The tsunami one year later by ABC News / AP / International Herald Tribune 8:28am 25th Dec, 2005   27 December 2005    One year after massive tsunami, UN officials urge continued aid to victims. (UN News)    One year after a series of earthquakes triggered a massive tsunami which claimed over 200,000 lives in the Indian Ocean region, United Nations officials are calling for continued aid to the survivors and secure funding for future relief operations.    Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized in a video message marking the anniversary that while “tremendous” progress has been made in assisting the devastated areas, huge challenges lie ahead.    “If we are to ‘built back better’ than what was there before, we need to strike a balance between quick results and sustainable development,” he said. “And we need to keep building on the courage of the communities who are valiantly taking charge of their recovery, despite the losses they endured and the conditions they live in.”    The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, noted in a recent op-ed that the tsunami “was only the beginning in what was to become the Year of Disasters.”    Writing in the Sunday edition of The Independent, he urged the international community to build on the generous outpouring of aid provided for disaster victims over the past year and to provide humanitarian agencies with the funds they need before tragedy strikes.    “Imagine if your local fire department had to beg the mayor for money to turn on the water hoses every time a fire broke out. Now imagine numerous fires occurring simultaneously all over the globe, but no money on hand to turn on the hoses. That"s the situation faced by aid workers whenever a major crisis erupts.”    Mr. Egeland hailed the recent establishment by UN Member States of a $500 million Global Emergency Fund to jumpstart relief operations within 72 hours of a crisis. About $200 million has already been pledged. He called on all governments, as well as the private sector, “to contribute the balance for this vitally necessary fund..”    Broadcast: 26/12/2005    “One year on, Aceh rebuilds”, by Tim Palmer. (ABC News Online)    26 December 2004 and video cameras packed for holiday movies instead collectively captured a horror movie - featuring an unstoppable, all-consuming malevolent sea. It had begun 66km off the coast of Sumatra. 8:00 in the morning local time, under sea and out of sight, the earth shrugged. Monitoring devices at the US Geological Survey measured this dramatic tectonic shift at 9 on the Richter scale. It propelled the ocean in all directions with monumental force. What followed would devastate communities near and far and challenge our capacity to comprehend the power of nature and our ability to cope with its consequences.    Within minutes, the east coast of the Indonesian province of Aceh was besieged. Aceh is remote. The communities are disparate and communications and services are rudimentary at best. It was also riven by bloody separatism and a hostile relationship with Jakarta. Discovering the impact of the waves and the scale of the disaster was going to be very difficult. Nevertheless, the ABC"s Indonesia correspondent, Tim Palmer, set off on what would become an unforgettable journey.    TIM PALMER: Could anyone forget something like this? Scenes so unspeakable, they challenged our senses and shocked the world.    MAN ON BRIDGE: There has got to be 200 or 300 bodies here.    TIM PALMER: What at first had looked like an enormous raft of debris backed up against Banda Aceh"s main bridge was, looked at closely, a sea of broken human bodies, swollen and blackening in the water - some sort of gauge of the immeasurable horror that was Aceh"s apocalypse. Soldiers and police had given up their shattered posts to search for their own families. Ambulance drivers operating on tiny fuel rations found only a fraction of the bodies, but still enough to pile in the hundreds on street-corner collection points. The world would come to help, but it would take weeks to have any real effect. All the while, Aceh"s dead lying where they were dumped by the water.    And so, a year later, we"ve come back to retrace our steps through a land that"s been transformed - its civil war ended and its shattered landscape dotted with the results of the biggest aid effort in history. But how could the Acehnese recover from what they had witnessed and what they had lost? Tonight, we"ve returned to find the people the wave left behind.    One of them was Yusri Mohammed. We first met him 12 months ago when we arrived at the village of Chotserani. Yusri and his wife had clung to their 2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter in the surge, but were overpowered.    YUSRI MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): When the water came, we started swimming in the water. Then my children were swept away, both of them.    TIM PALMER: It was heart-breaking watching Yusri at the first daybreak after the disaster, as he searched for his children among the bodies pouring into the local mosque. Even today, one year later, he tells us that search has never really ended.    YUSRI MOHAMMED: I found the body of one of them but I still haven"t found the other one. I still haven"t found my boy.    TIM PALMER: Not even a single photograph was left of the two lost children.    YUSRI MOHAMMED: Well, everyone here is sad. Every time we think about what happened it feels like we"re still on that day. We"ll always remember it. It"s an unforgettable event.    TIM PALMER: But Yusri hopes the spell of sadness is about to be broken. His wife, Yuni, is expecting a baby early in the new year. And in a small clearing near Yusri"s tiny house, survivors left without homes and, in many cases, families, are joining a lottery to rebuild their future, too. One by one, the names are called and a lot is drawn - tiny plots of land, but enough for a new start. Some houses have already risen from the sands here and today in one of them, we find Humdanoor Hassan.    On the first morning of our journey into Aceh last year, we"d found Humdanoor standing among concrete stumps, carrying the blanket he had shared with his wife and the power meter from his house, all he thought he had left in the world.    HUMDANOOR HASSAN (TRANSLATION): I still haven"t found the people I"m searching for. I"m still looking. I found my mother and her sister. They"ve both been buried already.    TIM PALMER: As it turns out, two days later, Humdanoor found some joy amongst the chaos. Somehow, his wife and three children had fled the waves and lived. HUMDANOOR HASSAN: I was so happy. All my fear just disappeared. My children and wife were all safe. Yes, my mother-in-law and aunt and all the others died. But when I knew my own family were alright, all my fear was suddenly gone.    TIM PALMER: But even that joy is relative. Humdanoor may have found his closest, but 45 out of the 90 members of his extended family died.    HUMDANOOR HASSAN: I cried. All I could do was cry. I asked where my mother was, where my brothers were? This person and that person? All of them were dead. We"re the only ones left from the whole family. Then we all had to go to live in a refugee camp.    TIM PALMER: But Humdanoor couldn"t stand living in the tents for long, so a few months ago, he became the first in his village to go back to the beach where they had lived. The house the Save the Children Fund built for them is already termite-ridden, but it"s only meant to be temporary and they"re to have a permanent home early in the new year. It was the symbolism of his return to the beach that mattered most.    HUMDANOOR HASSAN: I"m still grateful for life, even though I"m sad. I must remain strong and patient for the sake of the future of our children. That"s my story. For the sake of their future I can"t lose faith. Yes, I"m sad...I"m only human. I can"t just forget friends, much less family. But now I stay firm and leave everything in God"s hands.    TIM PALMER: Through that same resolve and courage, Aceh is being rebuilt, one house at a time. It"s true, many still do live under canvas, but the rate of building here is phenomenal. And as we retraced the coast to the capital Banda Aceh, the grisly images of a year ago are one by one being extinguished.    Where hundreds of bodies were once spread across a hospital courtyard, now children squeal in a game of chasings. The bridge where the bloated corpses were lodged for weeks now carries cars across a river where new fishing boats have taken the place of those that a year ago, were cast on top of buildings or strewn across streets, kilometres from the water. And the streets that last December we found smeared with greasy mud, stacked with wrecked cars and dotted with corpses, now reflect a prosperity in Banda Aceh that"s part aid money and part the spoils of an end to the province"s civil war. All along the coast here, the thud of the hammer is helping to shut out kilometre after kilometre of flattened, ruined wasteland.    But there"s no building in Lampung. A year ago, we spent hours walking into a sea of debris to what had been a town of 12,000 people on a long beach directly facing the earthquake"s epicentre. Today, 12 months later, you can drive to the same spot and find almost nothing has changed. It"s just as it was a year ago, when we"d found the last man standing, Zonadin Ahmed - totally alone and searching for his mother after the last few hundred of his fellow survivors left Lampung.    ZONADIN AHMED (TRANSLATION): I think maybe there were 30 children left alive, no more. There was no help at all for them when the water rose. No survivors. My mother herself couldn"t run so how could we even save the children? Many more people died there than those who are alive today.    TIM PALMER: Remarkably, he is still here today. We found Zonadin only a kilometre or so away, still living in a tent. Zonadin"s story had taken an incredible turn, too. He discovered his wife had grabbed his three children and run before the waves came. Zonadin found them all alive at a refugee camp.    ZONADIN HASSAN: I didn"t cry at first but my wife and daughter broke down when we met. They were hugging me and telling me, "We"re alive!"    TIM PALMER: But tragedy wasn"t done with Zonadin"s family. After a fortnight living in a tent, he woke early one morning to find one of his 3-month-old twin girls violently ill.    ZONADIN HASSAN: If I"m not mistaken, it was a Tuesday morning about 4am, and her stomach was bloated. Suddenly by 5am she wasn"t breathing any more, her spirit had gone.    TIM PALMER: From where he buried his daughter, Zonadin can look across to the bay where thousands of other families were picked up and swallowed by the roaring water, never to be seen again. Despite everything, Zonadin would like to come back to Lampung, but he knows he won"t. With a survival rate of less than 5%, there is almost no-one clamouring to rebuild here with him. The handfuls of survivors from several towns will instead be consolidated in a new site further down the coast. When I ask him how he faces his hardships, he laughs bitterly.    ZONADIN HASSAN: It"s something we have to face whether we like it or not. There was the time of sadness over losing our mother. Then there was happiness when I found our children, my family again. Then from nowhere one of them died and in an instant the sadness was back. So here is the life I have to live.    TIM PALMER: As the anniversary of one of the worst natural calamities on record passes, the memories are still fresh of how the waves tore into Aceh, obliterating the landscape and creating a wasteland where once buildings and trees had obscured views of the water. But today, 12 months on, we can observe those kilometres of nothingness slowly disappearing and people like Zonadin putting the unimaginable sorrow of the past year behind them.    December 25, 2005. (AP)    Aceh parents still looking for tsunami survivors.    The Red Cross says some parents in the tsunami-ravaged Aceh province of Indonesia are still clinging onto hope a year later that their loved ones may still be alive.    A local newspaper says some people are still placing advertisements in the paper in the hope of finding their missing children.    The Red Cross"s Sujapa Bordoloi says it is important that the people of Aceh have access to support programs to help them cope with grief. "For them to still hope that they would find the people that they have lost one year later is normal in a psychological context and they have perhaps not been able to accept it because they have not received the right kind of support," she said.    December 25, 2005    Ceremony marks tsunami anniversary. (Associated Press)    Survivors today launched a boat laden with flowers, candles and incense in the first ceremony marking the first anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami which swept away at least 216,000 lives in one of the world"s worst natural disasters in memory.    The ceremony in Thailand was the first of hundreds due to be held to mark the Tsunami"s grim anniversary in the dozen countries hit by the earthquake-spawned waves last December 26.    The mourning comes as survivors and officials take stock of the massive relief operation and peace processes in Sri Lanka and Indonesia"s Aceh province, the two places hardest hit by the tsunami. In both cases, success has been mixed.    At Bang Niang beach in Thailand"s Phang Nga province, Western tourists who were caught in the disaster joined those who placed offerings into a brightly coloured, bird-shaped boat that was floated into the Andaman Sea as members of the Moken, or sea gypsy, tribe chanted and banged drums. The Moken believe the ceremony helps ward off evil spirits.    Peter Pruchniewitz, 68, who was swept from his hotel room and lost a friend to the waves on that fatal Boxing Day, returned from Zurich, Switzerland, to attend anniversary ceremonies. Asked why, he said simply, "to remember".    In hardest-hit Indonesia, workers scaled the minarets of the imposing 16th century mosque in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, replacing missing tiles and slapping on a fresh coat of whitewash in preparation for special services on Monday.    Thousands of survivors have been rehoused in Aceh, but agencies say they are only about 20 per cent of the people needing new homes. The landscape in many places is still one of devastation.    "It"s been a tough year, if anything things have gotten worse as things went on," said Nila, a 42-year-old Indonesian woman who lost three children to the waves. "I somehow feel lonelier."    The tsunami brought one positive side effect in Aceh - a ceasefire between the government and guerrillas to end a decades-old separatist conflict.    No such progress was made in Sri Lanka, where disputes over aid delivery and an upsurge in violence blamed on separatist Tamil Tiger rebels have dashed hopes that the tsunami would bring a final end to the country"s long-running civil conflict. Today, troops patrolled the streets of the capital, Colombo, amid boosted security for tsunami ceremonies.    Exactly one year ago on Monday, the most powerful earthquake in four decades - magnitude 9 - ripped apart the ocean floor off Sumatra island, displacing millions of tonnes of water and sending giant waves crashing into Indian Ocean coastlines from Malaysia to east Africa.    A dozen countries were hit. Entire villages in Indonesia and Sri Lanka were swept away, five star resorts in Thailand were swamped, and in the Maldives whole islets temporarily disappeared.    At least 216,000 people were killed or disappeared in the waves, according to an assessment by The Associated Press of government and credible relief agency figures for each country hit - though the United Nations puts the number at least 223,000.    The true toll will probably never be known - many bodies were lost at sea and in some cases the populations of places struck were not accurately recorded. Almost 400,000 houses were reduced to rubble and more than two million people left homeless, the UN says.    December 23, 2005    "The tsunami - Where we stand one year later", by William Jefferson Clinton. (International Herald Tribune)    One year ago, as many of us were spending time over the holidays with our families, the earth shook for eight terrifying minutes, unleashing a gigantic wave that struck 12 countries across the Indian Ocean.    Over the next 24 hours, more than 230,000 people died, 2 million were displaced, and thousands of children were orphaned. The tsunami devastated over 5,000 miles of coastline, ruined 2,000 miles of roads, swept away 430,000 homes and damaged or destroyed over 100,000 fishing boats.    Just after the tsunami, I traveled with former President George H.W. Bush to the region, as we worked to increase the amount and effectiveness of American contributions to the victims.    Shortly thereafter, I was appointed the United Nations Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery and have since worked both at the UN and in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and Thailand, to supervise the coordination and increase the pace of the recovery efforts, and to solve specific problems in individual countries.    Recently I traveled to Aceh, Indonesia, and Trincomalee in northeastern Sri Lanka where I met with survivors who had lost everything: their loved ones, their jobs, their homes and communities. I was reminded again of the pain that so many continue to endure.    In Trincomalee, I met a young boy who had saved his younger brother but was haunted by the memory of his older brother, who slipped through his fingers as the billion-ton wave tore through his house. The boy never saw his older brother again.    In both countries, I was struck by the survivors" spirited determination to rebuild their lives despite the unimaginable losses they have endured and the often desperate conditions in which they live.    I was also encouraged by the many significant accomplishments over the last 12 months: Epidemics were prevented; many children are back in school; tens of thousands of survivors are employed and earning money once again; ongoing food assistance is being delivered; a common system of financial tracking is available online; and a regional tsunami warning system is expected to be in place next summer.    There is still a lot left to do. In Aceh and neighboring Nias alone, over 100,000 people still live in unacceptable conditions and with minimal access to job opportunities.    Even as aid agencies implement plans for permanent housing, there are pressing needs today to provide durable temporary shelters, upgrade existing transitional living centers and assist host families sheltering victims.    The tsunami presents the international community with a critical challenge: Will we stay the course in the recovery process even after the world"s attention has turned to other crises? What will happen in the days after the anniversary? And in the weeks and months ahead? This effort will take years, and we must see it through.    Now more than ever, I am convinced that recovery must be guided by a commitment to "build back better": better housing, schools and health care centers, safer communities and stronger economies.    Recovery policies must incorporate basic principles of good governance, such as consultation with local communities on reconstruction plans and objectives, and transparency and accountability.    In 2006, I will focus on three priorities to make sure that we do build back better (every nation has sufficient financial commitments except the Maldives, which needs $100 million more).    First, we need to ensure that this uniquely well-resourced recovery effort keeps faith with the most vulnerable populations: the poorest of the poor, children, women, migrants and ethnic minorities.    Within the Global Consortium on Tsunami Recovery, we have pressed governments to ensure extensive consultation with local populations and to promote policies that stress equity in assistance; we agreed to define "tsunami affected" populations broadly - to include persons displaced or otherwise affected by conflicts in places like Sri Lanka and Aceh - and we have encouraged governments to put in place tracking systems for donor assistance that are available online to ensure accountability.    Second, we need to ensure continued progress on disaster risk reduction in 2006. An Indian Ocean early warning system is a welcome development, but is only part of the answer.    Less than one month after the tsunami struck, 168 countries came together in Japan and agreed to the Hyogo Framework for Action, which set strategic goals, priorities and concrete steps for governments to reduce disasters over the next ten years.    These include national education campaigns to ensure that populations recognize the early signs of impending disaster, better planning for the use of land to avoid investments in disaster prone areas as well as agreement on standards for disaster resistant construction and restoration of essential environmental prevention like more grove trees.    These changes will require policy and resource commitments that have yet to be made. This effort must move more quickly.    Third, we cannot ignore the importance of political reconciliation, peace and good governance to successful recovery.    In Aceh, the tsunami forced political leaders to recognize that the issues that fueled conflict in the country were far less compelling than the factors that united the Acehnese.    The peace settlement has greatly enhanced prospects for reconstruction in Indonesia. Reconciliation in Sri Lanka would have a similar result. Across the region, political reforms will be critical components to sustainable recovery.    Of course, there have been more natural disasters this year than just the tsunami, and their heartbreaking aftermaths demonstrate the need for greater international coordination and cooperation.    The recent earthquake in Pakistan is a stark reminder of the need to support the creation of a Global Emergency Fund to provide humanitarian relief workers and affected governments with sufficient resources to begin life-saving work within 72 hours of any crisis.    The tsunami and its aftermath demonstrated both the fragility of human life and the strength and generosity of the human spirit when we work together to begin again.    One year ago, millions of ordinary people across the globe rallied to the immediate aid of communities devastated by the tsunami.    Now our collective challenge is to finish the job, to leave behind safer, more peaceful and stronger communities. We can"t be satisfied until the job is done.
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