100,000 dead here, 100,000 dead there

International relief agencies now report more than 100,000 have died as a result of last week's tsunami. Meanwhile the British journal Lancet estimates that at least that many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq.

100,000 dead here, 100,000 dead there: is there really any difference?

Sure, you say, Woodburydadd's about to take an obviously true but none-the-less cheap shot and point out that in one case they died as a result of an unanticipated natural disaster, while in the other they were killed as a result of a conscious decision by the U.S. to invade another country.



But is that all? Were the tsunami deaths unanticipated victims?



There's another dimension to this tragedy, one which we in the west seem to be trying our level best to avoid. We ought to consider this:

How many permanent residents of the region were killed as a result of the economic system that forces them to live and work in the coastal areas?

Plenty of western tourists now seem to be making their way to the safety of their homes (after stopping to provide their "survivor stories" for the television cameras). We ought to consider why these foreigners were there in the first place ... and how that added to the scale of this tragedy.



Over the three decades since the U.S. retreat from its war on Vietnam, Southeast Asia has become a vacation mecca for all sorts of affluent tourists, most of them from the western hemisphere. Attracted by the five-star resorts and the lure of low prices including $3/night beach front bungalows, tourists triggered an economic boom and an entire economy developed that was centered in the coastal regions and focused on the tourism industry.



Inevitably, local citizens in droves uprooted entire families to move to the coastal regions in order to take jobs serving the tourists. Abandoning their traditional villages inland, breaking up extended families and social support systems, a generation migrated in search of a measure of economic security. And the western tourists, coming from their worlds of plenty, provided the momentum by happily partaking of the bargain prices in this paradise on earth.



Cultural geographers point out that beach front regions are usually not favorable for human settlements. The soil is generally bad and the water is likely to be salty. There are frequent storms and, occasionally, a tsunami. And so settlements, particularly in agrarian societies, tend to be a way back from the beach. Unless there is some additional catalyst to encourage settlement, population centers tend to develop a safe distance away from the beach ... and often the catalyst is an economic one.



In Thailand alone tourism was a $20 billion industry last year. Is it any wonder then that government seismologists on the island of Sumatra, near the epicenter of the earthquake that triggered the tsunami, decided that it would be best delay issuing a warning because, if they were wrong, a false alarm might harm the tourism industry.



But now the tourists have gone leaving behind the locals to pick through the ruins, the air polluted with the stench of rotting corpses, perhaps pausing to contemplate what they have in common with the west ... and with the people of Iraq.



The Lancet (UK) - Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq



The Star (Malaysia) - Thai tourism to suffer as tourists flee devastated beaches