It is the living who are burdened with responsibility for those who have died. In New Zealand, where a Hollywood ending redolent of the San Jose Mine in Chile failed to materialise, mine management and redundant rescue teams must now contain the grief and anger of a nation.
'We need answers to what happened at Pike River, clearly something's gone terribly wrong and it's now claimed the lives of 29 people,' said the country's Prime Minister, John Key.
Twenty-nine lives that may have been extinguished much earlier, when the original blast ricocheted through the mine on New Zealand's sparsely-populated west coast last Friday.
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But in the absence of evidence either way, institutional post mortems are being ordered even before the bodies of the dead have been recovered or the grief of the living processed. No fewer than three inquests are planned: blame will be assigned, no doubt, and compensation paid, but the families' excruciating sorrow will never be assuaged.
Something went terribly wrong, too, in Phnom Penh on Monday night, when 347 people were either crushed to death or drowned after falling off a crowded bridge linking the city to an island in the Bassac River.
Compensation is being spoken of here, too: donations from the government, the monarchy, NGOs and the private sector will in all likelihood be used to cover funeral costs in a country whose population lives largely below the poverty line.
Organisations such as Caritas Cambodia and World Vision are providing medicine, food and — poignantly — 'three bottles of drinking water each day for a total of five days' to many of the 750 people injured during the stampede.
As they begin to recover from the shock of this unbearable tragedy, bewildered family members are said to be angry at the government for failing to provide adequate crowd control.
But unlike New Zealand, where an educated, self-confident populace will demand explanations and assert its rights, the relatives of those who died in Phnom Penh are unlikely to receive reasonable answers to their sorrow-filled questions.
Cambodians are all too familiar with brutality and loss; this most recent tragedy is just one more blow to a beaten, diminished people. It will be stoically absorbed into their national psyche, alongside all those acts of