Spring 2005

After the Wave

William Smith alumna and Voice of America reporter, MP Nunan ’91 describes scenes from the aftermath of the Dec. 26, tsunami and the painful, uncharted territory being crossed as people and governments come to terms with this epic disaster.

by MP Nunan ’91

(MP Nunan ’91, is the South Asia correspondent for Voice of America Radio and TV. She is currently based in New Delhi, India.)

I happened to be in the U.S. for the holidays when the Indian Ocean tsunami surged onto the shores of 12 countries on Boxing Day — killing tens of thousands in minutes, and ultimately claiming the lives of more than a quarter million in the days and weeks to follow.

By the time I returned to Asia, I had missed the disaster’s grisly crisis-phase — when bodies on beaches were bulldozed into mass graves and entire villages buried their children.

But since I’ve lived primarily in Asia for the past 13½ years — visiting and working in many of the places where the waves hit — I like to think I have some sense of the tragedy’s scale.

The scenes on the Thai resort islands of Koh Phi Phi and Phuket were reminiscent of the 2002 bombing of a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali by an al-Qaeda-linked group: shocked friends and relatives of the missing, still wearing shorts and tank tops, peering intently at bulletin boards bearing photos of the dead, hoping against hope they wouldn’t find what they think they’re going to find. And like Sept. 11th, many made photocopied fliers, pleading for information about someone whom no one had seen since the moment tragedy struck.

India was one of the first countries to realize a potential long-term risk of the tsunami — the loss of a traditional way of life in fishing villages. Trauma counseling was begun within days of the disaster so that children, primarily, would learn not to be afraid of the sea. Growing up in poor villages along the coast, many will have no other option but to make their living from it.

In Sri Lanka, where I was sent to cover the disaster’s aftermath, it was the sea walls that gave me my first real sense of the ocean’s wrath. Rocks almost two meters in circumference and weighing several hundred pounds were picked up by the waves and tossed half a mile inland, like pebbles. So was a train.

We learned many of those who died didn’t drown — they were killed by blunt trauma caused by debris churning through the waves.

School was out when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, so it was the first day back after the holiday when children and teachers alike learned from empty rows of chairs who survived and who didn’t. Some children I spoke with saw their friends being swept out to sea. Others had been holding hands with friends — or carrying younger children — when they were separated by the tumult of the water.

After 20 years of civil war, the question now is whether the devastation wrought by the tsunami will unite Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil and Sinhalese people. Or will the influx of billions of dollars in international aid — and the bickering over it — exacerbate tensions in an already fraying peace plan? So far the peace plan is still holding.  But only just.
A similar situation faces Aceh, Indonesia’s northernmost and most troubled province. Nothing ever seems to go right for Aceh. It was the nearest land mass to the epicenter of the earthquake that caused the tsunami, so it was affected by both the quake and the deadly waves. What’s more, before the tsunami some 12,000 people had died in a civil conflict that has dragged on for 27 years.

I spent five years in Indonesia as a freelance journalist, part of it covering the Aceh conflict.  Its structure is similar to myriad other conflicts worldwide: the Acehnese, a minority, feel exploited by the nation’s powerbrokers and demand independence. The government won’t relent — the fear being if Aceh breaks free, the whole of Indonesia might fall apart like the former Yugoslavia. A key catalyst in the fight is Aceh’s vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Five years of reporting on the Aceh conflict involved mass graves; blindfolded trips to meet rebel leaders; Exxon Mobil pipelines blown up, repaired, and blown up again; rebel ambushes and village sweeps by the army; independence leaders issuing manifestoes from jail; government promises to restore human rights; and an ambitious peace plan proposed that ultimately failed, resulting in the imposition of martial law across the province. There was press conference after press conference and clarification after clarification from the government in Jakarta.

All of it seemed so important at the time.

Along with tens of thousands of lives, it’s almost as if the tsunami washed away the history of an entire era. A quarter century of fighting between government and rebel forces, a quarter century of endurance by ordinary people, seems little more than human folly when compared to the ocean’s strength.

Like Sri Lanka, the hope in Aceh is that the tsunami will make the government and the separatists see beyond past their differences for the good of the many. We’ll see. But the history of Aceh, like many pockets of Asia I’m convinced, will forever be divided into what came before, and after, the tsunami.