Resolving differences in disaster's wake

Ooi Kee Beng, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

The best memorial to the thousands of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster will be for the politics of the region to change for the better because of the widespread suffering and through the international relief work that is now needed.

The longer political considerations are kept out of the picture, the easier it will be for the flow of aid to reach the survivors. Governments have now to act more as administrators than as guardians of narrow interests and ethnic prejudices.

The mass media of all nations now have an important role to play in discouraging politicians from reaping personal and strategic gains from this huge catastrophe.

The United Nations, governments over the world, and all sorts of international organizations are now raising and allocating funds and sending people and supplies into the region to rescue survivors, limit starvation and stop the spread of tropical diseases. In light of this, travel restrictions should be eased dramatically, and local expertise should cooperate fully with the generous armies of international aid workers that are now on the way. Much needs to be done, and even if we manage to fend off the very real threat of starvation and disease, the process of mourning and rebuilding will take months.

Closeness between the different nations can grow out of this, since no human agency or enemy was involved in the disaster.

This is a time of opportunity. Things have changed. This will be hard to recognize because it all happened so suddenly, and because we tend to think that politics is about principles and economics. But politics is just as much about emotions and how we deal with them. Right now, we are all mourning and, Insya Allah (God willing), we can make use of that to tear down walls and wash away barriers between us. For example, would any terrorist now dare to set off a bomb in the region; are not international tensions between Australia and South-east Asian nations now relaxed? If politicians can behave as statesmen would, then we can make the most out of this global disaster.

We may say that this is a temporary state of affairs, and things will return to how they were before Boxing Day, 2004. But that is how things always are. They return to their old state because we allow them to return to being the same. If we choose to recognize that things have changed, then we can change things. It is exactly this kind of horrendous event that can help us break karmic circles of hate.

The growing tension between Thailand and Malaysia over southern Thailand is now swept away by the destructive power of the tsunamis. Given the new scenario, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand can now rely for a while on goodwill from Thai citizens of all religions and even from the Malaysian government. With vision and statesmanship, it is not impossible for him to create an atmosphere for balanced negotiations with the Muslim separatists in the country's south.

Without doubt, the civil war between Buddhist Singalese and Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka has a history that stretches back over centuries, as does Acehnese irredentism. To a large extent, old scores matter because we want them to matter. This merely leads to new scores that in turn also need to be remembered, ad infinitum. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, an eye for an eye will indeed leave us all blind.

We must remain unwilling victims of nature, but surely we do not need to continue remaining victims of history.

The writer is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.