On Friday, the 28th of September, a 7.5-magnitude earth quake set off a tsunami that engulfed the city of Palu, the central island of Sulawesi. The number of people known to have died as risen up to 1.4000, government thinks at least thousands are dead. At least 60.000 people had lost their homes. This Wednesday a volcano began erupting on the same island, yet there is no information about killed or injured people.
The people in the area have no water, less food and electricity supply is still cut. When the people tried to take supplies from the shops, there was police firing warning shots and tear gas on the them.
Critique is getting louder about the Tsunami Early Warning System, which had been installed after the big Tsunami in 2004 (finished in 2008), where 250.000 people was killed. The German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS) was build up from German technicians. It consists of seismographic sensors, buoys, tidal gauges and GPS – none of these measures were able to predict the scale of the Tsunami and warn the people. A stuff member said, that since years the Early Warning System doesn‘t run adequately. More than 22 measuring stations are destroyed, disappeared or never serviced. In the case of Palu, the next measuring station is around 300 kilometers south of the city, too far to give reliable data.
The GITEWS was built by the German imperialists, but it was never fixed who pays the service. There are nearly no, except one in 2009, civil protection exercise to test the GITEWS for its function in practice. A lot of measurement results, which has been measured from India, Sri Lanka or Malaysia stay „secret“, because of „national interests“. As well as all data from th UN-Organization CTBTO, which watches the prohibition of nuclear weapon tests. They have many data from undersea in the Indian ocean – but „secret“. What kind of „help“ is it when western imperialist countries like Germany install a Warning System, if it just „technically“ works? Early Warning Systems have to fit in the concrete circumstances of the country and the area. In the case of the GITEWS it‘s just imperialist investment, which has nothing to do with the intention of saving lives.
Imperialism is killing those victims of the Tsunami Catastrophe. The imperialist world system shows the more and more aggravated contradiction between the productive forces (here the technical measuring instruments and technology) and the Imperialist world system, which bases on the exploitation and oppression of 2/3 of the whole world from a hand full of imperialist countries.Now the imperialists give „aid“ for the victims of the Tsunami-catastrophe. T