Analysis: Tragedy cast political shadows

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The horrendous tsunami catastrophe in South Asia has led to a rallying of human solidarity and compassion at its very best this week. But after the dead are buried and the period of immediate grieving is passed, the fallout from the tragedy is likely to weaken major governments in the region and possibly exacerbate some bitter, long-running conflicts there.

The still young Congress government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in India is likely to reel for months if not years from the tragedy. Singh had only been in power for nine months when the catastrophe occurred and whatever culpability his government faces for the fatal lack of disaster preparedness along Indian's coastlines should in justice be shared with the previous Hindu nationalist-led government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Nevertheless, the catastrophe struck on Singh's watch. And already hard questions are being asked in the Indian press about the two and a half fatal hours during which the government knew, or should have known, that huge tidal waves were racing westward across the Indian Ocean following the unprecedented earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter scale early Sunday morning below the ocean.

Almost as bad, there will now be the sense of an ill-starred fate hanging over Singh and his policies that marked a radical break from those of the previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Vajpayee.

A similar sense of ill-starred omens is likely to overshadow strongly pro-American President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono across the ocean in Indonesia, where the death toll from the disaster was highest.

At least 80,000 people are now known to have died on the island of Sumatra alone. The eventual death toll could soar far above 100,000 on it. And the worst hit part of the giant island was the energy rich province of Aceh at its northern tip where guerrilla secessionist forces have been waging a fierce struggle for independence for years.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, all thoughts of human conflict have been swamped by the colossal horrors inflicted by an uncaring Nature. But antennae of the people of Aceh have been honed to alertness by decades of what they regard as shameless exploitation of their riches by the old 32-year military dictatorship of President Suharto from 1966 to 1998. It would not take much to revive suspicions that aid was being given to other, more favored regions first or that the government was simply uncaring and incompetent in dealing with the huge scale of the catastrophe to stir up new resentments.

There is plenty of precedent in South Asia for natural catastrophes being the harbinger of wars and revolutions. The great Bengal famine of 1943 cost the lives of two to four million people. Historians agree the main cause of the huge death toll was a combination of complacency, incompetence and lack of compassion by British wartime officials who were criminally negligent in waking up to the scale of the disaster. But the immediate political result was to destroy Hindu-Muslim community relations in Bengal with many people in each community convinced the other one was hoarding food and deliberately increasing their suffering.

Within four years, Bengal was torn apart by ferocious Hindu-Muslim clashes at independence in 1947 that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The province remains divided between India and the independent Muslim nation of Bangladesh to this day.

Natural disaster triggered war and revolution again in the same area only a quarter of a century later. The inhabitants of the region, then known as East Pakistan, were convinced that the Pakistani government a thousand miles away made no effort to relieve their sufferings after between 300,000 to a million people were killed in a huge tidal surge caused by unprecedented cyclones in the Bay of Bengal in November 1970. Again, mass resentment quickly turned violent and led to a national liberation struggle that cost hundreds of thousands more lives against Pakistan until India intervened the following year and ensured the independence of the nation of Bangladesh.

Sri Lanka, a third nation heavy hit by last Sunday's tsunamis, has long been rent apart by a bitter ferocious guerrilla-terror war waged by the Tamil Tigers. There too, the wrath of nature has temporarily drowned mere human hatreds. But whether the traumatic experience leads to a new era of moderation, compromise and goodwill or a renewal of old, bitter feuds has yet to be seen.

There is more recent precedent too for a terrible natural disaster catalyzing long festering resentment at an entrenched and incompetent government that was soon after swept out of office.

The great swathe of urban squalor and misery that sweeps crescent-like north of Istanbul and then eastward for 80 miles across the southern shore of the Black Sea is home to 10 million people. This usually forgotten region of Turkey briefly hit the international headlines in 1999 when the terrible Izmit earthquake killed 23,000 people.

The death toll was so horrendous because, as we noted in UPI Analysis at the time, developers had run up hundreds of shoddily built apartment blocks in defiance of building codes.

On Aug. 20, 1999, we warned in these columns, "The disaster may boost the appeal of Turkey's Islamic fundamentalists at the expense of the government, ultimately threatening Turkey's strong ties to the West. Turkey is a NATO member -- the only Muslim nation."

And sure enough, the anger and despair fostered by this event funneled a new wave of support to the Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan that propelled it to its landslide election victory in November 2002.

Singh in India and Yudhoyono in Indonesia will soon be made aware of how closely the survivors and relatives of the dead will be scrutinizing the record of their actions both before and after the unprecedented events of last Sunday. However long they stay in power and whatever achievements they complete or attempt, from now on everything they do will be under the shadow of that judgment.