2004 began badly, continued so so and could not have ended worse.

It was the year of scenes of humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the year of so many terrorist attacks, which killed innocent victims especially in Iraq, and the year of so many on-screen barbaric executions of kidnap victims once again in Iraq.

Then, as the year was drawing to a close, this gigantic wave came and swept away everything in its path and the world from its epicentre, from near Sumatra to the eastern shores of Africa, 6,000 km away.

Over the past days, the media, worldwide, played around with figures: 100,000 victims or 120,000 or even 400,000? But as the natural disasters experts at the UN have said: the worst is still to come: the worst is the kind of future the survivors can expect.

As The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee said on Friday: “The horror of the tsunami drowns optimistic new year thoughts. Images of human flotsam and jetsam prompt nihilistic thoughts of meaninglessness.”

Ours is a globalised world where citizens from rich countries fly far and wide for their winter sun. The tsunami has shown us a different version of globalisation: who would have thought that something which happened deep under the seabed off Sumatra would have so affected the coasts of Sri Lanka and India, 1,200km away, and even the coasts of Somalia, 6,000 km away? Or that the earthquake was so massive as to make the entire world wobble on its axis and make each day a fraction of a second shorter than before?

At the same time there is this globalisation, when a catastrophe of these dimensions makes child’s play of frontiers and independent States, there is still a colonialism, an imperialism in capitalism: the huge number of locals swept out to sea, buried amid the debris, rotting in the trees, will never be known. Numbers do not make sense any more. There are no precise figures for the number of people who lived in the coastal areas of Sumatra, Sri Lanka or Tamil Nadu. Nameless people are being consigned to unmarked graves. In the makeshift mortuaries set up in mosques and temples, people pull aside a cloth, a piece of sacking, to see if their loved ones lie beneath.

In normal circumstances, except for the sheer vastness of the catastrophe, the West would have looked, and continued with its New Year festivities. But this time there was a huge number of westerners holidaying there, so the West has been forced to participate in this tragedy so much that in most countries New Year celebrations have either been cancelled or turned into a day of mourning for the victims.

Stung into action by scenes of the devastation, the countless amateur videos of the moment the tsunami struck, the horror stories of families torn apart in a second, the world is reacting with a massive flood of relief effort with aid-bearing ships and planes from all around the world converging on the region, including two American aircraft-carrier groups. The official world, the UN, and individual governments, are pledging far more sums of money in aid than apparently they were willing to do at first. One hopes they will keep their word, which does not usually happen.

One also hopes the relief comes in time to save the survivors from disease, providing them with sufficient quantities of potable water and food. That’s for the immediate future. Cleaning up will cost some $14 billion, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer. Many families have lost their bread-winner, many more have lost their homes. The boats and nets of fishermen have been wrecked, the crops and livestock of farmers devastated. Roads and railways have been washed away; fields and supplies have become poisoned with salt water.

It is true, however pointless it may be now, that this massive calamity could have been in part avoided. A system to monitor undersea quakes and alert the surrounding countries already exists in the Pacific. American scientists detected the tremors from the quakes within minutes but say they had no means of alerting those Asian countries that were about to be hit by the resulting waves. And the people monitoring the satellites say they could only watch helplessly as the tsunami raced on and on.

In the end, as Jeremy Seabrook wrote... “such events remind us of the sameness of our human destiny, the fragility of our existence. They place in perspective the meaning of security. Life is always at the mercy of nature – whether from such overwhelming events as this, or the natural processes that exempt no one from paying back to earth the life it gave us. Yet we inhabit systems of social and economic injustice that exacerbate the insecurity of the poor, while the west is prepared to lay waste distant towns and cities in the name of a security that, in the end, eludes us all.”

And, to conclude with a gripe about Malta: everywhere else, in Paris as in Milan, in Naples and in Berlin, even the New Year concert from Vienna, the New Year revels were muted or even cancelled. Did you see any sign of that happening here on this sunny island, which once again still thinks it has the right to be an exception? It is not enough for people to have a good night out and then wake up and donate objects or money. The fate of suffering humanity thousands of kilometres away affects and involves us: we walk away from this truth at our peril.