08 January 2005	Saturday	26 Ziqa'ad 1425

LONDON: The only word which can capture this strange moment of horror and hope in human history is kairos, the Greek word for time, the closest translation of which is crisis.

The Greek understanding of kairos, as opposed to the chronos of ordinary time, is time laden with meaning and choices. It offers a dramatic opportunity for action and for change.

What the tsunami and its aftermath has done is crash through the entrenched self-absorption of western nations. How it has done so - the involvement of tourists on their Christmas holidays, the dramatic amateur video footage - is irrelevant. The point is that billions of human beings across the globe have identified with the terrible tragedies of human beings just like themselves.

What parent, putting their child to bed over the past two weeks, has not thought of the toddlers snatched by the waves as they played? What heart has not been wrenched by the stories of people who have lost families, friends, entire neighbourhoods? The suffering reminds us of that most basic connection of one human being to another; how, for all the differences of wealth, geography, race, status, we share so much - the essentials of life are always the same - water to drink, food to eat, love, grief, death.

This moment of global solidarity, evident in the flood of donations, has inspired a hope that this could prove a turning point - a kairos in the relationship between the west and the developing world. Past catastrophes have had a long-term political or social impact - for example, the bubonic plague, which wiped out a third of Europe's population.

Other moments in human history are pinpointed as leading to a lasting shift in perception. The first shot of the Earth from space is credited as being instrumental in the rise of the environmental movement. Could the devastation in Aceh's fishing villages prove a comparable clarion call to the common destiny of all humanity?

That's the opportunity to be seized. Lose the scale of that, and one of the most tragic casualties of the tsunami will be the carefully laid plans to make 2005 a breakthrough year for Africa. With the world's attention focused on the Indian Ocean, there is a real danger that the impetus to tackle Africa's suffering will collapse.

Already, Kofi Annan has warned against robbing Peter to pay Paul, as donors in Jakarta compete for headline-grabbing generosity. There is grave concern that, with Phuket and Banda Aceh to the forefront, Darfur has dropped off the agenda.

Key figures such as Bob Geldof and the UK finance minister Gordon Brown are valiantly trying to keep Africa in the frame. Both have used statistics showing that the number of children dying from disease in Africa every year exceeds the number killed by the tsunami.

Mr Brown, in a moving speech on Thursday in Edinburgh, seized the challenge of this kairos with his call for a new Marshall plan for Africa, built on the powerful sentiments stirred by the tsunami of belonging to "one moral universe", in which "we are not and cannot be moral strangers" to the plight of other human beings.

But while the tsunami called for compassion, Africa calls also for justice; human beings tend to be better at giving charity than at delivering justice. While compassion makes us feel the richer for our magnanimity, justice stirs up far more complex emotions of self- justification and equivocation.

The transformation required at this point of kairos is to channel this burst of global solidarity, empathy and compassion into the dogged persistence required to achieve justice.

It's not going to be easy; while the tsunami offered compelling television viewing, the suffering of Africa does not. The latter does not offer dramatic miracle stories.

Instead, it's a landscape of human tragedy, the scale of which is too awful for most of us to face. Steel yourself to do so, and watch if you can the BBC's Fever Road, which charts the impact on the village of Kiagware in Kenya of malaria, a disease which kills 750,000 children in Africa every year.

It is a spare, quietly devastating picture of the precariousness of human life. Only this time the threat is not a tsunami but a mosquito and the complicated chain of human actions that ensures there are no doctors but quacks, no hospitals, no drugs which work, and no nets. Nets which might protect these children cost about 50 US cents each - a child's life for the cost of a cup of tea.

After the December 26 earthquake, many asked how a God could allow a tsunami to cause such suffering. That is the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking a question we can actually answer: how can human beings allow a mosquito to cause millions of deaths? -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.