How much is enough?
Everyone feels some sort of emotion about the tsunami disaster. But for those of us lucky enough to have a bolt-hole by the Andaman Sea, the extent of our luck amounts almost to a sense of guilt. But maybe guilt should focus not on our good fortune but on the contrast between our responses to the tsunami and to other natural disasters.
We were doubly lucky. We have a small apartment 100 metres from Kata beach in Phuket. We were not there on the morning of December 26, and the waves stopped a few inches from the ground floor. Kata itself was relatively lucky thanks to its headlands and a quickly shelving beach, which gave less scope for the wave height to build. Beachfront hotels were damaged but not destroyed.
What Phuket needs now is not charity, but business. To paraphrase an outpouring from one shop owner: we appreciate your offers of help but what we need most is to rebuild our livelihood. For her, the tourists who stayed after the disaster, who still sunbathed on the beach, were as much heroes as those arriving to do good work. Is this tasteless?
What has been tasteless to me has been the determination of politicians and, indeed, of rich nations generally to engage in relief one-upmanship. They have been falling over themselves to be seen at donor conferences and the like, as though promises of large quantities of money will bestow their nations with halos, or that the commendably massive relief efforts by the US military will compensate for the Iraq invasion or will restore America's standing in the Muslim world. The league tables of 'charity per head' are nauseating.
The British proposal for a debt moratorium for tsunami-afflicted nations was typical of the grandstanding. In the first place, the losses have been primarily human rather than economic. And why single out these countries? What about debt relief long sought but only occasionally extended under strict conditions to other poor countries hit by natural disasters? Much of Africa has suffered drought in recent years and the Philippines is still affected by the huge loss of farmland caused by the Mount Pinatubo eruption. I could go on.
