Sunday, January 09, 2005
January 9, 2005THE PUBLIC EDITOR
No Picture Tells the Truth. The Best Do Better Than That.By DANIEL OKRENT
WO Mondays ago, the scale of the Indian Ocean catastrophe was just emerging from the incomplete earlier reports (from a Times article the day before: a tidal wave had "killed more than 150 people in Sri Lanka"). By the 4:30 Page 1 meeting, picture editors had examined more than 900 images of devastation to find the one that would stretch across five columns and nearly half the depth of Tuesday's front page. Into a million homes came a grieving mother crouched beside the lifeless bodies of tiny children [photo], and perhaps more horrifying, three pairs of feet extending from beneath a white sheet in an upper corner, suggesting the presence beyond the frame of row upon awful row of the tsunami's pitiless toll.
Many readers and at least a few members of The Times's newsroom staff considered the picture exploitative, unduly graphic, and by its size and placement, inappropriately forced upon the paper's readers. Some felt it disrespectful of both the living and the dead. A few said The Times would not have published it had the children been white Americans. Boaz Rabin of Weehawken, N.J., wrote, "Lead with letters the size of eggs, use any words you see fit, but don't put a nightmare on the front page."
I asked managing editor Jill Abramson why she chose this picture. She said in an e-mail message that after careful and difficult consideration, she decided that the photo "seemed to perfectly convey the news: the sheer enormity of the disaster, as we learned one-third of the casualties are children in a part of the world where more than 50 percent of the population is children. It is an indescribably painful photograph, but one that was in all ways commensurate to the event." When I spoke with director of photography Michele McNally, who believes the paper has the obligation "to bear witness" at moments like this, she had a question for me: "Wouldn't you want us to show pictures from Auschwitz if the gates were opened in our time?"
The surpassing power of pictures enables them to become the permanent markers of enormous events. The marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima, the South Vietnamese general shooting his captive at point-blank range, the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's passing coffin: each is the universal symbol for a historical moment. You don't need to see them to see them.
But in every case, someone needs to choose them. Photo editors (The Times employs 40) and their colleagues make hundreds of choices a week. Stories may whisper with nuance and headlines declaim in summary, but pictures seize the microphone, and if they're good, they don't let go. In most cases, a story gets a single picture; major stories may get more, but usually only one on the front page itself - and that becomes the picture that stands for the event.
This won't make every reader happy. From last year's mail:
• "The picture hardly reflects the regular Turkish population." [photo]
• "I have never been a particular [fan] of Richard Grasso, but The Times should not prejudge his lawsuit by publishing photos that portray him as a monster." [photo]
• "I find it appalling and disgusting that you would print an Iraqi holding up the boots of one of our dead soldiers." [photo]
• "Why are we shown the pictures of tragically mutilated U.S. civilian contractors but not slain Iraqi children?" [photo]
One reader felt that a picture of a smiling Jesse Jackson next to George W. Bush made it appear that Jackson had endorsed the president. [photo] Another believed that a photo of a dead Palestinian child in the arms of a policeman looked staged, as if to resemble the Pietà [photo]
Richard Avedon once said: "There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." In this Age of Fungible Pixels, when not every publication, political campaign, or advocacy organization follows the Times policy prohibiting manipulation of news photographs, I'm not even sure about the accuracy part. But the untruth - or, at least, imperfect truth - of any single photograph is inescapable. Some readers object to the way a picture is cropped, arguing that evidence changing its meaning has been sliced out of the frame. But meaning is determined long before that. A photographer points the camera here , then turns three inches to the left and snaps again: different picture, maybe a different reality. A photo editor selects from the images the photographer submits (should the subject be smiling? Frowning? Animated? Distracted?). The designer wants it large (major impact) or small (lesser impact). The editor picks it for Page 1 (important) or not (not). By the time a reader sees a picture, it has been repeatedly massaged by judgment. But it's necessarily presented as fact.
Last May, for an article considering whether Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had a drinking problem, editors selected a seven-month-old file photo showing the president hoisting a beer at an Oktoberfest celebration [photo]. It may have been a sensible choice; drinking was the subject, and a picture of the president standing at a lectern would have been dull and disconnected. But any ambiguity in the article was steamrolled by visual evidence that may have been factual (da Silva once had a beer), but perhaps not truthful.
Even in the coverage of an event as photographically unpromising as a guy in a suit giving a speech, pictures convey judgment. When George J. Tenet resigned as C.I.A. director in June, a front page shot showed him looking down, biting his lip, possibly near tears; according to Bruce Mansbridge of Austin, Tex., at other moments during the broadcast of Tenet's speech, "he appeared quite upbeat." When Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Abu Ghraib in May, The Times showed him flanked by soldiers [photo], striding through the grounds of the prison, as if (wrote Karen Smullen of Long Island) "Karl Rove must have said, 'What we really need now is a photo of [Rumsfeld] leading soldiers and looking earnest and determined and strong.' " Did Rumsfeld pause at any point and laugh at a joke told by a colleague, or bark at a reporter who asked him a difficult question?
Did any of these pictures tell the whole story, or just a sliver of it?
Mix a subjective process with something as idiosyncratic as taste and you're left with a volatile compound. Add human tragedy and it becomes emotionally explosive. The day The Times ran the picture of the dead children, many other papers led with a photograph of a grief-racked man clutching the hand of his dead son. It, too, was a powerful picture, and it's easy to see why so many used it. But it was - this is difficult to say - a portrait of generic tragedy. The devastated man could have been in the deserts of Darfur, or in a house in Mosul, or on a sidewalk in Peoria; he could have been photographed 10 years ago, or 10 years from now. His pain was universal.
But the picture on the front page of The Times could only have been photographed now, and only on the devastated shores of the Indian Ocean. My colleague David House of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram says, "In this instance, covering life means covering death." The babies in their silent rows were as real, and as specific, as the insane act of nature that murdered them. This picture was the story of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 - not the truth, but a stand-in for the truth that will not leave the thoughts of those who saw it. The Times was right to publish it.
•
Speaking of pictures: In my Oct. 10 column, I distorted reality by not mentioning the researchers who conducted detailed studies of The Times's photo coverage of the presidential candidates. Belated thanks to Josh Hammond and Tom Holzel.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section
No Picture Tells the Truth. The Best Do Better Than That.By DANIEL OKRENT
WO Mondays ago, the scale of the Indian Ocean catastrophe was just emerging from the incomplete earlier reports (from a Times article the day before: a tidal wave had "killed more than 150 people in Sri Lanka"). By the 4:30 Page 1 meeting, picture editors had examined more than 900 images of devastation to find the one that would stretch across five columns and nearly half the depth of Tuesday's front page. Into a million homes came a grieving mother crouched beside the lifeless bodies of tiny children [photo], and perhaps more horrifying, three pairs of feet extending from beneath a white sheet in an upper corner, suggesting the presence beyond the frame of row upon awful row of the tsunami's pitiless toll.
Many readers and at least a few members of The Times's newsroom staff considered the picture exploitative, unduly graphic, and by its size and placement, inappropriately forced upon the paper's readers. Some felt it disrespectful of both the living and the dead. A few said The Times would not have published it had the children been white Americans. Boaz Rabin of Weehawken, N.J., wrote, "Lead with letters the size of eggs, use any words you see fit, but don't put a nightmare on the front page."
I asked managing editor Jill Abramson why she chose this picture. She said in an e-mail message that after careful and difficult consideration, she decided that the photo "seemed to perfectly convey the news: the sheer enormity of the disaster, as we learned one-third of the casualties are children in a part of the world where more than 50 percent of the population is children. It is an indescribably painful photograph, but one that was in all ways commensurate to the event." When I spoke with director of photography Michele McNally, who believes the paper has the obligation "to bear witness" at moments like this, she had a question for me: "Wouldn't you want us to show pictures from Auschwitz if the gates were opened in our time?"
The surpassing power of pictures enables them to become the permanent markers of enormous events. The marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima, the South Vietnamese general shooting his captive at point-blank range, the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's passing coffin: each is the universal symbol for a historical moment. You don't need to see them to see them.
But in every case, someone needs to choose them. Photo editors (The Times employs 40) and their colleagues make hundreds of choices a week. Stories may whisper with nuance and headlines declaim in summary, but pictures seize the microphone, and if they're good, they don't let go. In most cases, a story gets a single picture; major stories may get more, but usually only one on the front page itself - and that becomes the picture that stands for the event.
This won't make every reader happy. From last year's mail:
• "The picture hardly reflects the regular Turkish population." [photo]
• "I have never been a particular [fan] of Richard Grasso, but The Times should not prejudge his lawsuit by publishing photos that portray him as a monster." [photo]
• "I find it appalling and disgusting that you would print an Iraqi holding up the boots of one of our dead soldiers." [photo]
• "Why are we shown the pictures of tragically mutilated U.S. civilian contractors but not slain Iraqi children?" [photo]
One reader felt that a picture of a smiling Jesse Jackson next to George W. Bush made it appear that Jackson had endorsed the president. [photo] Another believed that a photo of a dead Palestinian child in the arms of a policeman looked staged, as if to resemble the Pietà [photo]
Richard Avedon once said: "There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." In this Age of Fungible Pixels, when not every publication, political campaign, or advocacy organization follows the Times policy prohibiting manipulation of news photographs, I'm not even sure about the accuracy part. But the untruth - or, at least, imperfect truth - of any single photograph is inescapable. Some readers object to the way a picture is cropped, arguing that evidence changing its meaning has been sliced out of the frame. But meaning is determined long before that. A photographer points the camera here , then turns three inches to the left and snaps again: different picture, maybe a different reality. A photo editor selects from the images the photographer submits (should the subject be smiling? Frowning? Animated? Distracted?). The designer wants it large (major impact) or small (lesser impact). The editor picks it for Page 1 (important) or not (not). By the time a reader sees a picture, it has been repeatedly massaged by judgment. But it's necessarily presented as fact.
Last May, for an article considering whether Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had a drinking problem, editors selected a seven-month-old file photo showing the president hoisting a beer at an Oktoberfest celebration [photo]. It may have been a sensible choice; drinking was the subject, and a picture of the president standing at a lectern would have been dull and disconnected. But any ambiguity in the article was steamrolled by visual evidence that may have been factual (da Silva once had a beer), but perhaps not truthful.
Even in the coverage of an event as photographically unpromising as a guy in a suit giving a speech, pictures convey judgment. When George J. Tenet resigned as C.I.A. director in June, a front page shot showed him looking down, biting his lip, possibly near tears; according to Bruce Mansbridge of Austin, Tex., at other moments during the broadcast of Tenet's speech, "he appeared quite upbeat." When Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Abu Ghraib in May, The Times showed him flanked by soldiers [photo], striding through the grounds of the prison, as if (wrote Karen Smullen of Long Island) "Karl Rove must have said, 'What we really need now is a photo of [Rumsfeld] leading soldiers and looking earnest and determined and strong.' " Did Rumsfeld pause at any point and laugh at a joke told by a colleague, or bark at a reporter who asked him a difficult question?
Did any of these pictures tell the whole story, or just a sliver of it?
Mix a subjective process with something as idiosyncratic as taste and you're left with a volatile compound. Add human tragedy and it becomes emotionally explosive. The day The Times ran the picture of the dead children, many other papers led with a photograph of a grief-racked man clutching the hand of his dead son. It, too, was a powerful picture, and it's easy to see why so many used it. But it was - this is difficult to say - a portrait of generic tragedy. The devastated man could have been in the deserts of Darfur, or in a house in Mosul, or on a sidewalk in Peoria; he could have been photographed 10 years ago, or 10 years from now. His pain was universal.
But the picture on the front page of The Times could only have been photographed now, and only on the devastated shores of the Indian Ocean. My colleague David House of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram says, "In this instance, covering life means covering death." The babies in their silent rows were as real, and as specific, as the insane act of nature that murdered them. This picture was the story of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 - not the truth, but a stand-in for the truth that will not leave the thoughts of those who saw it. The Times was right to publish it.
•
Speaking of pictures: In my Oct. 10 column, I distorted reality by not mentioning the researchers who conducted detailed studies of The Times's photo coverage of the presidential candidates. Belated thanks to Josh Hammond and Tom Holzel.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section
January 9, 2005
After the Tsunami, 3 Families Fight to Rebuild Their LivesBy AMY WALDMAN
ALUTARA, Sri Lanka, Jan. 7 - This is how Lal Karunamuni knows the difference in the landscape around him: with his bare feet he prods where the beach road washed out; his groping hands confirm that his bed, cupboard, gas cooker and radio are gone; he smells the sludge in his bedroom and toilet; and he feels the heat of the fires burning debris.
The rest he must take his neighbors' word for.
Mr. Karunamuni, 52, is blind, which makes his survival of the Dec. 26 tsunami all the more remarkable. A cousin saw him walking toward the massing sea, shouted at him to stop, then dragged him up two flights of stairs to safety.
Yet beyond needing his friends' guiding arms to navigate the rubble, Mr. Karunamuni's challenge in the tsunami's aftermath is no different from the challenges facing millions of others affected across Asia and Africa. Lives must be restarted, houses rebuilt, families reconstituted and losses weighed against others' misfortune.
Mr. Karunamuni said he was 26 when he went blind, a driver for tourists who, heady with youth, ignored signs of worsening glaucoma until the world went dark.
Soon after, his brothers built him a small home near the sea. "Welcome Sri Lanka," it says on the outside, a link to his past work shepherding visitors. He knows every corner of his neighborhood, at least as it existed before the water remade it.
Mr. Karunamuni says he reveres Helen Keller and likes to quote poetry: "O say what is that thing called light which I must never enjoy/ What are the blessings of the sight, tell your poor blind boy," which he attributed to John Milton, although it is by Colley Cibber.
He sang, in a lovely voice, a song he wrote soon after losing his sight. It begins, "I can go with this stick everywhere, you do not say I cannot go here and there," and ends, "I have a future, can become a teacher." He did not. His brothers were poor, and his country, still developing, has few resources for the disabled.
So, Mr. Karunamuni has spent more than two decades just getting by. He has survived on his brothers' charity and 500 rupees a month - about $5 - from renting out the extra room in his small house. He has lived on curry and rice.
His financial status, always fragile, is now precarious. Most of his possessions are gone. The extra room cannot be rented now, its interior sucked out by the sea. He is staying with Kaluperuma Chandrasiri Silva, 56, a cousin who lives nearby, and whose own home was inundated with five feet of water.
Mr. Silva's mattress is still wet. The papaya trees in his yard are already shriveling and dying. The restaurant where he worked is gone, and with it his job.
The hotel where Mr. Karunamuni's nephew, Mahesh Kumar, worked is closed. Seven adult members of the family are now subsisting on one schoolteacher's income.
Mr. Karunamuni, whose cloudy blue eyes sometimes look like the sea, is waiting for the government to assess the damage to his house and help him clean it.
Then he will sleep there, as he has for 25 years, within earshot of the waves. He calls the sea "a very dangerous bugger," but believes its innocence has returned.
He grasps clearly both his diminished finances and his relative good fortune.
"Other people lost everything, not only myself," he said, and casually pointed to the damaged houses as if he could see them.
Lost and Scattered Relatives
Muhammad Zain's home sat feet from the sea in a housing scheme in Hambantota, a town on the southern coast. Where 300 houses once stood, perhaps 10 are left. The rest were broken to bits by the tsunami.
[Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations flew in to visit Hambantota on Saturday. "From the air I saw a beautiful country, but there has been a lot of damage," he said, Reuters reported.]
Mr. Zain's family has been smashed as thoroughly as any structure. The water took the lives of as many as 60 relatives, including his two children and pregnant wife, and four of his eight siblings. An elaborate family tree has been denuded.
With so much mourning to do, the family, now divided among relatives' homes a safe distance from the sea, has not begun to think about rebuilding. Instead, they are focused on reuniting those still alive. Like hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan families, they rely for income partly on relatives working in the Middle East. This week, they were still collecting family members from abroad. There is also the future of an orphaned child to attend to.
Mr. Zain, 40, a fisherman who also lost his boat, sat on the couch between two of his sisters. On his left was M. I. Najuma, 35, who was in Dubai, where she worked as a housemaid, when the wave struck. She had not seen her husband, a postman, and son, 5, since she left for Dubai a year ago. On the phone, her son had asked for a bicycle and toys. When last seen alive on Dec. 26, father and son were heading to the store to buy a lollipop.
She had heard the news of the tsunami from her sister, living in Abu Dhabi, who learned about it from the BBC. When Ms. Najuma asked her employer for leave, he said no, accusing her of lying, she said. Only after a call from Sri Lanka conveyed the news of death, and after she threatened to kill herself, did he give her 15 days' leave, after she worked at his family wedding that week.
The bodies of Ms. Najuma's son and husband were buried before she could see them.
Seated next to Mr. Zain was Ms. Najuma's sister, Naisarina Tasim, 45. She lost her daughter, son-in-law and 3-year-old grandson. The only survivor on that side of the family, her 9-year-old granddaughter G. Risla Adahan, sat on her lap.
Ms. Tasim wanted to return to Abu Dhabi, but not without Risla. She had no idea how to begin getting the necessary permissions to take her out of Sri Lanka or a get her a visa for the United Arab Emirates. For now all she could do was cry.
"There is no one to look after this girl," she said, and said again.
Just then Nasar Mahamud, 31, walked in, having rushed back from Kuwait.
As he hugged his wife's grandmother, Karim Srainana, 83, she cried.
She had lost two of her three sons. One of them, she said through sobs, always gave her part of his salary.
Mr. Mahamud's wife and 5-year-old daughter had survived. The little girl had a talent for singing, the family said, and they asked her to perform. For a few minutes, there were smiles, laughter, forgetting.
A Battered Home
On the first night back home G. H. Premaratna and his family could barely sleep, listening instead for the sound of the water. The children dreamed that it was coming again, and shouted, "Run! Run!" The women slept in one bedroom, the men in the living room. The morning sun streamed in where the doors and windows used to be, and just 65 yards away a placid sea shone.
The family woke up to the day's tedious work of cleaning and repair. Their house in Koggala still stood, although half of the front wall and the kitchen, which had been out back, were gone. But the family - father, mother, two girls and a boy - was intact, and they preferred the privacy and familiarity of home, however damaged, to the crowded indignity of a refugee camp.
The rebuilding along the coast is as slow as the destruction was swift. One step at a time, first the home, then the livelihood; first sweep away, then reconstruct.
Here the morning's project was cleaning the well. A generator pumped out the brown water and sludge, and Mr. Premaratna, a fisherman, climbed down inside his 15-foot well to scoop from the bottom.
At the top of the well stood G. M. Wijewickrama, 25, an industrial engineer at Martin Emprex, a British textile company in the free trade zone nearby.
Mr. Wijewickrama gets his water from taps, and knows nothing about pumping out wells. Yet he was here on Wednesday, volunteering in a local fisherman's yard, his well-cut white shirt and finely spun gray pants spattered with muddy water.
"We have no experience but we can manage," he said.
By afternoon, the well was pronounced clean, although the water was still brown. The family bathed with it and washed dishes with it. They pondered the jars of rice and dried coconut that had survived what so many human beings did not.
In the fading light, Mr. Premaratna's oldest daughter, Yamuna Kumari, 22, carefully tended the fire over which she was cooking lentil curry in the absence of a kitchen. The cooking utensils had been donated, and so had the lentils, the family living from one handout to the next.
It was their second night back home. With no electricity, they ate dinner by candlelight just feet from where they had been eating breakfast when the tsunami came. The need to fuel themselves was the only continuity between then and now.
Mr. Premaratna had lost his boat, but his two daughters worked in a nearby garment factory. The family would be provided for, but finding the money to rebuild the house was another matter.
It had taken his wife, K. Florida, seven years of working as a housemaid in Lebanon to pay for building the six-room house and stock it with a television, washing machine, irons and more. She had left for the Middle East when her second daughter, now 17, was only 5 months old.
"The best part of my life I spent in Lebanon," Ms. Florida said, the words traced with sourness. Now much of what she had sacrificed for was gone.
That hurt, but she knew, amid her country's landscape of loss, what mattered more: in the candlelight, two long-haired daughters cooking, and a father feeding bread and curry to his 8-year-old son.
After the Tsunami, 3 Families Fight to Rebuild Their LivesBy AMY WALDMAN
ALUTARA, Sri Lanka, Jan. 7 - This is how Lal Karunamuni knows the difference in the landscape around him: with his bare feet he prods where the beach road washed out; his groping hands confirm that his bed, cupboard, gas cooker and radio are gone; he smells the sludge in his bedroom and toilet; and he feels the heat of the fires burning debris.
The rest he must take his neighbors' word for.
Mr. Karunamuni, 52, is blind, which makes his survival of the Dec. 26 tsunami all the more remarkable. A cousin saw him walking toward the massing sea, shouted at him to stop, then dragged him up two flights of stairs to safety.
Yet beyond needing his friends' guiding arms to navigate the rubble, Mr. Karunamuni's challenge in the tsunami's aftermath is no different from the challenges facing millions of others affected across Asia and Africa. Lives must be restarted, houses rebuilt, families reconstituted and losses weighed against others' misfortune.
Mr. Karunamuni said he was 26 when he went blind, a driver for tourists who, heady with youth, ignored signs of worsening glaucoma until the world went dark.
Soon after, his brothers built him a small home near the sea. "Welcome Sri Lanka," it says on the outside, a link to his past work shepherding visitors. He knows every corner of his neighborhood, at least as it existed before the water remade it.
Mr. Karunamuni says he reveres Helen Keller and likes to quote poetry: "O say what is that thing called light which I must never enjoy/ What are the blessings of the sight, tell your poor blind boy," which he attributed to John Milton, although it is by Colley Cibber.
He sang, in a lovely voice, a song he wrote soon after losing his sight. It begins, "I can go with this stick everywhere, you do not say I cannot go here and there," and ends, "I have a future, can become a teacher." He did not. His brothers were poor, and his country, still developing, has few resources for the disabled.
So, Mr. Karunamuni has spent more than two decades just getting by. He has survived on his brothers' charity and 500 rupees a month - about $5 - from renting out the extra room in his small house. He has lived on curry and rice.
His financial status, always fragile, is now precarious. Most of his possessions are gone. The extra room cannot be rented now, its interior sucked out by the sea. He is staying with Kaluperuma Chandrasiri Silva, 56, a cousin who lives nearby, and whose own home was inundated with five feet of water.
Mr. Silva's mattress is still wet. The papaya trees in his yard are already shriveling and dying. The restaurant where he worked is gone, and with it his job.
The hotel where Mr. Karunamuni's nephew, Mahesh Kumar, worked is closed. Seven adult members of the family are now subsisting on one schoolteacher's income.
Mr. Karunamuni, whose cloudy blue eyes sometimes look like the sea, is waiting for the government to assess the damage to his house and help him clean it.
Then he will sleep there, as he has for 25 years, within earshot of the waves. He calls the sea "a very dangerous bugger," but believes its innocence has returned.
He grasps clearly both his diminished finances and his relative good fortune.
"Other people lost everything, not only myself," he said, and casually pointed to the damaged houses as if he could see them.
Lost and Scattered Relatives
Muhammad Zain's home sat feet from the sea in a housing scheme in Hambantota, a town on the southern coast. Where 300 houses once stood, perhaps 10 are left. The rest were broken to bits by the tsunami.
[Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations flew in to visit Hambantota on Saturday. "From the air I saw a beautiful country, but there has been a lot of damage," he said, Reuters reported.]
Mr. Zain's family has been smashed as thoroughly as any structure. The water took the lives of as many as 60 relatives, including his two children and pregnant wife, and four of his eight siblings. An elaborate family tree has been denuded.
With so much mourning to do, the family, now divided among relatives' homes a safe distance from the sea, has not begun to think about rebuilding. Instead, they are focused on reuniting those still alive. Like hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan families, they rely for income partly on relatives working in the Middle East. This week, they were still collecting family members from abroad. There is also the future of an orphaned child to attend to.
Mr. Zain, 40, a fisherman who also lost his boat, sat on the couch between two of his sisters. On his left was M. I. Najuma, 35, who was in Dubai, where she worked as a housemaid, when the wave struck. She had not seen her husband, a postman, and son, 5, since she left for Dubai a year ago. On the phone, her son had asked for a bicycle and toys. When last seen alive on Dec. 26, father and son were heading to the store to buy a lollipop.
She had heard the news of the tsunami from her sister, living in Abu Dhabi, who learned about it from the BBC. When Ms. Najuma asked her employer for leave, he said no, accusing her of lying, she said. Only after a call from Sri Lanka conveyed the news of death, and after she threatened to kill herself, did he give her 15 days' leave, after she worked at his family wedding that week.
The bodies of Ms. Najuma's son and husband were buried before she could see them.
Seated next to Mr. Zain was Ms. Najuma's sister, Naisarina Tasim, 45. She lost her daughter, son-in-law and 3-year-old grandson. The only survivor on that side of the family, her 9-year-old granddaughter G. Risla Adahan, sat on her lap.
Ms. Tasim wanted to return to Abu Dhabi, but not without Risla. She had no idea how to begin getting the necessary permissions to take her out of Sri Lanka or a get her a visa for the United Arab Emirates. For now all she could do was cry.
"There is no one to look after this girl," she said, and said again.
Just then Nasar Mahamud, 31, walked in, having rushed back from Kuwait.
As he hugged his wife's grandmother, Karim Srainana, 83, she cried.
She had lost two of her three sons. One of them, she said through sobs, always gave her part of his salary.
Mr. Mahamud's wife and 5-year-old daughter had survived. The little girl had a talent for singing, the family said, and they asked her to perform. For a few minutes, there were smiles, laughter, forgetting.
A Battered Home
On the first night back home G. H. Premaratna and his family could barely sleep, listening instead for the sound of the water. The children dreamed that it was coming again, and shouted, "Run! Run!" The women slept in one bedroom, the men in the living room. The morning sun streamed in where the doors and windows used to be, and just 65 yards away a placid sea shone.
The family woke up to the day's tedious work of cleaning and repair. Their house in Koggala still stood, although half of the front wall and the kitchen, which had been out back, were gone. But the family - father, mother, two girls and a boy - was intact, and they preferred the privacy and familiarity of home, however damaged, to the crowded indignity of a refugee camp.
The rebuilding along the coast is as slow as the destruction was swift. One step at a time, first the home, then the livelihood; first sweep away, then reconstruct.
Here the morning's project was cleaning the well. A generator pumped out the brown water and sludge, and Mr. Premaratna, a fisherman, climbed down inside his 15-foot well to scoop from the bottom.
At the top of the well stood G. M. Wijewickrama, 25, an industrial engineer at Martin Emprex, a British textile company in the free trade zone nearby.
Mr. Wijewickrama gets his water from taps, and knows nothing about pumping out wells. Yet he was here on Wednesday, volunteering in a local fisherman's yard, his well-cut white shirt and finely spun gray pants spattered with muddy water.
"We have no experience but we can manage," he said.
By afternoon, the well was pronounced clean, although the water was still brown. The family bathed with it and washed dishes with it. They pondered the jars of rice and dried coconut that had survived what so many human beings did not.
In the fading light, Mr. Premaratna's oldest daughter, Yamuna Kumari, 22, carefully tended the fire over which she was cooking lentil curry in the absence of a kitchen. The cooking utensils had been donated, and so had the lentils, the family living from one handout to the next.
It was their second night back home. With no electricity, they ate dinner by candlelight just feet from where they had been eating breakfast when the tsunami came. The need to fuel themselves was the only continuity between then and now.
Mr. Premaratna had lost his boat, but his two daughters worked in a nearby garment factory. The family would be provided for, but finding the money to rebuild the house was another matter.
It had taken his wife, K. Florida, seven years of working as a housemaid in Lebanon to pay for building the six-room house and stock it with a television, washing machine, irons and more. She had left for the Middle East when her second daughter, now 17, was only 5 months old.
"The best part of my life I spent in Lebanon," Ms. Florida said, the words traced with sourness. Now much of what she had sacrificed for was gone.
That hurt, but she knew, amid her country's landscape of loss, what mattered more: in the candlelight, two long-haired daughters cooking, and a father feeding bread and curry to his 8-year-old son.
Sunday, Jan. 09, 2005Race Against TimeAs global charity surges, aid workers hit the ground in Asia. An inside look at the rush to beat disease, hunger and the destruction of the tsunamiBy NANCY GIBBS
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Yusniar still hears the roaring in her head, the waves thunderously loud. The sea that was supposed to be a mother, protecting, sustaining, became a fury, sweeping two of her children away.
Compared with some people, she was lucky. Yusniar, 50, was able to find them and bury them herself, before retreating to the hills where she can keep an eye on the ocean, keep it in its place, from her tent made of blue plastic sheets and Styrofoam fished out of the swamps. Neither she nor the 150 others camping with her near Banda Aceh, capital of the Indonesian province that suffered the worst destruction, are ready to come down. The relief workers haven't yet discovered them, like untold numbers of others. "The water took away everything," she says. "We're afraid the waves may come back and try to take the rest of us."
The most experienced soldiers in the modern wars against catastrophe call this the greatest challenge of their lifetime. The arrival of aid to the battered region offered the first promise of relief to the storm's survivors, but many questions remain: How quickly can $4 billion go toward saving 5 million people when the U.N. is warning that disease could kill as many as the tsunami did, a number now reaching upwards of 150,000? How do thousands of rescuers, from hundreds of agencies, from dozens of countries, speaking different languages, coordinate their efforts so that relief workers in need of antibiotics don't find that the truck they are unloading carries only biscuits and blankets? How do they resettle a port town when residents look at the ocean and see a grave, refuse to eat fish for fear it has fed on the lost? How do they calculate human nature in countries where government soldiers fight with rebels over who gets the credit for feeding people who are close to starving?
As if to rebalance some cosmic scale, another wave is washing over South Asia like none the world has ever seen. The worst disaster in memory has evoked the greatest outpouring of charity. "Just as we see the power of nature to destroy, we have seen the power of human compassion to build," said Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The pledges coming in to the U.N. for tsunami relief already surpass all the relief money received in 2004 for the top 20 disasters combined. The politics of pity is never pure, so there was a kind of global competition in generosity, especially after the U.S. increased an early pledge of aid tenfold, to $350 million. Japan offered $500 million, Germany topped that with a $660 million pledge, and Australia weighed in with $810 million. Arab commentators engaged in some self-criticism, asking why Norwegians and Belgians offered so much more than Arabs to help Asia's suffering Muslims. During his visit to Indonesia, the hardest-hit country and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Secretary of State Colin Powell could not let pass an opportunity for self-congratulation. "I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action," he said.
But for all the strutting and spitting, the overwhelming response was one of mercy. The money came so fast it crashed the website of Catholic Relief Services. Save the Children was logging more than 10 times the normal volume of calls, so that everyone from the CEO to the custodians was recruited to man the phones. Some groups, like M??decins Sans Fronti??res (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), actually announced that they had taken in all the money they could use for tsunami relief and began directing donors to their general disaster funds, because other places in the world still need help even if they don't make headlines. But the charity toward the tsunami victims was unrelenting. Kids in Michigan sold hot chocolate; in North Carolina they sold lemonade; students in an eighth-grade class in Wenatchee, Wash., voted unanimously to give their class-trip money, which they had been raising for more than a year, to the Red Cross. There was Sandra Bullock pledging $1 million, Willie Nelson scheduling a benefit concert, NBA players offering $1,000 for every point they scored during games played late last week, and Helen E. McKenna, 88, a widow in San Francisco, donating her whole month's Social Security check. "My family was saying I was getting too old to handle my own money and that I should get a financial adviser," she said. "But it's my money. I can do whatever I want with it."
The same technology that has made this the most intimate of modern horrors has vastly increased the size and speed of the response. Relief organizations that used to have to wait for the check to come in the mail were receiving 80% to 90% of their donations online and moving the money out into the field faster than ever before. A dollar donated in the U.S. to Action Against Hunger, for example, is wired from New York City to the headquarters in Paris, where it buys water tanks, pumps, pipes, testing kits or chlorine tablets. Those supplies are shipped to international staging grounds in Igualada, Spain, near Barcelona, flown to Colombo, Sri Lanka, then trucked to a place like Batticaloa, on the island's northeast coast. Time elapsed from donation to distribution: 48 hours.
Raising the money is just the beginning. Delivering the supplies to the people who need them turned out to be the greater challenge. That meant confronting a practical, political and cultural obstacle course that slowed down aid to the most desperate areas while everyone learned the shortcuts. In many places, the roads that were bad to begin with are gone now and the ports swallowed whole. With bulldozers scarce, elephants have been enlisted to help clear debris. When pilots try to fly into a small airport, they find that the maps are suddenly wrong because the landscape has been rubbed away. Precious hours were lost when the lone airstrip in Banda Aceh was closed after a 737 hit a water buffalo while trying to land. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world," says the U.N.'s Jan Egeland. In some Sumatran villages, it was impossible to deliver any goods at all until the U.S. and the Australian military showed up with amphibious vehicles that could stage beach landings. Sari Galapo, a U.N. volunteer in Batticaloa, was worried about the people on an island no one had heard from since the bridge to the mainland was washed out, so she set off by canoe. "The boat was barely above the water level, and I didn't want to look at the water," Galapo says. When she arrived, she discovered that the local government official had lost most of his family to the tsunami, become depressed, poisoned himself, and was hospitalized. In the meantime, no aid had got through until Galapo sounded the alarm.
When the physical hurdles are conquered, the political ones remain. In India, where 10,000 died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk wild pig in the rain forest with bows and arrows. They were believed to have been wiped out by the tsunami, until a relief helicopter attempting to assess the damage was fired on by tribesmen shooting poison arrows.
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks, "When the government can help other countries, why are they letting us down?" Says fellow survivor Aslam Majid, 22, who went five days without water: "People aren't dying from the tsunami. They're dying of thirst and hunger."
Elsewhere, relief workers have found themselves caught up in civil wars that have been raging for years. In Sri Lanka, there were hopes for some kind of peace, however temporary, between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels who have waged a 21-year war for independence in the northern part of the country. Scores of displaced Tamil families taking refuge in a school in Kudathanai had gratefully accepted food and water brought by government soldiers. But when soldiers arrived with a specially cooked New Year's meal, refugees refused it on orders from a rebel. That night part of the school was set on fire. "We are stuck between the army on one side and the [Tigers] on the other side," says K. Jayakumar, 29, a fisherman. "Please tell them both that we deserve some peace after all we have been through."
In all the worst-hit areas, the most immediate enemy is infection. Thousands of people were essentially attacked by their own flimsy homes, sliced up and gashed by falling planks of wood, shards of glass and jagged pieces of corrugated tin. So many wounds went untreated or were badly treated in local clinics that gangrene and tetanus have set in; amputation is the most common operation in field hospitals.
Among the first international aid workers to reach ground zero on the Indonesian island of Sumatra were the doctors and nurses of MSF. When they arrived at the one functioning hospital in Sigli, on the east coast, there was only a single, volunteer surgeon on hand. "Our hospital was crippled," says Dr. Taufik Mahdi, director of the 35-bed unit. "Most of our doctors and nurses were too traumatized to work or left to look for loved ones missing after the tsunami." That first day the MSF team performed six operations, and it hasn't stopped since. "The minute we sew one up," says Dr. Claire Rieux, a general practitioner from Paris, "another gets wheeled in."
Spending a day at the hospital with the MSF team reveals the scope of the crisis. "Oh, man, this one is really bad," an Australian doctor shouts as he approaches the operating theater. He's holding up the arm of a man whose limb looks like a shank of lamb. The elbow is essentially gone, and the lower and upper arm is barely held together by a few sinewy strings of muscle and flesh. Though paint is peeling off the walls and a layer of grime covers many of the hospital's windows, Sigli's only hospital is fairly clean compared with many others in Indonesia's remote provinces. There are small victories. A young girl is wheeled in for surgery, her left foot severed at the heel. The doctors fear they may have to remove her leg at the calf to stop the infection from spreading, but after a massive cleaning and huge doses of antibiotics, her foot is reattached.
Fran??ois Gillet, MSF's logistics coordinator in Sigli, is desperately trying to find extra beds, plugs and lightbulbs, which no one seems to have. "It's the little things that often get overlooked and are hardest to find," he says. The group has relied on satellite phones for most of its communications, but even they have been less than reliable. "This is why we have to be as organized as possible," says Belgian Alexis Moens, the field coordinator. "You have to put up a structure that is strong enough on both the medical and logistical sides. Otherwise, things just won't work."
Other relief workers operate as a mobile triage unit, moving through the refugee camps that have sprouted across Sumatra's now barren landscape. Some 50,000 people are camped in local mosques and schools. Most of the refugees are still using rivers for washing their dishes and bathing--a recipe for cholera and typhoid. As the advance teams uncover unsanitary conditions in the camps, they report them to MSF water and sanitation units working in the area. "We work until midnight every day at the earliest, but we're always running behind," says Moens. "We just don't have the time or people to be everywhere."
In a crisis of this scale, some tasks require the kind of muscle only a superpower has. The U.S. Navy has 21 ships and 12,600 crew members working on rescue and relief operations in the waters off Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Seahawk helicopters--their blades filling the air with a fluttering rumble--sidle in and touch down on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln's 4 1/2-acre flight deck. Since sunrise on Jan. 1, the carrier's Seahawks have been flying from 13 to 17 missions a day. "We're going nonstop from dawn until sunset. Then the commanders meet, talk about what we've learned that day and map out what needs to be done tomorrow," says Captain David Lausman, the ship's executive officer.
The sailors and pilots are trying as best they can to coordinate with private groups to set up a smooth supply line. A host of aid organizations flies in supplies on U.S. C130 cargo planes to the tiny runway of the airport at Banda Aceh. Once unloaded, the planes must take off immediately to clear space for the next plane. The Seahawks, meanwhile, are landing on a converted football field a few hundred yards away, and the pilots are managing the transfer of supplies from the C130s to the helicopters. "It was like the Wild West down there when we first flew in," says Lieut. Dave Moffet, "but it's getting better." The helicopters head off for the villages, each one delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lbs. of food, medical supplies, communications equipment and even a few toys and some candy for the children. Along the way, their crews scour the countryside, looking for isolated hamlets that have yet to receive help and for displaced people straggling along roads. When they come across those who are sick or wounded, they ferry as many as possible to the field hospital. "We're seeing a lot of dehydration, diarrhea, lacerations and people missing limbs," says Kenny Rowe, a petty officer on a Seahawk. "We've got people with gangrene and other infections that could be fatal that haven't been treated for a week." Back at the airport, a few C-2 Greyhound transport planes load up with rice and carry it in. "Right now rice is gold to these people," says Rowe.
But like the doctors on the ground, the pilots encounter frustration. "We land in villages, and we can't understand what they're telling us," Moffet says. "People tell us there's a village 6 kilometers away that needs food, and then we go out looking for it and can't find it, and we have to go back two or three times looking for it." Desperate people rush the helicopters and risk being sliced by the blades. "We're lucky most of them are pretty short," he says with a wan smile. Now they try to get a translator off the choppers first to keep villagers back. "We try and fly different routes every day to find villages we're missing. We found one today because they had laid out an H in a field with white stones."
The Lincoln will eventually have to be relieved, perhaps by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. But for now, no one is in a hurry to see this tour of duty end. "Frankly, I don't care how long we're here," Moffet says. "We're not going to leave these people hanging." Sailors on the Lincoln receive constant emails from buddies elsewhere offering to pitch in.
The true test will come when attention wanes and the world moves on to some other preoccupation. The people in this region will need help for some time to come--and not just food, water and medicine. "They've lost everything. You'd be surprised--they need little things we don't even think about in our daily lives," says Gail Neudorf, deputy director of emergency and humanitarian relief for CARE USA. "Things like soap, washing powder, buckets, bottles for water so you have a clean container to keep water in, cooking utensils, sleeping mats, clothing, blankets, diapers, sanitary pads, matches, candles, lanterns, cooking fuel. In time, we'll look at getting books for kids out there, school kits." Then the survivors will need another army of donors to piece together the lives they have lost. --Reported by Aravind Adiga/ Kudathanai; Denis Giles/aboard the relief ship MV Sentinel; Robert Horn/ aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln; Carolina A. Miranda and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York; Alex Perry/ Port Blair; Eric Roston/ Washington; and Jason Tedjasukmana/ Banda Aceh
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Yusniar still hears the roaring in her head, the waves thunderously loud. The sea that was supposed to be a mother, protecting, sustaining, became a fury, sweeping two of her children away.
Compared with some people, she was lucky. Yusniar, 50, was able to find them and bury them herself, before retreating to the hills where she can keep an eye on the ocean, keep it in its place, from her tent made of blue plastic sheets and Styrofoam fished out of the swamps. Neither she nor the 150 others camping with her near Banda Aceh, capital of the Indonesian province that suffered the worst destruction, are ready to come down. The relief workers haven't yet discovered them, like untold numbers of others. "The water took away everything," she says. "We're afraid the waves may come back and try to take the rest of us."
The most experienced soldiers in the modern wars against catastrophe call this the greatest challenge of their lifetime. The arrival of aid to the battered region offered the first promise of relief to the storm's survivors, but many questions remain: How quickly can $4 billion go toward saving 5 million people when the U.N. is warning that disease could kill as many as the tsunami did, a number now reaching upwards of 150,000? How do thousands of rescuers, from hundreds of agencies, from dozens of countries, speaking different languages, coordinate their efforts so that relief workers in need of antibiotics don't find that the truck they are unloading carries only biscuits and blankets? How do they resettle a port town when residents look at the ocean and see a grave, refuse to eat fish for fear it has fed on the lost? How do they calculate human nature in countries where government soldiers fight with rebels over who gets the credit for feeding people who are close to starving?
As if to rebalance some cosmic scale, another wave is washing over South Asia like none the world has ever seen. The worst disaster in memory has evoked the greatest outpouring of charity. "Just as we see the power of nature to destroy, we have seen the power of human compassion to build," said Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The pledges coming in to the U.N. for tsunami relief already surpass all the relief money received in 2004 for the top 20 disasters combined. The politics of pity is never pure, so there was a kind of global competition in generosity, especially after the U.S. increased an early pledge of aid tenfold, to $350 million. Japan offered $500 million, Germany topped that with a $660 million pledge, and Australia weighed in with $810 million. Arab commentators engaged in some self-criticism, asking why Norwegians and Belgians offered so much more than Arabs to help Asia's suffering Muslims. During his visit to Indonesia, the hardest-hit country and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Secretary of State Colin Powell could not let pass an opportunity for self-congratulation. "I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action," he said.
But for all the strutting and spitting, the overwhelming response was one of mercy. The money came so fast it crashed the website of Catholic Relief Services. Save the Children was logging more than 10 times the normal volume of calls, so that everyone from the CEO to the custodians was recruited to man the phones. Some groups, like M??decins Sans Fronti??res (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), actually announced that they had taken in all the money they could use for tsunami relief and began directing donors to their general disaster funds, because other places in the world still need help even if they don't make headlines. But the charity toward the tsunami victims was unrelenting. Kids in Michigan sold hot chocolate; in North Carolina they sold lemonade; students in an eighth-grade class in Wenatchee, Wash., voted unanimously to give their class-trip money, which they had been raising for more than a year, to the Red Cross. There was Sandra Bullock pledging $1 million, Willie Nelson scheduling a benefit concert, NBA players offering $1,000 for every point they scored during games played late last week, and Helen E. McKenna, 88, a widow in San Francisco, donating her whole month's Social Security check. "My family was saying I was getting too old to handle my own money and that I should get a financial adviser," she said. "But it's my money. I can do whatever I want with it."
The same technology that has made this the most intimate of modern horrors has vastly increased the size and speed of the response. Relief organizations that used to have to wait for the check to come in the mail were receiving 80% to 90% of their donations online and moving the money out into the field faster than ever before. A dollar donated in the U.S. to Action Against Hunger, for example, is wired from New York City to the headquarters in Paris, where it buys water tanks, pumps, pipes, testing kits or chlorine tablets. Those supplies are shipped to international staging grounds in Igualada, Spain, near Barcelona, flown to Colombo, Sri Lanka, then trucked to a place like Batticaloa, on the island's northeast coast. Time elapsed from donation to distribution: 48 hours.
Raising the money is just the beginning. Delivering the supplies to the people who need them turned out to be the greater challenge. That meant confronting a practical, political and cultural obstacle course that slowed down aid to the most desperate areas while everyone learned the shortcuts. In many places, the roads that were bad to begin with are gone now and the ports swallowed whole. With bulldozers scarce, elephants have been enlisted to help clear debris. When pilots try to fly into a small airport, they find that the maps are suddenly wrong because the landscape has been rubbed away. Precious hours were lost when the lone airstrip in Banda Aceh was closed after a 737 hit a water buffalo while trying to land. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world," says the U.N.'s Jan Egeland. In some Sumatran villages, it was impossible to deliver any goods at all until the U.S. and the Australian military showed up with amphibious vehicles that could stage beach landings. Sari Galapo, a U.N. volunteer in Batticaloa, was worried about the people on an island no one had heard from since the bridge to the mainland was washed out, so she set off by canoe. "The boat was barely above the water level, and I didn't want to look at the water," Galapo says. When she arrived, she discovered that the local government official had lost most of his family to the tsunami, become depressed, poisoned himself, and was hospitalized. In the meantime, no aid had got through until Galapo sounded the alarm.
When the physical hurdles are conquered, the political ones remain. In India, where 10,000 died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk wild pig in the rain forest with bows and arrows. They were believed to have been wiped out by the tsunami, until a relief helicopter attempting to assess the damage was fired on by tribesmen shooting poison arrows.
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks, "When the government can help other countries, why are they letting us down?" Says fellow survivor Aslam Majid, 22, who went five days without water: "People aren't dying from the tsunami. They're dying of thirst and hunger."
Elsewhere, relief workers have found themselves caught up in civil wars that have been raging for years. In Sri Lanka, there were hopes for some kind of peace, however temporary, between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels who have waged a 21-year war for independence in the northern part of the country. Scores of displaced Tamil families taking refuge in a school in Kudathanai had gratefully accepted food and water brought by government soldiers. But when soldiers arrived with a specially cooked New Year's meal, refugees refused it on orders from a rebel. That night part of the school was set on fire. "We are stuck between the army on one side and the [Tigers] on the other side," says K. Jayakumar, 29, a fisherman. "Please tell them both that we deserve some peace after all we have been through."
In all the worst-hit areas, the most immediate enemy is infection. Thousands of people were essentially attacked by their own flimsy homes, sliced up and gashed by falling planks of wood, shards of glass and jagged pieces of corrugated tin. So many wounds went untreated or were badly treated in local clinics that gangrene and tetanus have set in; amputation is the most common operation in field hospitals.
Among the first international aid workers to reach ground zero on the Indonesian island of Sumatra were the doctors and nurses of MSF. When they arrived at the one functioning hospital in Sigli, on the east coast, there was only a single, volunteer surgeon on hand. "Our hospital was crippled," says Dr. Taufik Mahdi, director of the 35-bed unit. "Most of our doctors and nurses were too traumatized to work or left to look for loved ones missing after the tsunami." That first day the MSF team performed six operations, and it hasn't stopped since. "The minute we sew one up," says Dr. Claire Rieux, a general practitioner from Paris, "another gets wheeled in."
Spending a day at the hospital with the MSF team reveals the scope of the crisis. "Oh, man, this one is really bad," an Australian doctor shouts as he approaches the operating theater. He's holding up the arm of a man whose limb looks like a shank of lamb. The elbow is essentially gone, and the lower and upper arm is barely held together by a few sinewy strings of muscle and flesh. Though paint is peeling off the walls and a layer of grime covers many of the hospital's windows, Sigli's only hospital is fairly clean compared with many others in Indonesia's remote provinces. There are small victories. A young girl is wheeled in for surgery, her left foot severed at the heel. The doctors fear they may have to remove her leg at the calf to stop the infection from spreading, but after a massive cleaning and huge doses of antibiotics, her foot is reattached.
Fran??ois Gillet, MSF's logistics coordinator in Sigli, is desperately trying to find extra beds, plugs and lightbulbs, which no one seems to have. "It's the little things that often get overlooked and are hardest to find," he says. The group has relied on satellite phones for most of its communications, but even they have been less than reliable. "This is why we have to be as organized as possible," says Belgian Alexis Moens, the field coordinator. "You have to put up a structure that is strong enough on both the medical and logistical sides. Otherwise, things just won't work."
Other relief workers operate as a mobile triage unit, moving through the refugee camps that have sprouted across Sumatra's now barren landscape. Some 50,000 people are camped in local mosques and schools. Most of the refugees are still using rivers for washing their dishes and bathing--a recipe for cholera and typhoid. As the advance teams uncover unsanitary conditions in the camps, they report them to MSF water and sanitation units working in the area. "We work until midnight every day at the earliest, but we're always running behind," says Moens. "We just don't have the time or people to be everywhere."
In a crisis of this scale, some tasks require the kind of muscle only a superpower has. The U.S. Navy has 21 ships and 12,600 crew members working on rescue and relief operations in the waters off Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Seahawk helicopters--their blades filling the air with a fluttering rumble--sidle in and touch down on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln's 4 1/2-acre flight deck. Since sunrise on Jan. 1, the carrier's Seahawks have been flying from 13 to 17 missions a day. "We're going nonstop from dawn until sunset. Then the commanders meet, talk about what we've learned that day and map out what needs to be done tomorrow," says Captain David Lausman, the ship's executive officer.
The sailors and pilots are trying as best they can to coordinate with private groups to set up a smooth supply line. A host of aid organizations flies in supplies on U.S. C130 cargo planes to the tiny runway of the airport at Banda Aceh. Once unloaded, the planes must take off immediately to clear space for the next plane. The Seahawks, meanwhile, are landing on a converted football field a few hundred yards away, and the pilots are managing the transfer of supplies from the C130s to the helicopters. "It was like the Wild West down there when we first flew in," says Lieut. Dave Moffet, "but it's getting better." The helicopters head off for the villages, each one delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lbs. of food, medical supplies, communications equipment and even a few toys and some candy for the children. Along the way, their crews scour the countryside, looking for isolated hamlets that have yet to receive help and for displaced people straggling along roads. When they come across those who are sick or wounded, they ferry as many as possible to the field hospital. "We're seeing a lot of dehydration, diarrhea, lacerations and people missing limbs," says Kenny Rowe, a petty officer on a Seahawk. "We've got people with gangrene and other infections that could be fatal that haven't been treated for a week." Back at the airport, a few C-2 Greyhound transport planes load up with rice and carry it in. "Right now rice is gold to these people," says Rowe.
But like the doctors on the ground, the pilots encounter frustration. "We land in villages, and we can't understand what they're telling us," Moffet says. "People tell us there's a village 6 kilometers away that needs food, and then we go out looking for it and can't find it, and we have to go back two or three times looking for it." Desperate people rush the helicopters and risk being sliced by the blades. "We're lucky most of them are pretty short," he says with a wan smile. Now they try to get a translator off the choppers first to keep villagers back. "We try and fly different routes every day to find villages we're missing. We found one today because they had laid out an H in a field with white stones."
The Lincoln will eventually have to be relieved, perhaps by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. But for now, no one is in a hurry to see this tour of duty end. "Frankly, I don't care how long we're here," Moffet says. "We're not going to leave these people hanging." Sailors on the Lincoln receive constant emails from buddies elsewhere offering to pitch in.
The true test will come when attention wanes and the world moves on to some other preoccupation. The people in this region will need help for some time to come--and not just food, water and medicine. "They've lost everything. You'd be surprised--they need little things we don't even think about in our daily lives," says Gail Neudorf, deputy director of emergency and humanitarian relief for CARE USA. "Things like soap, washing powder, buckets, bottles for water so you have a clean container to keep water in, cooking utensils, sleeping mats, clothing, blankets, diapers, sanitary pads, matches, candles, lanterns, cooking fuel. In time, we'll look at getting books for kids out there, school kits." Then the survivors will need another army of donors to piece together the lives they have lost. --Reported by Aravind Adiga/ Kudathanai; Denis Giles/aboard the relief ship MV Sentinel; Robert Horn/ aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln; Carolina A. Miranda and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York; Alex Perry/ Port Blair; Eric Roston/ Washington; and Jason Tedjasukmana/ Banda Aceh
The Futile Search for a Hard Number
By Rocky LopesSunday, January 9, 2005; Page B01
It's the disaster we'll remember for a lifetime. Already, most of us outside Florida have forgotten Hurricane What's-Its-Name and its three followers, which devastated the state late last summer. Until reminded of it recently, how many remembered the deadly earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam just a year ago? But I'll wager that 5, 10, 15 years from now, the single word "tsunami" will trigger in any who hear it a near-total recall of the fearful events of Dec. 26, 2004.
That's because the scale of death in that catastrophe, occurring without warning and in a matter of minutes, and striking so many nations, has catapulted it into a class of its own. In my experience, the single factor that most underscores the significance of any disaster is the number of lives it takes. News reports of constantly changing, rapidly rising numbers in South Asia have made the deaths hit home, and our psyche is responding to the further suffering we know these lost lives will cause.
That's why we have such a deep-seated need to know how many people died in South Asia. That's why relatives of the victims search so desperately for information about what precisely happened to their loved ones. But adding to the grim tragedy is the one certainty that remains in the tsunami's wake: We will never know with absolute certainty how many died, or just what happened to the missing. All we will have is a gross estimate of the death toll -- nearly 150,000 as I write -- which will continue to change for many months to come.
How do you count the dead when so many of them may never be found? This is the dilemma facing those trying to gauge the true scope of the tsunami's destruction. Tallying the victims, matching names and bodies, tracking the missing and trying to pinpoint their fate is difficult after any disaster. But it's magnified in this instance by a number of factors.
First is the absence of any solid population count to start with. Not all countries have a formal and detailed census system like ours in the West. Our government provides population data to very specific levels, and we're accustomed to the idea that each individual has an established identity that can be tracked through driver's licenses, credit cards and so on. This is not the case in more than half of the tsunami-affected countries, where governments have difficulty reporting the number of people who were lost when they don't have reliable data on who was there in the first place. Many of the residents were subsistence fishermen and farmers unlikely to be counted by census-takers.
You can count bodies, of course, but many tsunami victims, swept out to sea, will never be found. Instead, investigators must painstakingly interview survivors to learn who is missing and whether there were any eyewitnesses to these individuals' fates. For missing does not necessarily equal dead. If you knew that someone was in a specific area affected by a disaster, and if you've tried to but can't reach that person, it's easy to draw a conclusion that the person was killed. But until a body can be found, or a reliable witness can report what happened to the individual, you can't be sure.
As data analysis specialist Patrick Ball told NPR last week, what we're counting in this case are "memories rather than bodies. . . . you're depending on people's memories, on the collective memory about who isn't there anymore." Yet we may never even be able to collect all the necessary memories to discover all who are missing. The tsunami's scope was so incredible -- entire families and villages were wiped out, and there may not in some cases be anyone left to report missing people. And if some of the bodies are never found -- not all bodies washed out to sea drift back to shore -- then the deaths will never be recorded. That's why some speculate that the final tsunami death toll could be artificially low.
Ironically, it's likely that in the end there will be a more accurate count of foreign visitors who were killed than of natives, though it will take time. Tourists and temporary workers who enter a country legally are tracked at the port of entry by immigration officials. There are no records of where they go once in the country, but we're learning about the number of foreigners who were in the affected areas through credit card transactions, hotel registrations, transportation rentals and relatives or friends who have been calling their embassies in the affected countries to report missing loved ones.
Some of those reported as missing, though, may not actually be. Many may have been in one of the devastated countries, but nowhere near the areas hit by the tsunami. Sometimes, more than one person will report the same individual missing, who will then be listed multiple times. The State Department initially received thousands of calls about the whereabouts of Americans. It has now whittled that list down to fewer than 2,000 names still not accounted for, but Secretary of State Colin Powell last week downplayed fears that American casualties would be as high as those of some European countries. And the Europeans will gradually determine who among their missing truly is gone. Eventually, even if bodies don't turn up, officials will likely be able to determine whether they can be presumed dead if there is no further activity on their credit cards and passports.
Another complicating factor is the sheer number of countries involved. The tsunami directly impacted 12 nations, but each one is reporting its own data. There's no single organization in the world that collects and reports casualty figures after a disaster. International organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross rely on individual country reports to arrive at estimates of the dead and missing. Depending on the timing of the report, different agencies will report different numbers, so the death toll figures may vary considerably, as they did in the early hours and days after the catastrophe.
What's more, each country has different methods for reporting casualties. Some countries will report counts of both the dead and those missing, but will not count as dead someone reported missing until they find a body or get some alternate confirmation of the person's fate. Other countries use more generalized methods to count casualties. Thailand and Indonesia are using estimates of village populations from previous informal census figures and subtracting the number of estimated survivors to arrive at an estimate of the deaths. Indonesia is also estimating the number of bodies in mass graves and multiplying by the number of mass grave sites. This is why you may get more precise numbers from India and Sri Lanka, which report only confirmed deaths, but rounded-off numbers from other countries.
Then there's the problem of official and unofficial sources of data, which can sow confusion and anxiety. This was the case here at home after Sept. 11, 2001. Immediately after the attacks, media reports indicated that there could have been more than 10,000 people killed in the World Trade Center, based on the numbers who worked there. The government issued no casualty numbers until deaths could actually be confirmed. When they were, the initial estimates were found to be too high.
That was a blessing, but often, the official and unofficial numbers can't be reconciled. This was true, for example, after the Dec. 26, 2003, earthquake in Bam, Iran. Initial death estimates from the local governor's office exceeded 43,000. But final government tallies released in March 2004, based on a post-event census, indicated an official death count of 26,271. The government statisticians thought some of the dead had been counted twice. Survivors and relief groups in Bam, however, are still doubtful of the final tally. Survivors believe that more people died than death certificates were issued. We will see the same thing happen with the casualty results from the Asian tsunami -- official reports will be different from survivors' stories.
What's difficult for people to accept is that information collection after any disaster anywhere, but particularly in less developed countries, takes time, and that information changes rapidly. In an age of instant communication, we expect "breaking news" when major events happen. But after the tsunami, many areas were cut off from communication -- no phones, radios or satellite links. With no communications, governments just didn't know how many people were affected. Emergency workers worry more about areas we don't hear from right after a disaster than the areas we do. In this case, the adage "no news is good news" does not apply!
Once officials knew that communications were disrupted, the only way to know how many people had been killed or injured was to inspect the affected areas. It took hours to get to some areas near major cities, and days to get to others, where roads had been destroyed and the only way to get there was by boat or aircraft. Once searchers arrived and established communications, they sent reports, including initial estimates of missing and dead people. Even more than a week later, some remote areas had not been reached. Just last Friday, Indonesian rescue workers found 7,000 more bodies in an area that had been cut off by the tsunami's waters. As more survivors are interviewed, searchers will update their reports.
Every day still, the numbers change, and they will keep doing so. Now, in addition to the direct deaths caused by the tsunami, there are indirect deaths to consider -- those due to heart attack, trauma, injury, water-borne or communicable disease, all triggered by the event. And again, different countries will count these deaths differently. This is often the case. There are still varying reports, for instance, on the number of people killed by the hurricanes that struck Florida last year. If you search the Web, you'll see reports that count people who died of carbon monoxide poisoning as hurricane victims, when in fact they died because they had used a portable generator improperly. How deaths are tallied, and how long after the event they are tallied, affects the final figures.
And the figures affect us. They leave a sense of loss and waste, a gnawing feeling of impotence and a stark, and haunting, realization:
Every life counts. But sometimes, tragically, not every life lost can be counted
By Rocky LopesSunday, January 9, 2005; Page B01
It's the disaster we'll remember for a lifetime. Already, most of us outside Florida have forgotten Hurricane What's-Its-Name and its three followers, which devastated the state late last summer. Until reminded of it recently, how many remembered the deadly earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam just a year ago? But I'll wager that 5, 10, 15 years from now, the single word "tsunami" will trigger in any who hear it a near-total recall of the fearful events of Dec. 26, 2004.
That's because the scale of death in that catastrophe, occurring without warning and in a matter of minutes, and striking so many nations, has catapulted it into a class of its own. In my experience, the single factor that most underscores the significance of any disaster is the number of lives it takes. News reports of constantly changing, rapidly rising numbers in South Asia have made the deaths hit home, and our psyche is responding to the further suffering we know these lost lives will cause.
That's why we have such a deep-seated need to know how many people died in South Asia. That's why relatives of the victims search so desperately for information about what precisely happened to their loved ones. But adding to the grim tragedy is the one certainty that remains in the tsunami's wake: We will never know with absolute certainty how many died, or just what happened to the missing. All we will have is a gross estimate of the death toll -- nearly 150,000 as I write -- which will continue to change for many months to come.
How do you count the dead when so many of them may never be found? This is the dilemma facing those trying to gauge the true scope of the tsunami's destruction. Tallying the victims, matching names and bodies, tracking the missing and trying to pinpoint their fate is difficult after any disaster. But it's magnified in this instance by a number of factors.
First is the absence of any solid population count to start with. Not all countries have a formal and detailed census system like ours in the West. Our government provides population data to very specific levels, and we're accustomed to the idea that each individual has an established identity that can be tracked through driver's licenses, credit cards and so on. This is not the case in more than half of the tsunami-affected countries, where governments have difficulty reporting the number of people who were lost when they don't have reliable data on who was there in the first place. Many of the residents were subsistence fishermen and farmers unlikely to be counted by census-takers.
You can count bodies, of course, but many tsunami victims, swept out to sea, will never be found. Instead, investigators must painstakingly interview survivors to learn who is missing and whether there were any eyewitnesses to these individuals' fates. For missing does not necessarily equal dead. If you knew that someone was in a specific area affected by a disaster, and if you've tried to but can't reach that person, it's easy to draw a conclusion that the person was killed. But until a body can be found, or a reliable witness can report what happened to the individual, you can't be sure.
As data analysis specialist Patrick Ball told NPR last week, what we're counting in this case are "memories rather than bodies. . . . you're depending on people's memories, on the collective memory about who isn't there anymore." Yet we may never even be able to collect all the necessary memories to discover all who are missing. The tsunami's scope was so incredible -- entire families and villages were wiped out, and there may not in some cases be anyone left to report missing people. And if some of the bodies are never found -- not all bodies washed out to sea drift back to shore -- then the deaths will never be recorded. That's why some speculate that the final tsunami death toll could be artificially low.
Ironically, it's likely that in the end there will be a more accurate count of foreign visitors who were killed than of natives, though it will take time. Tourists and temporary workers who enter a country legally are tracked at the port of entry by immigration officials. There are no records of where they go once in the country, but we're learning about the number of foreigners who were in the affected areas through credit card transactions, hotel registrations, transportation rentals and relatives or friends who have been calling their embassies in the affected countries to report missing loved ones.
Some of those reported as missing, though, may not actually be. Many may have been in one of the devastated countries, but nowhere near the areas hit by the tsunami. Sometimes, more than one person will report the same individual missing, who will then be listed multiple times. The State Department initially received thousands of calls about the whereabouts of Americans. It has now whittled that list down to fewer than 2,000 names still not accounted for, but Secretary of State Colin Powell last week downplayed fears that American casualties would be as high as those of some European countries. And the Europeans will gradually determine who among their missing truly is gone. Eventually, even if bodies don't turn up, officials will likely be able to determine whether they can be presumed dead if there is no further activity on their credit cards and passports.
Another complicating factor is the sheer number of countries involved. The tsunami directly impacted 12 nations, but each one is reporting its own data. There's no single organization in the world that collects and reports casualty figures after a disaster. International organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross rely on individual country reports to arrive at estimates of the dead and missing. Depending on the timing of the report, different agencies will report different numbers, so the death toll figures may vary considerably, as they did in the early hours and days after the catastrophe.
What's more, each country has different methods for reporting casualties. Some countries will report counts of both the dead and those missing, but will not count as dead someone reported missing until they find a body or get some alternate confirmation of the person's fate. Other countries use more generalized methods to count casualties. Thailand and Indonesia are using estimates of village populations from previous informal census figures and subtracting the number of estimated survivors to arrive at an estimate of the deaths. Indonesia is also estimating the number of bodies in mass graves and multiplying by the number of mass grave sites. This is why you may get more precise numbers from India and Sri Lanka, which report only confirmed deaths, but rounded-off numbers from other countries.
Then there's the problem of official and unofficial sources of data, which can sow confusion and anxiety. This was the case here at home after Sept. 11, 2001. Immediately after the attacks, media reports indicated that there could have been more than 10,000 people killed in the World Trade Center, based on the numbers who worked there. The government issued no casualty numbers until deaths could actually be confirmed. When they were, the initial estimates were found to be too high.
That was a blessing, but often, the official and unofficial numbers can't be reconciled. This was true, for example, after the Dec. 26, 2003, earthquake in Bam, Iran. Initial death estimates from the local governor's office exceeded 43,000. But final government tallies released in March 2004, based on a post-event census, indicated an official death count of 26,271. The government statisticians thought some of the dead had been counted twice. Survivors and relief groups in Bam, however, are still doubtful of the final tally. Survivors believe that more people died than death certificates were issued. We will see the same thing happen with the casualty results from the Asian tsunami -- official reports will be different from survivors' stories.
What's difficult for people to accept is that information collection after any disaster anywhere, but particularly in less developed countries, takes time, and that information changes rapidly. In an age of instant communication, we expect "breaking news" when major events happen. But after the tsunami, many areas were cut off from communication -- no phones, radios or satellite links. With no communications, governments just didn't know how many people were affected. Emergency workers worry more about areas we don't hear from right after a disaster than the areas we do. In this case, the adage "no news is good news" does not apply!
Once officials knew that communications were disrupted, the only way to know how many people had been killed or injured was to inspect the affected areas. It took hours to get to some areas near major cities, and days to get to others, where roads had been destroyed and the only way to get there was by boat or aircraft. Once searchers arrived and established communications, they sent reports, including initial estimates of missing and dead people. Even more than a week later, some remote areas had not been reached. Just last Friday, Indonesian rescue workers found 7,000 more bodies in an area that had been cut off by the tsunami's waters. As more survivors are interviewed, searchers will update their reports.
Every day still, the numbers change, and they will keep doing so. Now, in addition to the direct deaths caused by the tsunami, there are indirect deaths to consider -- those due to heart attack, trauma, injury, water-borne or communicable disease, all triggered by the event. And again, different countries will count these deaths differently. This is often the case. There are still varying reports, for instance, on the number of people killed by the hurricanes that struck Florida last year. If you search the Web, you'll see reports that count people who died of carbon monoxide poisoning as hurricane victims, when in fact they died because they had used a portable generator improperly. How deaths are tallied, and how long after the event they are tallied, affects the final figures.
And the figures affect us. They leave a sense of loss and waste, a gnawing feeling of impotence and a stark, and haunting, realization:
Every life counts. But sometimes, tragically, not every life lost can be counted
today's papersRough DiamondBy Andrew RicePosted Sunday, Jan. 9, 2005, at 2:50 AM PT
Today, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times go with updates from Iraq, while the New York Times is workin' on the railroad. The WP leads with news of that a 500-pound bomb meant for an Iraqi militant hit the wrong target yesterday, destroying a home and killing several occupants. The LAT's top non-local story looks at the clandestine role many suspect Iran is playing in the Iraq's upcoming elections. And the NYT, following news of a train derailment in South Carolina that led to a deadly chlorine gas leak, questions whether the rest of the nation's 60,000 pressurized rail tank cars are safe from similar accidents, and from terrorism.
The potential rail car defects have been apparent for at least three years, the NYT says, since a derailment in North Dakota led to an ammonia leak, one death, more than 300 injuries, and the discovery of design flaws that could lead to "catastrophic fracture." Such rail cars also make tempting bombing targets, the FBI warns. After the Madrid train attacks last year, chemical shipments were quietly shifted away from a rail line that ran within four blocks of the capitol in Washington.
Accounts differ as to the number of victims of the errant airstrike in a village near the town of Mosul. The U.S. military says five are dead; neighbors say 14, according to the NYT. The military admitted it had hit the wrong house and issued a (qualified) apology, saying it "deeply regretted the loss of possibly innocent lives." The LAT calls the statement an "unusual step."
Though no one can prove it, the LAT says some Iraqis allege that Iran is "secretly pumping millions of dollars" into Shiite candidates' campaigns for seats in the new national assembly. In southern Iraq, the story says, "Iranian intelligence officials openly roam the hallways at party offices and Persian is sometimes the preferred language. Pictures of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hang on party office walls and even in government offices." Iraqi Shiite leaders deny any intention to emulate their neighbor's theocratic government.
The WP and NYT have their own analyses of the election. The WP's front-pager takes the wider view, saying that Iraq's elections, along with those in the Palestinian territories this month, "add up to the first meaningful test for Bush's vision of spreading democracy to a region ruled almost exclusively by monarchs, despots and theocrats." But skeptics like Brent Scowcroft fear that Iraq's elections may incite a sectarian civil war. Why? The NYT's inside piece explains that because seats in Iraq's new assembly will be allotted to candidates by virtue of their percentage of the national vote, and because turnout is expected to be light in Sunni-dominated areas, where the threat of election-related attacks is most dire, Sunnis will likely be underrepresented. That might well stoke the sense of marginalization that fuels Sunni militants. Last spring, some American officials advocated a regional-based vote, but the idea was dismissed as cumbersome and potentially divisive. Now, says the Hoover Institution's Larry Diamond, the decision looks like "a mistake."
Diamond, once a top aide to Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer, is all over the papers today with criticism of the Bush administration's approach. In a separate NYT op-ed column, he calls for a "one-time postponement of the vote" and inducements to coax moderate Sunni leaders to participate. But in yet another interview with the WP, he says he doubts his advice will be heeded, accusing President Bush, "a very stubborn man," of "self-defeating obstinacy."
A delay in the vote is exactly what Ali Ghalib, a Sunni government official from the province of Salahuddin, appealed for in a meeting with Shiite leaders in Najaf on Friday. Then, as he drove back to his home in Tikrit through an area known as the "triangle of death," he was stopped by gunmen. All the papers report that his bullet-riddled body turned up yesterday.
In tsunami news, the WP top-fronts a feature on the Indonesian government's efforts to fight smugglers who are purportedly trafficking in children orphaned by the disaster. The story opens with a touching scene of kids bedding down in a local school's dormitory, where they are being offered shelter and protection. Reading further, however, evidence of systematic kidnapping seems decidedly scant: UNICEF has confirmed just one case, though Indonesian authorities "are looking into dozens of similar allegations." Elsewhere in the paper, an Outlook section piece says Thailand's tourism industry might be partially to blame for many of the tsunami deaths there. Resorts are built right on the beaches, and the development has devastated coral reefs and other natural barriers that might have blunted the wave. And a LAT reporter writes about one small Sri Lankan town where 523 residents died, basing his story on several days of interviews.
Late editions of the NYT front word that an audit of the United Nations' much-maligned Iraq oil-for-food program uncovered … nothing very shocking. "There's no flaming red flags in the stuff," says the head of the inquiry, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.
The WP fronts a long feature on the latest in automotive technology: A car powered by hydrogen fuel cells that runs as far and accelerates as fast as an old fashioned gas-guzzler. The commercial success of "hybrid" cars like the Toyota Prius, popularized by TV's Larry David, is driving research into the technology. General Motors says it aims to be able to build 1 million hydrogen cars by 2010. But curb your enthusiasm: For now, the prototype is so expensive to build that if for sale, "it would cost as much as a warehouse full of Corvettes."Andrew Rice is a writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112058/
Today, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times go with updates from Iraq, while the New York Times is workin' on the railroad. The WP leads with news of that a 500-pound bomb meant for an Iraqi militant hit the wrong target yesterday, destroying a home and killing several occupants. The LAT's top non-local story looks at the clandestine role many suspect Iran is playing in the Iraq's upcoming elections. And the NYT, following news of a train derailment in South Carolina that led to a deadly chlorine gas leak, questions whether the rest of the nation's 60,000 pressurized rail tank cars are safe from similar accidents, and from terrorism.
The potential rail car defects have been apparent for at least three years, the NYT says, since a derailment in North Dakota led to an ammonia leak, one death, more than 300 injuries, and the discovery of design flaws that could lead to "catastrophic fracture." Such rail cars also make tempting bombing targets, the FBI warns. After the Madrid train attacks last year, chemical shipments were quietly shifted away from a rail line that ran within four blocks of the capitol in Washington.
Accounts differ as to the number of victims of the errant airstrike in a village near the town of Mosul. The U.S. military says five are dead; neighbors say 14, according to the NYT. The military admitted it had hit the wrong house and issued a (qualified) apology, saying it "deeply regretted the loss of possibly innocent lives." The LAT calls the statement an "unusual step."
Though no one can prove it, the LAT says some Iraqis allege that Iran is "secretly pumping millions of dollars" into Shiite candidates' campaigns for seats in the new national assembly. In southern Iraq, the story says, "Iranian intelligence officials openly roam the hallways at party offices and Persian is sometimes the preferred language. Pictures of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hang on party office walls and even in government offices." Iraqi Shiite leaders deny any intention to emulate their neighbor's theocratic government.
The WP and NYT have their own analyses of the election. The WP's front-pager takes the wider view, saying that Iraq's elections, along with those in the Palestinian territories this month, "add up to the first meaningful test for Bush's vision of spreading democracy to a region ruled almost exclusively by monarchs, despots and theocrats." But skeptics like Brent Scowcroft fear that Iraq's elections may incite a sectarian civil war. Why? The NYT's inside piece explains that because seats in Iraq's new assembly will be allotted to candidates by virtue of their percentage of the national vote, and because turnout is expected to be light in Sunni-dominated areas, where the threat of election-related attacks is most dire, Sunnis will likely be underrepresented. That might well stoke the sense of marginalization that fuels Sunni militants. Last spring, some American officials advocated a regional-based vote, but the idea was dismissed as cumbersome and potentially divisive. Now, says the Hoover Institution's Larry Diamond, the decision looks like "a mistake."
Diamond, once a top aide to Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer, is all over the papers today with criticism of the Bush administration's approach. In a separate NYT op-ed column, he calls for a "one-time postponement of the vote" and inducements to coax moderate Sunni leaders to participate. But in yet another interview with the WP, he says he doubts his advice will be heeded, accusing President Bush, "a very stubborn man," of "self-defeating obstinacy."
A delay in the vote is exactly what Ali Ghalib, a Sunni government official from the province of Salahuddin, appealed for in a meeting with Shiite leaders in Najaf on Friday. Then, as he drove back to his home in Tikrit through an area known as the "triangle of death," he was stopped by gunmen. All the papers report that his bullet-riddled body turned up yesterday.
In tsunami news, the WP top-fronts a feature on the Indonesian government's efforts to fight smugglers who are purportedly trafficking in children orphaned by the disaster. The story opens with a touching scene of kids bedding down in a local school's dormitory, where they are being offered shelter and protection. Reading further, however, evidence of systematic kidnapping seems decidedly scant: UNICEF has confirmed just one case, though Indonesian authorities "are looking into dozens of similar allegations." Elsewhere in the paper, an Outlook section piece says Thailand's tourism industry might be partially to blame for many of the tsunami deaths there. Resorts are built right on the beaches, and the development has devastated coral reefs and other natural barriers that might have blunted the wave. And a LAT reporter writes about one small Sri Lankan town where 523 residents died, basing his story on several days of interviews.
Late editions of the NYT front word that an audit of the United Nations' much-maligned Iraq oil-for-food program uncovered … nothing very shocking. "There's no flaming red flags in the stuff," says the head of the inquiry, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.
The WP fronts a long feature on the latest in automotive technology: A car powered by hydrogen fuel cells that runs as far and accelerates as fast as an old fashioned gas-guzzler. The commercial success of "hybrid" cars like the Toyota Prius, popularized by TV's Larry David, is driving research into the technology. General Motors says it aims to be able to build 1 million hydrogen cars by 2010. But curb your enthusiasm: For now, the prototype is so expensive to build that if for sale, "it would cost as much as a warehouse full of Corvettes."Andrew Rice is a writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112058/
'Inaugural Security Draws on Latest Technologies Intelligence to Stream Into Command Center From 50 Police Agencies Aloft and on the Ground
By Sari Horwitz and Spencer S. HsuWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, January 10, 2005; Page A01
The nerve center for the most heavily guarded presidential inauguration in history will not be in Washington, where President Bush will take the oath of office, but 25 miles away in a futuristic command post in Northern Virginia.
Inside a gleaming steel-and-marble complex, the Secret Service and 50 federal, state and local agencies will monitor action in the sky, on the ground and in the subway system. Giant plasma screens will beam in live video from helicopters and cameras at the U.S. Capitol, along the parade route and at other potential trouble spots. Officials will be able to track fighter jets patrolling the skies, call up three-dimensional maps of downtown, even project the plume of any chemical release.
One top police official likened the new facility to a set from the "Star Wars" movies. It is one of many signs that Bush's second inauguration Jan. 20 will take security in Washington to a new level, using expertise and equipment developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"This is the Super Bowl for us," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent James W. Rice II. "Everyone on every team is dressed up and playing in the game. And the bench is very, very deep."
The agents and officers at the swearing-in and along the parade route will have access to the latest tools. "Every piece of technology that exists will be a part of this," said Rice, who oversees the National Capital Response Squad.
Law enforcement officials are building on their experience from other high-security events, including the presidential nominating conventions in New York and Boston, dedication of the National World War II Memorial and the state funeral for former president Ronald Reagan.
"If this was the January after 9/11, there would be a lot more angst," said U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer. "But we have been continually ratcheting up our ability to prepare for large events."
Led by the Secret Service, authorities began planning eight months ago for the first post-9/11 inauguration. They have an array of resources that were not available four years ago, including new communications technology and advanced methods of screening.
Officials say they know of no specific threats relating to the inauguration and the evening balls, and some leaders, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), have urged that the city be kept as open as possible. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last week that intelligence monitors are picking up less terrorist threat chatter, in general, than a year ago. But authorities are equipped for a wide range of scenarios.
On Thursday, for example, law enforcement and intelligence officials gathered for four hours on Capitol Hill to "war-game" how they would respond to a fire at the Capitol, a suicide bomber or another crisis. Security officials say the most likely terrorist threat is a truck bomb -- one of the reasons they are barring vehicles from a wide swath of downtown Washington on Inauguration Day. One federal official said that Pennsylvania Avenue, and streets within four blocks of it, will be closed to traffic between 20th Street NW and the east side of the Capitol.
Ridge and other officials are expected to provide details about street closures and announce some of the other security measures tomorrow.
D.C. police and federal officials are meeting daily to finalize security details, from decisions about where police will stand to the size and location of security fences and the arrival and departure of dignitaries.
The noontime swearing-in at the Capitol and the parade that will follow on Pennsylvania Avenue will draw tens of thousands of people, including a large number of protesters. They will have to pass through unprecedented layers of security.
D.C. police plan to erect roadblocks and screen pedestrians around an area covering more than 100 square blocks in the center of official Washington. People will have to pass through at least one of the 22 checkpoints along the parade route and through metal detectors.
Protesters will be allowed to demonstrate in seven areas, but signs cannot be attached to anything that could be used as a weapon. No large backpacks, camera bags, thermos bottles, coolers, picnic baskets, strollers or umbrellas will be allowed on the parade route or the Capitol grounds.
Some people will be watched closely even before getting near a police checkpoint. Metro Transit Police officers have been trained to identify suspicious riders by looking for certain characteristics and patterns, such as people who avoid eye contact or loiter in the stations.
More than 4,600 law enforcement officers will be posted along the parade route. They will include hundreds of undercover officers in the crowd, as well as sharpshooters with rifles on rooftops. An army of Secret Service agents will be inside and on top of buildings along or off Pennsylvania Avenue.
Some of the most critical components of the security plan will be less evident to the public.
John P. Malone, special agent in charge of the Washington field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said his agency is bringing in certified bomb technicians and about 20 explosives-detecting dogs from across the country to sweep cars and buildings.
The military will have bomb jammers -- devices that have been used in Iraq and can block or delay someone using a cell phone or other remote gadget from detonating an explosive. Other military assets will be in place, such as engineering companies specializing in rescuing victims of building collapses and forces equipped to deal with a chemical or biological attack.
The anti-terror preparations include the use of mobile and stationary chemical and biological sensors that will sniff the air in subway stations, on the Mall, in buildings and on the streets.
In case of a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear incident, scientists at Department of Energy laboratories, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologists, Environmental Protection Agency cleanup crews and military and NASA experts will be placed on standby across the country.
Software models developed by the agencies will be tied to the biological and chemical sensors across the city and to wind and radiation monitors downtown, providing detailed alerts and airflow monitoring.
"If we had a release of sarin gas on the Mall, not only will the sensors on the Mall pick it up, we will know the height and density, its direction and how far it has spread," said one federal official. "We did not have this in place before 9/11."
Military radar will monitor the sky from ground stations throughout the city and aircraft aloft.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that it will triple the no-fly zone over Washington that now prohibits small aircraft within 16 miles of the Washington Monument.
Private flights will be banned from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Inauguration Day over the Baltimore-Washington area, defined as the region within 23 miles of Reagan National and Dulles and Baltimore-Washington International airports.
Violators may be intercepted by military fighter jets or customs aircraft and diverted for questioning by agents at regional airports in Easton or Carroll County, Md., or Stafford.
The dramatic expansion of flight restrictions is designed to avoid a repeat of the June 9 incident in which an errant transponder beacon aboard a plane carrying Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) mistakenly prompted security officials to evacuate the Capitol an hour before the memorial service for Reagan.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command will have increased air patrols over Washington by multiple jet fighters. The inability of one pair of fighters to identify the Fletcher aircraft in time contributed to the June incident.
Before, during and after the inauguration, D.C. police and U.S. Park Police helicopters will hover overhead, able to beam live images from the scene. Those images will complement the video from several hundred surveillance cameras.
The surveillance will be monitored by authorities at various command centers run by the many agencies working on security.
The main one is the Multi-Agency Coordination Center in Fairfax County, the new facility that is being used as a joint field office by the Secret Service for the inauguration. It is one example of the hundreds of millions of dollars invested by the federal government since 2001 in information technology for homeland security.
Laid out over one floor, the center is jammed with plasma television screens and other visual and information technologies, along with classified and unclassified computer networks and communications equipment, according to several federal security officials.
The Secret Service, Capitol Police and other agencies will be able to view three-dimensional maps of downtown derived from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a Department of Homeland Security official said.
"It's pretty spectacular," said Gainer, the Capitol Police chief.
"It is as big and glamorous as anything I've seen in the business," he said.
Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
By Sari Horwitz and Spencer S. HsuWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, January 10, 2005; Page A01
The nerve center for the most heavily guarded presidential inauguration in history will not be in Washington, where President Bush will take the oath of office, but 25 miles away in a futuristic command post in Northern Virginia.
Inside a gleaming steel-and-marble complex, the Secret Service and 50 federal, state and local agencies will monitor action in the sky, on the ground and in the subway system. Giant plasma screens will beam in live video from helicopters and cameras at the U.S. Capitol, along the parade route and at other potential trouble spots. Officials will be able to track fighter jets patrolling the skies, call up three-dimensional maps of downtown, even project the plume of any chemical release.
One top police official likened the new facility to a set from the "Star Wars" movies. It is one of many signs that Bush's second inauguration Jan. 20 will take security in Washington to a new level, using expertise and equipment developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"This is the Super Bowl for us," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent James W. Rice II. "Everyone on every team is dressed up and playing in the game. And the bench is very, very deep."
The agents and officers at the swearing-in and along the parade route will have access to the latest tools. "Every piece of technology that exists will be a part of this," said Rice, who oversees the National Capital Response Squad.
Law enforcement officials are building on their experience from other high-security events, including the presidential nominating conventions in New York and Boston, dedication of the National World War II Memorial and the state funeral for former president Ronald Reagan.
"If this was the January after 9/11, there would be a lot more angst," said U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer. "But we have been continually ratcheting up our ability to prepare for large events."
Led by the Secret Service, authorities began planning eight months ago for the first post-9/11 inauguration. They have an array of resources that were not available four years ago, including new communications technology and advanced methods of screening.
Officials say they know of no specific threats relating to the inauguration and the evening balls, and some leaders, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), have urged that the city be kept as open as possible. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last week that intelligence monitors are picking up less terrorist threat chatter, in general, than a year ago. But authorities are equipped for a wide range of scenarios.
On Thursday, for example, law enforcement and intelligence officials gathered for four hours on Capitol Hill to "war-game" how they would respond to a fire at the Capitol, a suicide bomber or another crisis. Security officials say the most likely terrorist threat is a truck bomb -- one of the reasons they are barring vehicles from a wide swath of downtown Washington on Inauguration Day. One federal official said that Pennsylvania Avenue, and streets within four blocks of it, will be closed to traffic between 20th Street NW and the east side of the Capitol.
Ridge and other officials are expected to provide details about street closures and announce some of the other security measures tomorrow.
D.C. police and federal officials are meeting daily to finalize security details, from decisions about where police will stand to the size and location of security fences and the arrival and departure of dignitaries.
The noontime swearing-in at the Capitol and the parade that will follow on Pennsylvania Avenue will draw tens of thousands of people, including a large number of protesters. They will have to pass through unprecedented layers of security.
D.C. police plan to erect roadblocks and screen pedestrians around an area covering more than 100 square blocks in the center of official Washington. People will have to pass through at least one of the 22 checkpoints along the parade route and through metal detectors.
Protesters will be allowed to demonstrate in seven areas, but signs cannot be attached to anything that could be used as a weapon. No large backpacks, camera bags, thermos bottles, coolers, picnic baskets, strollers or umbrellas will be allowed on the parade route or the Capitol grounds.
Some people will be watched closely even before getting near a police checkpoint. Metro Transit Police officers have been trained to identify suspicious riders by looking for certain characteristics and patterns, such as people who avoid eye contact or loiter in the stations.
More than 4,600 law enforcement officers will be posted along the parade route. They will include hundreds of undercover officers in the crowd, as well as sharpshooters with rifles on rooftops. An army of Secret Service agents will be inside and on top of buildings along or off Pennsylvania Avenue.
Some of the most critical components of the security plan will be less evident to the public.
John P. Malone, special agent in charge of the Washington field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said his agency is bringing in certified bomb technicians and about 20 explosives-detecting dogs from across the country to sweep cars and buildings.
The military will have bomb jammers -- devices that have been used in Iraq and can block or delay someone using a cell phone or other remote gadget from detonating an explosive. Other military assets will be in place, such as engineering companies specializing in rescuing victims of building collapses and forces equipped to deal with a chemical or biological attack.
The anti-terror preparations include the use of mobile and stationary chemical and biological sensors that will sniff the air in subway stations, on the Mall, in buildings and on the streets.
In case of a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear incident, scientists at Department of Energy laboratories, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologists, Environmental Protection Agency cleanup crews and military and NASA experts will be placed on standby across the country.
Software models developed by the agencies will be tied to the biological and chemical sensors across the city and to wind and radiation monitors downtown, providing detailed alerts and airflow monitoring.
"If we had a release of sarin gas on the Mall, not only will the sensors on the Mall pick it up, we will know the height and density, its direction and how far it has spread," said one federal official. "We did not have this in place before 9/11."
Military radar will monitor the sky from ground stations throughout the city and aircraft aloft.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that it will triple the no-fly zone over Washington that now prohibits small aircraft within 16 miles of the Washington Monument.
Private flights will be banned from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Inauguration Day over the Baltimore-Washington area, defined as the region within 23 miles of Reagan National and Dulles and Baltimore-Washington International airports.
Violators may be intercepted by military fighter jets or customs aircraft and diverted for questioning by agents at regional airports in Easton or Carroll County, Md., or Stafford.
The dramatic expansion of flight restrictions is designed to avoid a repeat of the June 9 incident in which an errant transponder beacon aboard a plane carrying Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) mistakenly prompted security officials to evacuate the Capitol an hour before the memorial service for Reagan.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command will have increased air patrols over Washington by multiple jet fighters. The inability of one pair of fighters to identify the Fletcher aircraft in time contributed to the June incident.
Before, during and after the inauguration, D.C. police and U.S. Park Police helicopters will hover overhead, able to beam live images from the scene. Those images will complement the video from several hundred surveillance cameras.
The surveillance will be monitored by authorities at various command centers run by the many agencies working on security.
The main one is the Multi-Agency Coordination Center in Fairfax County, the new facility that is being used as a joint field office by the Secret Service for the inauguration. It is one example of the hundreds of millions of dollars invested by the federal government since 2001 in information technology for homeland security.
Laid out over one floor, the center is jammed with plasma television screens and other visual and information technologies, along with classified and unclassified computer networks and communications equipment, according to several federal security officials.
The Secret Service, Capitol Police and other agencies will be able to view three-dimensional maps of downtown derived from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a Department of Homeland Security official said.
"It's pretty spectacular," said Gainer, the Capitol Police chief.
"It is as big and glamorous as anything I've seen in the business," he said.
Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
