Thais play tsunami corpses for $11 a day

People search for bodies after the real tsunami. Picture / Brett Phibbs

The BBC calls its upcoming mini-series Tsunami a compelling story of courage. But for many Thais who lost their families, the film-makers are reopening fresh wounds.

More outrage has greeted the decision to hire Thais to play corpses at cut-rate pay of $11 a day for Aftermath, to be broadcast this year.

That's less than a third what Western extras are routinely paid, although it's almost double the standard wage for a Thai day labourer.

Film crews from BBC2 and Warner Brothers' Home Box Office, shooting on location on the Andaman coast for a two-part television mini-series based on the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, are busy making drama out of a crisis.

But some survivors in Khao Lak and Phuket, two of the hardest-hit resorts in Thailand, complain that realistic recreations of the catastrophe are stirring up barely healed wounds.

"It's not right. It's not right," Trongchai Pachkrau told the Nation newspaper. The former boatman witnessed the deadly waves at Phi Phi island and is still too frightened to work at sea.

"Why are they doing this? It's too early," added Sawitree Kulmat, a tour guide whose income has plunged because Asian tourists fear wandering ghosts and book their trips elsewhere.

"Nobody wants this. Everyone is trying to forget," she said. "What about people who lost their families?"

Barely 18 months have passed since waves up to three storeys high drowned 5395 people on Thailand's shores, and left 2817 more missing and presumed dead.

Hundreds of cadavers still await identification in a Bangkok forensics laboratory. Some traumatised victims who watched their families drown are still undergoing therapy. Many survivors are still homeless.

Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, said the shows would be "dedicated to exploring the cultural and personal faultlines that can be ruptured by such a catastrophe".

The actors who play Westerners whose idyllic Christmas holidays were curtailed by quake-generated waves include Tim Roth, the British Oscar nominee, and the Australian actress Toni Colette.

The mini-series features young parents mourning their baby, a British woman whose husband and son are swept away, an aggressive reporter, an aid worker and an overwhelmed British diplomat. The programme is scheduled to be aired in December, two years after the tragedy.

Under swollen clouds in the off-season, initial filming was completed last month in Phuket.

Now the crew is in Khao Lak, where naked survivors of the tsunami once clung to trees as the backwash from 15m waves hurled chunks of concrete and broken glass at them.

"It's disgusting. I couldn't believe it. I almost had a heart attack when I saw a bunch of wrecked cars and a longtail boat up by the bridge," said Bodhi Garrett, director of North Andaman Tsunami Relief, which manages education and economic recovery programmes for victims.

"The first moment was pretty terrible - real deja vu. I thought maybe it was a flash flood.

"If there had been a simple warning sign that this was staged for the cameras there would have been a lot less offence caused."

The jungle highway was littered for months by the rusted hulks of boats and cars and the terrible tide of holiday gear unclaimed by the dead.

- INDEPENDENT