By Daniel McGrory in Bangkok, Catherine Philp in Colombo and Roger Boyes in Vellingey
The Weekend Australian
Edition 1 - All-round CountrySAT 08 JAN 2005, Page 021
INQUIRER SPECIAL

Source: The Times

The suffering is not over for grieving tsunami survivors. Daniel McGrory in Bangkok, Catherine Philp in Colombo and Roger Boyes in Vellinge report

AS presidents and prime ministers fall over themselves to pledge billions in aid to victims of the Asian tsunami, Van Intama sits cross-legged in the dirt of a refugee camp in southern Thailand with scant hope of ever seeing a cent.
Fanning her seven-month-old son with a scrap of cardboard against the heat, Intama's immediate financial needs are modest and humbling. ``If we had some plastic sheeting, and my husband had any sort of boat and a fishing net we could be back on our feet, and wouldn't be a burden to anyone. But our Government won't do it,'' she says.

Police rounded up the Intama family and 3000 of their neighbours who survived in the fishing port of Nam Khem and forcibly moved them to a patch of wasteland 8km away where they were allocated a tent barely big enough to hold two children.

She looks astonished and embarrassed when told how much money people around the world have donated and how at that moment international leaders in Jakarta were talking about making $US1billion ($1.3 billion) available immediately to the stricken areas.
``If there is all this money, and people have been so kind to us, then why are we living like beggars?'' she asks.
The simple answer is that the Thai Government has politely declined international help, claiming the country is able to cope on its own. Yet most observers agree that relief workers have been overwhelmed and foreign aid is essential.

There is no shortage of food, clothes or bottled water at this camp in Bang Bang Muang but the lives of Intama, her husband Achad and the others would be enormously improved if the likes of the leading charities with their proven expertise were permitted to help.
``We don't care where the helping hand comes from,'' says Intima. ``This is no time to be proud. Give me a pot and I will cook for my family. Why do we have to queue at kitchens?'' She watches in dismay as carpenters hammer together a flimsy line of corrugated iron-roofed sheds that is to be the Intimas' communal accommodation for what is likely to be many months to come.

Her only child, Mano, has a hacking cough and diarrhoea, as do many of the infants in the camp. Says Jongrak Insqwet, 37, the nurse treating him in a sweltering tent next to the open-air kitchen: ``This is not a healthy place for so many families to live and must only get worse.'' The nurse and her fellow volunteers from Bangkok hospitals run this field clinic in shifts, sleeping in a nearby school and assisted by holidaymakers who opted to use the rest of their holiday working rather than heading for beaches. The only foreign assistance is provided by a Bangkok-based Christian charity staffed mainly by Americans, a Taiwanese and a Japanese health team.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was due to visit the area yesterday and it was hoped he would persuade the authorities that it is no loss of face, nor an indictment of their efficiency, if they invite Oxfam and others in.
Briton Ian Archer took matters into his own hands. The 43-year-old self-employed builder from Kent flew to Phuket and asked how he could help.
``I sold a couple of properties and was going to buy a place in Spain for my wife and four children but I'll use that money to keep me going here for as long as I can be useful,'' says Archer.

Sweat runs down his face as he pitches in, knocking together the plywood boxes that will soon replace the tents. The Thai authorities aim to keep their public pledge that nobody in Bang Bang Muang will still be in a plastic tent in a fortnight but they don't add is that the alternative is not what these people want.
Amnavy Champrasit shares the wish of most in this camp that they could rebuild their homes right away. ``Give us the tools, the wood and we will do it. The longer we stay here the more I fear we will never go home,'' he says.

* * *
THE fishermen trooped into the cabinet room at the presidential palace in Colombo and stopped in front of the long table where the ministers were sitting.
They lifted the heavy box on to the table and plonked it in front of the President. ``We are asking you,'' the leader of the little delegation told her, ``to please eat our fish.'' Their industry and their homes already devastated by the tsunami that damaged and destroyed thousands of their boats, Sri Lanka's fishermen are having to contend with another hurdle as they struggle to get back to sea: the widespread perception that fish is unfit for consumption following the disaster.
Rumours that the fish have become infected with viruses from feeding on rotting corpses floating out to sea have spread like wildfire.
Text messages have raced around naming the fictitious virus and warning people not to eat fish, a staple on this small island. The Hong Kong Government, too, weighed in, warning its people not to eat seafood from tsunami-hit areas, saying it could be contaminated with heavy metals churned up by the turbulent waters.
Health experts have dismissed the fears as unfounded but as the rumours continue untrammelled, the price of fish has plummeted here, undermining the struggle of fishermen to start earning again and rebuild their lives. The fishermen came to Colombo from Mirissa, a sleepy fishing village with a small but bustling harbour on the island's southern coast. Many of the trawlers were damaged or destroyed but fishermen, many made homeless in the disaster, are desperate to get back to sea.

Three boats, not badly damaged in the disaster, limped back to sea two nights ago, bringing heavy catches of tuna and mullet to send to market. Samir Prabot, a trawler owner whose boat escaped damage, had waited days before going back to the ocean because of his fears of another tsunami.
But he could wait no longer to earn money to provide for his family. When he returned safely in the morning, however, his hold full of glistening tuna, there were no traders to meet him.

``No one comes from Colombo to buy the fish now,'' he says sadly as his crew shovel more ice down the hatch of the hold to stop the unbought tuna from going bad. ``I have a boat full of fish I cannot sell. I cannot go back to sea if no one will buy it.'' After an hour, a solitary wholesaler's truck draws up to buy up another catch, offering just 75 rupees (about $1) per kilogram. Two weeks ago, the prime tuna would have fetched 300 rupees.

In the Hilton hotel in Colombo, a waitress hands over a menu and apologetically points out the dishes of crispy mullet and grilled jumbo prawns that are not on offer. They are available at market, she says, but the hotel is not buying them. ``You have to be careful,'' she explains.

Geoffrey Dobbs, a British hotelier who lives part-time on the idyllic Taprobane Island just off the coast at Weligama, feared the region's recovery could be devastated if the rumours are allowed to persist. ``It is fishing and tourism here, that's basically it,'' says Dobbs. ``If they can't fish, they can't live.'' He contacted the World Health Organisation to seek assurance that the rumours were false and then mobilised the fishermen's delegation to the capital.

* * *
IN the worst-hit town of the worst-hit European country, it is as if the Pied Piper has called.
The tidy streets of Vellinge have fallen silent, emptied of children as if the Pied Piper had swept through this southern Swedish township.
Little wonder: Vellinge is the worst-hit community in the European country worst hit by the tsunami disaster. And, day by day, it is becoming clear that this is a children's tragedy.

At least 100 out of the 700 officially missing Swedes are small children or teenagers; hundreds more are among the 2000 Swedes still unaccounted for -- mainly families who had bought their air tickets on the internet and who were travelling independently or camping in Southeast Asia during the Christmas break.
A five-year-old girl has just returned to Vellinge alone. Her father, mother, brother and sister died in Thailand, victims of the Boxing Day tsunami. ``She is being shielded from the world at the moment,'' says her local priest, Carin Hompe Svedberg. ``And the state will protect her for the rest of her childhood.'' That is the advantage of a nanny state: it can indeed guard the vulnerable.

``What it cannot do is bring back the idea that Swedes are living as if on a safe island cut off from the world,'' says Svedberg. ``And that is shattering both for children and the adults.'' Psychiatrists, therapists and grief counsellors are converging on the pleasant, dazed community in order to advise teachers and bereaved parents before the first day of school next Monday.

Until Boxing Day there seemed no safer place than Vellinge. Surrounded by rich arable fields and orchards -- it is the most fertile corner of Sweden -- nothing much has happened there since the region passed from the Danes into Swedish hands in 1658. The summers are a delight: children playing with the ponies and horses put out to pasture. It is a rolling landscape of windmills, scarecrows and houses with roofs resembling tall hats. Winters are grim.
``The locals went first to Majorca in search of sunlight, then to the Canaries and finally to Thailand,'' says Goeran Holm, the mayor. ``The Thai holiday has become part of the rhythm of our lives.'' Some 200 out of a township of 30,000 spent Christmas on the afflicted Thai beaches and 73 have returned. Slowly, travellers from Vellinge are ringing home from Asia: the final death toll of children could, ``if the community is lucky'', be fewer than a dozen. Even so, there is no township that has been so badly bruised.