After the tragedy sum of our fears doesn't add up

Michael Vatikiotis, Hong Kong

The tragic aftermath of Sunday's massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean is a reminder that the biggest threat to human security is not ourselves, but the environment we live in and for the most part take for granted.

For more than three years now we in Asia have been in the grip of fear. Not of some earthquake, volcanic eruption or tsunami, but of a small band of Muslim militants who have planted bombs in a random pattern of violence that has been responsible for a few hundred deaths. It's ironic that the fear in Phuket and southern Thailand ahead of this year's holiday season was for a terrorist attack, not a huge tidal wave.

We should learn something from this and try and recalibrate our fears in order to become better prepared to save more lives.

We have spent a lot of money and effort watching our citizens and monitoring human movements and taken for granted the shifting patterns of climatic change and seismic activity. We are more afraid of a shadowy organization called Jamaah Islamiyah and strive to know more about its adherents than anything remotely connected with how exposed our coastlines are to the onslaught of nature. In Indonesia's province of Aceh, the central government has been intent on isolating a tenacious independence movement. As a result, the province is cut off from the international aid agencies that are now needed to save lives.

Our security fears in the first decade of the new millennium reflect selfish human obsessions and preoccupations. The world has been forced to focus on the aftermath of a brutal and tragic attack on the United States in September 2001 that left more than 3000 dead. Since then, our lives have become colored by the conflict in the Middle East, war in Iraq and the gruesome graphic beheadings of hostages by Muslim fanatics.

As a result we have not devoted enough time or priority to larger threats to human security that include the dangerous rise in sea levels due to global warming as well as the possibility of a global flu pandemic stemming from a variety of avian flu common in Asia. We tend to shrug off these potentially grave natural disasters and concentrate on seeking out the fanatics in our midst -- to the point of becoming almost as zealous and intolerant as the fanatics themselves.

Asia has received plenty of offers for help when it comes to security -- just the other day Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer was offering Thailand troops to help quell a low-level Muslim insurgency in Southern Thailand. It's unlikely that Australian troops will be on hand to help clear the beaches and rebuild the towns along the shoreline in Phuket. Australia's declared security priority is combating terrorbut not the kind of terror perpetrated by nature itself.

A few years ago, things looked different. With the end of the Cold War, the mighty military machines that once stood ready to defeat communism on the shores of Asia searched for a new role and one idea was to help poorer Asian nations cope with natural disasters -- such as the perennial flooding in Bangladesh that kills thousands every year. Not any more. Today, the United States military is too busy fighting a protracted war in Iraq to worry about the stranded and homeless along the beaches of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.

Aid agencies have called for as much as US$6 million in aid to help clear up and aftermath of the massive tidal waves that have surely left as many as 20,000 dead. But it will take more than money to cope with the stranded, homeless survivors now exposed to waterborne diseases. Many of the affected countries need raw materials, manpower and machinery that only a massive military operation can organize effectively in short period of time.

What a shame then that the world's greatest power is focused on protecting its soldiers from Muslim fanatics whose anger and fanaticism is in turn fueled by the global war on terror that has become the pinnacle of American foreign policy. It's a pity that the sum of all our fears is so narrowly focused.

The writer is a former editor and chief correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He can be reached at michaelvatikiotis@yahoo.com