AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005

The human face of disaster
Dr Jim Robertson, Australian Federal Police and
Professor Beverley Raphael, Department of Health, NSW

Jim Robertson

Powerpoint presentation (443KB)

There are benefits and disadvantages about being the last, or second last, speaker here. Time is obviously flowing on, but it does give me the opportunity of picking up on some of the comments that earlier speakers have made.

First of all, it is a great pleasure and I do welcome the opportunity to contribute to this forum and give you a brief insight into the DVI, disaster victim identification, process. I was very pleased to see the acknowledgement by earlier speakers – Bruce Billson and David Templeman – of the DVI process in this. There has certainly been a greater public awareness in Australia (regrettably, flowing out of Bali and now with this) but I think interestingly perhaps the Australian public have put even less pressure on us in this incident and there is now much greater tolerance for the complexity and difficulty and the time it takes, and to get results and more acceptance. And I think that is because this is a natural disaster and not a man-made event.

The AFP was a member of the task force that you heard about earlier, that was established in the very early days, and DVI assistance – as I will show you in a slide in the moment – was specifically requested by the Thais and has been, and is, a significant part of Australia’s assistance to the region. It is an ongoing exercise; we are going to be there for at least the rest of this calendar year.

Of the 270,000-plus people – and who will ever know what the exact figure is? – who have died across the region, I think it is interesting to note that international DVI standards have only been broadly applied in Thailand to about five and a half thousand of those people. Quite frankly, it is outside the scope of my talk and the time available to me to go more deeply into the reasons for that, but I guess they are practically realistic and they are cultural as well.

David Templeman talked earlier on about being asked to assist, and we were asked to assist. The reason why is that we have been in the region – the AFP and Australia more generally – building relationships in normal times. I think that is a really, really important part of this. We can’t expect to go in and assist, or be asked to assist, in these regions if we are not actually investing and actually doing things for our neighbours during the normal times. Often the role that agencies can play is that we cut across some of the political stuff and just get on with it, against a backdrop of political realities.

Very quickly: as I said, how did we get involved? Well, the request was specifically made to assist with the disaster victim identification process. One of my managers, Julian Slater, chairs the Australasian DVI Committee and we have a plan which was activated, and an Australian group – this is not an AFP exercise, it is an Australian exercise – deployed on 29 December. Interestingly, David also commented earlier on about us turning up with resources. Through our rapid response plan – I will be blunt with you, developed for counterterrorism, not for natural disasters – we had been developing rapid response capability. We are the only country that actually turned up in Thailand with supplies to get things moving. That was to the great surprise of many of the other international countries, who just turned up there and expected that in some strange way it would be all there for them.

Our role in response to international incidents is to coordinate Australian assistance, and as I say, we deployed consumables in support of the operation.

Another one of my managers, Karl Kent, who you would have seen on the television many times over the last few months, was asked early on in the process by the Thais to take on a role as so-called Joint Chief of Staff, answering to a Police General, although there were a number of government departments in Thailand involved in this. As Chief of Staff he has been responsible, with a Thai equivalent, for coordinating all of the international assistance. During the first three weeks that built up to over 30 countries, with over 400 people assisting in the DVI process. It is a massive operation, culturally very difficult, bringing all of those people together.

I was asked in a radio interview a number of weeks ago where you start with something like this, and I wasn’t being flippant when I said, ‘At the beginning,’ because when the people arrived on the ground there were five and a half thousand bodies lying in a decaying condition on the ground.

There are five phases to the DVI process. The starting point was to just start preparing the deceased for post-mortem examinations. There were no refrigerated cabinets available; those had to be arranged. By the end of the first week, they were starting to be put into refrigerated containers, but by that stage there was major decomposition.

Our people have to deal with that. They have to be able to handle that, and they have to be able to do it in an objective way in order to obtain the end result, which for us is to be able to identify deceased persons.

For the people on the ground, there is an equal number or more people back in other places such as Canberra here, in incident rooms, dealing with the relatives of deceased, back in Australia. We started off here in a situation where it was expected there might be many hundreds of Australians amongst the thousands deceased.

Working with DFAT, that could be reduced over the weeks and we are now in the position, I guess, that we can say fortunately that it looks as if we may get out of this with 27 Australians deceased – 21 have now been identified and grave concerns are held for six.

The Thai government estimate the total number of deceased to be of the order of five and a half thousand, but there are likely to be many bodies that are never recovered, have been washed out to sea, and the DVI process will continue for many more months.

To date, over 100 Australians have contributed to that effort. That has included representatives from all states and territories, from police and non-police organisations, covering a wide range of different types of people, from forensic people to specialist DVI police, pathologists, missing persons staff, odontologists, scientists, family liaison officers, psychologists, counsellors and chaplains. I think that Beverley, who is following me, is going to pick up on the role of some of those people – the important role they play in helping staff such as the people involved in the DVI work to cope with what they have to deal with.

We take a very positive view of what we do. Some people again say, ‘Well, how can you do this sort of work?’ The reality is because, in our culture, bringing closure to people is important, being able to return their deceased loved one to them brings closure to them. We have heard a number of people through this morning talk about cultural sensitivity. Interestingly, it is a two-way street. It is important as well that the countries you are working in recognise the culture that you live in.

So in this instance you might ask, ‘Well, why is it that in Thailand, in particular, they have put a heavy emphasis on this DVI process?’ If you wanted to be slightly cynical you might say it is about tourism, because they recognise that at the end of the day they are not going to get the Western tourists to go back there unless there is a sense of confidence that they do the right thing by people if they find themselves in a situation like this. I would like to take a less cynical view and say that it is because they recognise culturally the importance to Western society that we actually are able to identify people and return them to their loved ones.

We are about the business of trying to create a sustainable future to deal with these sorts of incidents, and interestingly one of the reasons why we were able to respond so quickly, to be able to take supplies with us, was this rapid response project. But we also were planning to deliver five DVI courses around the region this year, and as part of that we were actually going to be delivering consumables and to deal with up to 200 victims of disasters t