The Tsunami Effect- and How some Good Might Come of It

It was a horrible human tragedy, the scale of which has caught everyone off guard. Witnessing devastation and loss of life of that order, it would be impossible to remain unmoved. And yet people’s response has been remarkable. They want to do something positive, and have responded with a genuine outpouring of kindness and compassion.

Unfortunately the only way we can show our intense sadness and sympathy is by putting money there. Y’know, you kinda wish there were other ways, but if this is the only way, then good, and everyone has responded hugely. But we do need now to think hard about how we go forward with the relief effort and also to put what’s needed in South East Asia into a wider framework.
It was bizarrely fascinating, like one of those terrible, terrible tragedies that while you’re watching you think you’re in a disaster movie. And of course like a lot of other people I was thinking, ‘It doesn’t look very big to me.’ I mean, nobody’s written that, but I’m sure everyone thought it. And then there were these explanations that it was rushing at 500 miles an hour – no it wasn’t. That’s rubbish, you hit anything at 500 miles an hour, there’s nothing left. And yet the damage was appalling.
“But there are acts of God or nature, and there are acts of man. The interesting thing about the tidal wave – I don’t know even know why it’s called a tsunami, we have a perfectly fucking good name for it, tidal wave; tsunami sounds like a crap name for a punk singer – but daily in Africa there is a tidal wave of death that dwarfs what we’ve seen in the last weeks. It’s unseemly to make a comparison, and I’m not, what I’m saying is there are two distinct things. It’s completely different to the area that Bono and myself work in.
The tsunami disaster is an act of nature that we cannot prevent, and part of the panic inherent in our reaction to it is humanity’s hubris; that we believe we control everything. The reality is we control nothing and we will not prevent these things happening. Even with better warning systems we’re still going to get whacked, and that’s part of the shock, where you stand back and watch this thing unfolding and realise you are utterly helpless. That feeling of helplessness is followed by the pity for those who have lost everything – their families, their businesses etc.
If you’ve lost your family, you can be helped all you like with money but there’s no coming back. But if you’ve lost your business, you can reconstitute that – in those parts of the world you certainly can. These are middle-income countries, they can reconstitute themselves. You can build the houses on stilts, you can get your boats back, and you can start fishing again.
Indeed, if the area was rich, it’s arguable that you would have seen an even greater disaster, millions would be dead because it would’ve been cities along the coast, and even with the early warning systems everyone’s talking about, the highways would’ve been clogged with people trying to escape. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try and take better precautions for the future, and it’s certainly not to say we shouldn’t help those people affected, but the reality is that those areas will reconstitute themselves within a six-month period.
The equal reality is that there’s probably more than enough money gone in there right now to deal with the situation. Two billion dollars plus is a serious amount of money. The problem then is, do they have what’s called the absorptive capacity to take in that amount of aid, and can they actually spend that effectively and efficiently? And the answer is they can’t, that’s why they called in the aid agencies and the armies to help. There was a good cartoon in The Times here in London a couple of days ago: sick, struggling Indonesians labouring under the weight of a giant UN lorry piled with aid. So that’s the point about capacity.
But calling for debt moratoriums and stuff like that is preposterous because in effect you’re giving them a bankruptcy note which affects their export credits, and Thailand and Indonesia are (saying), ‘We don’t fucking want it!’ And frankly, their right. It would be counter-productive. In the meantime the news features are beginning to be a little exploitative. They’re milking our natural compassion now and trying to big themselves up. I’m totally in sympathy with the horror and the bewilderment of people in Ireland and England who’ve lost their friends and family while they were away, and I reiterate that man should always reach over the useless discourse of politicians and extend the hand of help to others in need, that’s a given with me. But I’m not sure that a lot of the media coverage is well-directed.
Maybe there is something we can learn from all of this.
Last year ended in horror and this one began with kindness and compassion. Now if we can steer that kindness and compassion towards the G8 and the European Union this year, then we might get serious change in Africa, which is a man-made tragedy and therefore worse, because daily there is a tidal wave of death. Daily. We’ve forgotten that. We know what causes those things, we know how to prevent it, and we do fuck-all, so you tell me which is the greater tragedy.
It is a major problem of the 21st century that will have severe repercussions politically, economically and security-wise, unless we get our heads around it. While we must deal with the natural tragedies that happened in South East Asia and elsewhere, we must also focus and put all our energies behind dealing with this gaping wound of Africa.
The world is a broken place and it is a political fracture, and it can only be healed through grand politics. The important thing is that Africa can be fixed. The thing to do is to use the realisation of the fragility of humans which the tragedy in South East Asia has given us – and focus it on real policy change. I know that sounds like a speech from the dock, but that’s the truth of it.

in conversation with Peter Murphy. A full interview with Bob Geldof will appear in an upcoming issue of hotpress