How Britain Let Us Down,

[The_Moog]

From today's Observer. Just in case you thought that British Embassy arrogance and incompetance was limited to visa issuance.

How Britain let us down, say desperate survivors of the tsunami disaster

UK diplomats have always been a byword for calm. But when disaster struck Thailand last Boxing Day, distraught families who turned to the embassy for help instead found incompetence, callous indifference and inhumanity. Gaby Hinsliff reveals how the Foreign Office failed its citizens in their hour of need

Sunday September 11, 2005

The Observer

When the Boxing Day tsunami hit the idyllic beach house he had built on the coast of southern Thailand, Michael Holland lost three generations of his family in one brutal stroke.

His mother Jane, his 15-year-old daughter Lucy and his wife Jane - a ballet administrator and the daughter of film director Richard Attenborough - all died in the wave. His elder daughter, Alice, was seriously injured. Of the party of 24 staying in the four houses near Khao Lak, six never came home.

Nine months on, Mr Holland is reluctant to dwell on personal grief. What he radiates instead is a fierce desire to hold the British consulate in Thailand publicly to account for failing to help bereaved, injured and stranded Britons.

A remarkable account of the aftermath of the disaster - compiled for the Foreign Office by the Hollands and three other families involved, and seen by The Observer - reveals unimaginable trauma worsened by what Mr Holland calls the 'bumbling incompetence' of British officials on the ground.

It has, he argues, 'direct echoes' of reports from British survivors of Hurricane Katrina in the US, with its claims of British diplomats apparently incapable of reaching the stricken areas in time to help and emergency procedures inadequate for the scale of tragedy. And it raises serious questions over whether the Foreign Office had learnt the lessons of the tsunami by the time disaster struck again in New Orleans.

When Mr Holland emailed the British embassy in Bangkok from the Thai hospital where his surviving daughter was close to death, asking for help, he says he did not even receive a phone call. 'Had I relied on them to get Alice out of the country, she would not have survived,' he says bluntly. She was eventually evacuated via friends in Singapore, who persuaded the British High Commissioner there to get her out.

Mr Holland's feelings are echoed by a family friend, Kate Rage, who lost her husband at Khao Lak. Newly widowed and clad only in her swimsuit and sarong, Mrs Rage and her three children struggled across southern Thailand to reach British officials, only to be turned away because her late husband was Swedish and her children - British born and raised - carried Swedish passports.

Mrs Rage finds the lack of compassion towards her children hard to forgive. 'They had witnessed things they should never have witnessed. They were looking at the dead, and holding injured people's hands. My son was really instrumental in rescuing several people out of the water. I had had to tell them their father wasn't ever going to be coming home again,' she says.

'There were lots of double-barrelled names

and double-breasted suits, clicking their shoes together. But the trouble is they didn't do anything.'

Like the other Khao Lak families, she speaks out today in the hope that lessons will be learnt. The National Audit Office is investigating the handling of the tsunami and the broader role of consular services, and is expected to produce recommendations for improvement shortly. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee is expected to grill senior Foreign Office officials over the issue soon.

But Mr Holland warns: 'Unless there is a fundamental desire to really understand and really learn, nothing ever will move forward.' he says.

This is the survivors' story:

Two sets of photographs of Khao Lak are stored on Mr Holland's laptop. The first shows a group of luxurious five-bedroom houses perched on powdery white sand. The second, taken after the huge wave, shows a mass of uprooted trees and mangled concrete. The devastation is clear.

The close-knit group of four families who built beach houses together were a resourceful bunch. Well travelled and well connected, they included the director of a City bank and the head of a travel company. Mr Holland is a shipping executive with friends and contacts across Asia. They knew how to pull strings. Yet they were shocked at how little official help was available.

'I dread to think what would have happened had we not had a certain amount of financial resources, or contacts in Bangkok,' says Simon Clough, a close friend of Mr Holland's, who had a house on the beach and lost his wife Melanie in the tsunami.

The men were further inland playing golf when the wave hit. With no British official presence to help, they began desperately searching local hospitals and then mortuaries for missing wives and children, who had been at the beach. The first 48 hours were chaotic.

'I used to stop people on the side of the road, flag them down and say "How much can I give you to take me here or there"?' says Mr Holland. He quickly traced Alice, 17, to a hospital in Phang Na. He says Swedish, Finnish and French officials visited the hospital to help their nationals 'from day one' but no British officials came.

He was advised to go to the resort of Phuket, where the British team was based. This popular resort suffered far lighter losses than Khao Lak. The journey was more than 100 kilometres (62 miles), with little transport available. Fearing Alice was dying, Mr Holland emailed a frantic message to the British embassy in Bangkok. 'I never got a response,' he says.

Instead, friends in Singapore hired an air ambulance and got help from the Singapore High Commissioner, Alan Collins. He arranged for Mr Holland's daughter, whose passport had been lost, to be evacuated without papers on humanitarian grounds. Mr Holland was later told that the British ambassador in Bangkok, David Fall, had set out for the hospital on 29 December. By then, Alice had already been evacuated.

Mr Holland then returned to Thailand to continue searching. His friends, meanwhile, were in a hotel inland, where they bumped into Colonel Peter Roberts, the embassy's defence attaché.

'He took details from us about the missing people, wrote it on a bit of paper and stuck a British flag on it, then stuck it on a noticeboard somewhere,' says Mr Clough. 'There was no offer of transport. Basically, he and his friends - it was about 9pm or whatever - said "We have been working pretty hard, we had better go home now".'

With local Thais working around the clock, the British families were unimpressed. Their report alleges that 'from their clear reluctance to engage with us, one had the impression that they... regarded our chance encounter with them as rather unfortunate [for them].'

They did not see Roberts again. The next they heard of him was last February when he was charged with drunkenness and threatening behaviour on a flight home. Roberts denies the charges and will face trial.

Although Germany and the US laid on buses to take their citizens to Phuket for evacuation, the British officials did not. The families were eventually rescued by a British expat friend based in Bangkok, who chartered a bus to take 15 survivors to the capital.

Mr Clough, unable to find his wife's body, flew home with his daughters on the first available British Airways flight from Bangkok, on New Year's Day. Other nations, he says, began evacuating survivors days before. Even then, the plane was half-empty, prompting suspicions that other British survivors were unable to reach it.

Although Kate and Peter Rage knew the Clough family in London, it was sheer coincidence that they ended up spending Christmas in a Khao Lak hotel near their friends. They were relaxing around their swimming pool when the first wave hit. At first, they did not realise the danger.

'My husband was so fascinated to see the wave coming in that he just stood there with my middle daughter, watching,' recalls Kate Rage. She escaped with her son Philip, then 15, and her daughter Olivia, 10, by racing to the roof of their hotel, but her husband and Lily, 14, were swept away. Cadging lifts on the back of strangers' mopeds, Mrs Rage began a desperate search.

Late that night, she found her daughter in hospital, wounded and traumatised. 'The last thing she knew, she had been holding my husband's hand. She thought she had been orphaned.' But there was no sign of her husband.

She found Peter's body on 27 December after a grim search of local mortuaries. Now desperate to get the family home, she rang the British embassy from a Red Cross shelter which had taken them in. Mrs Rage says she explained the family's mixed nationality, but was assured it was irrelevant.

'I told them I was a British mother and I had lost my husband, and I was told repeatedly that they would call me back. I gave them four separate numbers to the shelter, but nobody ever did.'

The Red Cross put them on a bus heading for a Phuket hospital. Exhausted, distressed and desperate for treatment for Lily's now infected wounds, Mrs Rage had a 'major fit' that caught the attention of a British expatriate. He took her to where the British consular team had set up camp.

'The British officials said, "Sorry for your loss, madam, but given that you have a British passport and your children are on Swedish passports we can't help you",' says Mrs Rage. 'I wasn't even offered a cup of tea: I wasn't offered any clothing - I was in a sarong and a pair of trainers with blood coming out of everywhere.'

She was finally evacuated by the Australian airline Qantas after a member of its staff overheard her pleading for help from more British officials. The final indignity, she says, was landing in Britain to be told by the medic meeting the flight that he could not deal with her daughter's infected wounds.

The families have been struck by the similarities between their stories and those of Britons in New Orleans, who have described how, while journalists reached survivors in hours, consular officials remained outside the city, insisting they could not get in. 'There are direct echoes: it's an inability to think on their feet, an inability to do anything except by the book,' says Mr Holland. 'This is symptomatic of a rather more deep-seated issue.'

Within weeks of returning home, the families began challenging the Foreign Office. Why were the evacuation flights from Bangkok, not Phuket, nearer those stranded? Why were calls for help to the embassy apparently ignored in the crucial first 48 hours? Why, if an Australian airline could take pity on Mrs Rage, were the British so inflexible? And why, when the embassy had plans for an emergency evacuation in the event of a terrorist attack, had it not been better prepared?

Although ambassador Fall offered the families what Mr Clough calls 'rather a forced apology' at a meeting last July, and all three praise the senior officials appointed to a unit overseeing tsunami survivors on their return to Britain, they remain unhappy with the answers they have had so far.

Mrs Rage fears that fighting the authorities has interfered with her recovery: 'I was really angry. In many ways that's probably a good thing, but maybe I haven't started grieving yet, because I have really had to go out there and fight. It's not nice, when you want to be left with your own thoughts and to miss the person you loved.'

Mr Holland, who received a letter from a senior Foreign Office official acknowledging that 'we failed to give proper service in some areas', remains concerned by Fall's response. 'His view is that they did the best anybody could have done and they were the "best in class",' he says bitterly.

Mr Clough says that if half the New Orleans reports 'are true it doesn't seem that they have learnt any lessons whatsoever. It just smacks of complacency and old colonialism. I would like people to speak out, because a lot of this gets brushed under the carpet. You get people like Tony Blair saying people are doing their absolute best [in New Orleans] working 24 hours a day and that's supposed to placate us.'

The families also want the Foreign Office to take seriously the recommendations in its own report, passed to the department in February. These range from providing the embassy with the 4x4 vehicles it lacked - essential for negotiating a ravaged landscape - to increased training in disaster management and better arrangements for bringing in medical supplies immediately. The report has been forwarded to the Audit Office.

Clough also wants the Foreign Office to disclose the findings of its own, unpublished internal review of the handling of the tsunami. A short memo based on that review, sent to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said changes would be made to disaster handling, including training officers 'to deal with emotional survivors', arranging emergency funds fast and guidelines for using expatriates.

A Foreign Office spokesman said last night that the Foreign Secretary had met both Mr Holland and Mr Clough, and that officials were still talking to the families. 'We recognise that Mr Holland has been through a horrific experience and have expressed our deepest condolences for his losses. We have apologised unreservedly for where we have failed,' he said. The families' recommendations had been incorporated 'as appropriate' into the FO review.

Mrs Rage too 'had not received a standard of care or service that should have been expected', he said. 'We are looking at why this has happened.' New measures were being implemented to improve future emergency responses.

The tales from New Orleans, however, have left the Khao Lak families with lingering doubts. 'I wanted people to learn the lessons for next time,' says Mrs Rage. 'But there's already been a next time. It can happen anywhere. What if it happens again?'

Link

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1567285,00.html