Sri Lanka is the worst victim of the tsunami disaster in terms of the proportions of the number of dead to its total population.

According to The New York Times, with 30,000 people killed in Sri Lanka out of a total population of 19.5, it has suffered proportionately more devastation than any other affected country. Although Indonesia has three times the number of dead, its population is seven times more.

The damage in Indonesia, India and Thailand was mainly confined to one geographical area, 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s 830-mile coastline was hit by the tsunami waves. While it took 20 years for Sri Lanka’s civil war to claim 64,000 lives, the tsunamis consumed half that number in less than an hour.

(Compiled from news dispatches by M. Chooki)