28 December 2004
By Arjuna Wickramasinghe

COLOMBO (Reuters) - The Maldives has evacuated 13 of its 200 inhabited islands after a tsunami flattened a host of idyllic resorts, officials say, but the death toll is holding at 55 -- a far cry from the thousands killed in India and Sri Lanka.

A boat washed on to the pavement by the waves
President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's office said on Tuesday that rescue teams had evacuated 10,000 people from the worst hit of the low-lying cluster of islands and appealed for food and medicine after the giant waves swept stores out to sea.

Officials said three British nationals were among the dead and 69 people were still missing, but the government finally made contact with all island communities, who were safe.

A speedboat on the pavement

"Male got off with the least amount of damage, but barring three islands in the archipelago, all the other islands were badly hit," said presidential spokesman Mohamed Shareef.

"Communications with all the 200 inhabited islands have now been restored, so that is a relief," he added.

The Maldives, whose white sand beaches and scuba diving are a magnet for honeymooners and well-heeled tourists from around the globe, declared a state of emergency on Sunday after tsunami waves deluged the remote island cluster and flooded two-thirds of the capital, Male.

The chain of 1,200 tiny palm-fringed coral islands dotted across 500 miles off the toe of India lies just a few feet above sea level, and many luxury hotels sit right on the beach with wooden cabins on stilts fanning out over limpid blue lagoons.

The Maldives' inhabited islands are home on average to just a few hundred people or house luxury tourist resorts which offer some of South Asia's most expensive holiday accommodation.

"We have 87 resorts and 20 have been completely destroyed," Shareef said. "We estimate the damage to property and infrastructure to be over $1 billion (520 million pounds). This is a big hit on the economy."

"We have moved about 300 tourists from these resorts since Sunday," he added.

The international airport, which sits on an island of its own a short boatride from Male, was closed on Sunday as tsunami waves wreaked havoc but was reopened later the same day after water levels receded.

Gayoom has spent much of his 26 years in power warning of the dangers that global warming, erosion and shifting weather patterns pose to low-lying island nations like his own.

Most of the Maldives' 300,000 majority Sunni Muslims are involved in the tourist industry, the nation's economic backbone.

Male, which is 1.25 miles long and half a mile wide and home to 75,000 people, was badly flooded when the tsunami hit, with residents forced to wade thigh-deep in seawater.

The island capital's streets of white-washed houses are very cramped and there is little communal open space for residents -- so much so the government is building a new island from scratch as an overflow.

The tsunami came just days ahead of December 31 parliamentary elections and it was not immediately clear if the polls would be delayed.