The scale of contributions, however, has not translated into a massive, well-coordinated aid effort. The first international assistance did not arrive in Meulaboh, one of the hardest-hit cities in Indonesia, until January 2—a full week after the disaster struck. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that as of January 7 areas of the devastated western Sumatran coast, where an estimated 1,550 villages have been destroyed, had not received any relief. There have been widespread press reports of deaths due to infections from minor wounds left untreated.

“To some extent a process of natural selection has occurred,” Paul Shumack, an Australian doctor, told the New York Times January 5. “People with no treatment at all are already dead.”

Shumack is treating patients at one of the hospitals that has been set up in Banda Aceh, the capital of the devastated Aceh province. The article described Shumack amputating the leg of a woman whose relatively minor wound had developed into a serious infection. The amputation was performed with what was described as a handsaw and without any blood for transfusions. The patient died after the operation.

“The 150,000 dead figure is a very low figure. It will be much bigger,” said Jan Egeland, a top UN official. The WHO has warned that the 150,000 toll could double as survivors contract diseases caused by poor sanitation. While the UN is nominally in charge of relief efforts, dozens of different organizations are running their own operations on the ground, creating a sprawling, decentralized jumble of agencies and jurisdictions.  
 
Government aid and private charity
Pledges of aid from governments have now topped $4 billion. Washington and other imperialist governments that have promised much of the assistance have a record of not fulfilling such pledges, at least not in their entirety. The aid that is arriving often has strings attached. The largest “donor,” the government of Australia, is actually offering half of its $810 million pledge in the form of low-interest loans. Other governments are contemplating requirements that the funds they offer be spent only on goods manufactured in their country.

“The word pledge doesn’t always mean commitment,” David Roodman, a researcher at the Washington-based Center for Global Development, told the Los Angeles Times. “A country is considered lucky if they get half of what is pledged at these donor conferences.”

Iranian president Mohammad Khatami said in December that of the $1.1 billion pledged after the Bam earthquake in his country in 2003, only $17 million had arrived. Of the $9 billion that was pledged at a 1999 donor conference for relief to Central American nations devastated in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch, less than a third ever materialized, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In the United States, both the Democratic and Republican parties have placed particular emphasis on private donations instead of a massive, government-organized relief effort. By January 8, more than $342 million has been given to private aid agencies and charities, a number that is on its way to dwarfing the $350 million pledged by the federal government in Washington.

These private charities are often little more than businesses in their own right, complete with highly paid chief executive officers (CEOs) and scores of well-remunerated officials who grow fat off the generosity of those making contributions.

The American Red Cross, for example, which has raised nearly $150 million in the wake of the tsunami, pays current CEO Marsha Evans a base salary of $450,000. Her predecessor, Harold Decker, raked in $1.3 million for serving a nine-month stint in that post from October 2001 to June 2002. Decker’s predecessor, Bernadine Healy, received a golden parachute of more than $1.5 million plus $352,283 for the last six months of 2001.

This record is not unique to the Red Cross. The CEOs of most major charities rarely make less than $200,000 a year, and many clear twice that sum or more.  
 
‘Untouchables’ denied relief
What relief does make it to affected countries is then distributed by the local capitalist regimes according to its social priorities. According to a January 7 report from Agence France Presse (AFP), India’s lower-caste victims of the tsunami disaster have been forced from relief camps by higher caste survivors and are being denied aid supplies. Members of the lower cast are often referred to as “untouchables.”

“The higher caste fishing community did not allow us to sleep in a marriage hall where they are put up because we belong to the lowest caste,” said Kuppuswamy Ramachandran, 32, a farm worker from the Nagapattinam district, which bore the brunt of the maelstrom. “After three days we were moved out to a school but now the school is going to reopen within three days and the teachers drove us out.” Ramachandran reported that the school had no lights, toilets, or drinking water.

“No government official or aid has flowed into the village which houses 83 Dalit [untouchable] families,” said the AFP report.

“At the relief camps we are treated differently due to our social status. We are not given relief supplies,” said Chandra Jayaram, 35, who lost her husband to the tsunami and is yet to receive the government-promised compensation of 100,000 rupees ($2,174). “The fishing community told us not to stay with them. The government says we will not be given anything as we are not affected much.”  
 
‘Freezing’ the debt
The United Kingdom’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, announced January 7 that the G7—a grouping of creditor nations made up of Paris, Washington, London, Rome, Berlin, Ottawa, and Tokyo—would place a temporary moratorium, perhaps for one year, on debt payments for the countries most affected by the tsunami. Brown did not say that the debt wouldn’t continue to accrue interest during this period, only that scheduled payments would be postponed. He made it clear that under the proposal no portion of the debt would be cancelled.

Indonesia, the hardest-hit nation, is also the biggest debt-slave in the region. Its more than $130 billion debt accounts for 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Sri Lanka’s $9.6 billion debt equals 59 percent of its GDP. In all, the World Development Movement, a UK-based organization that campaigns for debt relief and cancellation, reports that the five countries worst-hit by the disaster—Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and the Maldives—pay $45.2 billion a year to wealthy families in the citadels of finance capital on the principal and interest of a debt that among them totals nearly $300 billion.  
 
More on early-warning system
The undersea 9.0 magnitude earthquake that caused the tsunami erupted less than 100 miles off the coast of Sumatra. Fifteen minutes later, the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a bulletin on the quake to the 26 Pacific-rim nations giving it a preliminary estimate of 8.0 on the Richter scale. “We know a tsunami will occur if the [earthquake] magnitude is over 6.3, and that a tsunami will cause damage if it’s over 7.0,” said Yoshinobu Tsuji of the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Knowing that there was a virtual certainty that the temblor would set the killer waves in motion, the bulletin from the center was relayed by the U.S. Pacific Command to its base in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia.

Some 4,000 U.S. troops and support personnel are stationed at the base, which sits just south of the Maldives and directly in the path of the tsunami. The U.S. Navy said that “favorable ocean topography minimized the tsunami’s impact on the atoll.” But the base received a warning that was quickly broadcast to all who would be potentially affected. This fact no doubt contributed to the absence of fatalities. No one was even injured at Diego Garcia, while dozens died in the nearby Maldives islands.

Although the first tsunami wave took less than an hour to reach Indonesia, it took more than two hours to reach Sri Lanka and Thailand, and at least three hours to reach southern India. Yet in that entire time, no warning was conveyed to those countries.

U.S. senator Joseph Lieberman is calling for buoys to be installed throughout the world that would extend the system currently in place in the Pacific to other bodies of water. The cost of the proposed network is $30 million. The Associated Press reports that Lieberman’s proposal, however, doesn’t account for “a more costly factor—communications links to warn people in coastal areas before the giant waves arrive.”

That would require long-term development of infrastructure in the semicolonial nations in the region, from electrification to roads, to modern communications networks—not to mention well-constructed housing—which the majority of working people in the region do not have access to. Instead, the workings of capitalism ensure that the plunder of resources and superexploitation of labor by imperialist states and the local capitalist regimes will go on, blocking any meaningful social development and leaving millions at the mercy of nature when disasters like the recent tsunami strike.
 
 
Related articles:
Colonial legacy, capitalist reality plague Sri Lanka  
 
 
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