More than any other agent, it is the news media’s framing of events that influence people’s responses to disasters. By giving voice to IDPs, the media brought them much relief; but the voices of the GNs they accused of misuse of power were largely absent. This was understandable: tent dwellers were a new phenomenon in Sri Lankan society and their terrifying tsunami experiences and post-tsunami frustrations fed the public appetite for the sensational and the unique. By contrast, GNS’ accounts of their experiences would not attract an audience – even though the silence implied, whether true or not, they were guilty as charged. The media did make an exception, however when, unable to bear the verbal abuse heaped on them by some IDPs, two village officials, one in the south and the other in the east, committed suicide.
Suicide may be the ultimate and the most tragic expression of the degree of trauma anyone suffers, but these deaths were all the more tragic because these officials were not direct victims of the tsunami itself. It seemed to me this extreme action by the two men cried out for justice for all GNs and I decided to talk to the village officials of the Habaraduwa division about the IDP’s allegations regarding aid distribution. The Habaraduwa Division is made up of 59 GN divisions, of which 29 were affected by the disaster. 18 officials had assembled at the Habaraduwa Divisional Secretariat Office when I got there for the meeting.
Since the tsunami hit with no warning, on a public holiday, and the GoSL had no Disaster Management Plan, the GNs said they got no assistance or direction from the Central government for a few days. So, working under the direction of the Government Agent (the head of the administrative district,) and with volunteer helpers, they “shouldered the responsibilities of rescue and relief operations.” When central government intervention did start, the process became more of a hindrance than help they said, because “The government wanted all kinds of data and reports by midnight tonight, noon tomorrow, in two days.” This was a terrible burden because being on the lowest rung of the local government administrative structure GNs have no assistants to delegate work. They also have no computers, and officials wrote all reports and filled data sheets by hand. Amidst all this work the GNs also had to attend to the clamoring by tsunami survivors throughout the day. But unlike other relief workers, they seem to have got no respite for days because “Fifty, sixty people were waiting at home when we got back close to midnight, after checking the situations and relief distribution at various refugee camps.” Utterly stressed by the situation, two GNs I met said they came to work with letters of resignation, but did not submit them “because of moral and technical support from our colleagues.”
Several officials have young children, and the parents were clearly distressed that they had no time to attend to their children’s needs for weeks after the tsunami. Work-related stresses had taken a physical toll on some officials as well. I met this group three months into the disaster, and five were being treated for gastric ailments their doctors attributed to the excessively stressful work environment of the post-tsunami period. Scratching his head, another described how sores developed on his scalp because he had no time to shower for more than a month. So, I was not surprised when I asked what recommendations they had should such a situation arise again, the group agreed unanimously, “It is essential that the government provides more trained personnel to share the work.”
Listening to these GNs, it seemed they committed themselves 100 percent to help the IDPs and it was wonderful to learn that the GoSL recognized Habaraduwa Division as one of five in the island that provided outstanding service to IDPs. The news was especially significant because the Habaraduwa Divisional Secretariat building was also partially damaged by the deluge. The office lost its only computer and the Divisional Secretary, brought his home computer and borrowed another from a friend to compile the mountains of data the government required. He did such a good job disseminating information not only to the government but also to other relief organizations that a German group donated a new desk top computer to his office.
I congratulated the GNs for the commendation they received from the government, but reminded them that tent dwellers still accused them of unfair aid distribution. The group acknowledged there may have been a few oversights at the beginning because the situation was so chaotic, but insisted nobody deliberately held back aid from deserving people. One said emphatically, “I can say no ralahamy in this district took any advantage of the tsunami. We all did everything possible twenty-four hours of the day! We were absolutely committed to doing what was right and I would go so far as to say that even the worst, the laziest ralahamy did his or her best to bring relief to the people.”
“Then why do you think some are complaining that you did not give them what was due to them?” I asked. They replied that when the government allowed people to appeal if they did not get the monthly allowances, some IDPs saw an opportunity to exploit the disaster for their own advantage by making false claims. But they were not the only group. One GN said, “Everybody now thinks that if some water came into their gardens, they are entitled to aid. We know people with enough wealth who are running after this aid. People of high social and economic standing who lost nothing gave us so much pressure to get the government grants. A bank clerk told me that a doctor came to get the Rs. 5000. This is someone who can earn that much in a day!” I was inclined to believe what I heard. I was present when two middle class householders, whose homes were not damaged sufficiently to claim redress, discussed ways and means to do so.
But accusations that officials pilfered aid by IDPs everywhere were not entirely baseless. Tilak Ranaviraja, Chairman of Essential Services, said mismanagement and corruption was evident in the distribution of the government-authorized short-term relief packages. He said about Rs.10,980 m ($96,000) had been earmarked to cover the costs of basic rations, funeral benefits, kitchen utensils, and resettlement allowance of the IDP; but that people who were not affected by the tsunami must have received ration cards because the number issued (963,000) exceeded the actual number of displaced people. [1]
Sarath Mayadunne, the auditor general, also confirmed that widespread corruption was detected in aid distribution, and that widespread misappropriation of funds was found in all tsunami affected regions. Although the exact percentage siphoned off was unknown he believed the numbers were large. He attributed initial problems to inefficiencies, the lack of proper systems and controls, and the fact that the abolishing of the registration of the Chief Householder System left no base document to identify families and individuals. “But” he noted, “Even after the emergency phase was over, the irregularities continued.” [2] The media also exposed numerous instances when donations ranging from generators to school supplies were stolen by relief providers during my initial period of research although I do not know whether or not any GNs I met did so. Australian aid organizations also reported $50 million missing from Indonesia’s post-tsunami reconstruction fund and believed government officials siphoned off the money. [3]
So, it seems, the mountains of aid funds that are raised following disasters tip the normal behaviors of people towards deviance. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell says “the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves….or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, a new virus, Capitalizing on the Disaster, had indeed begun to spread. And as shown below, it reincarnated itself in various forms and infected not only the people in the south, but also people in the north and the east, globally renowned relief organizations, NGOs and INGOs, the IDPs themselves, and even the world’s richest and the most powerful people. When tThe tsunami hit the country, the 2002 Cease Fire Agreement was still in effect. But as we see below, the LTTE and their international sympathizers also exploited the tsunami disaster for their own gain, thus creating conditions for the resumption of the war.
***
As mentioned, both the Northern and Eastern coastal areas fell victim to the tsunami, and following urgent appeals for relief and medical assistance from the LTTE to GoSL, ttruckloads of relief items from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) left for the areas. But with roads ravaged by the war as well as the tsunami, trucks were driven at no more than 30 miles an hour and mostly at night, to avoid traffic. When destinations were inaccessible by road, the goods were airlifted. [4]
At the destinations, UN workers coordinated distribution with other agencies in the area, and published data shows that by March 9, 2005, the north and the east received 60 percent of the ration cards, and 16,368 metric tons of food, [5] while the south received 7,297 metric tons of food. Medical supplies and personnel, and various other relief items were also deployed to the north and east and Lionel Fernando, Chairperson of the Disaster Relief Monitoring Unit (DRMU) of the Human Relations Committee, confirmed in a personal interview that GoSL did all they could to help rebel helped areas.
But as tremendous amounts of humanitarian aid started to arrive in the country, the LTTE, which by 2004 had its own administrative infrastructure in areas it controlled, insisted on partnering with relief organizations and carrying out reconstruction work in those areas. The government resisted their demands, relations between the two sides soured, and rebels and civilians in the north and east accused politicians of giving preferential treatment to the south. The GoSL in turn charged that among other things, the rebels were not allowing aid trucks to enter some places under their control and that they were hijacking relief trucks and distributing aid as their own.
In the meantime, INGO efforts to capitalize on the disaster heightened ethnic tensions. These agencies traditionally describe themselves as nonpolitical and it is widely assumed that they remain neutral in conflict situations. But even before the tsunami, some INGOs were believed to be sympathizers of the LTTE and post-tsunami, they exploited the duty-free status the government declared for aid items, sending items such as helicopter parts, generators, bullet-proof vests, and communication devices to the rebels in the guise of tsunami aid. Consequently the government detained some six hundred containers in the port for inspection, causing enormous frustrations for relief providers and the tsunami victims alike, and eventually withdrew the duty free status from certain aid items.
This turn of events is to be expected because as anthropologist and disaster scholar, Anthony Oliver-Smith reminds us not only disaster risks, but disaster outcomes are socially produced. In other words, how post-disaster situations evolve is often determined by underlying social, economic, territorial, and political processes operating in specific locales because disasters are not simply material phenomena. When societies are already deeply fractured along ethnic fault lines, post-disaster problems become even more complex because the control of relief and reconstruction processes is subject to intense political pressure and manipulation. While affecting large civilian populations, they bring into high relief pre-existing social interactions and power struggles as was seen in post-Katrina New Orleans too.
In Sri Lanka, the politics surrounding the disbursement of aid and the control of people, land, and livelihoods, not only ended the interethnic solidarity that emerged soon after the disaster; they also created serious rifts between the president and her coalition partners. The most serious emerged when, pressured by the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Norway (co-chairs of the Tokyo Conference on Reconstruction and Development of Sri Lanka) the president agreed to share with the LTTE the $2.1 billion the international community committed for Sri Lanka. This agreement, known as the Post-tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) [6] was challenged in court and was never implemented, but it pitted the president in a battle with her main coalition partner, the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP,) with who she was already at logger heads over aid provision.
The president was vacationing in Europe when the catastrophe occurred. Within hours the Marxist-oriented JVP, which has a well organized grassroots network, galvanized their cadres into action. Among other services, they built temporary shelters for all tsunami victims in Kirinda in the Hambantota district within a month of the disaster and organized very successful health camps for IDPs throughout the island. But their laudable action only made the president – who had no plan to deal with the disaster – look more inept and she accused the JVP of distributing the global aid the country received, under their party banners. The media provided plenty of evidence of how other political parties were also mobilizing themselves under their different banners for relief operations; how some politicians were jostling over prestige and brand imaging; how they were building independent power bases; and how they were linking relief work to the upcoming presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections. But these revelations made no difference to the president’s antagonistic feelings towards the JVP.
Things came to a head between her and the JVP two months after the tsunami when the president closed down the CNO and initiated three Task Forces to rebuild the country. Of these, the most important in the present context – the Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation (TAFREN,) functioning under the UN – was made up of seven sub-committees responsible for housing; fisheries and boats; power, telecommunication, and water supply and drainage; education; tourism; roads, bridges, and railways; and health. But it had no representation from the JVP, other coalition parties, or the Opposition; fishing, farming, and environmental sectors; disaster construction specialists and scientists; the majority of civil society groups, or IDPs. Instead, TAFREN comprised of a select group of people from among Sri Lanka’s most powerful business executives. The highest number was from the tourist sector. Executives from other industries and the banking sector, and a few civil society groups known to agree with the president, made up the rest. The reason for her selection appears below. At this point the JVP quit the government coalition, weakening the government and depriving the president of a working majority.
While the people at the top were fighting among themselves, the IDPs, whose lives were in upheaval, continued to create turbulence in various parts of the country, claiming mistreatment by the government. What they did not know was that that it was not only local politicians, relief providers, and rebels who were responsible for the havoc in their lives. The hidden agenda of global powers out to exploit the disaster for their own gain was also causing the initial disaster to morph into many others, bringing more turmoil and long delays in the reconstruction process.
***
As we heard in the previous chapter, the most urgent need of the IDPs was to get permanent homes and most families, like disaster survivors in Japan and elsewhere, wanted to rebuild homes in former places of residence. But they were prevented from doing so by the president, who declared ‘buffer zones’ (100 meters from the median high tide water line towards the land in the south, and 200 meters in the east,) that was off limits to residents, as well as to people who had operated small business in those spaces. Instead, the GoSL offered financial assistance for those who had lived beyond the buffer zone to rebuild their homes, and promised to build new homes in safe locations for families who used to live in the buffer zone. By contrast, owners of partially damaged tourist resorts and other big hotels, even when they were situated right at the water’s edge, were allowed to rebuild if the structures were considered repairable.
The proposed replacement homes, designed by the government according to urban or village development plans and built by donors, offered more amenities to tent dwellers than they could ever afford on their own: unlike the small huts they used to live in, the new homes, costing an estimated $50,000 (about Rs. 500,000) per unit, would provide at least 500 square feet of floor space with electricity and running water. Health care and recreational facilities were part of the package as well. [7] But thousands of IDPs rejected the offer, and they as well as the general public widely denounced the discriminatory behavior of the government towards the bigger business owners. What accounted for this discrimination?
The answer lies in a “Bounce Back Plan” developed for the tourist industry. Stating that “A twist of fate has provided a unique opportunity to transform Sri Lanka into a world class tourist destination” in the Tourism Master Plan, the government called for the combination of international marketing and promotion of the unique tourism attractions unaffected by the tsunami, with a rehabilitation and reconstruction program designed to fast track the development of world-class facilities in ‘popular beachside areas.’
These areas were located in fifteen zones, stretching from Kalpitiya in the west, and Wadduwa in the southwest, all the way through Galle and Hambantota in the south. But they had been home to fisher communities for centuries because as a near-shore fisherman explained to me, fishermen must live near the sea to carry out their livelihood. “We do not go to sea at set hours, come back with our catch, sell it, and go home for the rest of the day,” he said. “This is a seasonal occupation that lasts only a few months and we must make use of every possible opportunity to go to sea. To do that, we have to continually observe the sea to make sure the conditions are right for fishing.”
Living near the sea is also important for fisher communities because beaches and harbors provide the large communal spaces they need to repair torn nets, and sea-going fishermen keep their boats and other equipment on the beaches, though they remove the engines of motorized boats and take them home to prevent theft. But not all can afford to hire vehicles to transport the engine; some carry it home themselves and the further they live, the more difficult it is to carry engines back and forth from the beach. Moving inland would mean a jobless future for a majority of fishermen also because many men drop out of school to learn their trade from their fathers or uncles at a young age, consequently most have no marketable job skills to compete in other areas because they are illiterate or have minimal education. And many of their wives, who supplement their husbands’ earnings by selling food and drink, dried fish, or other wares along the main road bordering the beach, would lose their income by relocating inland. So, why did the government declare the “buffer zone?”
The Finance Minister explained the government’s decision was based on a deep sense of responsibility; in the best interest of the people and in good faith; that they reached the decision only after serious consideration of risks involved and after close consultation with the relevant experts and professionals; that it aimed particularly to protect women and children who had been the most vulnerable tsunami victims; that privately held lands within the restricted zone would not be taken over by the government, and that owners could put up temporary structures or develop coconut or other plantations on the lands. [8] What he did not say was that the heartland of the tourist industry is the beaches and that when the CFA was signed in 2002, international hospitality giants such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts had sought to develop these areas.
In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, award winning author, journalist, and filmmaker, documents how, following the signing of the CFA, the usual global economic players, most prominently U.S. AID, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF,) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), began planning Sri Lanka’s entry into the world economy. The plan was to turn desirable beach areas into playgrounds for the ultra-rich, because as US AID raved, the beautiful beaches in the north and east that were yet to be covered with high-rises due to the long civil war, and the country’s abundant wildlife, its mountains dotted with the Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim temples and holy sites, were all contained in a space the size of West Virginia. In their eyes, says Klein, Sri Lanka was one of the “last places left uncolonized by go-go globalization” and,
…Precisely because of the enormous wealth created in the other outposts of deregulated capitalism, money would be no object when it came to enjoying the perfectly calibrated combination of luxury and wilderness, adventure and attentive service. Sri Lanka’s future, the foreign consultants were convinced, rested with chains like Aman Resorts, which had recently opened two stunning properties on the southern coast, with rooms going for $800 a night and plunge pools in every suite. [9]
In 2002, says Klein, the World Bank and IMF quickly offered loans to modernize the country’s infrastructure – a cost far beyond the reach of the government burdened by the war – in exchange for agreements to open the economy to privatization and “public-private partnerships.” And the United National Party (who was then in power and who liberalized the economy earlier) together with the global partners, drafted a plan called Regaining Sri Lanka. But the plan was never implemented. At the next general elections, the people voted into power the UPFA government made up of a coalition of center-left politicians who vowed to scrap the plan.
But post-tsunami, the Master Plan’s Needs Assessment to rebuild the country was led by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and funding nations such as the United States, Japan, and the European Union; and the president went back on the pledge she made to the people. She appointed the same politician/entrepreneur who was the prime advocate of the failed Regaining Sri Lanka plan to head TAFREN, declared emergency law to implement the buffer zone plan, and gave the central government the right to take back the powers of devolved government which included making decisions on housing and zoning matters in the districts. Klein notes that the Bush administration, seeing opportunities for the kind of reconstruction aid familiar from Iraq – awarding megacontracts to its own companies – backed the Task Force. U.S. AID launched a program to organize the Sri Lanka’s tourism industry into a powerful Washington-style lobby group. The U.S. Embassy launched the Competitiveness Program, an outpost mandated to advance US economic interests in the country.
Here then, the colonial policies were being reintroduced in a new guise. Instead of grabbing the land for free, the plan was to make the state an accomplice to the process. But again the country rose in protest. In addition to fisher communities and various others living and /or working in the contested zone, professionals and civil society groups banded together and one of these, the People’s Planning Commission for Post-tsunami Rehabilitation and Reconstruction informed the public of the real nature of the new plan: The proposed 15 tourist zones would have 62 new cities (12 large, 20 medium, and 30 small,) equipped with modern luxury facilities that will house not IDPs, but 200,000 others; near-shore fishermen will never be able to resume their livelihoods because the proposed new fisheries harbors, and the donations of huge trawlers – ear marked for destruction to prevent over fishing by the European Union in their waters – meant fishing would be done by large industrial trawlers operating out of deep ports; infrastructural development, including five new bigger and faster highways to facilitate transportation, would be built with aid from the European Union.
The US government’s “Disaster Capitalism” is neither new nor limited to Sri Lanka. In her book, Klein provides case after case of how successive U.S. governments and the powerful lending institutions such as the World Bank, the ADB, and the IMF put into practice Milton Friedman’s free-market economic policies to harvest huge financial benefits from countries destabilized by wars or natural disasters. She observes that post-tsunami Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Maldives all caved in to the Americans and imposed buffer zones to prevent villagers, mostly subsistence fishers, from returning to their old villages and that two thirds of Thai villagers who lived in the buffer zone are embroiled in land-rights cases.
In the Maldives too, constituting a chain of some two hundred inhabited islands off the coast of India, former coastal dwellers lost their homes forever. Klein writes that, declaring tsunami survivors would get state assistance for recovery only if they moved, the Maldivian government removed them from their ancestral islands to one of five designated “safe islands.” This program was funded by the World Bank and other agencies and a year after the tsunami, the Maldivian government offered thirty-five new islands to be leased to resorts for up to fifty years, with no concern about “hotels built with precarious architecture on low-lying islands.” All this was possible says Klein, because “The World Bank and USAID understood something that most of us did not: that soon enough, the distinctiveness of the tsunami survivors would fade and they would melt into the billions of faceless poor people worldwide, so many of whom already live in tin shacks without water. The proliferation of these shacks has become as much an accepted feature of the global economy as the explosion of $800-a-night hotels.”
In Sri Lanka too, the buffer zone plan won the approval of some powerful people. A few fisher families I spoke with liked the idea of moving inland for safety reasons, but the vast majority saw the plan as another tsunami that threatened their livelihoods. There were other reasons for the opposition too. A successful vendor of curios who lost his shop and home told me he opposed the plan not only because he would lose customers by relocating inland, but also because “If only big hotels are allowed to operate there, we (Sri Lankans) will lose our right to go to the beach because they will say that we are disturbing the tourists. Security guards carrying weapons standing in front of big hotels already makes it difficult for us to enjoy the beaches.” A UDA official confirmed that with the expansion of the tourist industry, beach accessibility was already a contentious issue before the tsunami.
The expansion of the tourist industry was unpopular for more reasons. In Tourism in Sri Lanka: The Social Impact one of Sri Lanka’s prominent sociologists, Dr. Nandasena Ratnapala writes that the public blames tourism wholly or partly for a host of social problems now afflicting Sri Lanka: increased prostitution and drug addiction, nudism, alcoholism, school absenteeism, and the gradual disappearance of traditional arts and crafts due to an emphasis on commercialized art forms.
In declaring the buffer zone plan, the government also ignored the depth of people’s attachments to their ancestral homes and villages. The value of water front properties increased tremendously due to the tourist industry, but I met land owners who refused to sell their properties even before the tsunami either because of emotional attachment or because it was their only unmovable economic asset.
The UNHCR urged the government to rethink the new policy, pointing out that if people could not return to their old habitats, the ranks of the displaced groups could swell to unmanageable numbers. Other UN organizations also expressed concern that the government was violating the IDPs’ human rights by denying them the right to return to their former places of living. In the chaos, IDPs in the south started defying the government and rebuilding homes in their old places of residence within three months after the disaster. They told me that sympathetic locals and foreigners provided lumber and other building materials and money. Faced with protests from all sides, and stymied by the lack of government-owned buildable land inland, the president abruptly rescinded the buffer zone plan in October, 2005.
***
Sri Lanka’s Buffer Zone saga provides an important lesson for all developing nations: that in times of crisis, the richest and the most powerful people in the world will swoop down to grab their lands and their resources, and exploit their abject vulnerability to get even richer, with the cooperation of corrupt national leaders. Had they succeeded in Sri Lanka, not only would the public have lost their rights to freely enjoy their national heritage – as the CCD describes the coastal zone – there would have emerged a huge population of what Klein calls the “faceless poor,” with socioeconomic implications for the nation far worse than those created by the British when they grabbed the forests where the poor had cultivated their crops, because the world is a much more dangerous place today than it was in the 19th century. An example of the situation that would have emerged can be seen in the plight of 152 fisher families from Moratuwa in the southwestern province, who had been relocated about 500 meters inland. I was told about them by the Deputy Inspector General of Police, H.M.S Herat and his team of sub-inspectors (SIs) when I returned for follow-up research. The SIs had stumbled upon these families while looking into problems of truancy in the area.
The relocation of these 152 fisher families so far inland made it impossible for the men to go to sea, and the SIs said that while a few older youth and men found occasional work as day laborers in a nearby wood shop, most men, with no other marketable job skills, simply hung around the camp. The women too sat around chewing wads of beetle leaf and gossiping because having got used to the rice packets people brought after the tsunami, they no longer cooked regularly, making do with something from nearby snack shops. Not surprisingly, the SIs said, spousal tensions were increasing and couples were getting separated.
The deterioration in health and hygiene among the people was also of great concern to the SIs. They said some tents and transitional shelters, erected less than two feet apart on a small grass patch, were occupied by ten or twelve family members. With no running water (water was delivered by bowzers regularly) and only temporary toilets shared by both males and females, the people were living in utter squalor. “You can’t imagine the condition of some of those shelters and toilets,” one officer said. “Once when we went they complained that the toilets had not been emptied for a couple of days.”
Relocating the group so far from their original places of residence had thoroughly disrupted the children’s education as well. Before the tsunami children had gone to school regularly and some had been high achievers. Now they were supposed to go to the nearest school but some schools were located too far for children to walk. And one SI said that, “Even when schools are near enough the children don’t want to go because teachers discriminate against them saying, ‘Oh, those are the tsunami children. They don’t even know how to speak in a civilized way. We don’t want them mingling with other children’.”
With so many families living close to one another in a confined area and simply passing the time of day, morality among the people had broken down too. Before, when they lived in their own communities, delinquent behavior by a few would have had little influence on the majority in a village, an SI said. But now, illegal activities and delinquent behavior were spreading quite rapidly. “Young girls are subject to harassment and sexual abuse. But these incidents often go unreported either because of shame, their economic situation, or even because the victims don’t realize they have been abused….Selling and using marijuana and other drugs, consumption of illicit arrack, and gambling, are all becoming part of everyday life….Adolescent males skip school and earn some money painting furniture or doing other odd jobs, so they have money to gamble or spend on drugs. Drug peddlers can do their business in a minute or two because their customers are right there and adults pay younger children to be lookouts. That is quite effective because when we go, we don’t normally take note of the behavior of little children; we are looking out for unusual behavior among older people. So, children living in these camps hear and see things they should not, and learn deviant behaviors. There is no protection, proper nutrition, no guidance, for children.”
The Deputy Inspector General of Police summed up the socioeconomic implications of the situation not only for these families, but for the country as a whole. “We have thousands of highly educated people in Sri Lanka, but until my SIs visited this group of IDPs nobody had gone to see if children who got displaced were attending school. The only role models for the children my SIs told you about are the adults around them. If the children’s education is not restored right now, they will pose serious social problems in the future because what is developing in these situations is the crime-ridden subculture found in Colombo’s slums. There are no gangs yet, but the conditions are ripe for their emergence.”
***
To avoid the terrible outcome predicted by the Deputy Inspector General of Police, new permanent housing and the necessary infrastructure had to be built quickly so IDPs could begin to rebuild their shattered lives. As if to highlight the critical need for well built permanent homes, a tsunami warning was issued for March 26, 2005 – the third-month anniversary of the tsunami. The sea was extremely rough on the 26th but nothing happened that day or the next. On the 28th we were already in bed when the telephone rang. It was my landlady’s aunt from Colombo. There had been an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra and a tsunami warning had been issued. My landlady yelled for everyone to get up. The temple was already crowded when we reached it. But Mother Nature was kind this time; after a couple of hours the media announced no tsunami had resulted from the quake.
According to UDA estimates, 98,000 new permanent homes were required, and three months after the disaster, the Surveyor General’s Department had completed perimeter surveying in 5,000 acres for permanent house construction in inland areas. The UDA, which was responsible for allocating land to donors, had signed 100 Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with relief organizations for 30,000 donor-driven permanent homes. Nearly three months after the tsunami the Treasury Secretary reported Sri Lanka received approximately Rs.9 b ($90 m). Of this only approximately Rs. 1.2 billion ($12 m) went directly to government accounts. The rest went to the UN agencies and other relief organizations. The accounting of the Central Bank more or less matched these numbers. [10]
Tony Vaux, former consultant to UNDP and other relief organizations, and the founding director of Humanitarian Initiatives which promotes exchange on conflict-related issues among practitioners, observes that, “The idea behind humanitarianism is that in extreme cases of human suffering external agents may offer assistance to people in need” and a Sri Lankan investigative journalist, Fredrika Janz, reported that a month after the disaster, an estimated 140 NGOs, of which only about 40 were local, were engaged in tsunami-related work in the eastern district of Amparai alone. So expectations that houses would be built quickly were high. But the media reported that in the first three months after the tsunami, not a single donor-driven permanent home had been completed, although donors who purchased land privately had done so. [11]
The IDPs and the general public again vented their wrath on the GoSL for the delays in the construction of permanent housing. As mentioned, however, the role of the government was to provide technical support; suitable plots of land had been allocated to donor organizations, some of which were large multilateral organizations that had pledged to build multiple homes. So, what had they done over the three months? Where had the money gone in that time? In Rhythm of the Sea, Ramya Jirasinghe provides the answer:
Many of these organisations (sic.) rented buildings above market prices in areas where they were working and created artificial rates in the real estate sector. They opened project offices, filled them with electronic equipment and duty free vehicles; spent their budget on relocation costs, salaries and offshore benefits of expatriate staff, and brought in local staff on salaries they will not receive in another job once the project was completed. The feeling among the (IDP) community is that the tsunami money meant for them is not being used fairly by some international agencies and charities. As a result, there is a tangible animosity among the locals towards them.
Jirasinghe’s findings of the ways in which relief agencies spent excessive amounts of tsunami funds on enhancing their images, powers, and status were widely reported in newspapers, and repeated to me by several individuals. So in 2006 and 2007 I went to the Auditor General’s Department to verify allegations about INGOs importing what many said were duty-free luxury vehicles in the name of tsunami work. I could not obtain the official report of the Auditor General that was still to be presented to the parliament, but the four officers I spoke with on the two occasions confirmed various relief agencies “did import hundreds of duty free vehicles for tsunami relief work.” The government had allowed their importation on the understanding that after eight months the vehicles, identified by a special CR code, would be exported back, or that if they were retained, duty would be paid. But according to the officials, almost all organizations removed the CR sign and sold the vehicles. One official summed up their collective opinion. “INGOs got millions of rupees. But the ultimate result was an increase in consumerism; not aid or development.”
What enabled these organizations to exploit funds that hundreds of thousands of local and global people donated in the belief that they will be used to bring relief to tsunami victims? While most NGOs and INGOs were registered under the Companies Act and therefore were accountable to the state, there was no mechanism to monitor funds coming into them, and no structure to monitor their services in the first year after the disaster. The situation became even more complicated because many brand new organizations mushroomed in the wake of the tsunami, and a whole glut of little-known groups arrived in the country. But it was not only those groups who exploited the crisis for their own gain. In a series of newspaper articles Janz exposed how UN agencies and other long-established large organizations wasted millions of dollars of tsunami funds, for example, to import expatriate workers.
Talking specifically about the UN, Janz writes that its agencies imported over 1,500 expatriate workers they classified as ‘experts’ or ‘volunteers.’ But she says that the ‘volunteers’ were actually paid relief workers who were accommodated in five star hotels; airlifted or driven in four-wheel-drive vehicles to tsunami affected areas; were paid a Daily Subsistence Allowance (DSA) in the range of $100 (Rs. 10,000) as well as a monthly remuneration packages of $5,000-6,000; and who were later joined by spouses, relatives, partners, and friends, all in the name of tsunami effort. [12]
The journalist says that when she interviewed the UNDP Chief about these payments, he confirmed the fact, but pointed out the DSA is reduced by half after expatriate staff completes a two-month stay in the country. However, says Janz, what he did not reveal was that “Many of the individuals take a break for a week or more after two months and return fresh for another two-month stint. Or, their friends are sent to reap the same financial benefits. Thus, there is no reduction in support costs.” Consequently, she writes, “….27 percent of a flash appeal submitted by the UNDP in the aftermath of the tsunami seeking urgent aid for Sri Lanka will be fed back into the UN and its partner organizations to pay for coordination and support services.” [13] By contrast, Malini, a local counselor I spoke with, said her team of Sri Lankan medical personnel who went to several IDP camps in the south traveled at their own cost in non-luxury vehicles to minimize feelings of alienation among camp dwellers, and they did not get paid for services they provided the IDPs.
I met the UNDP’s country director to discuss these allegations. He justified the importation of ‘experts’ because they can arrive at the site within 24 hours. But among the ‘experts’ one UN agency imported, Janz lists a security officer, administration officer, public information officer, and procurement assistant – positions that Sri Lanka, with a large number of unemployed graduates proficient in English and Sinhala and/or Tamil, could have filled with ease. It would have also ensured more tsunami funds would have been used for reconstruction work. Most importantly, it is essential for relief providers to be knowledgeable about the societies and cultures for effective disaster management, as shown in Chapter Two.
I also interviewed three local UN workers about these hirings and one said, “This is basically a good organization, but there are fundamental problems in areas of mobilization, project planning, project supervision, and project management. A big problem is the hiring of international experts and international consultants. They are paid $1,000-15,000 more than the local consultants with the same capacities. I call that mismanagement of tsunami funds. We have to mobilize and build on local capacities; it costs much less.” That the country also has dedicated professionals fully capable of handling reconstruction work was demonstrated on the heels of the disaster when Sri Lankan engineers rebuilt the severely damaged rail system long before the deadline.
So, what is the real reason behind the UN’s importation of “experts?” Vaux provides the answer. He says that in the Consolidated Appeals Process that UN agencies use to raise funds, the amounts requested are based not on an assessment of needs but on almost random bids by UN agencies. The percentage of an appeal being met by donors is used as an indication of whether needs are being met. Thus the practice provides only the crudest possible indicator of the relationship between global needs and responses, and the agency is of course not held accountable to host governments. To deal with the challenge of spending huge sums of aid donations in high-profile areas within a reasonable period of time, says Vaux, “Field staff are drawn from other programs. The opportunity cost of the tsunami disaster has been considerable.”
According to Janz, other powerful and long-established agencies including the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) and OXFAM also used tsunami funds to import expatriate staff and/or vehicles without fulfilling their pledges to build homes. In fact, the IFRC, which pledged to build 15,000 houses and was allocated land, was yet to honor the commitment seven months after the disaster, and the president threatened to give the allocated land to other organizations. Janz quoted IFRC’s Sri Lankan staff, who said the organization had become an employment generating agency for foreigners, most of who were having “a gala time” in Sri Lanka, without doing much for tsunami victims. [14]
***
Besides exploiting the tsunami funds, the policies and practices of many international Non-governmental organizations created many other problems. As Jeerasinghe observes, artificial rates in the real estate sector created by INGOs made it much harder for local groups to afford office space. It was reported that in the east, monthly house rentals reportedly went up from Rs. 15,000 to as much as Rs. 65,000, which placed NGOs at a huge disadvantage. There, the public also complained that principals and teachers in government schools were neglecting their duties to work for aid agencies for much higher salaries. A furious boss of a local NGO reportedly accused government agents of kowtowing to foreign aid workers and demanding that NGOs put hard cash on the table to get the green light to work in tsunami affected areas. In Hambantota, I heard of a conflict of a different nature: an NGO would not allow IDPs they had cared for move into transitional homes because that meant the end of their own funding.
Pamela Lupton-Bowers says the importance of teamwork cannot be overemphasized in humanitarian assistance operations; but such cooperation does not seem to have been on the international INGOs’ agendas. While many INGOs came with a few million dollars already in hand, local NGOs had to wait until their appeals were approved by parent groups before they received any funds. While they waited, one Executive Director of an NGO accused INGOs of scaling down his operations by robbing his staff with offers of salaries three times what he could afford; of making huge promises to tsunami victims which many of them could not keep; and lacking transparency about their funds.
Janz also reported that in Killionchchi in the north, a heated argument broke out between representatives of UNICEF and local NGOs, when UNICEF charged that local NGOs were too small to work with. Non-cooperation with local organizations appears to be the norm rather than the exception in other disaster-stricken places too, as shown earlier in an example from Haiti.
It is also important to note that in tsunami-hit countries, adversarial relations and competition for money, power, and prestige, were not limited to relations between INGOs and NGOs. Vaux writes that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) which acts as a secretariat to national societies and generally takes a fatherly control of the overall process, was severely constrained by the policies and limitations imposed by the national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies which “demanded respect for their sovereignty to the extent of excluding international responses” in post-tsunami Sri Lanka and India. Paul Farmer also observes that “When a stunning 9.9 billion of reconstructions pledges were made” for Haiti, “….Below the surface consensus, rifts began to appear regarding who would be in charge of the reconstruction dollars. The international financial institutions were vying for control, as were a few major donor nations and the UN…These tensions, though hidden away, were fierce….”
Jirasinghe identifies another problem that emerged as hundreds of faith-based organizations rushed to tsunami stricken areas. While many helped the survivors without ulterior motives, some engaged in proselytizing activities in the guise of aid, and, “In cases where faith-based organisations (sic.) have tied religious conversion of individuals to the decision of ‘who receives funding’, this communal animosity has, at times, spilled over into open violence.”
In Sri Lanka, inept assistance and/or disrespectful treatment by humanitarian agencies also posed health risks for IDPs. At one welfare center over 50 men, women, and children were hospitalized with vomiting and vertigo after consuming a variety of grain donated by an Asian donor agency. Hospital sources later discovered that the grain, which looked like the cashew nuts so common in Sri Lanka, should have been soaked for a day to rid it of toxins before consumption. But the local people did not know this and the donor agency did not provide instructions on how to prepare the food for consumption. I also read a news report that said some 5,000 packets of pet food had been donated by an INGO to the IDPs in the Hambantota district. Most people, seeing pictures of cats and dogs on labels, had not eaten them but those who did had developed nausea and diarrhea, and the Chief Public Health Inspector seized the remaining stocks. I also saw some canned food that had been distributed in the Habaraduwa district that looked suspiciously like pet food, but identification of the product or its origin was impossible because the labels had been removed before distribution.
The many problems revealed above presumably emerge because humanitarian organizations do not share compatible mandates, analyses, priorities, or ways of working. But Vaux says most generally take as their badge of honor the principles of humanitarianism laid out in the Red Cross Code of Conduct (IFRC 1994) and the Sphere Charter (The Sphere Project 2004.)
The Sphere Project was created by a group of humanitarian non-governmental organizations and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The Sphere Handbook, containing “the most widely known and internationally recognized set of standards for humanitarian response” has been translated into more than 40 languages. The project’s website says that,
(The) cornerstone of the Handbook is the Humanitarian Charter, which describes core principles that should govern humanitarian action and asserts the right of disaster-affected populations to life with dignity, protection and assistance. A series of Core and Minimum Standards are based on best practices in the sector. The Core Standards pertain to the planning and implementation phases of humanitarian response. The Minimum Standards refer to four sets of life-saving activities: water and sanitation; food security and nutrition; shelter and non-food items; and health.”
Vaux says that The Sphere project has profoundly influenced humanitarian agencies, but that its impact has fallen short of its lofty aims because, “Donors never committed themselves to ensuring that Sphere Standards will be met, and they have been able to shrug off responsibility for failure by blaming each other. The emphasis on relief responses and technical standards has tended to reinforce a minimalist approach focused on saving lives, rather than tackling the causes of problems and dealing with them in sustainable ways.”
We have seen the many adverse social consequences caused by this failure. It took yet another form in the southern province, when it enabled tent dwellers themselves to capitalize on the disaster for their own gain, resulting in arguments and fights between IDPs and further fragmenting already fragmented communities. Poor people who lost homes inland complained to me that tent dwellers living by the main road of prevented aid items from reaching inland and that they took everything for themselves. A UDA official confirmed this allegation. She said, “To tell you the truth, some IDPs now have more household goods than we do. They own twelve or thirteen mattresses. Some have three coconut scrapers and we all know a family needs only one. Now their problem is where to store the stuff since they cannot keep everything in the tents! But we did not see such behavior soon after the disaster. When Sewa Lanka distributed kitchen utensils worth about Rs. 3,000 people made sure those who really needed them got them. But when truckloads of aid started coming their attitudes changed. People started to grab as much as they can. Some people still keep their tents by the side of their transitional homes to collect aid and reporters who don’t know the situation write about them, so people still bring aid.”
Competition for aid resulted in conflicts not just in my neighborhood. Once I was returning to Galle from Colombo after a short visit home, and asked the driver to turn into the site of the train tragedy for another look. Just as I got down from the vehicle, men and women started yelling and screaming about fifty yards away. Within minutes four or five men ran into nearby huts – temporary homes built for them – and came back with knives and batons. Fortunately, no one got cut or stabbed because a few women, screaming and wailing desperately, pulled the men away from each other. The violence subsided, though the argument continued. What was the fight about? From what we could discern, it was ignited by some people accusing others of taking more of the cooking oil distributed that morning.
In the final analysis, attempts to capitalize on tsunami aid reveal our commonality as members of the human species. Regardless of our skin colors and social status, regardless of how powerful and rich we are, or where we come from, we are all vulnerable to various desires. And when confronted with seemingly unlimited amounts of material wealth and opportunities for enhancing power, prestige, and status, some people fall victim to their desires regardless of the circumstances that led to the wealth in the first place. We see this again in the next two chapters, in which I document my findings on the reconstruction of houses and the rebuilding of livelihoods in Sri Lanka and Japan a year after the disaster.
“Ration cards issued in excess of tsunami affected persons.” Daily Mirror. March 9, 2005.
Press Trust of India News, September 25, 2004.
“Wave of corruption” by Mark Dodd and Stephen Fitzpatrick. Australian, April 24, 2006.
“Getting aid from the warehouse to the homeless in Sri Lanka. Financial Times. January 22, 2005.
Daily Mirror, March 9, 2005.
Jirasinge, Ramya Chamalie. Rhythm of the Sea. Sri Lanka: Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce, 2009.
Information from government notices supplied by the Urban Development Department of Habaraduwa.
Sunday Observer, March 20, 2005.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
The Sunday Times. March 20, 2005.
See The Sunday Leader. March 27, 2005.
“The Sunday Leader, February 13, 2005; April 10, 2005; April 24, 2005.
Ibid.
See “International Red Cross staff gagged.” The Island, Online edition. Aug. 30, 2005.