After the Network Stars Depart

Tsunami-Struck South Asia Rebuilds Without U.S. Attention

While the U.S. news anchors have moved on, the tsunami story remains page one news in South Asia's online media.

There are miraculous stories, like the BBC's report on a woman found alive on a remote Indian island 45 days after the tidal wave. There are disputes about whether the United States is stingy or not. And there are many useful blogs that compile all sorts of information about one of the worst natural catastrophes in the past 100 years.

But most daily news coverage focuses on the awesome scope of the devastation and the mundane challenges of reconstruction after more than 200,000 people perished in 11 countries.

In Indonesia, corpses are still being collected at the rate of 500 a day, reports the Borneo Bulletin. A Red Cross spokeswoman said that plans to search for bodies until June may have to be revised. "Every time you lift a stone you might find something under it because there's still lots of rubble," she said. The survivors who have lost parents, grandparents, spouses and siblings feel bleak and desperate, reports the Jakarta Post.

On the island of Banda Aceh, 700 fishermen in one town still cannot go back to work because they lack boats, reports Acehkita, a news site on the island that bore the brunt of the tsunami. On Feb. 1, Acehkita reported that 108,100 corpses had been buried, more than the entire population of Charleston, S.C. Among the dead are 1,814 schoolteachers.

The recovery effort is intertwined with the politics of war in Indonesia. For 30 years, Islamic separatists on the island have been fighting for independence. The government is sending 6,000 troops to do reconstruction work on Banda Aceh, according to the newsweekly Tempo. The Indonesian army chief of staff said that the troops will still take defensive action against the rebels.

In the Kuala Lumpur independent news site Malaysiakini, letter writer Shaukat Ali predicted that wealthy countries would soon forget about the marginalized and destitute tsunami survivors. "Meanwhile, the U.S. spends in excess of $40 million on one event -- President George W. Bush's inauguration," he wrote.

But another letter writer, George Yeoh, said the United States can never please its critics and expressed gratitude to the "16,000 U.S. navy and marine personnel who have been risking their safety and lives in an alien land where anti-American fanaticism has been stoked for years."

In any case, the U.S. role in reconstruction does not loom large in the regional coverage.

In Sri Lanka, at least, the donations of other countries have received more attention in recent days. On Saturday, Lankapage, a U.S.-based news site, reported that the South Korean navy was expected to deliver 78 tons of relief material and 6.5 tons of medicine over the weekend. The Daily News in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, reported four countries will help the island nation rebuild its harbors and fisheries. The United States is not one of them.

Michael Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter, is doing a blog for washingtonpost.com from Weligama, a resort town where his family was on vacation when the tsunami hit. Dobbs says the town has been visited by "provincial mayors from Germany, water engineers from Holland, aid workers from Canada, and schoolteachers from Ireland." The only person from the United States Dobbs mentions encountering is his photographer from New York, Antonin Kratochvil.

The Independent (by subscription) of London is chronicling reconstruction efforts in Mirissa, a once-paradisiacal beach on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Americans are scarce there too.

A government-funded business school in Singapore is helping Thailand and Indonesia with building low-cost housing, according to a report in the Borneo Bulletin, a news site in the oil enclave of Brunei. A 60-member team from the Singapore Management University is scheduled to build houses in Thailand for two weeks in April before moving on to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the site reported.

One place where U.S. aid has not gone unnoticed is the Maldives islands, located southwest of the tip of India, where an estimated 82 people perished in the tsunami. The Haveeru Daily Online posted an American Red Cross press release that it has launched a "culturally appropriate psychosocial program."

"In every school that I have visited, the smiles and thank you's of kids and teachers are not a thank you to me, but a thank you to the American Red Cross and the public who so graciously donated funds" said the program's field director.

In the tsunami's wake, a lot of people, myself included, have asked, "Is America Stingy?" The answer, according to a well-documented survey by Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine, is "Yes." Compared to northern Europeans, Americans and their government are tightfisted toward the poor people of the world.

The absence of coverage of U.S. recovery efforts in the South Asian online media may be one indication of American parsimony.

(Lauren McMahon provided research for this column).