Tsunami Devastation - Asia
A very sad New Year brought our global community closer.
But... it also swept away 100,000 lives caused by a man-made tsunami.

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STORIES OF TRAGEDY AND MIRACLES:

Tsunamis That Spared Neither Rich Nor Poor.
December 29, 2004 - 6:30PM  SMH - AP/AFP

Petra Nemcova - who appeared on the cover of the 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue
- was carried away with her long time boyfriend, British fashion photographer Simon Atlee,
after a huge wave ploughed into southern Thailand on Sunday.

Nemcova's New York spokesman, Rob Shuter, said the model and her boyfriend were
vacationing in the resort of Phuket when waves overwhelmed their beach hut.

Simon Atlee 33yrs and Petra Nemcova 25yrs

Nemcova, 25, clung to a tree for eight hours as the water swirled around her. She was recovering
in a Thai hospital today with broken bones, possibly including a broken pelvis, and unspecified
internal injuries. Atlee, 33, was swallowed by the raging waters and was still missing today.

"I've spoken to Petra several times and she's in pretty bad shape," Shuter said. "She's on pain
medication. She probably doesn't realise yet the magnitude of the disaster."

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was on holiday in Sri Lanka's south -
one of the areas most devastated by tsunamis. Kohl and his entourage were evacuated
from a hotel by the Sri Lankan air force yesterday.

British science fiction author Arthur C Clarke, who lives in Sri Lanka, lost his diving
school in the deadly tsunami. The loss echoes a plotline from his first book about the island.

Clarke - who predicted the establishment of communication satellites and shot to fame with
the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey - said his diving school at Hikkaduwa, 100km south of the
capital Colombo, was destroyed.

"Among those affected are my staff based at our diving station and holiday bungalow, both
beach-front properties located in areas worst hit," Clarke said in a statement. "We still don't
know the full extent of damage as both roads and phones have been damaged. Early reports
indicate that we have lost most of our diving equipment and boats. Not all our staff members
are accounted for yet."

Clarke, confined to a wheelchair after suffering from post-polio syndrome, was not in the area
at the time. His first book on Sri Lanka had a chapter on tidal waves hitting the southern port
of Galle, he said.

Swedish skiing great Ingemar Stenmark was sunbathing in Thailand when he saw an
immense wave roaring to shore and ran for his life. Stenmark - who won two gold medals
at the 1980 Olympics and 86 World Cup races - was with friends in Khok Kloi, about
50km from Phuket.

"The water from the first wave disappeared, but then it came back with terrifying speed,"
Stenmark told Swedish media. He and his girlfriend were not injured.

Another athlete wasn't so lucky. Troy Broadbridge, an Australian Rules football player,
was on his honeymoon in Phuket when he and his bride were swamped as they strolled along
a beach. Trisha Broadbridge was safe, but Troy was still missing today.

Several Italian soccer players - including AC Milan striker Filippo Inzaghi, Milan captain
Paolo Maldini, and Juventus defender Gianluca Zambrotta - were caught in the maelstrom in
the Maldives but were unhurt.

Thailand's royal family are also among the grieving. The Thai-American grandson of King
Bhumipol Adulyadej, Poom Jensen, 21, was reportedly jet-skiing when the tidal wave struck
Phuket. His body was found later.

Lucy 14 years old

Hollywood actor-director Richard Attenborough's family also suffered tragedy. His
granddaughter Lucy, 14, perished and his daughter Jane and her mother-in-law are missing
in Phuket. Another granddaughter, Alice, 17, was being treated in a hospital today.

Attenborough's directorial credits include Cry Freedom, Chaplin and the Oscar-winning Gandhi.
He has appeared in scores of films including The Great Escape, Elizabeth and Jurassic Park.

On Thailand's Phi Phi island, where The Beach (starring Leonardo DiCaprio) was filmed, 200
bungalows at two resorts were swept out to sea, and resort officials said many foreign tourists
were among the missing.

Designer Nate Berkus, a regular contributor on The OprahWinfrey Show, was carried away
with a friend by a tsunami after it ripped off the roof of their hut in Sri Lanka.

They briefly clung to a telephone pole, but a second wave ripped them away. Berkus climbed
to safety on the roof of a submerged home but his friend disappeared into the raging sea.

In the Maldives, holidaying action star Jet Li injured his foot against a floating piece of
furniture as he protected his daughter from tsunami waves that flooded his hotel.

Li, who starred inÊthe recent box-office hit Hero andÊmovies such as Romeo Must Die and
Lethal Weapon 4, was with his daughter in the hotel's lobby on Sunday when huge waves
gushed into the hotel, Hong Kong's Apple DailyÊreported.

"My sister's friend had a baby on 23 December. The tsunami took away her
with the three-day-old baby." - Kuhan, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

Miracles Do Happen - BBC 12/29/04
Among all the deaths and misery, there are some stories of miraculous escapes from
the waves. One 13-year-old girl survived after spending two days clinging to a wooden
door in the Indian Ocean after being swept from an Indian air force base on the remote
Car Nicobar island.

Locals found Meghna Rajshekhar walking along a beach in a daze after she had drifted
for 48 hours in water teeming with snakes and turtles, officials said.

Six-year-old Yeh Chia-ni from Taiwan, who was holidaying in Thailand's Phi Phi island
with her parents, clung to a coconut tree for more than 20 hours before she was rescued.

And a four-year-old boy in southern Thailand was reunited with his parents after
spending more than two days on a tree-top without food or water.

"I was saved by a mango tree after the tsunami hit my village. For five minutes I clung
to one of the branches until my husband swam over to get me. It felt like such a long time.
Even now, I don't know how I did it. I was nine months pregnant and my baby was due.
I was determined to save the baby, so that's where I must have got my strength. It was
so desperate, and the baby was mostly all I could think of.

My mother and one of my younger sisters were not lucky. We buried them at 6pm that
same day. It was about two hours before I started the labour pains. I gave birth to my
little girl the next morning in hospital. Now, I am a sad and happy person."
- Kanagaswary, 22, and her baby, of Uduththurai, northern Sri Lanka.

NATURAL DISASTERS
2004 Asian quake disaster - toll so far exceeds 125,000
2003 Earthquake in Bam, Iran - official casualty figure is 26,271
1976 Earthquake in Tangshan, China, kills 242,000
1970 Cyclone in Bangladesh kills 500,000
1887 China's Yellow River breaks its banks in Huayan Kou killing 900,000
1826 Tsunami kills 27,000 in Japan
1815 Volcanic eruption on Indonesia's Sumbawa Island kills 90,000
1556 Earthquake in China's Shanxi and Henan provinces kills 830,000

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A man-made tsunami.
Why are there no fundraisers for the Iraqi dead?
Ongoing tragedy and devastation.

Terry Jones
Tuesday January 11, 2005
The Guardian

I am bewildered by the world reaction to the tsunami tragedy. Why are newspapers, television and politicians
making such a fuss? Why has the British public forked out more than £100m to help the survivors, and why
is Tony Blair now promising "hundreds of millions of pounds"? Why has Australia pledged £435m and
Germany £360m? And why has Mr Bush pledged £187m?

Of course it's wonderful to see the human race rallying to the aid of disaster victims, but it's the inconsistency
that has me foxed. Nobody is making this sort of fuss about all the people killed in Iraq, and yet it's a human
catastrophe of comparable dimensions.

According to the only scientific estimate attempted, Iraqi deaths since the war began number more
than 100,000. The tsunami death toll is in the region of 150,000. Yet in the case of Iraq, the media
seems reluctant to impress on the public the scale of the carnage.

I haven't seen many TV reporters standing in the ruins of Falluja, breathlessly describing how, in 30 years
of reporting, they've never seen a human tragedy on this scale. The Pope hasn't appealed for everyone to
remember the Iraqi dead in their prayers, and MTV hasn't gone silent in their memory.

Nor are Blair and Bush falling over each other to show they recognise the scale of the disaster in Iraq.
On the contrary, they have been doing their best to conceal the numbers killed.

When the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated the figure of 100,000 killed in
Iraq and published their findings in one of the world's leading scientific journals, the Lancet, Downing
Street questioned their methodology, saying "the researchers used an extrapolation technique, which
they considered inappropriate, rather than a detailed body count". Of course "a detailed body count"
is the one thing the US military will not allow anyone to do.

What is so odd is the way in which so much of the media has fallen into line, downplaying the only
authoritative estimate of casualties in Iraq with the same unanimity with which they have impressed
upon us the death toll of the tsunami.

One of the authors of the forenamed report, Dr Gilbert Burnham, said: "Our data have been back and
forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school, so we have the scientific strength
to say what we have said with great certainty."

So, are deaths caused by bombs and gunfire less worthy of our pity than deaths caused by a giant wave?
Or are Iraqi lives less worth counting than Indonesian, Thai, Indian and Swedish?

Why aren't our TV companies and newspapers running fundraisers to help Iraqis whose lives have been
wrecked by the invasion? Why aren't they screaming with outrage at the man-made tsunami that we have
created in the Middle East? It truly is baffling.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python. His book Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror
is published this month by the Nation. ~ www.terry-jones.net

How YOU Can Help Right Now
Important information - can be used anytime disaster strikes.

Note To USA
Americans that don't care.