{news} Fw: 55, 000 Dead...Money for human needs, not for war...

Justine McCabe justinemccabe at earthlink.net
Tue Dec 28 21:57:46 EST 2004


A Statement from the International Action Center


While earthquakes and tsunamis are natural disasters, the 
decision to spend billions of dollars on wars of conquest 
while ignoring simple measures that can save human lives 
is not.

At least 55,000 people were killed by the tsunami that 
devastated coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia.  Almost a 
third of the dead are children.  Thousands are still 
missing and millions are homeless in 11 countries. 
 Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions 
face a bleak future because of polluted drinking water, a 
lack of sanitation and no health services, according to UN 
undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency 
relief coordination.

Egeland said, "We cannot fathom the cost of these poor 
societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages 
and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of 
thousands of livelihoods have gone."

No money for early warning system

Much of this death and destruction could have been 
prevented with a simple and inexpensive system of buoys. 
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia have said that an 
immediate public warning could have saved lives, but that 
they could not know of the danger because there is no 
international system in place to track tsunamis in the 
Indian Ocean.

Such a system is not difficult or expensive to install. 
In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunamis have 
been available for decades and the U.S. has had a 
monitoring system in place for more than half a century. 
More than 50 seismometers are scattered across the 
Northwest to detect and measure earthquakes that might 
spawn tsunamis. In the middle of the Pacific are six buoys 
equipped with sensors called "tsunameters" that measure 
small changes in water pressure and programmed to 
automatically alert the country's two tsunami-warning 
centers in Hawaii and Alaska.

Dr. Eddie Bernard, director of the NOAA Pacific Marine 
Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, says just a few buoys 
could do the job.  Scientists wanted to place two more 
tsunami meters in the Indian Ocean, including one near 
Indonesia, but the plan had not been funded, said Bernard. 
The tsunameters each cost only  $250,000.

A mere half million dollars could have provided an early 
warning system that could have saved thousands of lives. 
This should be compared to the $1,500,000,000 the U.S. 
spends every day to fund the Pentagon war machine. This 
means that for what the U.S. is spending for less than one 
second of bombing and destruction it could construct a 
system that could have prevented thousands of needless 
deaths. Lack of funding for an inexpensive, low-tech early 
warning system is simply criminal negligence.

Indian Minister of State for Science and Technology Kapil 
Sibal said,  "If the country had such an alert system in 
place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the 
imminent danger and avoided the loss of life."   But there 
is no room in the Bush budget for such life-saving 
measures; the U.S. government's priorities are corporate 
profit and endless war.

At a meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic 
Commission in June, experts concluded that the "Indian 
Ocean has a significant threat from both local and distant 
tsunamis" and should have a warning network. But no action 
was agreed upon.  Geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. 
Geological Survey said, "Sumatra has an ample history of 
great earthquakes, which makes the lack of a tsunami 
warning system in the Indian Ocean all the more tragic. 
Everyone knew Sumatra was a loaded gun."

U.S. government failed to warn region

Although the local governments had no real warning, the 
U.S. government did, and it failed to pass along the 
information.  Within minutes of the massive 9.0 magnitude 
earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, U.S. scientists 
working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration (NOAA) suspected that a deadly wave was 
spreading through the Indian Ocean.  They did not call 
anyone in the governments in the area.  Jeff LaDouce, an 
official in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration, said that they e-mailed Indonesian 
officials, but said that he wasn't aware what happened 
after they sent the e-mails.

In this day of instant communications, controlled in a 
large part by the U.S., it is possible to communicate 
within minutes to every part of the globe.  It is beyond 
belief that the officials at the NOAA could not find any 
method to directly and immediately contact civilian 
authorities in the area.  Their decision not to do so may 
have cost thousands of lives.

Even a few minutes warning would have given the 
inhabitants a chance to seek higher ground.  The NOAA had 
several hours notice before the first waves hit shore. Tim 
Walsh, geologic-hazards program manager for the Washington 
State Department of Natural Resources, said, "Fifty feet 
of elevation would be enough to escape the worst of the 
waves. In most places, 25 feet would be sufficient.  If 
you go uphill or inland, the effect of the tsunami will be 
diminished."   But the inhabitants of the area weren't 
given the warning - as a result, television and radio 
alerts were not issued in Thailand until nearly an hour 
after the waves had hit and thousands were already dead.

The failure to make any real effort to warn the people of 
the region, knowing that tens of thousands of lives were 
at stake, is part of a pattern of imperial contempt and 
racism that has become the cornerstone of U.S. policies 
worldwide.

The NOAA immediately warned the U.S. Naval Station at 
Diego Garcia, which suffered very little damage from the 
tsunami.  It is telling that the NOAA was able to get the 
warning to the US Navy base in the area, but wouldn't pick 
up the phone and call the civil authorities in the region 
to warn them.  They made sure that a US military base was 
notified and did almost nothing to issue a warning to the 
civilian inhabitants who were in the direct path of the 
wave--a warning that might have saved thousands of lives. 
This is criminal negligence.

Disease may kill tens of thousands more

The 55,000 deaths directly resulting from the tsunami are 
just the beginning of the tragedy.  Disease could claim as 
many victims as have been killed in the weekend's 
earthquake-sparked tsunami, according to the World Health 
Organization (WHO). Medical experts warn that malaria, 
cholera and dengue fever are expected to pose serious 
health threats to survivors in the area, where waves 
spoiled drinking-water supplies, polluted streets and 
homes with raw sewage, swept away medical clinics, ruined 
food stocks and left acres of stagnant ponds where 
malaria-carrying mosquitoes can breed.

 "The biggest threat to survivors is from the spread of 
infection through contamination of drinking water and 
putrefying bodies left by the receding waters," said Jamie 
McGoldrick, a senior U.N. health official.

"Within a few days, we fear, there is going to be 
outbreaks of disease," Indonesian Vice President Jusuf 
Kalla said. "Cholera is going to be a problem. This is 
going to be the most important thing in a few days."

The response of the U.S. government to this emergency is 
to offer a paltry $15 million "aid package."  To put this 
in perspective, this is one tenth of one percent of what 
Washington has spent thus far on the war against the 
people of Iraq.

Money for human needs, not for war

The U.S. and British governments owe billions of dollars 
in reparations to the countries of this region and to all 
other formerly colonized countries.  The poverty and lack 
of infrastructure that contribute to and exacerbate the 
scope of this disaster are the direct result of colonial 
rule and neo-colonial policies.  Although economic and 
political policies cannot control the weather, they can 
determine how a nation is impacted by natural disasters.

We must hold the U.S. government accountable for their 
role in tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of deaths. 
We must demand that it stop spending $1.5 billion each 
day for war and occupation and instead provide health care 
for the victims of this tragedy, build an early warning 
system, and rebuild the homes and infrastructure destroyed 
by the tsunami.


Sara Flounders
Dustin Langley
for the International Action Center





The International Action Center
http://www.iacenter.org
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