Tsunami tragedy stirs caste bias in India

KEEZHAIVANAGIRI, India — Muthu Vellaithevan, a farm laborer who is part of India's untouchable caste, lost seven goats and a cow when massive waves lashed at his coastal village in the Dec. 26 earthquake-tsunami that ravaged coasts across South Asia. The water also swept away his thatch-roofed mud hut.

But he said his real problems began after the water receded, when his people became victims of aid discrimination by the fishermen of his village.

"Forty families from my community took shelter in a school building outside the village," recalled Vellaithevan, 35, a father of three. "But in two days, the fishermen's families at the shelter began troubling us. They did not allow us to sleep and eat with them. They did not want to be under the same roof with us."

The South Asian tragedy has ripped open centuries-old fault lines of caste in rural India's rigid social hierarchy. In the district of Nagapattinam, where more than 6,000 people died, untouchables from about 10 villages have openly protested what they call discrimination against them in the provision of relief supplies and access to shelters.

The Indian constitution outlaws the country's 3,000-year-old caste system, in which society is organized into groups ranked in a strict hierarchy. But many Indians retain the system mentally. Untouchables are at the bottom of the rural social order; people of other castes often consider them unclean and refuse any contact with them.

The chief of Thirumullaivasal village, Shankuntala Natesan, a woman from the fishing community, denied the charges of aid discrimination.

She said the losses suffered by the untouchables were small because they had little to begin with. She said 90 fishing people and three untouchables died in the village.

"We have lost everything. Our homes, boats and lives," Natesan said, as she showed a television and refrigerator that lay broken in her home. "They lost their thatch roofs, a few goats and maybe a sickle and a spade."

The fishing families lived closest to the sea in this coastal community and appeared to have suffered the most damage, in loss of both lives and livelihood, in this area. The bulk of relief supplies, from the government and private organizations, has gone to them.

"The fishermen have cornered all the relief supplies that come into the village. The whole world thought that only the fishermen are the victims," said Selvi Thangavelu, 40, whose husband washed fish and loaded them into trucks. "When we queued up for food or clothes, they said, 'Go away, we have suffered the most because we have lost lives and boats. What have you lost?' Our lives and our work are closely tied to theirs. But nobody paid any attention to us."

When they were thrown out of the school building, Vellaithevan and others went to a marriage hall and lived separately there for 10 days. The government built plastic-roofed tents for 10 untouchable families in the village, while all the fishing families received shelters, he said.

When the government gave the family the equivalent of $90 and two sacks of rice as immediate relief a week ago, they returned to their village. "Now we cook our own food with the help of the money," he said.

In Thirumullaivasal, 55 untouchable families have been living in a school away from the fishermen's tents. A private charity group cooks community meals in the village, but the untouchables allege that they mostly have served the fishing families.

"The fishermen say we will be fed only if there is extra food," said Neesa Madiazhagan, 28, a mother of two small children. "Whenever a relief truck enters the village, they unload it for themselves first. Whatever is left over is sent our way."

A senior bureaucrat looking after relief operations in Nagapattinam district acknowledged some problems with supplies not reaching the untouchables.

"Fishermen bore the brunt of the tragedy. The untouchables also faced the problems, but to a lesser extent. Naturally all the attention was on the fishing community. But there is no deliberate caste discrimination," said the official.

The World Conference on Disaster Reduction opened with a moment of silence for people killed in Dec. 26 tsunami. The five-day meeting held in Kobe, Japan, which is marking the 10th anniversary of a huge earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people, focused on disaster response, and will discuss an Indian Ocean alert network like the one on guard for tsunamis in the Pacific.

In Indonesia's Aceh province, a United Nations security consultant yesterday said a 24-hour ban on U.N. staff driving between provincial capital Banda Aceh and Medan, the largest city on tsunami-stricken Sumatra island, expired early yesterday and was not extended.

An unprecedented international forensic operation to identify more than 3,000 tsunami victims in Thailand has confirmed the identity of up to 15 people in its first week, Thai police said yesterday. Officials in the department said bodies so far identified included one Dutch citizen, one Canadian, one Italian, one Swede, two Norwegians, two Australians and two Japanese. The forensic operation involves Interpol, the Thai police and at least 20 other national police forces. It is believed to be the biggest disaster-victim identification system in history.