Echoes of 9/11 as friends and relatives look for loved ones
Pictures of Thai families posing stiffly for a formal photo, smiling tourists basking in the sun and photos of battered corpses flutter from notice boards at Phuket’s city hall - they are the missing and the dead from Sunday’s devastating tsunamis.
In scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, anxious friends and relatives are converging on city hall - a makeshift diplomatic enclave and relief centre on the Thai island of Phuket where nations have set up temporary embassies on fold-up tables.
Diplomats log lists of names in computers and offer free phone calls to survivors.
There are computers giving access to websites and internet message boards designed to link up family and friends with the missing.
Experts from around the world have poured into Phuket with equipment to identify victims or take DNA samples and photographs to help put a name to them in the future. Computer-generated lists of the dead and digital photos are posted on notice boards alongside those of survivors.
But there is a huge gulf between the well co-ordinated efforts in this tourist haven – where many victims were wealthy foreigners – and impoverished regions even harder hit by Sunday’s tragedy.
In poor coastal regions of India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – where most of the 100,000 victims died – most relatives have virtually no access to computers and many are illiterate.
In Indonesia’s Banda Aceh region, Samson, who uses only one name, was looking for his grandmother by checking corpse after corpse.
By the side of a road where she used to live, he lifted a mattress covering a bloated body.
“It’s not her,” Samson shouted to his mother, who couldn’t bare to watch. “This one has black hair.”
Samson, with cotton wool in each nostril to block out the stench, said he would check all the hundreds of corpses still littering the streets close to where her house used to be. If he had no luck, he would check Banda Aceh’s one functioning hospital and then the scores of refugee camps.
“If we still can’t find her, then we will accept it as God’s will,” he said.
Many of the corpses it seems are destined to end up unidentified and buried in mass graves, amid fears that rotting corpses could spread disease.
The story is the same along the south-eastern coast of India.
In Tamil Nadu state, where more than 6,000 of the national total of nearly 7,000 deaths occurred, hundreds of distraught people left no stone unturned, literally, to look for loved ones. They combed the beaches, turned every boat, every piece of wood and rocks to look for bodies. Many found them.
In the Christian town of Velangani, most of the dead were out-of-town visitors and pilgrims. After the disaster, hundreds of relatives descended on the region looking for their loved ones.
The task of finding the bodies has been left to the police, who have cordoned off beaches to all except a volunteer force of body searchers.
“Relatives cannot search for themselves so we have employed volunteers who are tracing the bodies, consoling kith and kin. We have made arrangements for them to stay here also,” said Father Xavier, the rector of the Bascilica of Our Lady of Good Health, a shrine dedicated to Virgin Mary.
In Sri Lanka, where more than 4,000 people are unaccounted for, television channels are devoting 10 minutes every hour to read the names and details of the missing. Often photos of the missing are shown with appeals that they should contact the family or at the nearest police stations.
Back in Phuket – and despite the high-tech efforts, Canadians Catherine and David Smith were supposed to meet their friends John and Jackie Knill yesterday. Instead, the Smiths spent the day pouring over pictures at city hall after spending the night sleeping on the lawn of a hospital.
At the hall – where dazed survivors mingled with diplomats, volunteer helpers and other people trying to track down loved ones – the Smiths registered their friends, also from Vancouver, as missing.
There is no word on their plight.
German volunteer Thomas Mueller said a German came in Wednesday looking for his mother-in-law. Instead he found her image – among those of the dead.
“The man he was very sad about it. He didn’t cry, but you could see it in his face – very sad,” Mueller said.
The photo boards show images of people from countries including Mexico, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland and France.
“The saddest thing is just all the other foreigners that we’ve run into over the last day and just hearing who they’re looking for,” Catherine Smith said, her voice choking with emotion.
“Not to sound cliché, but I feel like I’m reliving 9/11. I remember sitting at home and watching people who were searching for their missing loved ones and now I’m doing it. It’s very surreal.”
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