Resolving differences in disaster's wake

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.