Twenty years later, they pay tribute to the 220,000 victims of the tsunami

The countries hit by the tsunami of December 26, 2004 will pay tribute next week to the more than 220,000 people who perished two decades ago when a tidal wave devastated regions bordering the Indian Ocean.

Tributes and religious ceremonies will take place across Asia, in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, countries hardest hit by one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

On Boxing Day 2004, giant waves sometimes reaching 30 meters in height devastated coastal areas, moving several kilometers inland, leaving thousands homeless and killing tourists on usually palm-fringed beaches. so peaceful.

“My children, my wife, my father, my mother, all my brothers and sisters were swept away,” Baharuddin Zainun, a survivor and fisherman from the Indonesian province of Aceh, told AFP.

“The same tragedy was felt by others as well. We feel the same feelings,” added the 69-year-old.

The origin of the earthquake is linked to the rupture of the subduction zone between two tectonic plates, over a length of approximately 1,200 kilometers.

The magnitude of the earthquake was initially estimated at 8.8, but was raised to 9.1 by the American Geological Survey (USGS).

At their maximum speed, the waves moved at nearly 800 km/h.

In total, the tsunami caused 226,408 deaths according to EM-DAT, a recognized global disaster database.

In Indonesia, where more than 160,000 people have died, ceremonies are planned in Banda Aceh, the most affected region, with first a minute of silence on December 26 shortly before 8 a.m. local time, when the disaster occurred. struck.

Government officials, NGO representatives and residents will then visit a mass grave in Banda Aceh where nearly 50,000 bodies lie, before an evening prayer at the city’s grand mosque.

In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people have been killed, a reconstructed express train, hit by giant waves 20 years ago, will connect the capital Colombo to Peraliya, where it was torn from the tracks.

A brief religious ceremony will take place with the relatives of the victims. Some 1,000 passengers died, as did residents who boarded the train after the first wave.

Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies will also be held to commemorate the victims in the South Asian island nation.

Thailand, which counted 5,000 dead in the disaster, half of them foreign tourists, but also 3,000 missing, is organizing an official ceremony on December 26 at which hundreds of people are expected.

Among the guests are representatives of the many foreign countries with victims.

In Phang Nga province, an exhibition on the tsunami, a documentary screening and presentations from the government and the United Nations on disaster preparedness are planned.

A commemorative walk-run is also scheduled for December 27, starting from the Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Memorial Park, a coastal garden with a Buddha statue and a curved concrete wall representing a wave, before concluding at the Tsunami Museum. tsunami located nearby.

Nearly 300 people also died on the African coast in Somalia, more than a hundred in the Maldives and dozens in Malaysia and Burma.

At the time, there was no warning system in the Indian Ocean, but today, a sophisticated network of monitoring stations helps reduce warning times.

“It is important for all of us to know, explain and simulate disasters,” says Marziani, an Indonesian teacher who goes by one name and lost a child in the tsunami.

“If we had known at the time that the mountain was not far away, we could have fled from it.”