National day of mourning for Sweden
Sweden greeted the new year with a national day of mourning today, flying flags at half mast and lighting candles for 3,500 of its citizens still missing in Thailand.
Sweden is the Western nation hardest hit, with 59 confirmed killed. This may be the worst natural disaster in the country’s history, the government has said.
Firework displays across the Nordic regions were cancelled last night and celebrations were subdued, police said.
“It’s never felt so hard to welcome a new year,” said Prime Minister Goeran Persson in a New Year’s speech at Stockholm’s open air museum Skansen, where thousands gathered for a muted ceremony.
“Our big task is now to share a difficult time with each other, to support each other through despair, sorrow and loss.”
The Thai tourist resorts hit hardest by the tsunamis, such as Phuket and Khao Lak, were winter havens for thousands of Swedes seeking to escape the frigid Scandinavian temperatures for a warmer Christmas.
The government estimates that more than 20,000 Swedish tourists were in Thailand when the tidal wave struck. In addition to the 59 known dead, 3,559 are still missing and the final death toll is widely expected to be in the thousands.
If so, it would be “the most dramatic disaster in our country’s history”, Persson said yesterday, noting that few of the country’s nine million people would be unaffected.
Hundreds of churches across the country planned candlelight vigils today, as hospitals called in extra personnel to care for hundreds of injured Swedes returning on specially chartered planes from Thailand.
Public broadcaster SVT planned a two-hour telethon tonight, with both Persson and King Carl XVI Gustaf scheduled to make pleas for gifts, along with several top Swedish artists. Commercial TV station TV4 planned a similar programme to start a two-week collection drive for the Red Cross.
The Swedish Red Cross has already received donations totalling more than 50 million kroner (€5.6m) this week, it said today.
In neighbouring Denmark, Queen Margrethe started her annual televised New Year’s speech by addressing the tsunami disaster that has killed seven Danes while 466 are reported missing.
“Let us not only just think of our losses but also of the many thousand people who now must see their whole existence broken into pieces,” she said.
Flags on Danish government buildings will fly on half staff tomorrow.
But good news was still trickling in to some Scandinavians. Yesterday, 33-year-old Dane Kate Soerensen, whose mother Karna Soerensen and stepfather Juergen Kern had been missing in Thailand for six days, got a postcard in the mail from them.
“Hi everyone, we’re doing fine despite the disaster,” the postcard said. “We’re sleeping in the mountains so there is no danger… We will write later, Juergen and your mother.”
“I was so incredibly happy,” Kate Soerensen told reporters. “I thought I had lost my mother and Juergen who has been like a father to me in the past 24 years.”
