Every child's nightmare (From Warrington Guardian)

Every child's nightmare

FORMER BBC war reporter Martin Bell, who served the people of Knutsford as their MP for four years, spent five days in Sri Lanka and witnessed the devastation of the Asian tsunami for himself.

Here the Unicef ambassador tells the Knutsford Guardian about the experience

IT is perhaps only once in a lifetime or even in a generation that a calamity occurs of such colossal and earth-shaking proportions that it stops us in our tracks.

A calamity that impresses on us most suddenly and dramatically what not to take for granted; that reminds us of destructive forces beyond our control; that shakes us out of our ingrained habit of caring mostly for ourselves and those around us.

The current crisis in Asia is one such calamity. It has inflicted untold damage and casualties that can still only be guessed at, on some of the poorest places in the world.

Two of them - Sri Lanka and Aceh province in Indonesia - have recently suffered the horrors of civil war. At least the tsunami puts those conflicts into some kind of perspective.

But it is in my experience since I became ambassador for UNICEF in 2001, that the more we know about these things the more we realise what we do not know.

Even now, only the sketchiest of reports have come in from the remotest and worst-affected communities.

There is an especially worrying lack of information from Nicobar and Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean, directly in the path of the tsunami, where thousands of people are at risk.

What is tragically clear, however, is that across the affected countries it is the children who have suffered and are suffering, disproportionately.

UNICEF estimates that one third of the victims of this disaster are children.

The very young are the most vulnerable to the next stage of this killer catastrophe - cholera and other diseases arising from the destruction of fresh water supplies and the contamination of water by whatever human and animal remains may be decomposing in it.

Children need special help and are least able to take care of themselves.

UNICEF is working first and foremost to keep children in affected areas alive. Their number one priority is the health, well-being and protection of these children who are becoming more and more vulnerable to disease every day.

From every corner of these ocean territories we also hear of stories of parents who have lost their children and children who have lost their parents.

There are countless children in this desperate predicament and organisations like UNICEF are doing what they can to work with governments and other relief agencies to ensure a system of identifying such separated children and relocating their families and communities.

It is every child's nightmare to be cast adrift.

And every parent's to have lost a loved one and not to know even where to start looking.

Such nightmares are afflicting the poorest of the poor.

From a coastal village in south-eastern India, there are reports of mothers, who, unable to find their children, lack so much as the money or the bus fare to go looking further afield.

Every day and every hour now matters. Delay kills. Timely intervention saves lives.

It does no harm to recognise how quickly the aid agencies and charities like UNICEF mobilised their resources while most of us were struggling to shake off the effects of Christmas.

Supplies have already been delivered to the region including tens of thousands of blankets, hundreds of thousands of rehydration salts for sick children, medical supplies for thousands of people and shelter equipment such as tents.

But the task for UNICEF is daunting and the full extent of the need remains to be seen.

Aid flights are giving hope, but are nowhere near enough.

With every day that passes the need will grow and I believe that we the British public have a special part to play.

We are a generous people. We are an international people.

We need to do our bit.

Many of the countries affected are our former colonies.

So many of our people are bound by ties of kinship and history to their people.

The Indian and Sri Lankan communities in this country feel their suffering in an almost personal way. But so do we all. We live together precariously on a fragile, endangered planet.

We are many people and yet all, in a sense, one people.

A common humanity binds us together.

We do not share the suffering of those fated to live by the Indian Ocean - but at least - through the power of television we are made aware of it.

We do not have the alibi of ignorance.

The lost child we see helpless and parentless among the wreckage of what was once a coastal community in Sumatra, Aceh or Sri Lanka - that is a child who might as well be ours, whom indirectly we can help, and to whom we can reach out as one of our own.

Governments, of course, have a responsibility to do what they can, and what they must.

So does the United Nations. So, also, do we.

Here's a challenge. Reckon how much money you think you can give to organisations like UNICEF. And then double it.

Cheques and postal orders made payable to UNICEF can be sent to: UNICEF Asia Tsunami Children's Emergency Appeal, PO Box 254, Prestwich, Manchester M25 3WT.

It was as if all the war zones in the world had been dumped on the coast: Page 19