Splinters

The coverage of the tsunami's one year anniversary leaves a lot to be desired. I only have access to BBC World and their tsunami reporting is pitiful even by the own mediocre standards. There's a lot of images of the ceremonies and people crying, close ups of memorials and grieving faces, disaster porn in short: but there is no mention at all of the the millions of dollars which have gone missing from the aid pledged to the tsunami victims; of government corruption and failure to help their own people; of the villagers who received more aid than they knew what to do with while those in the village next door received nothing; and of the unaccountablity of the international NGOs who descended on the tsunami zones and seem to have spent as much time squabbling with each other as helping those who have lost everything.

You only have to read the Bangkok Post and The Nation, Thailand's English language newspapers, for a couple of weeks to understand that there is a huge collection of problems that still remain in Thailand in the fallout of the tsunami, and the rush to restore the affected regions so as to get tourists to return has been at the expense of the local people themselves. Managing a response to the tsunami is incredibly complex, so problems and big errors of judgement are only to be expected too - but the BBC doesn't report any of it and doesn't even acknowledge it as a problem. The Bangkok Post today published an excellent tsunami report that tries to highlight and analyse all these problems, ranging from the shoddiness of replacement houses built after the tsunami to the Burmese workers in Thailand who hid in fear from both the tsunami and the Thai police.

My feelings on the anniversary of the tsunami are mixed. Sadness and grief, obviously - so obvious that does it even need to written or plastered all over the television? Is there anyone who doesn't feel sadness about the events of a year ago, however unaffected? Gratitude that I left Khao Lak three weeks before the tsunami struck, after living there for a month through last November. Most of all, relief that all my friends who were living and working in Khao Lak, Koh Phi Phi and Koh Lanta all escaped safely and have subsequently managed to rebuild their businesses and get on with their lives.

But at the moment I mainly feel anger at the lack of attention paid to all the problems faced by Thailand in the aftermath of the tsunami. The dead are dead - but the living must go on living. The media, and especially its international bastions like the BBC, need to stop reducing disasters to the level of soap operas and start doing some real journalism - investigate and follow the issues created by the tsunami, track down those who are accountable and get some answers. At the moment their reports are filled with assertions, and not verifications, and more importantly, they're full of vague platitudes and mawkish voiceovers. They are, in short, helping no one and they are not even reporting a semblance of the truth.

I calculate that in the 13 years I lived in the UK as a TV license payer, I must have given the BBC over a thousand pounds. Unless they pull their finger out and start delivering some of quality investigative journalism for which they are supposedly famed, I'd like my money back.

[Other stuff I've written on the tsunami: my first post the day after the tsunami happened; the stories of how my friends escaped the tsunami; my return to Khao Lak in January 2005; and going through a tsunami warning on Koh Lanta in April 2005.

I've also written articles for Asian Diver magazine about diving the Similan Islands and Koh Lanta after the tsunami, which are reproduced on my scuba diving site Divehappy.]

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