Professor Hitoshi Miyazawa writes that 115,000 homes suffered complete or partial collapse in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, 80 percent of which were situated along the Pacific coast of the Tohoku district. 30% of the damages occurred in the southern part of the Sanriku coast area, where many built-up zones that had developed in the bay head areas such as Shizugawa of Minamisanriku and Rikuzentakata in Iwate were completely destroyed. Slightly more than 40 percent of the damaged or destroyed homes were located in the Sendai Bay area. [1]
As the first anniversary of Japan’s disaster approached, NHK reported little progress has been made in the recovery and reconstruction processes. [2] Some 340,000 IDPs still live in transitional homes or with relatives; businesses and industries are yet to be rebuilt; and only about 6 percent of the more than 22 b. tons of the debris has been removed. A Disaster Safety and Recovery expert interviewed by the national broadcaster also observed he had never seen the recovery process creep along so slowly anywhere else. “In this kind of project, process of getting started is especially important….debris must be cleared as quickly as possible and life lines, such as roads, must be restored quickly…. I think our society has failed to get adequate support for affected areas” the expert said. So, in the country that is best equipped to deal with complex disasters, what explains the snail-pace of the recovery process? To find out, we must look at social, environmental, and economic factors, the nature and scale of the disaster, and also what appears to be short-sighted political decisions.
The debris remains, says NHK, because other prefectures have taken as much as they can, and the affected region must build incinerators within their bounds to dispose of the rest. Recovery and reconstruction has been slowed by national budgetary problems also. Eight months passed before Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government announced a $234b budget for the work, which will be spent over the next five years. But Japan has been stuck in deflation since the mid 1990s and the gross state debt is more than 200 percent of gross domestic product, so when monies will be released is uncertain. [3] As told by Jim Sato, mayor of Minamisanriku, to Alex Thomson of Independent Television News, this uncertainty about how much and how soon funds will come from the central government is causing some towns to proceed cautiously. [4]
In Minamisanriku, the tsunami engulfed the town center, destroying the municipality office, the main shopping area and its seven shopping centers, and even the three-storey Disaster Control Center, killing scores of town officials who had rushed up to its roof. The plan for reconstruction includes input from residents, and its completion is estimated to take 10 years. It calls for the rebuilding of the town in a safer location inland, residential areas and other facilities to be relocated on the surrounding hills; the commercial district to be raised from the fishing docks; and for more evacuation centers with wider access routes so people can escape faster from future tsunamis. Minamisanriku is described as a microcosm of the challenges facing the entire area; other badly devastated towns like Rikuzentakata, also face similar challenges and timeframes in reconstruction work. [5]
The nature and scale of the projects are no doubt extremely challenging, but considering the seriousness of the situation and Japan’s wide-ranging experiences with disaster recovery, one might have thought the prime minister would quickly appoint suitable officials to take care of the recovery process. But it took him almost a year to create a Reconstruction Agency. Headed by the Reconstruction Minister, it has the headquarters in Tokyo and three bureaus in Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima. With a life span of 10 years, it is mandated to develop rebuilding policies, hand out grants, create special deregulation zones, and give tax breaks. About 250 personnel from various government agencies now work for the Reconstruction Agency, which will oversee the rebuilding of the devastated areas as well as the revitalization of the Fukushima Prefecture.
The Disaster Safety and Recovery expert believes the agency should have been set up in one of the affected areas, with the minister stationed there all the time, so he can communicate and consult with the residents on a daily basis and make quick decisions based on their needs and standpoints, and be flexible with guidelines. That he is right is shown by the fact that the agency seems to be making decisions with little consideration for the realities of the IDPs’ situation: Sato told Thomson that recovery and reconstruction is also delayed because Tokyo officials are lumping the natural and the manmade disasters together, although the vast majority of tsunami affected towns and villages are not in the vicinity of the stricken nuclear complexes, and unlike the nuclear crisis which is still on-going, the tsunami was a one-day event.
So, the lives of the IDPs continue to be in turmoil, and the future looks bleak for other reasons too. Under the master reconstruction plan, the national government will bear the cost for cutting through the hills and developing relocation sites, and will also purchase land affected by the tsunami. IDPs are responsible for purchasing plots and rebuilding new homes. But as told by NHK, when people gathered for a briefing on the plan from the town office, money problems came to the forefront.
The IDPs requested a place where everyone could live together while staying close to the sea and officials offered them a choice of two upland sites. But they will be ready only in about 10 years and in the meantime, the IDPs must leave transitional homes after two years and find alternative accommodation on their own. They do not know when the government will evaluate their devastated lands or how much the newly developed land will cost. They are not eligible for house building subsidies until they start the building process, and most are still unemployed because the infrastructure is yet to be rebuilt. A fisherman, who is sustaining his family of six with a part time job and his savings, voiced his predicament, common to many. “It might cost up to a million dollars to replicate what I was doing before the disaster. That would leave me with no way even to consider rebuilding my home,” he said, adding that unless he can get back to fishing, he will have to pack up and find work elsewhere. This was no idle threat: A survey released in February showed about 40 percent of families who survived had left the area, were planning to leave, or were considering it.
Thus, it is no longer the younger people who are moving to other areas in search of work. And for the middle-aged survivors, the prospect is frightening because all they know is the traditional way of life and livelihoods of the Tohoku region and they must now learn new skills, including fitting into other regions that have changed with times. This was revealed to an NHK reporter by a couple planning to move out of Ishinomaki in the Spring, when the husband’s unemployment benefits run out. “I’ve lived all my life in Ishinomaki. The idea of moving out makes me worried. I cannot imagine what our future will be like,” the wife said. Her husband said that the inability to use his decades of experience in fish processing, a job he enjoyed, and having to develop new job skills, is a big dilemma, but the bleak future in his hometown leaves them no choice but to move.
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the world was struck by the resilience of Japanese survivors; but faced with the long delays in recovery and reconstruction, and with families and communities breaking up as people move out of the area, that seems to be slipping. Of course, not everyone has lost that resilient spirit as we see in Chapter Eight. But as shown in Chapter Nine, the elderly people left behind have begun to give up and are succumbing to physical and psychological illnesses. So, it is imperative that the Reconstruction Agency accelerates the reconstruction process to prevent those who can contribute to the area’s revitalization from leaving, as well as to help the elderly survive their predicament. Officials must take care of the elderly who are left behind because as this study shows, recovery and reconstruction is not only material; the process applies to the rebuilding and restricting of shattered lives as well. Moreover, helping the elderly will help the agency because they possess a great deal of knowledge about their natural environment that officials may find useful as they proceed with the work.
A year after the disaster, Japan is still grappling with the aftermath of the nuclear accident too. Six months after the accident Prime Minister Noda informed a UN meeting that steady progress was being made in bringing radio activity under control, and that engineers were attempting to achieve a cold shutdown by the end of the year – earlier than initially scheduled. But decommissioning the plant is expected to take 40 years and a year after the accident, NHK reported 60,000 households and many businesses are still displaced, with no knowing if and when they can return to their places of origin. There is no question that TEPCO must compensate them adequately so they can move on.
TEPCO said it took six months to produce a compensation program because it was not prepared to deal with an accident of this nature and scale and needed to decide what sort of damage would be compensated. Paying out claims running into trillions of yen is also be problematic because Japan had not placed a cap on payable compensation and the company does not have sufficient funds. The law allows government to help out in a case like this but there are no specific guidelines for the process.
When the company finally issued claim forms, the product turned out to be a manual of some 156 pages that IDPs find next to impossible to complete. They must categorize all expenses such as relocations costs, psychological distress, and costs for radiation testing, but most give up in frustration and it is not as if they are not looking to get rich on compensation. As one evacuee, who used to run a Western-style tourist inn and is now working in a construction site which leaves him physically exhausted says, “We are just living day to day. I am not asking for a better life. I just want to make progress in the compensation process so that we can live a stable life.”
But as NHK says, TEPCO seems to have paid no attention to the hardships it caused the evacuees when designing the compensation application. A company representative explained the forms are long because the company wants applicants to record all items for which they deserve compensation, but their actions don’t match their worlds. The company would not revise the manual to help applicants file their claims; instead it assigned 6,500 staff members to help the applicants – who are now scattered across Japan. Furthermore, even if they manage to submit applications, the IDPs do not receive compensation for all the losses the company wants them to list. For example, NHK reported that a farmer, who remodeled his home located 10 km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant at a cost of about $40,000 shortly before the disaster, and was forced to abandon both that and his farm, was paid only about $44,000 in compensation. TEPCO turned down his request for compensation for the house and the land saying the government plans to regroup the evacuated areas according to levels of radiation, and since the value of real estate will be determined by how soon residents can return to the locations, it is waiting for the outcome of the government review.
According to NHK, TEPCO receives more than 3,000 daily inquiries about how to fill compensation claim forms, and to help mediate the process, the government established The Center For Settling Disputes Over Nuclear Accidents, which received over 800 applications in the first six months. But NHK says that many IDPs are now reluctant to apply for compensation because they will be paid less if they start new jobs. This may make economic sense for the government, but both the government and TEPCO seem to have forgotten the ‘dana’ ideal towards their own citizens, and seem to ignore the fact that it was they who tore the IDPs’ lives apart. IDPs’ only fault – if it can be called a fault – was being poorer than the rest of the society.
Unlike in Japan, in Sri Lanka, house construction was in full swing when I returned for follow-up research a year after the disaster. But as will be shown, progress was mixed and I hope the following data and analysis will provide insights that will help to avoid costly mistakes in terms of money, time, and effort to other nations who may face the challenge of urgently relocating IDPs. In a world where an international panel of climate scientists predict the occurrence of more severe and frequent deluges, heat waves, and droughts resulting from global warming, [6] more and more countries will surely face the problem in the coming years.
***
In my research site, the rubble was largely gone a year after the tsunami. Along the beach front some houses were being repaired and new ones were being built because after the GoSL relaxed the controversial buffer-zone law and reinstated the pre-tsunami range of 35 to 50 meters stipulated in the 1997 Coastal Conservation Act, IDPs who had lived within 100 meters were given the option of returning to former places of residence or relocating to homes built by donors in safer areas. Those who had lived beyond the stipulated zone were eligible for owner-driven house building cash grants as well.
So, rebuilding had begun in earnest, but with an estimated 98,000 permanent homes needed, thousands of families were still living in transitional shelters. These were wooden huts that afforded the occupants about 200 square feet of living space and they were a step up from the tents. But people said they felt insecure living in the huts and that during the monsoons some had leaked when it rained while some had lost their roofs in the storms.
In the year gone by change had occurred structurally too. The government had created new agencies and policies to reduce corruption and other problems, and to increase productivity among those engaged in reconstruction efforts. To improve coordination among the organizations engaged in reconstruction work and to monitor their progress, the Tsunami Housing Reconstruction Unit (THRU) had been created. To consolidate services and needs of the reconstruction and development work, and to coordinate and facilitate the work done by all stakeholders, the Reconstruction and Development Agency (RADA) had been created. And to ensure that the reconstruction process progressed smoothly and efficiently in areas devastated by the tsunami as well as the war, the government and developmental partners supporting the reconstruction effort had endorsed eight Guiding Principles. [7]
I will now define the Guiding Principles, and use them as the analytical framework in this chapter, in which I look at the reconstruction of homes, and in Chapters Eight, where the focus is on the reconstruction of livelihoods.
The Guiding Principles:
Equity: Local and international donors should be guided by identified needs and local priorities, without regional, ethnic, gender, political, or sector based discrimination. The recovery process should strengthen the peace process and build confidence, and the reconstruction process should be sensitive to the impact on neighboring unaffected communities
Subsidiarity: Reconstruction activities should be decentralized as much as possible by designing and implementing at the lowest competent tier of government. Aim is to ensure that rebuilding activities progress without compromising efficient implementation and quality of output, and with minimal delays of execution, by enabling locally appropriate solutions, participation of sub-national structures, capacity building, and strengthening different levels of governance and civil society
Consultation: Consult affected communities about their mid and long-term needs, engage them in decision-making and in reconstruction activities, and when intervening, respect local religions, culture, structures, and customs
Communication and transparency: Must be ensured at all levels by the government, donor agencies, and I/NGOs in decision-making and implementation. This refers to policies, entitlements and procedures, and resource use and there should be zero tolerance of corruption
Reduce future vulnerabilities: Reconstruction should achieve this by adopting a multi-hazard risk approach
Analysis of individual interventions: Interventions should be assessed for prospective impact on peace and conflict, on gender, on governance, and human rights regarding the distribution of aid across geographic regions and ethnic communities
Debt relief: revenues resulting from debt relief should demonstrably benefit tsunami victims
Coordination: Efforts between all relevant stakeholders needs to be coordinated to maximize benefits and prevent duplication
All actors involved in reconstruction efforts were expected to adhere to these Principles, but it was not mandated and my visits to some donor-driven housing sites in the Galle and Hambantota districts, as well as data given to me by the chairperson of the DRMU of homes built in the Matara and Hambantota Districts, showed significant variations in how people adhered to them. Besides this fact, as shown below, logistical problems of building in previously uninhabited areas without proper planning, the speed with which homes were completed, and various failures on the part of government officials resulted in a good number of homes preventing their occupants from resuming normal lives or even beginning new lives in those homes.
In the Galle district, I visited four housing projects in the Habaraduwa Division with the DS. On our way to the first new village where homes were being built by an INGO, Kurier Aid Austria, we drove past a fairly large hill. “We planned to level that hill for 40 houses Kurier Aid was going to build,” he said. “But the buffer zone law delayed the process so much that the agency purchased land on their own in another area and started building, so we need to build only about fifteen homes on the hill. Kurier Aid is one of the larger agencies helping us and they are doing very good work, working with us to build in very difficult locations” the DS said warmly, indicating that the agency was generally fulfilling the expectations of Subsidiarity. His words were echoed by other local government officials. They were all glad Kurier Aid was also building on another site they purchased in the Habaraduwa Division, and in government allotted land in Galle and Hikkaduwa.
When we arrived at the construction site, I saw the agency had also taken precautions to reduce future vulnerabilities. The lot, though located about 300 meters inland, was almost at sea-level. Work on 24 two-story twin houses of a targeted 140 was well under way and the homes were being built on three meter high concrete columns. The living quarters were located on the upper level and only the kitchen and an open veranda were located in the lower level. So, in the event of another tsunami that did not exceed the height of the last one, the sea would rush under the homes rather than through them.
A UDA official said Kurier Aid was building the homes according to the plan they and the CCD recommended after studying the heights of tsunami waves in the area, but that other NGOs and INGOs opposed it because it increased construction costs. They may have objected also because as Sunil Bastian, a Sri Lankan political economist and development consultant says, aid agencies respond to disasters based on a particular understanding or interpretation of the phenomenon. [8] That is, they treat disasters as isolated events, without considering the interrelationships between a natural phenomenon and society, and when that is the case, says Bastian, the focus is on restoring infrastructures and livelihoods as soon as possible, thus replicating the conditions that made those structures vulnerable to the disaster in the first place. Kurier Aid, on the other hand, seems to have considered the interrelationship between the natural phenomenon and society, as advised by Kengo Kuma and other architects and planners.
Samarasekere said the twin-houses I saw would be occupied mostly by fisher families. I asked about the selection process. “Houses are assigned through a lottery scheme,” he said. “We interview applicants together with the donor agency. We are not biased towards any family and they relocate voluntarily. And because these are twin houses, lottery winners are free to exchange their house with someone else if they want to live next door to a friend or relative.” His reply indicated that they were making an effort to fulfill the guidelines of equity, consultation, communication and transparency. But some IDPs believed that some GNs favored people known to them in matters of housing. When I raised this concern with a UDA official he said, “In Habaraduwa district, we use the data supplied by the GNs. I believe all the houses that were destroyed or damaged were examined by another team of people before their claims were processed. Still, it is possible some favoritism may have happened because there was no committee to check on data gathered by the GNs. If such a precaution had been taken unfair practices could have been avoided, but because of the emergency situation, that could not be done.”
The second housing scheme we visited that morning was Sumithuru Gama (Friendship Village). The 30 homes there had been constructed by the Joint Organisation (sic) for Kolonnawa National Disaster Relief Services, with monies given by local and foreign donors. Each 550 sq. ft. home, stood on 9 perches. A new community hall, a small Budu Medura (Shrine to the Buddha,) and water and electricity supplies were all in place and families had begun to resettle in November, 2005.
We went into two homes in Sumithuru Gama. In the first one, an elderly woman and her adult daughter were comfortably settled because the donor agency had also given every family two beds, a cupboard, dining table and chairs, a gas cooker, and other kitchen utensils. Being one of the first homes to be completed, however, this one had a roof of corrugated sheeting and lacked a ceiling. But those built later had ceilings and tiled roofs which made the homes much cooler during the hot afternoons.
In the next home a resident complained that the water in the tube well tasted of oil and mud. The DS told her that tube wells were a temporary measure and that a proper water service would be supplied in due course. He was keen to find out if any trouble had broken out in the new village because families resettled there had originated from several villages, and he had already had to cope with opposition to the resettlement of fisher families among other groups in some newly created villages. While one reasons for the opposition is caste differences, Dulini Perera, a doctor who takes care of fisher families provided other reasons. She said there is a higher incidence of alcoholism and domestic violence in fishing communities; that with many mothers working as domestic workers in the Middle-East, the children are often left in the care of relatives when their fathers go to sea thus compromising their health, hygiene, and education; and that there is a higher incidence of disciplinary problems among children from such families since they grow up without consistent supervision.
So, achieving equity was problematic not only because some relief providers are partial towards affected people, but also because survivors themselves discriminate against people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Therefore, says S.T. Hettige, when people who are suddenly and violently torn from their traditional communities and resettled in new villages, there is a critical need for community building efforts among such groups. [9] Neglecting such efforts, he points out, results in affected families competing rather than cooperating with each other to overcome their individual and common problems, leading to intra-community disputes and conflicts.
But it seemed such problems had not arisen in Sumithuru gama; when Samarasekara asked the woman if there have been any conflicts between people one of the women answered, “Oh no, there haven’t been any problems. Everyone gets along with one another.” “So, the fact that these are twin houses which may be occupied by two families from different villages has not become an issue?” Samarasekara persisted.
“No. In fact, all the villagers are now planning a collective dana on December 27 for everyone who died in the tsunami,” she said. And then, validating Hettige’s observation, she said that the chairman of the donor agency visits periodically and advises them to perform their religious rituals and to live in harmony.
“That is very good to know,” the DS said, obviously relieved. Turning to me he said, “When I came two weeks ago, there was a wedding in one of the homes and everyone seemed happy about it. The IDPs had been unable to do these things, but now their lives are getting back to normal.” The smiling women nodded.
But while Sumithurugama appeared to have averted communal problems, Hettige points to other places in the south where conflicts had arisen because some families and external agencies concentrated on fulfilling household and individual needs, neglecting community issues such as the environment, sanitation, and community participation. Why did this situation emerge when the Guiding Principles emphasized equity and community consultation and participation in identifying the needs of the IDPs?
Malathi de Alwis and Pradeep Jeganathan, two Sri Lankan social anthropologists observe that categories like ‘community,’ ‘representation,’ ‘consultation,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘capacity building,’ ‘good governance,’ and ‘participation’ have become naturalized in aid discourses and practice produced by INGOs and their local partners. However, as they show in insightful essays, these practices often inflict more wounds on already wounded communities by restructuring them in divisive ways reminiscent of the colonial legacy. For example, talking of ‘consulted communities’ Jeganathan writes, "It is not only that one community can have many voices, it is also that many voices may be unarticulated. But, in the discourses of community consultation that dominates descriptions of INGO Aid practice, the ‘community’ and the ‘consulted community’ appear to be synonymous." In Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka, [10] which looks at how disaster relief and recovery efforts unfolded in a culturally pluralistic political landscape, that is among Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities, Dennis B. Mcgilvray and Michele R. Gambourd also reveal how the reconstruction process was hampered by political patronage, by the competing efforts of hundreds of foreign human organizations, and by the on-going civil war.
Just a few meters away from Sumithuru Gama, Hampton Village was coming up. This project was the work of a Sri Lankan doctor and other donors in England. His target group was middle class people who had lost their homes. The fifty detached homes here were bigger than those I already saw and beneficiaries had to meet minimum standards in educational qualification and employment status, and have a family size of no more than five members to receive one of them.
The donor was able to stipulate these and other conditions because he purchased the land himself. When homes were built on state-owned land, donors received the land free and ownership of homes was transferred to the heads of the resettling household with the single condition that they could not transfer homes to non-family members. At Hampton Court, recipients were given homes on a five year lease, after which they were eligible to apply for ownership if they had resided in the homes without a break of more than three months during the first five years. Applications for ownership would be reviewed by a Welfare Society, already formed from selected members of the 32 resettled families.
Besides better housing, Hampton Village offered other benefits and privileges to its occupants. Based on their incomes, each family would contribute up to Rs.1,000 to the Welfare Society. 50 percent would be used for village maintenance and the rest would go towards a benefit fund for the villagers. They were also getting a computer center, and six of the fifty homes would be reserved for families that would come from England to teach residents computer skills, English, and crafts. A memorial dedicated to tsunami victims was being built in the compound and shady trees and seating around it would provide a space for quiet reflection and meditation. In 2007 I visited a family originally from Talpe who had resettled in Hampton Village and they said it would soon become a gated community.
There was no doubt the doctor who built Hampton Village was trying to ensure equal opportunities for his chosen beneficiaries. But he had overlooked an important fact: located just a hop, step, and a jump from other villages where settlers had none of the above privileges would surely pave the way for jealousy and conflicts between them and those of Hampton Village.
The last housing scheme we visited that morning, Thilinagama, was being built by Stretchline Garment Factory, a private local company. Equipped with a community center, a small library, and a playground, this site still had some homes under construction. But people were settled in those already finished and youngsters were cheerfully swinging on the three swings in the play ground, while older ones were looking through books in the library.
We walked up to a house with a small lawn and a few saplings in its front yard and Samarasekara knocked on the door. A smart young woman named Shamila opened it and her younger brother came running. Their parents had gone to work, but she gave us a tour of their new home. The two bedrooms were equipped with beds and cupboards given by the donor agency. The living room featured new furniture and curtains, also given by them. With running water and electricity, the family was nicely settled and obviously took pride in the upkeep of their new home. They are a fisher family and the DS asked Shamila how she liked living here. “Oh, we are much happier to be away from the sea. We can sleep peacefully at night!” she sighed. I complemented Shamila on their garden and Samarasekara said the family had planted the garden even before the house was completed. Shamila smiled happily. “When it’s your own, you must also help out, isn’t it?” she chirped.
Shamila’s attitude was quite a contrast to what the Sarana Foundation and the Documentation Officer of Kurier Aid had encountered among most beneficiaries. The Sarana Foundation built ten homes in three villages and Gnanaweera Thero encouraged beneficiaries to help with house construction work so they could use the savings in labor cost towards purchasing household goods. But nobody took up the offer. “The youths just sat there smoking cigarettes and watching the workmen,” said the monk, disappointed and frustrated.
I met the Kurier Aid official at Samarasekara’s office and she too said the agency offered IDPs cash for work opportunities, but that nobody participated. “They seem so lethargic! Many of them just lean back and wait until everything is done for them. They even seem reluctant to act independently or make decisions for themselves. Why are they so lethargic?” she wondered. Here then was a case where IDPs themselves made it impossible to ensure that consultation and communication between the relief providers and themselves would occur.
This was quite different to the IDPs’ attitude soon after the disaster. During my first research trip, I spoke with Chatura Welivitiya, chairman of HELP-O (a human and environment link progressive organization based in Galle.) Back then, he organized eager crews of IDPs to clear debris from roads and home gardens in cash-for-work programs but now, even though laborers could earn 400 rupees per day and skilled workers commanded much higher rates, beneficiaries refused to help out with building their own homes. Why? Both the monk and the Kurier Aid agency official believed the IDPs got spoilt because they received so much for free. “Now they just lean back and wait until we build houses for them” said the Kurier Aid official. To avoid such a situation in future disasters she believed that “One or two INGO representatives should oversee the disbursements of monies and monitor the work and IDPs should do the construction themselves under supervision of local authorities.”
***
The above data shows that there had been some adherence to the Guiding Principles of equity, consultation, communication, and so on at the sites I visited with the DS, but I found several violations at other sites. For instance, in several homes built in a village very near Talpe walls were already cracked. A family in one of those homes showed me a stack of tiles that had been delivered, many of which were broken. Communication between the donors and beneficiaries appear to have been nonexistent: The family did not know the name of the NGO responsible for the building program or the sub contractor doing the work.
Bastian too observes that many documents on the progress of implementation, and the general thrust of the public debate, suggest that there has been little compliance with the Guiding Principles. “What accounts for this obvious lack of transparency, accountability, corruption, and poor quality of work and materials in the same DS Division?” I asked Samarasekere. He said the NGO engaged in reconstruction work had obviously not followed the Subsidiarity Principal. “But” he said, “There is little we could do because INGOs and NGOs are not required to work with local government authorities.” In other words, since it was not mandated that the Guiding Principles had to be observed, some donors simply ignored them. And the fact that NGOs and INGOs could go anywhere, create ‘communities,’ and engage in reconstruction activities without being accountable to any authorities enabled unscrupulous people to do half-baked projects, exploiting the disaster for their own advantage.
When I visited some families still living in tents in Habaraduwa district that I met the previous year, I discovered that unrestricted communication between donors and IDPs had allowed the latter to exploit the situation to their own advantage as well. Among the people gathered around me at the tent site were two women who seemed to have really mastered the art of complaining. Their main one was that they were yet to be allocated a house by the government. When I got back in the three-wheeler however, the two village youths who accompanied me there told me that both women had received donor-driven homes, and that one woman also had a house built for her by her German daughter-in-law.
Allegations that some IDPs obtained multiple houses from different donor agencies in their names or that of their children’s were fairly common. At the tent site, I also heard some legitimate complaints from several women which demonstrated that equity in relief and recovery was yet to be achieved. A mother of a four-year-old girl whose husband had left her said that before she became homeless she earned a living sewing pillow cases, sheets, and clothes. “I’ve been telling the NGOs that if I got just a one-room house and a sewing machine, I could get back to work, but nobody has given me anything yet!” she said. The DRMU chairman, Lionel Fernando, and the Planning Director at the Galle Secretariat also told me that female heads of households were not being treated equitably.
Clearly, many problems with house building projects in the Habaraduwa Division occurred because NGOs and INGOs were not accountable to local authorities. In 2005, the government attempted to make these organizations accountable by setting up the Center for Non Governmental Sector to facilitate the relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction work of NGOs, INGOs, and other organizations. But the rate of compliance was very low. By 2008, 1121 NGOs and INGOs had registered with the Center but less than 170 had submitted the audited reports for 2006 that had been requested by August 15 of 2007. And just 112 had sent in their Action Plans requested by December 15 of 2007. [11] Consequently, in 2008, the government made visa renewals for INGO personnel dependent on submission of these documents.
***
House building problems similar to the ones portrayed above and even worse ones were discovered in January of 2006 by a team of DRMU officers who monitored the progress of over 1,000 donor-driven homes being constructed in forty-five sites in the Matara and Hambantota districts. [12] The collective summary of their findings below reveal not only how the Guiding Principles had been violated by donors, and how corrupt local authorities whose job it was to provide technical help to donors had seriously neglected their duties, but also many problems that emerged because new settlements were being created with no adequate planning in previously uninhabited areas .
The first set of problems is associated with the location. The suddenness of the disaster, the enormous number of IDPs who urgently needed new permanent homes, and the lack of buildable land around established villages left the government little choice but to hastily clear land in state-owned forests and hilly areas where no infrastructure exited. So, even though beneficiaries were entitled to receive houses with water and electricity according to post-tsunami housing policy, hilly locations made provision of water connection and roads particularly problematic. DRMU officials found 25 houses which were completed and handed over, but only 15 were occupied due to lack of water and electricity connections. In Galle district too I saw homes that had been built on hilly locations. The cut surfaces of hillsides had not been reinforced, leaving the communities in the vicinity extremely vulnerable to landslides.
DRMU officials also found other location-related problems. In one site people were forced to procure water illegally from other places at great financial cost to themselves because no water was being delivered as promised. In another, tube well water was undrinkable. DRMU representatives also found houses built with no access roads or pathways to the homes; children unable to get to school due to lack of convenient access to public transport; people unable to cultivate home gardens because they had been resettled in land without boundary markings; and people who were not used to wild animals living in great fear of wild elephants in the area.
The second set of problems centered on poor construction, low quality materials, and incomplete workmanship. These included the construction of small cesspits meant to convert human waste to bio gas, but without the installation of the mechanism for this procedure; toilets built with no drainage systems and bathrooms; missing ceilings; cracked walls and rafters; crumbling plaster; sunken floors; and warped doors and windows. DRMU representatives also found homes that appeared to be smaller than the minimum square footage specifications stipulated by the government and one instance where the donor organization had left the project with no explanation after constructing only three out of seven houses they promised to build.
Unwise planning, incompetence, lack of consulting and communication between local government officials and corruption among them, characterize the third set of problems. DRMU officials found: administrative delays at the District Secretariat causing delays in electricity and water connections; alteration of the beneficiary list; District Secretary’s office not releasing the beneficiary list needed by the builder to apply for water and electricity connections; the UDA giving land ear marked for a Vocational Training Center in deep sea fishing, fishing boat repair and maintenance, tourism, and cookery, to a donor organization for house construction without consulting the ministry, which meant the training center might never be built; THRU officials whose job it was to monitor house construction, not knowing the location of construction sites; THRU officials ordering the demolition and reconstruction of twenty-five unsatisfactorily built homes so late it caused excessive wastage of money, time, and building materials; the curtailment of the construction of 200 homes due to lack of proper access road to the site.
A closer look at the last case mentioned above is particularly useful for all disaster practitioners to understand how problematic location, unwise planning, and incompetence on the part of officials combined to curtail the construction of 200 homes. A new access road of nearly a mile was needed to enable the construction of homes to go on. But the proposed route entailed a railway crossing and railway authorities would not allow the construction of the road. The alternative was to reroute the road along the side of a hill. This meant cutting a seven meter wide and seventy-eight meter long road along a hill. But the hill belongs to a nature reserve and approval by the Central Environmental Authority was needed to continue. A year after the disaster, if and when that would be granted was still unknown. It should be noted that some of the problems mentioned above occurred also because the huge demand for building materials and skilled workers led to inflated prices. And some donors scaled back their house building programs because their funding groups pressured their representatives on the ground to finish projects as quickly as possible which compromised quality and quantity.
The problems portrayed above in Matara and Hambantota do not mean that the DRMU team did not have success stories. They found some well-built houses (some on twenty perches of land) at costs ranging from 600,000 rupees to 910,000 rupees per house. In many cases, with boundaries clearly demarcated and fenced, the new occupants had already planted home gardens. In one project, the donor had also provided a playground for children.
Tsunami house reconstruction problems were not confined to Sri Lanka only. Nearly two years after the tsunami, there was growing discontent in Indonesia too about the state of house building efforts by OXFAM, Save the Children, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and GITEC, a German contracting company. Many problems echoed those in Sri Lanka: roofs and “gappy water-stained wood-plank walls” leaked during heavy rains. An aid agency built houses where another had agreed to build a road. Builders encountered problems of corruption and landownership. 371 completed houses had to be torn down. There was a severe shortage of qualified labor and building materials. [13]
Another example comes from the US, where, after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, mismanagement by FEMA and local government authorities left hundreds of families languishing in temporary shelters for how long, no one knew. The Federal Government poured more than $25 billion into aid for individuals, emergency housing, and state rebuilding block grants. In December 2006, the State of Mississippi received $275 million from FEMA to mass-produce prefabricated cottages for homeless Katrina victims. Architects designed and built 3,075 “Mississippi cottages,” low-cost permanent houses that can withstand winds of 150 mph. But nearly four years after the hurricane, some 700 cottages standing in one lot remained empty because many local jurisdictions refused to grant permits or alter zoning codes for fear that the small structures would lower property values in the area. In the meantime, the state of Lousiana was yet to complete a single cottage, and nearly 20,000 families made homeless by the hurricane were living in temporary trailers and apartments, not knowing when and where they would be able to put down permanent roots. So, FEMA faces harsh and prolonged criticisms, and states are accused of diverting federal rescue funds or failing to deliver on promises to restore long-term affordable housing, drafting poorly designed programs, and of using funds for economic development projects. [14]
***
In Sri Lanka, due to the high degree of inequity displayed by the NGOs in the house building efforts, the DRMU, together with Practical Action (an INGO) organized a day-long workshop bringing together about 200 non-governmental organizations for discussions about their progress on house building. I attended this workshop and found that the Guiding Principles had also given some INGOs an inflated sense of their own importance – which would have been funny if it was not so offensive, and the post-tsunami reconstruction situation not so serious. In a break-out group on ‘Consultation and Communication’ that I participated in, the question we had to address was, “Who should donors consult and communicate with to find out about the needs of villagers?” A couple of representatives from an American INGO declared that they were the authorities on village matters because they have interviewed some of the IDPs. I pointed out that it is the GNs and Divisional Secretaries who are the experts and authorities on village matters, but the pair would not back down. I saw this high-handed attitude from another representative of the same organization at the Livelihood Program Workshop the ADA organized, that I write about in Chapter Eight. It highlights how little some foreigners care about working within the administrative structure of a country.
By contrast, the Documentation Officer of Kurier Aid projected a very different set of values and attitudes held by her agency. She said that following the tsunami, “The first thing that came to our minds was that once you go into a foreign country, one of the most sensitive issues is to try to understand the culture, to understand the people, and to work with them and not impose concepts and programs from back home.” She also said that Kurier Aid has five international employees in Sri Lanka, the director, financial administrator, construction engineers, and herself, but that the architects, contractors, Management Officers, Construction manager, and the workers are all Sri Lankans. This meant their overhead costs were less, which ensured that the funds they had raised would be used to help tsunami victims much more extensively than other agencies that spent thousands of dollars importing luxury vehicles and expatriate workers.
In 2007, the Additional Divisional Secretary of Hambantota, W. A. Dharmasiri took me to see another exemplary housing project. This one was in Siribopura, where the devastated town center was being created. Hundreds of acres of state land had been allocated for new settlements and I was glad to see that the local government authorities had taken great care to leave many mature trees in the area as they cleared the area. Here the Tzu Chi Foundation, a Taiwanese organization, had built hundreds of homes with much consultation and communication with the beneficiaries, made up of both Sinhala and Muslim people. Their needs and cultural lifestyles and the needs of the housing scheme as a communal unit had been considered as the homes were built. Most importantly, Dharmasiri said that the Tzu Chi Foundation had made a five-year commitment to the project, which meant they would have representatives on-site to deal with any issues that might emerge, ensuring its long-term success.
By contrast says Bastian, the bulk of what went on in Sri Lanka in the name of tsunami reconstruction was dominated by the more traditional ‘event focused’ and ‘emergency mode’ responses, and the process was carried out by an unprecedented amounts of funds, charity mentality, and dominance of a large number of international agencies who would not be there to resolve future problems this approach might create. In short, they did not care about the sustainability of the projects. Was the situation any better with the rebuilding of livelihoods? This is what we shall explore in Chapter Seven.
Miyazawa, Hitoshi. “Land Use and Tsunami Damage in Pacific Coast Region of Tohoku District” in The 2011 East Japan Earthquake Bulletin of the Tohoku Geographical Association. Published May 25, 2011. Retrieved on September 25, 2011.
All information attributed to NHK in this chapter was aired on March 10, 2012.
Financial Times. “Protect and revive.” August 5, 2011.
PBS Newshour. Aired on Dec. 7, 2011.
San Jose Mercury News/Associated Press. “Japan tsunami recovery stalls.” November 20, 2011.
“Scope of weather disasters to increase, panel predicts” in San Jose News/Associated Press. March 29, 2012.
The Guiding Principles have been defined using two sources. The first is Chapter Eight of the Joint Report on Post tsunami Recovery and Reconstruction by the Government of Sri Lanka and Development Partners, published in December 2005. The second is a paper on “Post-Tsunami Policy Implications and Framework” presented by Lionel Fernando, Chairperson of the DRMU, at the Oxfam Advocacy Workshop on 7-9 February, 2006
Bastian, Sunil. “From Research to Policy” in Tsunami in a Time of War. Sri Lanka. International Center for Ethnic Studies. 2009.
Hettige, S.T. “Community Development: A Neglected Aspect of Disaster Recovery and Resettlement of Tsunami Victims in Sri Lanka” in Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Retrospect and Prospect. Sri Lanka: Social Policy Analysis and Research Centre University of Colombo in collaboration with ActionAid International, Sri Lanka: 2007.
McGilvray, Dennis B. and Michele R. Gamburd. Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions. UK: Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 2011.
Errant NGOs’ days numbered? in The Sunday Times, January 27, 2008.
“Field Report (of) Housing progress in Weligama, Tangalla, and Hambantota DS Divisions” compiled by the Disaster Relief Monitoring Unit, Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, January, 2006.
“After the deluge, aid agencies find themselves in unfamiliar terrain.” Financial Times. October 2, 2006.
“Permanent housing still eludes some Katrina victims.” San Jose Mercury News, June 14, 2009.