The tsunami-hit country will commemorate next week the more than 220,000 people who died in the Boxing Day disaster two decades ago, when huge waves ripped through communities along the Indian Ocean coast.
Seaside commemorations and religious ceremonies will be held across Asia in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, the countries hardest hit by one of the worst disasters in modern history.
On December 26, 2004, a tsunami that reached 30 meters (98 feet) in some areas devastated coastal areas, tore apart families, left thousands homeless and killed winter holiday visitors to palm-fringed beaches. .
“My children, my wife, my father, my mother, all my brothers and sisters were swept away,” said Baharuddin Zainun, a 70-year-old survivor and fisherman in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
“Others are feeling the same tragedy. We feel the same way.”
An undersea earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale caused the largest fault line ever to rupture and sent huge waves sweeping through coastal communities around the Indian Ocean basin.
The seafloor was torn open and waves traveled across the Indian Ocean without warning for hours at twice the speed of a bullet train.
According to EM-DAT, a recognized global disaster database, a total of 226,408 people died in the tsunami.
In Indonesia, where more than 160,000 people have died, mourners will gather in Banda Aceh for a series of ceremonies as the disaster strikes, starting with a moment of silence shortly before 8am local time (0100 GMT).
Government officials, NGO representatives and the public will visit the mass graves in Banda Aceh, where nearly 50,000 bodies are buried, before holding evening collective prayers at the city’s Grand Mosque.
– Train Ceremony –
In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people have died, a rebuilt express train that was hit by huge waves 20 years ago will run from the capital Colombo to the same spot in Peraliya where the track was ripped off.
A brief religious ceremony will be held for relatives of those who died in the incident, which killed around 1,000 passengers, and for residents who boarded the train after the first wave inundated low-lying areas.
Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies will also be held to commemorate the victims across the South Asian island nation.
Official figures say more than 5,000 people have died in Thailand, about half of them foreign tourists, and 3,000 are missing, with hundreds expected to attend a government memorial service scheduled for December 26.
Among the invitees were representatives from foreign countries, and about 2,500 of the dead were tourists from these countries.
A tsunami exhibition, documentary screenings and presentations on disaster preparedness and recovery measures by government and UN agencies will be held at a hotel in Phang Nga province.
Local residents and mourners from across Thailand may hold informal candlelight vigils on the beach.
A commemorative “walk and run” scheduled for December 27 will begin at Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Memorial Park, a coastal garden with Buddha statues and curved concrete walls representing waves, before stopping at the nearby Tsunami Museum.
Nearly 300 people died as far away as Somalia, more than 100 died in the Maldives and dozens more died in Malaysia and Myanmar.
In 2004, there was no early warning system in the Indian Ocean, but now a complex network of monitoring stations has shortened warning times.
“It’s very important for all of us to understand, communicate and simulate (disasters),” said Marziani, an Indonesian teacher.
“If we had known that the mountain was not far away, we could have escaped it.”
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