Tsunami reveals fanatics of all stripes

 "These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities and even entire countries, are Allah's punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims." So said Sheikh Fawzan al-Fawzan in a Saudi television interview [1]. 

He continued: "We know that at these resorts, which unfortunately exist in Islamic and other countries in South Asia, and especially at Christmas, fornication and sexual perversion of all kinds are rampant." 

"The fact that it happened at this particular time is a sign from Allah. It happened at Christmas, when fornicators and corrupt people from all over the world come to commit fornication and sexual perversion. That's when this tragedy took place, striking them all and destroyed everything. It turned the land into wasteland, where only the cries of the ravens are heard. I say this is a great sign and punishment on which Muslims should reflect. All that's left for us to do is to ask for forgiveness, We must atone for our sins, and for the acts of the stupid people among us and improve our condition. We must fight fornication, homosexuality, usury, fight the corruption on the face of the earth, and the disregard of the lives of the protected people." 

Al-Fawzan is a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia's highest religious body. 

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The Boxing Day tsunami that followed the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra would be among the largest natural disasters in our lifetime. Over 200,000 people died, and millions made homeless. Countless families lost loved ones, and tens of thousands of children lost parents. 

Despite initial slowness, which was in its own way understandable because few could immediately comprehend how immense the disaster was, the relief efforts have gradually built up to a massive scale. 

Of course, on hindsight, we can pick out examples of bad judgement, inefficiency and incompetence, but we have to accept that frictional foul-ups happen all the time. To expect people and bureaucracies to spin around on their heels and promptly become quick, well-informed, energetic and capable when they have never been that way, is unrealistic. 

So the head of the Thai meteorological department made a poor judgement call and decided against issuing a tsunami warning and was sacked by the Prime Minister. But the poor fellow had no real data to go on except the theoretical possibility of a tsunami, set against the perceived pressure to not damage the tourism industry with false alarms. 

A little more culpably, the Indian bureaucracy foresaw the possibility of a tsunami, but faxed their memo to the wrong minister. It went to the previous Science Minister, who had been out of office for six months,  instead of the current one (see box alongside) 

As for Indonesia, its response was really slow. For the first 48 hours, the media gave the impression that the main damage and loss of lives were occurring in Sri Lanka and India. Together with Phuket and Phang-nga, these were the places where news, body-counts and pictures originated. With that high level of awareness, initial relief efforts were steered to those areas. 

But we can't blame the media. They had hardly any news from Sumatra, except that Banda Aceh, the provincial capital at the northern tip of Sumatra, was devastated. 

On hindsight, we should have expected Aceh and Sumatra to have taken the worst of it, for they were closest to the epicentre. We could have guessed that they suffered a double whammy: first the earthquake that would have flattened many buildings and cracked bridges, then the tsunami. Which indeed, they did, to horrific loss, as we were subsequently to discover. 

Perhaps, as some reports have suggested, the destruction in Aceh [2] was so severe that the provincial administration couldn't function, having lost large percentages of their civil servants, and nearly all communication and transport links. From one report, I learnt that the main hospital in Banda Aceh had a staff function on the beach that very Sunday morning. The tidal wave thus swept away large numbers of medical personnel just when they were critically needed. 

In the town of Meulaboh, an entire garrison of a few hundred soldiers were swept into the ocean because their barracks were at the tip of a peninsula. They might have been crucial in search, rescue and relief in this Aceh town had they lived. 

Others have accused the central administration in the capital Jakarta for being too lethargic to process what little data there was, or too uncurious to ask why so little was heard from that part of the country for days. 

Either way, precious hours and days were wasted before many realised that Aceh was the part worst hit, on a scale many multiples of what happened in Sri Lanka or Tamil Nadu. 

This section revised and updated in September 2005:

After six months, the toll settled into these figures:

Indonesia: 128,000 dead, at least 37,000 missing
Sri Lanka: 31,000 dead, 4,000 missing
Mainland India: nearly 9,000 dead
Andaman and Nicobar Islands: 1,900 dead, 5,500 missing [3]
Thailand: 5,300 dead, 2,200 missing
Burma: unknown, thought to be in the hundreds or thousands

Other countries: Somalia had 100-200 fatalities, Maldives and Malaysia, under 100 each, and one or two in Tanzania, Kenya and the Seychelles.

(These figures from BBC online, 22 June 2005)

But as the scale of the calamity sank in, I think most people and many nations have mobilised in strength to help. 

Even the Arab press has scolded their governments for being pusillanimous. They have shamed Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, among others, for being slow and tight-fisted when their economies have long depended on the labour and skills from India, Sri Lanka and other affected countries. Where is the empathy, the press asked, especially when Arab budgets have been enjoying a windfall through 2004 from record-high oil prices? 

Commentators pointed out that the Arab world does not have a tradition of charity towards humanitarian causes. Their giving has usually been directed to Islamic causes, for there is a tendency in Arab Islam to see the world divided into Muslims and infidels, and consequently, feelings of humanity do not easily extend to the latter. Perhaps, but we should note it was the Arab press that did their job, and reminded their governments to do their part, so that analysis isn't entirely fair. The Saudi government, at last report, raised its pledged contribution to US$90 million. 

* * * * *

At this point, I will come back to what Sheikh Fawzan al-Fawzan said. "We must fight fornication, homosexuality, usury, fight the corruption on the face of the earth, and the disregard of the lives of the protected people." 

Put aside the fornication and homosexuality. Focus instead on "We must fight ... the disregard of the lives of the protected people." 

What was he saying? 

Note the distinction: the "protected people" and those not. Once again, he cleaves humanity into Muslims and infidels. Then he blames some of the infidels for doing dreadful things, among which is causing offence to the mores and lives of Muslims, thus giving rise to Allah's wrath. 

In a moment of continent-wide tragedy, he was only interested in rallying his flock and selling his extreme views. Victims be damned. 

* * * * *

Sheikh Fawzan al-Fawzan might have been the most reported fanatic, but he wasn't the only one. 

The South Korean government had to issue a stern warning to Christian charity groups rushing to Indonesia and elsewhere, not to proselytise while giving out aid, and certainly not to make humanitarian assistance conditional upon conversion. 

In Singapore, an sms went around appealing for Muslim families to adopt 300 orphaned children from Aceh, so that they would continue to have a Muslim upbringing. The subtext to this was that Christians were stampeding into Aceh to take these children and convert them to Christianity. 

It is difficult to know whether the fear was justified or not, but the Jakarta government also issued an order not to permit children to be taken out of the affected region. This seems to suggest that there was some ground for concern, but then again, even if they had but the slightest whiff of such plans, it was a sensible precaution. 

Nonetheless, the effect of such text messages going around was to fuel suspicion and sharpen religious antipathy at a time when everyone should be pulling together. 

From India came reports that Hindu refugees huddling in a relief centre turfed out the dalits among them. The dalits, formerly called 'untouchables', are the lowest in the Hindu caste system. Other castes, if they're of an old-fashioned mind, take offence to having them in their midst, sharing food and water with them, or even having to touch what the dalits had touched. 

The dalits themselves had already complained that the Indian bureaucracy generally gave them the short end of the stick when apportioning relief. 

In Sri Lanka, the Muslim and Hindu victims (often Tamil rather than Singhalese) similarly complained about being bypassed in favour of Buddhist victims, by their government officials. Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist. 

Amidst such an enormous disaster and a huge outpouring of help, these are the sickening stains. They have one thing in common: prioritising the next life over this one; speaking and acting in terms of "us" and "them", the "protected people" and infidels; preferring conflict towards achieving some god-given order to peaceful help. Even as things are horrid enough, they consciously make things worse.

Times like these, whatever your faith, you should say to these crazies: curses on all your houses.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. Translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors television news in the region, and carried by gay365.com
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2. Almost all the 165,000 Indonesian dead and missing were from the province of Aceh , which had a population of about 5 million. Aceh lost about 1 person in 30, which is, by any measure, horrific.
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3. Tthe Andaman and Nicobar Islands had a population of only 356,000 in the 2001 Indian census, so their 7,400 casualties represented a terrible 1 in 50 persons.
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Addenda

1. See also the article Feverish minds cook up the wrath of God