The Indian Ocean Tsunami Kills 230,000 on Boxing Day, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution Overturns a Stolen Election and Bush Wins Re-Election as Fallujah Falls

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2005 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2005

Quarterly Briefing

• A magnitude-9.1 earthquake off the coast of northern Sumatra on December 26 generates tsunamis across the Indian Ocean that strike coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia; as this edition is published, confirmed deaths stand at over 150,000 and the final toll is expected to exceed 200,000; the tsunami hits Sri Lanka and southern India with particular force; hundreds of thousands are displaced; the international humanitarian response is mobilising but remains wholly inadequate to the scale of the disaster.
• Ukraine’s presidential election of November 21, in which Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was fraudulently declared the winner over Viktor Yushchenko, triggers the Orange Revolution; up to a million protesters occupy Kiev’s Independence Square for three weeks; the Supreme Court nullifies the result; a re-run election on December 26 produces a clear Yushchenko victory; the event is the most significant democratic reversal of electoral fraud in the former Soviet space.
• George W. Bush is re-elected President of the United States on November 2 with 286 electoral votes and 51 per cent of the popular vote, the first president to win a majority of the popular vote since his father in 1988; his re-election is interpreted as endorsing the Iraq War and the war on terror strategy; Democrats face a fundamental reassessment of their approach to national security.
• US Marine and Iraqi forces capture Fallujah from insurgents in Operation Phantom Fury, November 7-19; the battle is the largest urban combat operation since Hue City in 1968; Fallujah is substantially destroyed; several hundred insurgents and 95 Americans are killed; the operation clears the city but most insurgent leaders escaped before the assault; the overall insurgency is undiminished.
• Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat dies in Paris on November 11 after a mysterious illness; his death removes the central figure of the Palestinian national movement for forty years; Mahmoud Abbas becomes the PLO Chairman and leads the Palestinian Authority; presidential elections are scheduled for January 9; the prospect of a renewed peace process, long blocked by Arafat’s polarising presence, opens cautiously.
• The Caribbean’s hurricane season — the most damaging since 2004— has produced Hurricane Ivan in September, which devastated Grenada, killed 39 people across the Caribbean and caused $13 billion in damage; Grenada’s reconstruction will require years and international support far exceeding the island’s own resources.

Prologue: The Quarter That Ended With a Wave

The last quarter of 2004 had seemed, by December 25, to have been defined by three concurrent narratives: Bush’s re-election and its implication for continued American engagement in Iraq; Ukraine’s democratic revolution and its implication for Russia’s sphere of influence; and Arafat’s death and its implication for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. All three were significant. Then, on December 26, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami announced, in nine hours and across fourteen countries, that the three political events that had dominated the world’s attention were dwarfed by nature’s capacity for catastrophic disruption. For the Caribbean, which in September had watched Hurricane Ivan destroy most of Grenada’s buildings, the tsunami served as a terrible reminder of the vulnerability that all island and coastal communities shared with the people of Aceh, Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu.

The Tsunami’s Immediate Aftermath

The scale of the Indian Ocean disaster was not immediately comprehensible. The earthquake’s magnitude of 9.1 released energy equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs; the tsunamis it generated crossed the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet aircraft. The displacement of the sea floor was so large that the Earth’s axis shifted slightly; day length changed by a few microseconds. In Banda Aceh, the first Indonesian city reached by the wave, entire coastal communities simply ceased to exist. Sri Lanka, which had no warning, lost hundreds of thousands of people along its southern and eastern coasts. Thailand’s tourist beaches — including Phuket and Koh Phi Phi — killed thousands of European and North American tourists whose deaths ensured Western media coverage.

As this edition is published, the confirmed death toll stands at over 150,000 and continues to rise; experienced disaster response officials are estimating that the final count will exceed 200,000. The humanitarian operation being assembled is the largest since the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran; the US military has deployed carrier battle groups and logistics aircraft from its Pacific command. For the Caribbean, the disaster’s immediate consequence was a global diversion of humanitarian attention and donor resources from existing crises, including ongoing recovery operations in Haiti following political unrest and a series of tropical storms in 2004.

Hurricane Ivan, Grenada and Caribbean Resilience

Grenada’s devastation by Hurricane Ivan on September 7 had demonstrated, weeks before the tsunami, the catastrophic vulnerability of small island states to extreme weather events. Ivan’s Category 3 winds destroyed or damaged 90 per cent of Grenada’s buildings; the nutmeg industry — Grenada’s principal agricultural export — lost an estimated forty per cent of its trees; hotels, schools and hospitals were devastated. The island of 100,000 people faced a reconstruction challenge that would take years and cost several times its GDP. Jamaica, spared a direct hit but affected by Ivan’s passage, sent assistance; CARICOM mobilised regional support; international donors pledged funds whose disbursement was characteristically slow. The Ivan experience reinforced the case that Caribbean small island states had been making in climate and development forums: their exposure to catastrophic events was structural, not incidental, and required systematic international risk-sharing mechanisms.

Looking Ahead

The Indian Ocean tsunami relief operation, just beginning as this edition is published, will be the defining humanitarian story of the first half of 2005; whether international generosity can be translated into effective reconstruction programmes across fourteen affected countries will determine how many of the 150,000 displaced survive their displacement. Bush’s second term begins January 20; his inaugural address and early policy appointments will indicate whether the next four years will bring any reconsideration of Iraq strategy. Palestine’s January 9 presidential election, with Abbas expected to win, creates the first real opportunity since the breakdown of Camp David in 2000 for a resumption of peace negotiations; the question is whether either side has the political will to take it.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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