Tsunami Truths

Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

The cataclysmic earthquake near Sumatra, Indonesia, and the tsunamis it unleashed provided seismologists and oceanographers with important and sobering data about natures behavior. They also yielded some important lessons about how todays world works.

The first lesson is that sovereignty kills. The maps and satellite pictures tracing the path of the huge ocean swells are a powerful reminder of the enormity of nature and the smallness of humans. They also testify to how irrelevant national borders can be. For the tsunamis, borders meant nothing.

But those same lines on maps proved deadly for many survivors, as they obstructed rescue efforts. Each government, even down to local and municipal councils, sought control over the rescue operations. Survivors were still hanging from trees as the United States and the United Nations quarreled about where money would go and who should lead the rescue operations. The Indian authorities refused to release information or let any foreign help into Indias Andabar and Nicobar Islands, which the tsunami hit hard. The Indian government, you see, wanted to preserve the security of its large military air base at Car Nicobar. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tiger guerilla movement and the government entered into complex and time-consuming deliberations on how to coordinate their rescue efforts. Burma, of course, remained the closed, despotic, and murderous regime that it is.

The second surprising lesson is that 3,000 deaths in New York and Washington had a much greater impact than 175,000 people killed in 12 poor nations. The human-made tragedy of September 11 changed the world; the natural disaster of December 26 did not. If the worlds attention to this catastrophe follows the trajectory of other natural disasters, the tsunami will have disappeared from our TV screens and from our daily conversations in just a few months. September 11 was a suicidal terrorist attack to the heart of a global power deeply connected to the rest of the world. It carried the message that it had a purpose and that it would not be the last. The tragedy in South Asia, by contrast, was a freak of nature that touched poor communities largely isolated from the rich world and with little capacity to influence it.

The tsunamis impactor lack thereoftells us something about the links between countries and regions. The insurance industry, which was on its knees after the losses of September 11, does not expect the destruction wrought by the tsunamis to have major global financial repercussions. The afflicted areas are so poor and underdeveloped that international insurers had almost nothing to do with them. A strong hurricane season in the Caribbeanwith a death toll usually under 1,000can actually produce more financial damage than the devastation in South Asia.

But globalization has also made remote places in the Indian Oceanfrom Phuket to the Maldivesmore accessible to tourists than ever before. As a result, northern Europe appears to be the region most affected by the tsunamis after Southeast Asia itself. Norways foreign minister said that the tsunami may become one of the worst modern disasters for his Nordic nation.

If the tsunamis connected distant regions in grief, they also showed that the bonds of human solidarity may be stronger than ever. Although governments quibbled about aid strategies and about who was being more generous than whom, a flood of individual donations overwhelmed private relief organizations. The level of private resources available to the relief effort is unprecedented. Like the tsunamis, the goodwill of individuals was not deterred by governments, national borders, or political differences. Human solidarity, too, can be a force of nature.