Survivors and grieving relatives of victims yesterday held the first ceremonies marking one year since the Indian Ocean tsunami swept away at least 216,000 lives in one of the world's worst recent natural disasters.
Western tourists who returned to the beaches of southern Thailand where they were caught in the disaster were among hundreds of people who launched a boat laden with flowers, candles and incense to ward off evil spirits.
Ceremonies in Thailand yesterday were the first of hundreds due to be held to mark the disaster's grim anniversary in the dozen countries hit by the earthquake-spawned waves on Dec. 26 last year.
The mourning comes as survivors and officials take stock of the massive relief operation and peace processes in Sri Lanka and Indonesia's Aceh province, the two places hardest hit by the tsunami. In both cases, success has been mixed.
At Bang Niang beach in Thailand's Phang Nga Province, hundreds of mourners placed offerings into a brightly colored, bird-shaped boat that was floated into the Andaman Sea as members of the local Moken, or sea gypsy, community chanted and banged drums.
Peter Pruchniewitz, 68, who was swept from his hotel room and lost a friend to the waves a year ago, returned from Zurich, Switzerland, to attend anniversary ceremonies. Asked why, he said simply, ``to remember.''
In hardest-hit Indonesia, workers yesterday scaled the minarets of the imposing 16th century mosque in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, replacing missing tiles and slapping on a fresh coat of whitewash in preparation for special services tomorrow.
The tsunami resulted in a cease-fire between the government and Aceh's separatist guerillas and thousands of people have moved into new homes built with some of the billions of dollars in foreign aid that poured in after the disaster.
But aid agencies say 80 percent of Indonesians who lost their homes are still waiting for a new one.
In Sri Lanka, troops yesterday patrolled the streets of the capital, Colombo, amid boosted security for ceremonies marking the tsunami's anniversary.
Disputes over aid delivery and an upsurge in violence blamed on separatist Tamil Tiger rebels have dashed hopes that the tsunami would bring a final end to the country's long-running civil conflict.
Exactly one year ago tomorrow, the most powerful earthquake in four decades -- magnitude 9 -- ripped apart the ocean floor off Sumatra, displacing millions of tonnes of water and spawning giant waves that spread in all directions, picking up speed as they neared land.
Almost 400,000 homes were reduced to rubble and more than 2 million people left without a place to live, according the UN. The livelihoods of 1.5 million were swept away.
The tsunami generated an unprecedented outpouring of generosity, with donor pledges reaching some US$13.6 billion.
Rebuilding has started in some places, and fishing boats and seeds have been handed out to kick-start ruined village economies.
But many refugee camps are still full, with residents relying on aid handouts to survive, and the UN and others have expressed concern about the pace of rebuilding.
The small Christian communities in tsunami-hit countries were preparing Christmas services yesterday, and Muslim clerics in Aceh urged people to keep their end of year celebrations solemn to respect the tsunami dead.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
RSS