Posted on 12/29/2004 1:00:53 PM PST by Charles Henrickson
STOCKHOLM (AFP) - With more than 1,000 Swedish tourists in Thailand still unaccounted for, Sweden looked likely to be the Western country hardest-hit by the giant tidal waves which struck Asia's coastlines.
"The catastrophe is probably the worst of our time and will impact everyday Swedish life for a long time to come," Prime Minister Goeran Persson told a news conference on Wednesday.
Calling the tidal waves "a huge tragedy" Persson said the number of Swedish victims was "very high", but offered no figures beyond the six Swedish fatalities which had been positively identified since Tuesday.
"What we need now is national unity," Persson said.
Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds spoke of a "national trauma" for her country.
In Phuket, Thailand, where she touched down on Wednesday, Freivalds said more than 1,000 Swedes were still missing.
"Many of them, I fear, we will not find," she was quoted as saying by the TT news agency.
Freivalds compared the trauma for Swedes with the 1994 sinking of the Estonia car ferry, Europe's worst post-war maritime disaster, which occurred during a crossing from Tallinn to Stockholm and was survived by only 137 of the 989 on board.
"You won't find many people in Sweden who don't have some personal link to this tragedy," Freivalds said.
When the waves struck, some 20,000 to 30,000 Swedes were believed to be holidaying in the disaster areas, of whom up to 10,000 could have been travelling independently of any tour operator, officials said.
Some 80,000 Swedes visited Phuket in 2003.
The Thai authorities said that Western tourists had borne the brunt of the tidal wave disaster, especially northern Europeans.
"For the tourists the hardest-hit group was northern Europe, especially Scandinavia," Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters.
Norway was still without news of 446 of its citizens in Thailand, the government said Wednesday.
A further 930 Norwegians were believed to have been in the region at the time of the disaster, but their exact whereabouts were not known, Foreign Minister Jan Petersen told a news conference.
The official casualty toll was still 13 Norwegians dead, and between 20 and 40 injured.
Norway was to dispatch a second aircraft equipped with medical facilities on Thursday to Thailand after a first such plane took off Wednesday.
As families across Scandinavia endured the painful wait for news from their loved ones, the Swedish government announced efforts to repatriate its citizens from Thailand.
"The most important thing is now to get all Swedes home," Freivalds said.
This included those in hospital. "They are clearly well taken care of, but we are putting strain on the health services here in Thailand which does not have enough resources for its own population," she said.
Swedish tour operator Fritidsresor said Wednesday that simply evacuating people from Phuket was "no longer enough".
"There is a crying need for ambulance transport for people with open wounds and those who are in a state of shock," Managing Director Johan Lundgren said.
Fritidsresor spokeswoman Lottie Knutson said the Thai authorities sent many tourists from evacuated areas straight to Phuket airport, although they were in urgent need of medical attention.
"There are thousands of tourists with open wounds, bleeding and in a state of shock at the airport," she said. "There are no doctors, no air conditioning. People are lying there in the heat and dying," she said.
At the request of the government, Scandinavian flagship carrier SAS said it will add 14 flights from Thailand to Scandinavian capitals to its regular schedule before the weekend, and hopes to repatriate 3,500 Swedes. The first two aircraft left Stockholm's international airport Arlanda on Wednesday.
Swedish mobile phone operators Telia, Tele2 and Vodafone all stopped charging for mobile phone calls to and from Southeast Asia for 48 hours to make it easier for survivors to get in touch with their families.
The three companies also sent SMS messages to all Swedish-registered phones in Thailand asking subscribers to make contact with their families or the Swedish embassy.
well, California had Johnny (Jihad) Taliban.
good to hear from ya, militanutcase.hope you didn't have
any friends or rellies in Asia.
good luck.
I also have wondered about the vile sex trade and its predators in some of these areas.
I'll second that! It is considered extremely bad form of you fail to warn folks before opening a can of Surströmming! Seriously! It is nasty!
I won't. The replies are pretty incredible. I never suggested anything derogatory about Swedes (and do not believe anything derogatory about Swedes. Hell, I had breakfast at Al Johnson's in Sister Bay on Monday) - yet some people take this (topic) as though it can only be about praying for the victims. I think we can do that and chew gum at the same time. My point was that when an event like this comes down like a cleaving blade - it exposes things. Some mundane and obvious (lack of early warning, integrated communications systems, etc.) others surprising (perhaps to do with civil engineering standards, etc.) and then there is the surprising stuff. I'll wait.
I don't believe anything derogatory about Swedes either. HOWEVER, my sister was on a group tour in Thailand and when night falls, what you say DOES happen. Not with nice families but there are men who troll beaches for young girls. People may have a problem with the timing of such comments, but oh well. I did not see such people in all the threads about Haiti and Hurricane Ivan and FAR WORSE things were being said about people there.
Praise God because I thought dad may have perished.
That face says it all.
I am going to wait on commenting on that one, and see what kind of corruption comes out of this terribly sad situation, I think there will be plenty of stealing, and looting, and cheating, to get assistance, if you take out the tourist you have the locals that were working there if you look at people lined up for help, they are skeletons that came down from their squalor, just for free food and whatever else they can get their hands on ,I know this sounds mean spirited, but MY STARS when the truth is known I wont be stunned ,I tell you just stunned, to hear of such goings on .
I can't help but notice that this poor child has had the same expression in every photo. I thank God for their reunion. I also pray that the horrors this boy has seen eventually leave him.
Why doesn't the little boy have his father's name?
That expression was the same in the video clip. He is totally in shock - God bless him. So many families ripped apart - prayers for them all.
1000 dead tax payers not paying into the coffers.
I bet that will hurt the Government socialist system.
Why doesn't the little boy have his father's name?
I'm guessing that the boy's Swedish mother, Suzanne Bergström, and the Finnish father, Marko Karkkainen, never bothered to get married, and that the father let the mother give the boy her last name. That's just my guess, but I think it's likely.
Prayers for the safety of those who survived, and for the souls of those who did not. May God comfort their families.
My prayers to all that are affected by this disaster. Sri Lanka will be the most affected by this tragedy though. The numbers don't matter if it's one of your family, but the locals suffered much more than westerners
Childs to unmarried children recieves their mothers name.
About 4500 Swedes are now reporting missing (1500 charter and 3000 backpackers) and about 60 confirmed dead.
Keeping my fingers crossed that most of them will turn up alive, but like many here, hope starts to fade as the days goes by.
All of you obsessed with the sex trade of Thailand can start another thread about that. Yes, almost every tourist place in Thailand, Indonesia etc. has this problem, but Thailand has become the single most popular vacation place for Swedes, even surpassing the spanish coast and islands. THis year over 100 000 Swedes are visiting Thailand. Show some fucking respect, no one over here talked about prostitutes and drug dealers around times square in your hour of need.
unmarried children = unmarried parents...
prostitution is pretty common in most thai resorts, but phuket is way down on the list. sex tourists go to pattaya or bangkok, not phuket. in this case, the high profile of phuket(being thailand's most popular and expensive resort) has caused the government to crack down harder on the sex trade there than at sleazier places like pattaya.
when i was in phuket about 2 years ago, i noticed the really high number of swedes there. in fact, because thais avoid phuket(way too expensive for a native) i saw more beautiful swedish women than any other nationality. my deepest sympathies to both the vacationing westerners and the locals who were killed. my heart tightens every time i see a picture of a street in phuket that i've personally walked down.
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