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

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