Sunday, January 02, 2005
today's papersSweet ReliefBy Keelin McDonellPosted Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005, at 3:57 AM PT
Everyone leads with the first round of substantial U.S. aid finally reaching tsunami victims in South Asia. American Navy ships, including the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, stopped off the coast of Sumatra yesterday. The Lincoln dispatched a fleet of helicopters to ferry food, water, medicine, and tents to hard-hit towns and villages in Indonesia.
As the death count seemed to hold steady at about 150,000 (including at least 80,000 in Indonesia alone), officials shifted their focus from burying the dead to caring for the living. Over half a million people are believed to be seriously hurt, while an estimated five million have lost their homes, according to the New York Times.
U.S. officials promised that this was just the opening gambit of the American relief mission. A convoy of seven vessels is expected off the coast of Sri Lanka within the week, while six slower ships are headed to the region from Guam. So far the effort includes around 10,000 to 12,000 American military personnel. The Los Angeles Times notices that cargo planes from Australia, New Zealand, and other countries have also been pitching in to deliver supplies.
Just a day after President Bush promised $350 million in American funds, Japan upped its tsunami aid pledge to $500 million. The offer from Tokyo is the largest of any government so far and brings the international aid total to $2 billion.
Despite the much-lauded global munificence, bad roads, rainy weather, and several aftershocks have made delivering the goods a nightmare. And in a related Page One piece, the Washington Post catches word of serious organizational bottlenecks already stalling the relief effort.
More feature stories from the tsunami's frontline put a human face on all the statistics. Following on the heels of last Friday's NYT piece, the LAT fronts a compelling tick-tock on how tepid tsunami chatter ricocheted between scientists in the hours just before the catastrophe hit. (One new detail in the LAT piece: Tsunami water is apparently dark and dense with fine debris—it's described both as "syrupy brown" and "oily black.") Meanwhile, the Post files an in-the-moment front page account of the tsunami's touchdown on Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. For its part, the NYT checks in on the ravaged Meulaboh, Indonesia.
Bush administration officials are readying a plan for indefinitely detaining suspected terrorists, the Post reports below the fold. The current ad hoc system of indefinite detention apparently makes the Pentagon and CIA nervous, especially since there are "hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts." CIA and Pentagon officials are hoping the White House will issue "a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions." For now, the CIA keeps the problem under control with "renditions"—transferring captives who are apprehended abroad to countries—like Egypt and Jordan—that have no qualms about holding people without due process. Not surprisingly, human rights groups are up in arms.
The LAT and the WP go inside with opposing takes on the upcoming Iraqi elections. Under the headline IRAQI OFFICIALS CITE RISE OF INTEREST IN ELECTIONS, the Post picks up word that "[a]bout 1.2 million forms were submitted to add names to the voter lists." (Officials touted these requests for corrections as indications of voter interest since voter registration in Iraq is automatic.) The LAT, on the other hand, goes with the far less optimistic news that just three candidates turned out to make political ads in the Sunni triangle city of Baqubah. Even as security concerns mount, other challenges—like Iraq's very low literacy rate of 40 percent—plague the election process.
U.S. officials can't decide what Afghanistan should do about its massive poppy harvest, the LAT reports. Some, fearful that the proceeds will go straight into the pockets of al-Qaida, have recommended killing off the crops with aerial spraying. But others, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, warn that this would cripple the Afghan economy and provide a powerful anti-American image for terrorist recruiters. The State Department is hoping for about $780 million from Congress to fight narcotics in Afghanistan, $152 million of which would go to spraying poppy fields with an herbicide. In an effort to clue Karzai into the threats of drug trafficking, some U.S. officials have been urging him to chat with members of the Colombian government.
American oil executives are anxious to get their hands on newly available Libyan petroleum, the NYT reveals below the fold. Now that U.N. sanctions against Libya have been lifted U.S. companies will have access to significant oil reserves. That should take some of the sting out of surging oil prices, but lots of hurdles remain. For one, Libya is still on a U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism. Rampant corruption and the always unpredictable leadership of Muammar Qaddafi are the other wild cards at play.
Families of American troops killed in Iraq are often divided over the justness of the war, the Times says up front. While G.I. relatives bond over the experience of losing a loved one, political disagreements can fracture these ties. Relations remain civil between war supporters and detractors, but the NYT notes that "flashes of tension have crept up at small gatherings and group interviews, and even after condolence sessions with President Bush."
Fun and Games ... The Los Angeles Times reports on the popularity of video games among U.S. troops in Iraq. G.I. faves include "Halo," "Madden NFL 2005," and "Neverwinter Nights." But all that time in front of the PlayStation may have a serious purpose. According to the article, "[p]sychologists who treat combat stress recommend video games for Marines to unwind and boost morale."Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111712/
Everyone leads with the first round of substantial U.S. aid finally reaching tsunami victims in South Asia. American Navy ships, including the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, stopped off the coast of Sumatra yesterday. The Lincoln dispatched a fleet of helicopters to ferry food, water, medicine, and tents to hard-hit towns and villages in Indonesia.
As the death count seemed to hold steady at about 150,000 (including at least 80,000 in Indonesia alone), officials shifted their focus from burying the dead to caring for the living. Over half a million people are believed to be seriously hurt, while an estimated five million have lost their homes, according to the New York Times.
U.S. officials promised that this was just the opening gambit of the American relief mission. A convoy of seven vessels is expected off the coast of Sri Lanka within the week, while six slower ships are headed to the region from Guam. So far the effort includes around 10,000 to 12,000 American military personnel. The Los Angeles Times notices that cargo planes from Australia, New Zealand, and other countries have also been pitching in to deliver supplies.
Just a day after President Bush promised $350 million in American funds, Japan upped its tsunami aid pledge to $500 million. The offer from Tokyo is the largest of any government so far and brings the international aid total to $2 billion.
Despite the much-lauded global munificence, bad roads, rainy weather, and several aftershocks have made delivering the goods a nightmare. And in a related Page One piece, the Washington Post catches word of serious organizational bottlenecks already stalling the relief effort.
More feature stories from the tsunami's frontline put a human face on all the statistics. Following on the heels of last Friday's NYT piece, the LAT fronts a compelling tick-tock on how tepid tsunami chatter ricocheted between scientists in the hours just before the catastrophe hit. (One new detail in the LAT piece: Tsunami water is apparently dark and dense with fine debris—it's described both as "syrupy brown" and "oily black.") Meanwhile, the Post files an in-the-moment front page account of the tsunami's touchdown on Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. For its part, the NYT checks in on the ravaged Meulaboh, Indonesia.
Bush administration officials are readying a plan for indefinitely detaining suspected terrorists, the Post reports below the fold. The current ad hoc system of indefinite detention apparently makes the Pentagon and CIA nervous, especially since there are "hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts." CIA and Pentagon officials are hoping the White House will issue "a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions." For now, the CIA keeps the problem under control with "renditions"—transferring captives who are apprehended abroad to countries—like Egypt and Jordan—that have no qualms about holding people without due process. Not surprisingly, human rights groups are up in arms.
The LAT and the WP go inside with opposing takes on the upcoming Iraqi elections. Under the headline IRAQI OFFICIALS CITE RISE OF INTEREST IN ELECTIONS, the Post picks up word that "[a]bout 1.2 million forms were submitted to add names to the voter lists." (Officials touted these requests for corrections as indications of voter interest since voter registration in Iraq is automatic.) The LAT, on the other hand, goes with the far less optimistic news that just three candidates turned out to make political ads in the Sunni triangle city of Baqubah. Even as security concerns mount, other challenges—like Iraq's very low literacy rate of 40 percent—plague the election process.
U.S. officials can't decide what Afghanistan should do about its massive poppy harvest, the LAT reports. Some, fearful that the proceeds will go straight into the pockets of al-Qaida, have recommended killing off the crops with aerial spraying. But others, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, warn that this would cripple the Afghan economy and provide a powerful anti-American image for terrorist recruiters. The State Department is hoping for about $780 million from Congress to fight narcotics in Afghanistan, $152 million of which would go to spraying poppy fields with an herbicide. In an effort to clue Karzai into the threats of drug trafficking, some U.S. officials have been urging him to chat with members of the Colombian government.
American oil executives are anxious to get their hands on newly available Libyan petroleum, the NYT reveals below the fold. Now that U.N. sanctions against Libya have been lifted U.S. companies will have access to significant oil reserves. That should take some of the sting out of surging oil prices, but lots of hurdles remain. For one, Libya is still on a U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism. Rampant corruption and the always unpredictable leadership of Muammar Qaddafi are the other wild cards at play.
Families of American troops killed in Iraq are often divided over the justness of the war, the Times says up front. While G.I. relatives bond over the experience of losing a loved one, political disagreements can fracture these ties. Relations remain civil between war supporters and detractors, but the NYT notes that "flashes of tension have crept up at small gatherings and group interviews, and even after condolence sessions with President Bush."
Fun and Games ... The Los Angeles Times reports on the popularity of video games among U.S. troops in Iraq. G.I. faves include "Halo," "Madden NFL 2005," and "Neverwinter Nights." But all that time in front of the PlayStation may have a serious purpose. According to the article, "[p]sychologists who treat combat stress recommend video games for Marines to unwind and boost morale."Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111712/
Sunday, Jan. 02, 2005Could It Happen Here? You BetA tsunami striking the U.S. is not a question of if but whenBy J. MADELEINE NASH
Nothing even approaching last week's toll of death and destruction has ever visited U.S. shores, but that doesn't mean North America isn't vulnerable. Large tsunamis are not that rare, especially in the Pacific, and every now and again, they crash into familiar ports of call, sweeping away people and property. In 1960, for example, a tremendous earthquake in Chile unleashed an armada of giant waves that killed 61 people on the island of Hawaii and then moved on to kill at least 100 more on Japan's Honshu Island. Four years later, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Alaska resulted in more than 100 deaths in Alaska, four in Oregon and 13 in California, plus $100 million in property damage along the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada.
And those are just the tsunamis in recent memory. The prehistoric record is more disquieting. Geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey has assembled compelling evidence that as recently as 300 years ago, huge tsunamis of shocking power pummeled the Pacific Northwest, from California to British Columbia, reshaping coastlines and surging far up rivers and streams. The culprit: an undersea fault in the Cascadia subduction zone that bears more than a passing resemblance to the fault that just ruptured off Sumatra.
"There are so many similarities between what happened there and what could happen here," says Vasily Titov, a tsunami modeler with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. "It's not a question of if but when."
The more scientists look into the tsunami threat to North America, in fact, the larger it seems to loom. Hawaii not only sits in the path of tsunamis that are generated around the Pacific—in 1946, a wave unleashed by a temblor off the Aleutians killed some 170 people in the city of Hilo—but it also harbors its own, homegrown threat.
Tsunamis can be triggered by massive landslides as well as earthquakes, and University of Hawaii oceanographer Gary McMurtry has evidence to suggest that about 120,000 years ago, a landslide unleashed by the Mauna Loa volcano created a mega-tsunami that heaved sand and sea fossils 1,600 ft. up the slopes of nearby Kohala.
The U.S. tsunami danger is not confined to the Pacific's hyperactive Ring of Fire. In the Canary Islands, the western slope of the Cumbre Vieja volcano poses a threat to Atlantic coastlines. Should it collapse all of a piece, a scientist from University College London warned last week, the big splash would send tsunamis coursing through the Atlantic at hundreds of miles an hour. According to one nightmare scenario, cities up and down the East Coast would be swamped by waves as tall as five-story buildings.
Fortunately, tsunamis take time to travel, which can give populations in harm's way anywhere from a few minutes to many hours to flee. For this reason, 26 countries have banded together to establish a tsunami-warning system for the Pacific (though not for the Atlantic Ocean or, alas, the tsunami-ravaged Indian Ocean). As presently configured, it's far from perfect, producing a 75% rate of false alarms. But that should change with the deployment of a new generation of detectors that can be positioned deep underwater, away from surface chop. In November 2003, a trial run of the system determined that a tsunami unleashed by an Alaskan earthquake would be too small to do any damage when it reached Hawaii, thereby avoiding an unnecessary and costly coastal evacuation like the one caused by a false alarm eight years earlier. After last week's disaster, however, few are likely to ignore the tsunami sirens the next time they sound.
Nothing even approaching last week's toll of death and destruction has ever visited U.S. shores, but that doesn't mean North America isn't vulnerable. Large tsunamis are not that rare, especially in the Pacific, and every now and again, they crash into familiar ports of call, sweeping away people and property. In 1960, for example, a tremendous earthquake in Chile unleashed an armada of giant waves that killed 61 people on the island of Hawaii and then moved on to kill at least 100 more on Japan's Honshu Island. Four years later, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Alaska resulted in more than 100 deaths in Alaska, four in Oregon and 13 in California, plus $100 million in property damage along the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada.
And those are just the tsunamis in recent memory. The prehistoric record is more disquieting. Geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey has assembled compelling evidence that as recently as 300 years ago, huge tsunamis of shocking power pummeled the Pacific Northwest, from California to British Columbia, reshaping coastlines and surging far up rivers and streams. The culprit: an undersea fault in the Cascadia subduction zone that bears more than a passing resemblance to the fault that just ruptured off Sumatra.
"There are so many similarities between what happened there and what could happen here," says Vasily Titov, a tsunami modeler with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. "It's not a question of if but when."
The more scientists look into the tsunami threat to North America, in fact, the larger it seems to loom. Hawaii not only sits in the path of tsunamis that are generated around the Pacific—in 1946, a wave unleashed by a temblor off the Aleutians killed some 170 people in the city of Hilo—but it also harbors its own, homegrown threat.
Tsunamis can be triggered by massive landslides as well as earthquakes, and University of Hawaii oceanographer Gary McMurtry has evidence to suggest that about 120,000 years ago, a landslide unleashed by the Mauna Loa volcano created a mega-tsunami that heaved sand and sea fossils 1,600 ft. up the slopes of nearby Kohala.
The U.S. tsunami danger is not confined to the Pacific's hyperactive Ring of Fire. In the Canary Islands, the western slope of the Cumbre Vieja volcano poses a threat to Atlantic coastlines. Should it collapse all of a piece, a scientist from University College London warned last week, the big splash would send tsunamis coursing through the Atlantic at hundreds of miles an hour. According to one nightmare scenario, cities up and down the East Coast would be swamped by waves as tall as five-story buildings.
Fortunately, tsunamis take time to travel, which can give populations in harm's way anywhere from a few minutes to many hours to flee. For this reason, 26 countries have banded together to establish a tsunami-warning system for the Pacific (though not for the Atlantic Ocean or, alas, the tsunami-ravaged Indian Ocean). As presently configured, it's far from perfect, producing a 75% rate of false alarms. But that should change with the deployment of a new generation of detectors that can be positioned deep underwater, away from surface chop. In November 2003, a trial run of the system determined that a tsunami unleashed by an Alaskan earthquake would be too small to do any damage when it reached Hawaii, thereby avoiding an unnecessary and costly coastal evacuation like the one caused by a false alarm eight years earlier. After last week's disaster, however, few are likely to ignore the tsunami sirens the next time they sound.
January 2, 2005AID
U.S. Helicopters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia RefugeesBy ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Substantial aid finally began reaching desperate refugees in devastated areas of northern Sumatra yesterday as American warships, led by the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, arrived offshore and a fleet of helicopters airlifted critical supplies to stricken towns in Aceh Province.
Flying through pounding rains, a dozen Sea Hawk helicopters from the Lincoln ferried food, water, medicines, tents and other supplies from warehouses at Banda Aceh airport to refugees in decimated Indonesian coastal towns and inland villages that had been virtually cut off when the tsunami destroyed roads, bridges and communications a week ago.
It was the beginning of what was expected to become a steady stream of international aid for Indonesia and a dozen other countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean, where estimates of the dead hovered between 140,000 and 150,000. Serious injuries were believed to exceed 500,000, and the likelihood of epidemics of cholera and other diseases threatened to send the totals much higher.
As the first trickle of supplies broke through, the global relief effort to save an estimated five million homeless survivors of last weekend's undersea earthquake and tsunami was reinforced yesterday when Japan raised its pledge of aid from $30 million to $500 million, the largest contribution so far. Combined with a $350 million pledge by the United States on Friday, this brought the total contributions of more than 40 nations to $2 billion, according to the United Nations. [Page 9.]
The United Nations will begin a new world appeal for money in New York this week, and Secretary General Kofi Annan will arrive in Jakarta on Thursday to convene a meeting of major donor nations to map strategy for the relief campaign. Private donations, which have flooded charitable organizations around the world, are expected to add hundreds of millions to the relief programs.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in his first comments on the disaster, said the world faced a long-term relief commitment. "At first it seemed a terrible disaster, a terrible tragedy," he said. "But I think as the days have gone on, people have recognized it as a global catastrophe. There will be months, if not years, of work ahead of us."
President Bush too spoke of a long commitment. "We offer our love and compassion, and our assurance that America will be there to help," he said in his weekly radio address from his ranch in Crawford, Tex. He cited a host of problems - communications, roads and medical facilities damaged or washed out - but promised that help was coming, and, indeed, had already begun to arrive.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the president's brother, were expected to arrive in the region today with a team of experts to tour some stricken areas and to assess the needs. Their schedule was still being worked out, officials said.
The need is indeed enormous, especially in Aceh Province, where towns and villages were destroyed. Meulaboh, on Aceh's west coast, was flattened, and as many as 40,000 of the 120,000 residents were killed. It lay buried under mountains of mud and debris yesterday as Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, flew in to see the devastation.
Other firsthand reports of the devastation in Aceh were provided by the pilots and crew members of the helicopters that, from dawn to sunset on New Year's Day, shuttled 25,000 pounds of supplies to refugees. "There is nothing left to speak of at these coastal communities," Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vorce, a pilot from San Diego, told The Associated Press. He told of a swath of destruction two miles deep from the coasts, with trees mowed down, roads washed away and only foundations where buildings once stood.
Besides airdrops by the American helicopters, fleets of cargo planes from Australia, New Zealand and other nations continued to land at Banda Aceh and Medan, ferrying in tons of supplies. But bad roads, destroyed bridges, a lack of fuel and trucks, and other problems continued to hamper the distribution.
While the Abraham Lincoln and four accompanying ships represented the vanguard of American emergency aid to Indonesia, American officials said seven more vessels led by the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard were steaming west from the South China Sea with more supplies and were expected to be off the coast of Sri Lanka in the coming week, a Pentagon spokesman said.
Military officials said that yet another convoy, six slower-moving ships loaded with food, water, blankets and a 500-bed portable hospital, was en route from Guam, but was not expected to reach the stricken region for about two weeks.
Capt. Rodger Welch of the Navy, representing the operations directorate of the military's Pacific Command, said late Saturday that the American relief mission likely was the largest in the region in at least 50 years. "And we are only beginning this effort," he added.
About 10,000 to 12,000 American military personnel were now involved, mostly aboard the Lincoln and Bonhomme Richard groups. In Sri Lanka, flash floods yesterday forced the evacuation of thousands of people from low-lying areas hard hit by the tsunami, which killed more than 28,700 there. At least 15 camps where 30,000 refugees had been sheltering were evacuated after storms dumped 13 inches of rain over the eastern coastal region.
Weeklong efforts to bury the dead in Sri Lanka and coastal areas of India were winding down, and government and private aid workers said they were turning their attention increasingly to sheltering the survivors in more sanitary refugee camps, while the homes of an estimated one million displaced persons are rebuilt.
"This is where we are going to see a rise in communicable diseases, diarrhea, measles, upper respiratory infections," said David Overlack, a health care specialist surveying camps in Sri Lanka for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
World Health Organization workers have noted "a slight increase in the reporting of diarrheal illness" in areas of Sri Lanka and Indonesia affected by the tsunami, David Nabarro, an official of the United Nations agency, said in an interview yesterday.
But the increase does not mean an epidemic, he said. There have been no outbreaks of cholera or other diseases, he said, adding that it is too early for such outbreaks to occur.
Aid workers praised Sri Lankan officials and volunteers for their efforts to bury the dead quickly and to place 600,000 homeless people in schools, temples and mosques. An outpouring of donations from Sri Lankans has prevented shortages of food and clothing, officials said.
Jeffrey J. Lunstead, the American ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, said the first planeload of American relief supplies had arrived in Sri Lanka - plastic sheeting to house 3,600 people and 5,400 cans of fresh water. He said most of the American aid would be aimed at reconstruction, rather than emergency food and medicines.
To that end, American military officials said 1,500 marines and 20 helicopters would be deployed in the next few days to clear debris and aid survivors in devastated areas of Sri Lanka. The first contingent of 200 was expected to arrive today.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Ian Fisher in Sri Lanka, Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez in Indonesia,Thom Shanker in Washington and Lawrence K. Altman in New York.
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January 2, 2005
How Nature Changes HistoryBy DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
WHAT follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties toward a peace table? A surge in Islamic fundamentalism?
If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of Dec. 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself. Disasters rip away social moorings as harshly as they tear children from their mothers' hands, and while faceless nature may be to blame for the first blow, governments may reap the political whirlwind that follows it.
In this case, the wave that rose out of the Andaman Sea broke over some remarkably fragile societies:
Indonesia's Aceh province had been under virtual martial law, largely closed to the outside world as 40,000 troops hunted separatists.
Sri Lanka was cut in two by civil war, and new killings had raised fears that a two-year cease-fire was collapsing.
In Thailand, fighting between the government and Muslim rebels not far from its beach resorts claimed at least 500 lives last year.
And the Maldives, a nation of 1,190 coral islands averaging three feet above sea level, already feared the slow rise in the surrounding waters caused by global warming.
Disasters have often deflected the course of history. Three whole civilizations that met watery dooms occurred to Dr. Brian M. Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The least-studied of these cataclysms took place in 5500 B.C., when the Mediterranean, rising as the last Ice Age melted, burst through the hills surrounding a brackish lake to the northeast, and created the Black Sea. Seawater probably poured for weeks through what is now the Bosporus, covering human settlements ringing the lake.
In about 1600 B.C., roughly three centuries before the Trojan War, the Santorini volcano, 200 times as powerful as the Mount St. Helens explosion, sent waves hundreds of feet high across the Mediterranean, devastating Crete, capital of the Minoan empire, its fleet and its coastal cities. Fatally weakened, the empire was later conquered by the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland, who established the model for Western culture. (For example, Minoan doors had no locks, while Mycenaeans built citadels.)
And in the sixth century A.D., the Moche civilization, based in desert valleys in coastal Peru, may have been fatally weakened by a combination of earthquakes and El Niño storms that washed away hundreds of miles of irrigation canals from the Andes. A tsunami may also have flung their washed-away hillsides back ashore, forming dunes that blew over the valley farmland.
Sudden and shocking as they are, earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves are not the biggest forces in human history. Tiny microbes are more powerful. Plague undermined the medieval social order by killing a third of Europe in the 14th century, and the New World fell to the poxes and sniffles of conquistadors and Puritans, not to their muskets. Then there are political assassinations: a Serbian bullet precipitated World War I.
But winds and waves, even from average storms, can topple empires if timed perfectly - usually catching a navy at sea or an army on the march. As Bryn Barnard, the author of "Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History" (Random House), noted, typhoons in 1274 and 1281 (later dubbed the "kamikaze" or divine wind) saved Japan by sinking Mongol amphibious assault fleets. In 1360, an English army was marching on Reims to crown Edward III the king of France when hail the size of pigeons' eggs stormed down, killing men and horses and taking the fight out of the superstitious Edward. Invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler bogged down in harsh winters.
The Dec. 26 tsunami will probably not end a civilization. But it did worsen the prospects for a nation's existence. The Maldives, dependent on tourism, lost habitable islands and a quarter of its 95 resorts, and suffered damage equal to double its gross domestic product. The government's spokesman admitted that its future was in peril. (In 2001, Tuvalu, a nation of nine coral atolls, agreed with New Zealand that all 11,000 Tuvalans would resettle there.)
Several areas hit by the tsunami, particularly Aceh, contain some "very dangerous and unpredictable social cocktails," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a San Francisco-area research group.
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, he said, helped the cause of Muslim fundamentalists among the Indonesian nationalists already assassinating Dutch colonial planters and fighting their marines. That war was fought hardest in Aceh, on the north end of Sumatra, which practices a militant Islam linked to the Arabian peninsula, rather than the gentler mix of animism, Hinduism and Islam of Java, the island where Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, is situated.
"There was a sense that the old gods had failed them," said Mr. Saffo, who said he expected the new devastation to become "a wacko magnet of enormous proportions with new cults founded" in what is already an isolated rural area.
The Indonesian government's response "has to be swift, effective and free of corruption or it will be a gift to the fundamentalists," he said. The American war on terror, Mr. Saffo argued, might fare better by outspending Islamic charities in Indonesia than by "pouring money into the sand" in Iraq.
Dr. Diane E. Davis, a professor of political sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also foresaw change in Aceh, though she spoke in terms more political than religious. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which she studied, hastened the end of 71 years of autocratic rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
In relief efforts run by the Mexican military and police, aid packages were brazenly stolen, and police officers were assigned to rescue sewing machines from a collapsed garment factory while bodies lay in its rubble. Instead of rebuilding merchant blocks in downtown Mexico City, the government tried to clear them for modern buildings.
The Indonesian soldiers now running relief in Aceh "could be the same ones that had just been murdering people," she said. "Imagine what that means on a face-to-face level."
By contrast, in war-exhausted Sri Lanka, citizens may see a contest. The government and the Tamil Tigers each control a stretch of devastated coast: which will do a better job?
With the right amount of goodwill, though, disasters can be a unifying force, said Dr. Michael H. Glantz, an expert on early warning systems at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Perhaps the greatest success for a disaster, he pointed out, was spawned by two earthquakes that took place just three weeks apart in 1999. When one near Izmit, Turkey, killed 17,000 people, the first country to send aid teams was Turkey's ancient enemy, Greece. When Greece in turn had a quake, Turkey reciprocated.
Admittedly, some diplomatic groundwork had already been laid, but Greece's foreign minister said later that the tragedies sent both nations a simple message: "We are all human." The warmer relations eventually led to talks over Cyprus and an end to Greek opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.
"Maybe there's a way to get the rebels and government in Sri Lanka to say 'We're in this together,'" said Dr. Glantz. Then he hesitated. "But it doesn't really work like that."
How Nature Changes HistoryBy DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
WHAT follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties toward a peace table? A surge in Islamic fundamentalism?
If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of Dec. 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself. Disasters rip away social moorings as harshly as they tear children from their mothers' hands, and while faceless nature may be to blame for the first blow, governments may reap the political whirlwind that follows it.
In this case, the wave that rose out of the Andaman Sea broke over some remarkably fragile societies:
Indonesia's Aceh province had been under virtual martial law, largely closed to the outside world as 40,000 troops hunted separatists.
Sri Lanka was cut in two by civil war, and new killings had raised fears that a two-year cease-fire was collapsing.
In Thailand, fighting between the government and Muslim rebels not far from its beach resorts claimed at least 500 lives last year.
And the Maldives, a nation of 1,190 coral islands averaging three feet above sea level, already feared the slow rise in the surrounding waters caused by global warming.
Disasters have often deflected the course of history. Three whole civilizations that met watery dooms occurred to Dr. Brian M. Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The least-studied of these cataclysms took place in 5500 B.C., when the Mediterranean, rising as the last Ice Age melted, burst through the hills surrounding a brackish lake to the northeast, and created the Black Sea. Seawater probably poured for weeks through what is now the Bosporus, covering human settlements ringing the lake.
In about 1600 B.C., roughly three centuries before the Trojan War, the Santorini volcano, 200 times as powerful as the Mount St. Helens explosion, sent waves hundreds of feet high across the Mediterranean, devastating Crete, capital of the Minoan empire, its fleet and its coastal cities. Fatally weakened, the empire was later conquered by the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland, who established the model for Western culture. (For example, Minoan doors had no locks, while Mycenaeans built citadels.)
And in the sixth century A.D., the Moche civilization, based in desert valleys in coastal Peru, may have been fatally weakened by a combination of earthquakes and El Niño storms that washed away hundreds of miles of irrigation canals from the Andes. A tsunami may also have flung their washed-away hillsides back ashore, forming dunes that blew over the valley farmland.
Sudden and shocking as they are, earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves are not the biggest forces in human history. Tiny microbes are more powerful. Plague undermined the medieval social order by killing a third of Europe in the 14th century, and the New World fell to the poxes and sniffles of conquistadors and Puritans, not to their muskets. Then there are political assassinations: a Serbian bullet precipitated World War I.
But winds and waves, even from average storms, can topple empires if timed perfectly - usually catching a navy at sea or an army on the march. As Bryn Barnard, the author of "Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History" (Random House), noted, typhoons in 1274 and 1281 (later dubbed the "kamikaze" or divine wind) saved Japan by sinking Mongol amphibious assault fleets. In 1360, an English army was marching on Reims to crown Edward III the king of France when hail the size of pigeons' eggs stormed down, killing men and horses and taking the fight out of the superstitious Edward. Invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler bogged down in harsh winters.
The Dec. 26 tsunami will probably not end a civilization. But it did worsen the prospects for a nation's existence. The Maldives, dependent on tourism, lost habitable islands and a quarter of its 95 resorts, and suffered damage equal to double its gross domestic product. The government's spokesman admitted that its future was in peril. (In 2001, Tuvalu, a nation of nine coral atolls, agreed with New Zealand that all 11,000 Tuvalans would resettle there.)
Several areas hit by the tsunami, particularly Aceh, contain some "very dangerous and unpredictable social cocktails," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a San Francisco-area research group.
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, he said, helped the cause of Muslim fundamentalists among the Indonesian nationalists already assassinating Dutch colonial planters and fighting their marines. That war was fought hardest in Aceh, on the north end of Sumatra, which practices a militant Islam linked to the Arabian peninsula, rather than the gentler mix of animism, Hinduism and Islam of Java, the island where Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, is situated.
"There was a sense that the old gods had failed them," said Mr. Saffo, who said he expected the new devastation to become "a wacko magnet of enormous proportions with new cults founded" in what is already an isolated rural area.
The Indonesian government's response "has to be swift, effective and free of corruption or it will be a gift to the fundamentalists," he said. The American war on terror, Mr. Saffo argued, might fare better by outspending Islamic charities in Indonesia than by "pouring money into the sand" in Iraq.
Dr. Diane E. Davis, a professor of political sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also foresaw change in Aceh, though she spoke in terms more political than religious. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which she studied, hastened the end of 71 years of autocratic rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
In relief efforts run by the Mexican military and police, aid packages were brazenly stolen, and police officers were assigned to rescue sewing machines from a collapsed garment factory while bodies lay in its rubble. Instead of rebuilding merchant blocks in downtown Mexico City, the government tried to clear them for modern buildings.
The Indonesian soldiers now running relief in Aceh "could be the same ones that had just been murdering people," she said. "Imagine what that means on a face-to-face level."
By contrast, in war-exhausted Sri Lanka, citizens may see a contest. The government and the Tamil Tigers each control a stretch of devastated coast: which will do a better job?
With the right amount of goodwill, though, disasters can be a unifying force, said Dr. Michael H. Glantz, an expert on early warning systems at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Perhaps the greatest success for a disaster, he pointed out, was spawned by two earthquakes that took place just three weeks apart in 1999. When one near Izmit, Turkey, killed 17,000 people, the first country to send aid teams was Turkey's ancient enemy, Greece. When Greece in turn had a quake, Turkey reciprocated.
Admittedly, some diplomatic groundwork had already been laid, but Greece's foreign minister said later that the tragedies sent both nations a simple message: "We are all human." The warmer relations eventually led to talks over Cyprus and an end to Greek opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.
"Maybe there's a way to get the rebels and government in Sri Lanka to say 'We're in this together,'" said Dr. Glantz. Then he hesitated. "But it doesn't really work like that."
