in modern history. But while the bourgeois media refer to such events (floods, droughts, earthquakes, etc.) as “natural disasters,” the terrible toll in lost lives and devastation they wreak is far more the result of the capitalist society in which such calamities take place.

Although some would certainly have died given the killer waves’ tremendous force and speed, the vast majority of those killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami could still be alive today were it not for a system in which production, housing and every aspect of social life is governed by what is profitable rather than by what’s required to fulfill human needs. Most of those who perished were poor people living in vulnerable locations dangerously close to the sea, because that was where they were forced to huddle under the miserable conditions prevalent in semi-colonial countries. Even many of the tens of thousands who died when the first waves hit the Sumatran coast could have been saved with timely warnings, as the difference between life and death often consisted of being a few dozen or a few hundred meters inland on higher ground. The half hour before Thai beach towns were struck would have been sufficient to get people away from the shore, if an alert were sounded. None of the 30,000-plus victims in Sri Lanka had to die, with 90 minutes to get them out of harm’s way. But their callous rulers made no attempt to warn them.

Now the media are repeating over and over that there was no way the tragedy could have been avoided, that while there is a tsunami warning system in the Pacific, there is none in the Indian Ocean, besides, tsunamis seldom occur there, and so on. Thus the New York Times (28 December) reported:

“When experts at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu were first alerted that an earthquake had struck Sunday off Indonesia, they had no way of knowing that it had generated a devastating tsunami and no way to warn the people most likely to suffer.

“Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, which has no system for detecting them and alerting those in danger, and scientists do not have the tools to tell when an earthquake has created one.

“Not until the deadly wave hit Sri Lanka and the scientists in Honolulu saw news reports of the damage there did they recognize what was happening.”

This is a lie. The day before, the Times reported, “Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, in fact, scientists running the existing tsunami warning system for the Pacific, where such waves are far more common, sent an alert from their Honolulu hub to 26 participating countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, that destructive waves might be generated by the Sumatra tremors.” In fact, a rapid alert was sent out, but it wrongly said that “no destructive tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data.” Their subsequent calls around the region went unheeded.

The non-alert did, however, reach the U.S. Navy in the Indian Ocean and the atoll of Diego Garcia where the Navy and Air Force have installations (and where the CIA keeps many of its “high value prisoners” from Iraq, housed in clandestine jails so that they can be tortured far from the prying eyes of the International Red Cross, nosy reporters and the like). Diego Garcia was hit by high waves but, in part because of the warning, it suffered no significant losses. As for the spurious claim that scientists in Hawaii didn’t realize what was happening until the tsunami hit Sri Lanka (an hour after hitting tourist beaches in Thailand?!), it turns out that no less than four earth-orbiting radar satellites just happened to be over the Indian Ocean at the time and from their data scientists were able to measure the height of the waves at different stages. “By chance, these satellites were in the right place at the right time,” said Walter H.F. Smith, a geophysicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to an article on the NOAA Internet site.

The lack of warning to the affected populations is only the beginning of how virtually every aspect of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster is determined by the imperialist-dominated capitalist system. Currently the media are full of stories of a vast outpouring of charity and donations from across the globe to provide relief for the victims of the unparalleled tragedy. But the first response from the American White House was to offer a paltry $15 million in aid. Reporters pointed out that this was less than half the amount budgeted for George W. Bush’s lavish second term inauguration celebration, financed by the cash-laden corporations who engineered his reelection. This showed the administration’s real priorities were to “party on.” Smarting over a United Nations official calling the Western nations “stingy,” Bush eventually came out of the brush on his Texas ranch to announce that the U.S. would pony up $350 million in disaster relief. This was soon topped by Japan at $500 million, then Germany with $650 million, followed by $765 million from Australia, as in a tent revival meeting. Private corporations, too, are getting in on the act: Coca-Cola is donating bottled water to South Asia (where peasants are protesting its siphoning off of local water supplies) while Starbucks promises to donate $2 to tsunami relief out of every $10 pound of gourmet Sumatra coffee it sells.

The administration’s media spinmeisters soon realized that human tragedy could be spun into a public relations bonanza. Coming just after Christmas, it could appeal to Bush’s right-wing evangelical base as an example of Christian charity. Furthermore, they hoped, maybe it could counteract the hideous images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. So Colin Powell shows up in Indonesia for a photo op with Florida governor Jeb Bush, and soon the air waves are filled with feel-good TV shots of U.S. helicopters delivering aid to hard-hit coastal towns in Indonesia and ferrying injured victims on stretchers to field hospitals. If they couldn’t get the Iraqis to greet the U.S. invaders with hugs and flowers, at least they can get shots of desperate Indonesian Muslims grateful for U.S. aid in their dire straits. But while the media and government pat themselves on the back for “American generosity,” it should not be forgotten that the total aid pledged by Washington for tsunami relief barely amounts to a day and a half of the cost of the Iraq occupation. The whole cynical exercise is an attempt to build support for U.S. imperialism’s criminal war on the Iraqi people.

While U.S. rulers strut before the cameras, the local satraps of the American empire use the flood of emergency relief aid to further their vicious wars on minorities. In the Aceh province at the northwestern tip of Sumatra, where almost all of Indonesia’s 160,000-plus victims died and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless, cargos of tents, clothing and medical supplies pile up beside the runways. Some 1,000 trucks are reportedly lined up at the airport in Medan. Meanwhile, the TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, Indonesia’s armed forces) herds survivors into barely disguised concentration camps guarded by soldiers. These are replicas of the “strategic hamlets” the U.S. set up in Vietnam, intended here to separate the population from the guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) which has been fighting for independence for almost 30 years. Now the Indonesian army has announced that foreign aid workers will be restricted to two towns, the capital Banda Aceh and Meulaboh down the coast. The rest of the province is still under a state of “civil emergency,” meaning it is a “free fire” zone for the TNI to kill suspected rebels. In addition, security has been tightened around the huge gas fields run by Exxon Mobile in Aceh, which supply much of the natural gas for Japan and South Korea.

At first little was said in the press about the Aceh insurgency, but with reporters swarming through the area it was well-nigh impossible to keep it out of print. But there has been hardly a word printed or broadcast about the Thai government’s murderous war on the Muslim minority in the southern region just across the narrow peninsula from where the tsunami hit. Last October, Thai police arrested 1,300 Muslim protesters in Narathiwat province and packed hundreds of prisoners into police trucks where 78 suffocated or were crushed to death. Earlier, in April 2004, Thai military forces shot 107 “suspected Islamic militants” in a single day. Cultivating an image of peaceful Buddhism to attract European and American tourists, this brutal monarchical-military regime is running a reign of terror just out of sight, while workers at the languid beach resorts toil for miserable wages and live in dirt-poor slums. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka the government makes a show of seeming harmony with the Tamil minority. President Chandrika Kumarantunga is photographed shaking hands with a commander of the rebel LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and announces she will adopt a Tamil child. But when the UN secretary general Kofi Annan wanted to meet with LTTE guerrillas in the hard-hit Tamil region on the island’s east coast, the government nixed it. Now Sinhalese chauvinists are cutting off all direct aid to the Tamil areas.

Through it all, U.S. imperialism is using the recent disasters to extend its support for reactionary forces throughout South and Southeast Asia, while the Pentagon has seized the opportunity to reestablish its presence in the region. In the Philippines, 600 U.S. troops set up operations in the former Clark Air Force Base in early December following heavy typhoons that killed 1,000 Filipinos. In Sri Lanka, 1,200 U.S. troops arrived from Okinawa at the beginning of January, along with another 300 Marines from an expeditionary strike group headed for Iraq, to participate in post-tsunami reconstruction. In Thailand, the former Utapao air base, from which USAF B-52 bombers took off during the Vietnam War, has been reactivated. Most significant of all, Washington is taking advantage of the “humanitarian” opening to resume military aid to the murderous Indonesian military, something the Bush administration has been pushing for since it took office. Already spare parts have been released for the TNI’s C-130 air transport planes. Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal noted: “The leading neoconservative at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, has tried to overthrow US restrictions on aid to, and relations with, the Indonesian military” (“The neocons have a hand in Aceh, too,” Guardian [London], 6 January). Where Wolfowitz goes, war and brutal repression are sure to follow.

Obscurantist forces ascribe calamities such as the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to the “hand of god” or other supernatural power, often as retribution for the supposed “sins” of humanity. Leading Indonesian Muslim clerics argue that the disaster is a test of faith, while in Sri Lanka some Buddhists blame it on Christians. Such religious claptrap can be used as an opiate to preach passivity to the masses, or as an amphetamine to whip up a sectarian frenzy against infidels and apostates, leading to intercommunal slaughter. Yet even ostensibly enlightened bourgeois organs blame everything on the blind forces of nature. Thus the New York Times (27 December 2004) editorializes:

“But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.”

It was not the “amoral mechanics” of natural forces that was responsible for the tens of thousands of avoidable deaths, but the cold indifference of capitalist rulers for whom the lives of their subjects are cheap. What the terrible toll in human suffering shows is not how fleeting is man’s existence but how criminal is the social system that refuses to use existing technologies to protect the population. The liberals and reformist pseudo-leftists who call on the government to “help the victims in any way we can” are buying into the false consciousness of fatalism spread by the bourgeoisie. The grievously suffering survivors will of course take any aid they can get. But revolutionaries must warn that the imperialists and their toadies will at best use such aid to try to put a pretty face on their dirty wars and colonial occupations, while exploiting the opportunity to intensify their exploitation and oppression, as is happening in Aceh today.

Marxists draw lessons from the tsunami disaster that are diametrically opposed to those propagated by the ruling class. We underline that the massive death toll was the result of the exploitative system that consigns desperately poor populations to a miserable existence, “living” in shacks in ecologically perilous zones, whether clinging to the sides of ravines prone to flash floods in Honduras or crowded onto lowland swampland as in Indonesia where they are prey to killer waves. We stress that the same forces that today are dropping bags of rice from helicopters and handing out candy to children will tomorrow be dropping bombs on the population and torturing the hapless prisoners they round up at random. We point out that the enormous advances of modern science make it possible to counteract the “blind forces of nature,” but only if this knowledge is wielded by a society in which the interests of those who toil are supreme.

In response to the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004, the League for the Fourth International calls not to get the capitalist exploiters to “help the victims” but to intensify struggle to sweep away these rapacious ruling classes through international socialist revolution. n

^* Although commonly referred to as “tidal waves,” tsunamis are not caused by tidal action.