Most tsunami victims still in tents, shelters

HONG KONG – A year after the waves spread destruction and death across South Asia, hundreds of thousands of tsunami victims still live in moldy tents and ramshackle camps where women are particularly vulnerable to abuse.

On the first anniversary of the tsunami Monday, 80 percent of the 1.8 million left homeless were still without “satisfactory permanent accommodation,” according to the anti-poverty group Oxfam International.

A survey of 2,300 tsunami victims by the San Francisco nonprofit Fritz Institute found 100 percent of respondents in the hardest-hit parts of the Indonesian island Sumatra, 92 percent in India and 78 percent in Sri Lanka are in tents or shelters.

Indonesia, where the tsunami killed up to 160,000 and left more than 500,000 homeless, has built just 16,200 of the 80,000 to 110,000 houses needed, the government says. At 5,000 new houses a month, its target won’t be reached for more than a year.

Sri Lanka has built just 5,000 of 78,000 planned houses. Tamil Nadu, the hardest-hit state in India, has built 1,000 of 31,700 houses, Oxfam said.

Two United Nations experts complained last week that survivors remain in shelters, many “mired in unacceptably rudimentary conditions.” Miloon Kothari and Walter Kalin said women are vulnerable “to physical and sexual abuse” in homeless camps where they have little privacy.

In many camps, men and women share latrines and bathing facilities, said Ritu Sharma of the Women’s Edge Coalition, a Washington advocacy group.

“There’s a huge sense of frustration,” says Sharma, who visited camps in Sri Lanka last month. “People don’t understand why the place is flush with (donor) money, but they are still living in tents.”