Small islands seek an early warning system

AFP- TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2005

PORT LOUIS: A UN conference on small islands opened in Mauritius on Monday with a call to set up an early warning system in the wake of the tsunami disaster in Asia that left more than 156,000 dead. "We meet here in Mauritius at a time of terrible death and destruction caused by the Asian tsunami two weeks ago," said UN official Anwarul Chowdhury as he opened a week-long UN conference on small islands. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to attend the conference later this week after touring the Maldives, a cluster of 1,192 low-lying islands scattered across the Indian Ocean that was hard hit by the December 26 tidal waves.

"His recent call for a global early warning system needs serious attention from this conference," said Chowdhury, the secretary general of the meeting. An early warning system, which makes use of seismic stations throughout the world to locate earthquakes capable of unleashing giant waves, is already in place for Pacific Ocean countries.

Providing such technology and expertise has been singled out as one of the urgent measures to be taken in the aftermath of the tsunami, which the United Nations has said is the worst natural disaster in its history. "Many lives could have been saved had there been an appropriate early warning mechanism in the Indian Ocean," Paul Berenger, the prime minister of Mauritius, said