Before anybody thinks it's a good idea to let Laura Bush save the Myanmars.. Read this!!!

The tsunami victims got screwed...

The Shock Doctrine.. Tsunami part one..

Not so long ago, this beach and dozens like it up and down Sri Lanka's coast had been the site of a frantic rescue mission after the most devastating natural diaster in recent memory-the December 26, 2004 tsunami, which took the lives of 250,000 people and left 2.5 million people homeless throughout the region. I had come to Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries, six months later to see how the reconstruction efforts here compared with those in Iraq.

When the tsunami came, it cleared the beach completely. Every single fragile structure was washed away-every boat, every fishing hut, as well as every tourist cabana and bungalow. And yet, underneath the rubble and the carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along-a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden.

When the emergency subsided and the fishing families returned to the spots where their homes once stood, they were greeted by police who forbade them to rebuild. "New rules," they were told-no homes on the beach, and everything had to be at least two hundred meters back from the high-water mark. Most would have accepted building farther from the water, but there was no available land there, leaving the fishing people with nowhere to go. And the new "buffer zone" was being imposed not only in Arugam Bay but along the entire east coast. The beaches were off-limits.

The tsunami killed approximately thirty-five thousand sri Lankans and displaced nearly a million. Small-boat fishing people like Roger made up 80% of the victims: in some areas the number was closer to 98%. In order to receive food rations, and small relief allowances, hundreds of thousands of people moved away from the beach and into temporary camps inland, many of them long, grim barracks made of tin sheet that trapped the heat so unbearably that many abandoned them to sleep outside. As time dragged on, the camps became dirty and disease ridden and were patrolled by menacing, machine-gun-wielding soldiers.

Officially, the government said the buffer zone was a safety measure, meant to prevent a repeat of the devasation should another tsunami strike, On the surface, this made sense, but there was a glaring problem with that rational-it was not being applied to the tourism industry. On the contrary, hotels were being encouraged to expand onto the valuable oceanfront where the fishing people had lived and worked. Resorts were completely exempted from the buffer-zone rule-as long as they classified their construction, no matter how elaborate or close to the water, as "repair," they were free and clear. So all along the beach in Arugram Bay, construction workers hammered and drilled. "Don't tourists have to fear a tsunami?" Roger wanted to know.

To him and his colleagues, the buffer zone looked little like little more than an excuse for the government to do what it had wanted to do before the wave: clear the beach of fishing people. The catch they used to pull from the water had been enough to sustain their families, but it did not contribute to economic growth as measured by the World Bank, and the land where their huts once stood could clearly be put to more profitable use. Shortly after I arrived, a document called the " Arugram Bay Resource Development Plan" was leaked to the press, and it confirmed the fishing community's worst fears. The federal government had commissioned a team of international consultants to develop a reconstruction blueprint for Arugram Bay, and this plan was the result. Even though it had been only the beachfront properties that were damaged by the tsunami, with most of the town still standing, it called for Arugram Bay to be leveled and rebuilt, transformed from a hippie-charming seaside town into a high-end "boutique tourism destination"-five star resorts, luxury $300-a-night ecotourism chalets, a floatplane pier and a helipad. The report enthused that Arugram bay was to serve as a model for up to thirty new nearby "tourism zones," turning the previously war-torn east coast of Sri Lanka into a South Asian Riviera.

Missing from all the artists' impressions and blueprints were the vicims of the tsunami-the hundreds of fishing families who used to live and work on the beach. The report claimed that the villagers would be moved to more suitable locations, some several kilometers away and far from the ocean. Making matters worse, the $80 million redevelopment project was to be financed with aid money raised in the name of the victims of the tsunami.

It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and others like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami-it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, theit children swept out ot sea. Yet for the communities like Arugram Bay, the "reconstruction" meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land.

The Tsunami part two...

As they marched past the hotels, a young man in a white T-shirt with a red megaphone led the demostrators in a call-and-response. "We don't want, we don't want..." he called out, and the crowd shouted back, "Tourist hotels!" then he shouted, "Whites..." and they cried, "Get out!" "We do want, we do want..." and the answers came flying: "Our land back!" "Our homes back!" "A fishing port!" "Our aid money!" "Famine, famine!" he shouted, and the crowd replied, "Fisher people are facing famine!"
Outside the gates of the district government, leaders of the march accused their elected representatives of abandonment, of corruption, of spending aid money meant for the fishing people "on dowries for their daughters and jewelry for their wives." They spoke of special favors handed out to the Sinhalese, of discrimination against Muslims, of the "foreigners profiting from our misery."

It hadn't started this way. When Kumari first came to the east coast in the days after the tsunami, none of the official aid had arrived yet. That meant everyone was a relief worker, a medic, a gravedigger. The ethnic barriers that had divided this region suddenly melted away. "The Muslim side was running to the Tamil side to bury the dead," she recalled, "and the Tamil people were running to the Muslim side to eat and drink. People from the interior of the country were sending two lunch parcels each day from each house, which was alot because they were very poor. It was not to get anything back; it was just the feeling 'I have to support my neighbor; we have to support the sisters, the brothers, the daughters, the mothers.' Just that."

Similar cross-cultural aid was breaking out across the country. Tamil teenagers drove their tractors from the farms to help find bodies. Christian children donated their school uniforms to be turned into white Muslim funeral shrouds, while Hindu women gave their white saris. It was if this invasion of salt water and rubble was so humblingly powerful that, in addition to grinding up homes and buckling highways, it also scrubbed away intractable hatreds, blood feuds and the tally of who last killed whom. For, Kumari, who had done years of frustrating work with peace groups trying to bridge the divides, it was overwhelming to see such tragedy met with such decency. Instead of endlessly talking about peace, Sri Lankans, in the moment of greatest stress, were actually living it.

It also seemed that the country could count on international support for its recovery efforts. At first, the help wasn't coming from governments, which were slow to respond, but from individuals who saw the disaster on TV: schoolchildren in Europe held bake sales and bottle drives, musicians organized star-studded concerts, religious groups collected clothes, blankets and money. Citizens then demanded that their governments match their generousity with official aid. In six months, $13 billion was raised-a world record.

In the first months, much of the reconstruction money reached its intended recipients: NGOs and aid agencies brought emergency food and water, tents and temporary lean-tos; rich countries sent medical teams and supplies. The camps were built as a stop-gap, to give people a roof while permanent homes were constructed. There was certainly enough money to get those homes built. But when I was in Sri Lanka six months later, progress had all but stopped; there were almost no permanent homes, and the temporary camps were starting to look less like emergency shelters and more like entrenched shantytowns.

Aid workers complained that the Sri Lankan government was putting up roadblocks at every turn-first declaring the buffer zone, then refusing to provide alternative land to build on, then commissioning an endless series of studies and master plans from outside experts. As the bureaucrats argued, survivors of the tsunami waited in the sweltering inland camps, living off rations, too far from the ocean to begin fishing again. While the delays were often blamed on "red tape" and poor management, there was in fact far more at stake.


I didn't post anymore in this chapter. But it's sad..If BUSHCO "saves" them, they will end up with nothing!

They just STEAL!

Her criticizing was meaningless.

to no time to spend with family and friends and people have given up on others. Nowadays, many only care about them and theirs and will say they care but do nothing to show that they care of others they don't know. The problem with this thinking is that eventually, the system WILL do something that affects you and no one will be there to help you.

The system = divide and conquer

What we need is simple, together we stand, divided we fall. This time around in history it will just be different categories, poor first, then middle class, maybe blacks after that and then maybe even woman...who knows how they will do it but it definetly looks like they are heading there. Look at all the changes to the constitution, all of their new laws and signing statements are set around control and dissent and being implemented because of the so called terrorism that we are in danger of???

(I dont no one person that is worried about terror) Kind of reminds you of what happened after The Reichstag fire and Nazi Germany...hmmm?


First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

what's his name. The moral high ground to lecture any other nation as how to respond after a natural disaster floated away with Katrina.

Sorry, sad, disgusting state of affairs!

You say if BUSHCO "saves" them, they will end up with nothing!

Are you saying Bush is responsible for the actions of the Sri Lankans?

:shrug:

but I suspect they are more British and European than American.

The tsunami chapter really long..But it's amazing what happened, they even moved some of the Maldive Islands villagers off the small ones onto the big one and them sold them off. The little people got totally screwed.

source? Sorry if it should be obvious. It isn't to me.

I might even be able to give you a page number

I didn't recognize it, and I should. I so research in that part of the world, but Naomi Klein isn't "academic" enough to allow on my dissertation bibliography yet (my adviser's estimation, not mine). Now I have an excuse to read it. :)

Our 'aid' is terminally destructive for those who ask for it.

Try getting a tourist visa to that country and find out. The Phuket area of Thailand that got hit with the worst of the Tsunami had long been a tourist area and I'm sure that the government and businesses loved the concept that all those shacks and huts were washed away...and, possibly with it "riff raff" or undesirables. Sadly, this happens in when the financial interests of tourism reign higher than the living standards of the people who live there...an issue Thailand has long been fighting with.

Sri Lanka also has a lot of problems...Tamil Tigers being a big one...and I recall at the time that the government there was concerned outside aid was going to the rebels and not to the people...the byproduct of a civil war that has been tearing apart that country for decades. But since this ugly war isn't about oil or involves American interests, little here is reported or understood.

Myammar is next to North Korea in having an open society. It's been long run by a ruthless military/oligarchy that would use this tragedy to their advantage...but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to try to help the people in that country. I can't see how sending aid and assitance...no matter how corrupted it is...in hopes that some of it trickles down to those who need it most. Sure beats spending a billion dollars a day killing and destroying.

The US problem is the blatant hypocrisy that was and is the handling of our own Katrina victims on the Gulf Coast. Pickles looked like a total fool lecturing the Myammar regime while this regime let New Orleans all but drown...