AWTW on tsunami

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Subject: AWTW News Service - 03 Jan 05

The AWTWNS packet for the week of 3 January 2005

• CORIM statement on the tsunami

• The question of warning: were so many tsunami deaths inevitable?

• The tsunami’s aftermath in India



CoRIM statement on the tsunami


3 January 2005. A World to Win News Service. The following is a 1 January statement by the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic centre of the world’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organisations.



The year 2005 has begun under a terrible cloud. The tsunami that devastated the coastal areas of a number of countries in Southeast and South Asia has wiped out huge numbers of people and left even more homeless and destitute. The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement extends its deepest sympathy to all those who are enduring such great suffering.



At the current stage of human development and mankind’s scientific knowledge, earthquakes and tsunamis still represent a terrible menace. But even the means that do exist for early warning are divided very unevenly and unjustly in the world. The ability of the people to minimise the damage caused by natural disasters and to respond quickly and effectively when one strikes is determined to a great degree by the form of organisation of human society, in specific countries and in the world as a whole.



Throughout the world as well as in the affected regions, people are heartbroken by the death and suffering and are looking for some way to help. But for the most part the masses are sidelined, allowed only to be frustrated observers of the unfolding human tragedy. The rulers of this world, the imperialists and the reactionary ruling classes allied with them, will use this calamity to appear as the only possible saviours. In reality it is the system they profit from, preside over and enforce that is the principal obstacle preventing mankind from organising its collective knowledge and energy to systematically combat natural disasters as well as poverty, disease and other ills. The blood-stained US military, now organising televised deliveries of food relief, is in reality the single most powerful enforcer of the very poverty and backwardness that has so aggravated the death toll from the tsunami.



In the tsunami-stricken areas there is a great need to organise relief efforts on the basis of the cooperative efforts of the people themselves, and we call on the Maoist forces in those regions and elsewhere to contribute in every way possible. We also call on them to expose the hypocrisy and manipulation of the domestic and foreign enemies. So long as the masses are enslaved by the exploiting classes and whole nations are dominated by the ruling classes of a handful of imperialist countries, more tragedies like the one we are experiencing today are inevitable.



While we struggle to overcome this natural disaster, we must continue to aim at the overthrow of the existing ruling classes, cast aside the superstition and ignorance they foster, and unfetter the energy of the people, which is ultimately more powerful than even a tsunami.

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The question of warning: were so many tsunami deaths inevitable?


3 January 2005. A World to Win News Service. Deep under the Bay of Bengal is a gigantic rock plate that forms a part of the Earth’s crust. In an age-old natural process, that plate is gradually sliding under another slab of rock on which Indonesia and the Eurasian continent sit. Usually the processes through which the planet changes and shifts are almost invisible to us because the movements are so slow, in this case 10 centimetres a year. But for some reason, a piece of sliding rock some 1200 kilometres long got stuck, building up enormous pressure. On 26 December that plate jerked free all at once just west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, creating one of the biggest releases of energy humanity has ever seen. The explosion was so tremendous it knocked the earth slightly out of orbit. All along the fault line the sea floor was suddenly thrust sideways and up by several metres, creating a tsunami, savage waves that grew taller and taller as they entered shallow waters.



The immediate loss of lives made this the most painful disaster in recent memory, and the total cost in human suffering is not yet known. Maybe the earthquake and especially the tsunami could not have been predicted; certainly they could not have been prevented. But the magnitude of their destructive effects, as terrible as they were, were multiplied many, many times over by the destructive powers of capitalism and the way it has organised our globe.



When so many people die and the survival of millions more hangs in the balance, this poses the most basic questions. People of all walks of life, in different ways, ponder why this happened, and what it means, in practical and spiritual terms. The men who run this world find their ideologies and often their legitimacy – their fitness to rule – questioned at such moments. While they consider themselves the masters of technology, they obscure an all-around rational understanding of what happened, especially when it comes to what the common people are told. Such an understanding – scientific in terms of both nature and society – would hold them unforgivably accountable.


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In the coming weeks and months, many different aspects of this disaster will come to light, and those who care for the masses will need to analyse them from various angles, from what the people went through in this situation to issues of physical science. For now, we want to pose some questions and focus on one of the most obvious and immediate: Why were so many people swept away with no warning?



“The death toll could have been cut at least in half if the affected region had had the same kind of international warning network set up by the US to protect the adjacent Pacific Basin,” The New York Times editorialised 29 December. Within days, the UN-sponsored agency announced that it would work to establish one in the Indian Ocean. But why has it taken half a century and so many deaths before this need was recognised? More than ignorance was involved. The question of economic and political interests is decisive in answering that question.



The “easy” answer, one long repeated by public officials responsible for our fate and some scientists as well, is that tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean. This, as everyone now knows, is fatally one-sided. It is true that 90 percent of the world’s tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean because of the particularly intense underground activity that makes geologists call it the ring of fire. But what some experts say was the worst explosion in geological history happened 71,000 years ago – not very long in the history of the Earth –on Sumatra, 150 kilometres from the epicentre (bull’s eye) of the December 26 quake. The most powerful explosion in recorded human history occurred not far away in 1883, when the island of Krakatoa near Sumatra triggered a tsunami even bigger than the one today. The region also shook in 1797, 1833 and 1861. Singapore felt a magnitude 7 earthquake in 2000, and another measuring 7.4 on an island northwest of Sumatra may have been, in retrospect, a foreshock of the recent quake. A few scientists who study geological records kept by the region’s Dutch colonialists and traces of past earthquakes detectible in the growth patterns of coral reefs have been worried for some time.



In the 1990s the UN International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific recommended extending the network to the Indian Ocean and throughout the globe. The proposal was ignored. A similar proposition presented at a 1997 international gathering of experts in Peru fell on deaf ears. A meeting in October 2003 in New Zealand voted the proposal down, not for scientific reasons but because it fell outside of the group’s geographical mandate. In 2004, one of the most prominent of the concerned scientists, Australian seismologist Phil Cummins, presented a paper to experts in Japan and Hawaii provocatively entitled, “Tsunami in the Indian Ocean – Why Should We Care?” Now he’s widely quoted, but then no one was listening.



A geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology was so worried that he printed up 5,000 brochures at his own expense and distributed them in the region to publicise the danger and what to do about it. He planned to go to Indonesia a month ago, but the trip was cancelled for lack of funds.



“There wasn’t much interest [in Indian Ocean tsunamis] in the scientific community outside of Australia and Indonesia,” Geosciences Australia senior seismologist Phil Dunning commented last week. Why? One reason is because there was much less experience in Indian Ocean tsunamis than Pacific ones. But a bigger reason is all too horribly simple: monitoring and research costs money, and no big backer was interested. The US created the Pacific warning system (with help from Japan and Australia), and without US support the extension of the warning network elsewhere just didn’t happen.



One of the questions to be examined is to what extent the US failed to take an interest in such a system, killing it passively, and to what extent it was actively involved in discouraging it. Placing wave motion detectors on floating buoys linked by satellite across oceans has extremely important military implications. It is probably no accident that the US initiated the Pacific system just after World War 2, when it achieved naval hegemony in the Pacific. Much of today’s ocean research is connected in one way or another to the US Navy. Further, all studies of the earth and its crust are not only relevant for military purposes, they are also the heart of the cutthroat and strategic business of finding and exploiting oil.


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Because it monitors even much smaller tremors and explosions throughout the globe, the international nuclear test ban treaty organisation headquartered in Vienna detected the Sumatra earthquake instantly. But it has no emergency function and no one was on duty. Even after the quake it has not yet been decided whether its extensive data on this seismic event can be released for scientists to study. Many countries consider such information a military secret – about their own and others’ atomic activities – and don’t want it automatically divulged to the public. The US has refused to participate in the Vienna organisation, to protect its own secrets while undoubtedly enjoying access to those of other countries. India, which has conducted its own nuclear weapons tests, is not a member. As we will see, the military dimension of this kind of information was to play a key role in turning an unavoidable disaster into an even more devastating tragedy. Further, in general the changes brought about by earthquakes increase the pressure on some fault lines and decrease it on others. Studying the data from this quake is a matter of life or death and could be extremely urgent.



At least as criminal as the lack of a tsunami detection system in the Indian Ocean is what happened when the gathering catastrophe began to dawn on scientists in the Pacific. In a word, just as the powers that be ignored the warnings that a tsunami might occur in the Indian Ocean, once the waves began to march toward its shores no one in power, as far as we now know, took any steps to protect human life.



Experts in Japan, Hawaii and the West Coast of North America became aware of the earthquake as soon as it happened. Within 15 minutes they were sending out notices. Because not every undersea earthquake produces a tsunami, they couldn’t forecast the giant waves at first, and there was not a single detector in the Indian Ocean to tell them. Because of the complexity of interpreting different instrument readings, for several hours, they miscalculated the earthquake’s force, at first estimating it as having a magnitude of eight on the Richter scale. This, they knew, was potentially very serious. Later they realised it was a nine, a hundred times more powerful. But even at the very beginning it was clear that a tsunami was at least possible, given the quake’s undersea location. A little more than half an hour after the Earth trembled – anywhere from 20 minutes to more than an hour before the first waves hit land, according to varying accounts – they sent out a tsunami warning, even without yet knowing whether there really was one or how big it was. When they realised the exact magnitude of the upheaval, that dreadful possibility filled them with sheer terror. As the earliest reports of giant waves hitting northwest Sumatra came in, scientists set up mathematical models and predicted what was to happen very closely. It was too late.



The scientists found themselves trapped in their laboratories, their shouts unable to get through the walls. They reported the situation to their superiors – so far, what their superiors did is unknown. They reported to the military. And they sent e-mails, SMSes and faxes to their colleagues. They had no way to get to the people in the tsunami’s path. You can imagine them crying in frustration and dismay.



An inevitably murderous natural disaster killed all the more because it affected so many people already living on the edge of survival. Similar disasters could strike many of the world’s imperial capitals, and the loss of life would be awful. But the particularity of where this quake did hit, although an accident in relation to human society, had a great deal to do with determining how the disaster unfolded.



Sumatra was hit first, initially by the earthquake itself (the only place where it killed people directly on land) and then repeatedly by the sea. As of this writing, it seems that two thirds of the total of disaster victims perished on the northern tip of the island. The province of Aceh in Sumatra was so badly damaged that much of it is no longer recognizable from the ground or air. Most of the capital city, Banda Aceh, was destroyed, and other cities and many towns and villages vanished entirely. People flying over outlying areas report not seeing a living soul in all but a few places. It is beyond the capacity of this article to examine the relationship between how the people lived there, in what kinds of locations, in what kind of housing and so on, and what happened to them. But Sumatra lies on a well-known geological fault line, and the danger of an earthquake there was obvious to those who care to know and are allowed to. Further, Aceh is under occupation by 40,000 Indonesian troops there to serve and protect the Exxon Mobile liquefied natural gas plant and gas field that make the area too valuable to be left to its indigenous people. Some journalists say that the Indonesia government was warned about the tsunami. The question of how many lives could have been saved is controversial, but no one disputes that it almost certainly was thousands.



There were two hours before the waves reached Sri Lanka, the country second hardest hit. At least one American scientist is reported to have telephoned the US ambassador there. Who did the diplomat tell, and what did they do?



According to some newspaper accounts, the Thai government was warned. Recently it has been charged that the government held back this information because it didn’t want the country’s tourist industry damaged if it turned out to be a false alarm. Although the army was called out after the disaster, on 3 January the government dispatched 10,000 troops on a counter-insurgency mission to the southern provinces along the Malaysian border.



Another target of the seas was the Indian-owned Andaman and Nicobar islands, near Sumatra and Thailand. India’s main interest in this archipelago of small, low-lying peaks of a submerged mountain range so far from the Indian mainland is geopolitical, especially military, in other words, they serve India’s expansionist interests. The island Car Nicobar is a navy base, and India treats the whole chain as a military area, with access forbidden to people from outside.


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The tsunami took three or four hours to reach the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. There, too, there was no public warning about the waves that had hit Sumatra and were rushing to kill thousands more. By the time the waves reached West Africa some ten hours later the whole world should have known what was happening. But no official fingers were lifted.



One island in the middle of the Indian Ocean left undamaged was Diego Garcia, a British colony leased to the US for one of its most important military bases, used to dominate the Indian Ocean and the skies of a whole swath of the world from Afghanistan to Iraq. It was spared by the passing waves that killed people in West Africa by its location in extremely deep water where the tsunami did not form surface waves. According to reports, military authorities there did receive advance warning. What was happening with that information, and how and for what purposes was it used when so many lives were at stake in so many countries?



Maybe the most disgusting and unfortunately easy to understand fact amid these questions is this: in financial terms, the tsunami may not turn out to have been very expensive. Economists quoted by Reuters news agency 31 December put the total cost, in lost property, at 14 billion dollars, little more than a tenth of the 1992 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, that struck down 6,400 people, and less than half as much as Hurricane Andrew that killed 50 people in the US in 1992. Even more comforting to the “financial community,” Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer (a company that insures other insurance companies against unexpected large losses), announced that its clients’ pain would be minor. In fact, these economists predicted that despite the loss of what is at this moment estimated to be 150,000 lives, with another five million people facing extreme hardship, the global economic impact will be small or even negligible, since so many of those who died were simply fighting for survival and not a big part of the world economy. “Most of the damage, aside from the death toll of course, was to residences, and it is a heavy price for the people but it won’t have that much of a subtraction from production capacity, the exception being the tourism industry in Thailand,” an Australian bank economist explained. The human cost didn’t register on the world’s stock markets.



Capitalism “builds best on best” – in other words, development is considered most efficient when it takes place in most developed areas, between and within countries. This system thrives on and worsens inequalities – and the death toll from natural disasters fattens on them. In the future, even if an effective Indian Ocean tsunami detection system is ever really set up and not just an empty promise, it will not eliminate a very major factor in this tragedy: the unequal development and the political oppression that inevitably accompanies and enforces it.



In short, the basic human problem lies with the relations between people and in particular property relations: the relations between countries, where imperialist capital subordinates whole countries and reorganises them according to the interests of a handful of parasites headquartered in the imperial metropolises, and the relations among all human beings individually and collectively in a system in which the first, last and only real question is profit – cold-blooded money calculations, the politics of maintaining this criminal system and the interests of the country now aiming to rule over it all, the United States.



Natural disasters are not always predictable, but when a society’s highest value is not human life and fulfilment, tragedies on an immense scale are guaranteed. One of the most infuriating dimensions to this tragedy and one that deserves further investigation is the way the profit system and its state, especially the army already all too present in many of the affected areas, instead of mobilising the people before and after the disaster, serving and relying on the people as only a revolutionary state can do, stood in their way, often forcibly.



The capitalist system stood between many scientists and the object of their studies. It trapped them with no way out above or below – it made public officials deaf to their appeals and made it impossible to combine science with the masses, to the extent that they literally could not reach the people. Even aside from the question of why no radios issued warnings, even the most basic public education could have saved many thousands of lives. In a previous tsunami, a schoolteacher on a Pacific island saw the sea suddenly receding and immediately evacuated her pupils, because she had been taught to recognise the danger. The school was destroyed, but all the pupils saved. Why was this not common knowledge throughout the Indian Ocean, where people who face great potential danger had no idea how to recognise the signs of an approaching tsunami?



Surely this terrible event will inspire many valuable examinations of the problems involved, in all their particularity and profundity, by physical and social scientists and intellectuals of all sorts as well as political activists. They will have to take this understanding to the masses, for one of the most important lessons of this disaster is that if knowledge left in the hands of the imperialists and their lackeys and not brought to the people, if science is not conducted in the interests of the vast majority of mankind and increasingly put in their hands, then far more people will continue to die on a more massive scale than humanity can tolerate, even with our still limited knowledge of nature. On the other hand, the more the truth about what happened and why is brought out to the masses of people, the more that will spur on and clarify the aims of a revolutionary struggle to create a society where the chains that bind the real power of humanity and especially of the masses of people are broken with explosions just as powerful as this one, and people’s relationships to one another and to nature are radically transformed.



Just like the rock plate under the Indian Ocean, human advance today is stuck and needs to be freed by revolution. In past and recent history, many a regime has fallen in the wake of natural disasters. The imperialists who see nature as something to be raped or ignored as it suits their interests – and who see human beings the same way – are not fit to rule our Earth.

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The tsunami’s aftermath in India


3 January 2005. A World to Win News Service. By an AWTW correspondent in India. On 26 December, a catastrophic tsunami wave in the Indian Ocean triggered by an earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale and the tidal waves that followed caused a huge loss to human life and public and private property in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Maldives, Burma, Somalia and other countries. The worst hit among them is Indonesia, where the official report has said that the dead amount to a hundred thousand. The second is Sri Lanka, where more than 30,000 dead have so far been recorded. In the third, India, more than 10,000 dead have been officially recorded to date. However, these numbers are on the rise and may double or even treble in the days to come. These statistics do not include non-recorded deaths. Not only human lives, but also an enormous amount of private and public property including water supply and sanitation systems, roads, bridges and the like have been swept away. Coastal ecosystems have been thrown off balance. The net loss of social infrastructure and land seems almost impossible to figure out in terms of money, but is sure to go beyond billions of dollars. The post-disaster outbreak of epidemics like cholera is sure to raise the total number of deaths further.

Nature has its own laws, which, irrespective of the political system, human beings cannot counteract. Nevertheless, the development of science and technology has enabled people to foresee many of the possibilities of such disasters and take precautionary measures. The planned mobilization of various resources available at the moment can lessen the economic loss to a great extent and keep post-disaster epidemics to a minimum if the government were responsive to people’s suffering.

No government, however sensitive to people’s suffering, could have prevented this catastrophe. But the precautionary measures taken to keep possible losses to a minimum definitely reflects the state’s concern for the welfare of the people. No government in this region took any precautions in the face of the possibility of this catastrophic event. The Indian government’s recent public statement in favour of the establishment of seismic detection centres in the Indian Ocean calls to mind the popular saying, “Calling the doctor after the death.” It may be granted that the Indian government has at least opened up its eyes and may help play a minor precautionary role about such events in the future. But how it is going to fulfil its immediate responsibility to the sufferers can be anticipated from its class character and the past record of how it has dealt with various natural calamities in the country. The same is true for other regimes too.

First of all, if one looks at those suffering most from this catastrophe in India, they are the destitute fishermen who have been forced to take refuge in the coastal areas under straw huts. For the most part people from well-to-do families live in supposedly earthquake-proof and reinforced concrete buildings, where casualties were much fewer. Along these lines, one can say that the anti-people political system of the comprador bureaucrats and feudal rulers submissive to their imperialist masters is to a great extent responsible for this disaster among the coastal poor. Of course, this disaster was not caused by the elite class, nor did nature take aim at these impoverished peoples. But it is a fact that those whom nature hurt the most were those forced to live an abject life in seashore huts because of exploitation and plunder enforced by the reactionary regime.

Soon after the eruption of the earthquake and the monstrous waves that followed, various governments and social institutions in the rich countries have bucketed down financial and material assistance to the local regimes under which the masses have suffered. Various political parties are busy, and will remain so for days to come, in collecting funds from the general masses in the name of aid to the victims. A huge amount is being heaped up in relief funds the world over.

Now a question arises: will these relief funds reach the worst hit people and be distributed impartially? No doubt, the reactionary media will claim this so as to dupe the masses. Based on past experience, one can assume that there is a network of different channels these relief funds must go through. Firstly, high-ranking “personalities” including ministers and government officers will use the bulk of these funds to fill their own pockets. Secondly, starving local leaders will miss no chance to follow the same course shown by their national leaders. Thirdly, the main portion of the funds that do end up being distributed will go to those areas politicians consider their unwavering vote banks. Fourthly, some nominal amount will go to the areas where the masses are conscious and struggle for this. And finally, the poorest people from the worst hit areas will get the least or nothing at all. But the rulers will not fail to do one thing – to make use of pro-regime journalists and propagate through the audio and video media that the relief funds have been distributed to such and such people and so many victims impartially. Television shows will untiringly screen some of the photographs snapped in the field to misinform the masses. Frankly, no more is going to happen to the real sufferers.

Although natural calamities show no class favouritism, the exploiting ruling classes cannot go beyond their class interests when dealing with such disasters in a class society. A non-class and pure humanitarian rhetoric on their part is only a show tusk to misguide the masses. All they do is to try and convince the masses that they are seriously sensitive to the people’s suffering from such disasters. But in fact, they cannot handle such issues in a real humanitarian way. Their class interests do not allow them to do so.

Various states have provided significant funds in the name of relieving sufferers. In fact, the motive behind such funds provided by different reactionary regimes is mainly to hoodwink the general public and the oppressed masses by posturing kind-heartedly. Are they really sympathetic to the suffering poor and oppressed masses? If that were so, why do these imperialist powers and the reactionary regimes keep mum when thousands of poor people die of hunger in the world every day? Why don’t they turn their eyes towards those poor who have been suffering from malnutrition in their millions all over the globe? What relief have they brought about for tens of millions of children working dawn to dusk in factories? It is true, they have provided relief funds in view of this disaster, but that is not at odds with their reactionary interests. Their main interest is to project their system so that they appear sympathetic to the sufferers and mislead the masses, and thereby maintain their system of oppression and plunder unharmed.

Natural catastrophes have nothing to do with which class rules society. Whether it is a socialist or new democratic society led by the proletariat or a bourgeois society ruled by the bourgeois class, natural laws are impartial. But if it is a society led by the oppressed class there is a fundamental difference in taking defensive measures in view of the possibility of such disasters and afterwards effectively carrying out rescue operations for the real sufferers, because this is related to the question of class interests and proletarian outlook. If these countries had proletarian state power, firstly, the proletarian government would seek to take effective precautionary measures that would minimize the loss of human life and public property. Secondly, the state machinery could completely control the misuse of relief funds and distribute them in an impartial, unprejudiced and systematic way. Thirdly, the proletarian power would prepare a scientific plan to control post-catastrophe epidemics. But unfortunately, none of these things will happen in the case of the present disaster.

Only in a communist society, when the division of society into classes has been finally overcome, can the full collective strength of humanity be brought into play against natural calamities and thus the preventive measures become more effective. By exploring the laws of nature in greater depth, the collective fight of human beings in a classless society will enable that future society to deal with natural disasters unfettered by narrow, short-term and inhuman considerations of profit. And rescue operations will be impartial because the only motive of humanity will be to elevate the whole of society to more prosperous and successful heights. So, in order to struggle with nature collectively and enjoy a prosperous life with no discrimination between man and man, there is no way other than establishing communism worldwide. For this, let us strive for making proletarian revolution in each country under the ideological and political guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and marching together towards classless society, communism.

[1949]

Are these articles available elsewhere online, such as the AWTW site? I still can't get to the news service at the AWTW site for some reason, so I can't tell.

[flyby2]

the news service is available in yahoogroups.
the name of the group is aworldtowin.

uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/

[Maz]

Increases of one point on the richter scale represent a ten-fold increase in power, not a one hundred-fold increase.

[flyby]

this was corrected in the http;//rwor.org version of this article