by Naomi Klein
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 disaster 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.2 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.
My travel companion, Kumari, an activist from Colombo, had been a part of the rescue and rehabilitation effort and had agreed to act as guide and translator through the tsunami-struck region. Our trip began in Arugam Bay, a fishing and faded resort village on the east coast of the island, which was being held up by the government’s reconstruction team as the showcase for its plans to “build back better.”
That’s where we met Roger, who gave us, after only a few minutes, a very different version. He called it “a plan to drive the fishing people from the beach.” He claimed that this mass eviction plan long predated the giant wave, but the tsunami, like so many other disasters, was being harnessed to push through a deeply unpopular agenda. For fifteen years, Roger told us, his family had spent fishing season in a thatched hut on the beach in Arugam Bay, near where we were sitting. Along with dozens of other fishing families, they had kept their boats beside their huts and dried their catch on banana leaves in the fine white sand. They mingled easily with tourists, most of whom were Australian and European surfers staying in hostels along the beach, the kind of place with ratty hammocks out front and London club music playing on speakers lodged in palm trees. The restaurants bought fish straight off the boats, and the fishing people, with their colorful traditional lifestyles, provided just the splash of authenticity most rugged travelers were looking for.
For a long time, there was no particular conflict between the hotels and the fishing people in Arugum Bay, in part because the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka ensured that neither industry could grow beyond a small scale. The east coast of Sri Lanka saw some of the worst of the fighting as it was claimed by both sides—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known as the Tamil Tigers) in the North, and the Sinhalese central government in Colombo—but was never fully controlled by either. Reaching Arugam Bay required navigating a maze of checkpoints and running the risk of getting caught in a shootout or a suicide bombing (the Tamil Tigers are credited with having invented the exploding suicide belt). All the guidebooks contained stern warnings about steering clear of Sri Lanka’s volatile east coast; the wave breaks were notoriously good, but only worth the trouble for the seriously hard core.
The breakthrough came in February 2002, when Colombo and the Tigers signed a cease-fire agreement. It wasn’t exactly peace but more like a taut pause in the action, one punctured by the occasional bombing or assassination. Despite this precarious state, as soon as the roads were opened, the guidebooks began pumping up the east coast as the next Phuket: great surfing, beautiful beaches, funky hotels, spicy food, full-moon raves…“a hot party spot,” according to Lonely Planet.3 And Arugam Bay was the center of the action. At the same time, the opening of checkpoints meant that fishing people from around the country could return in large numbers to some of the most plentiful waters along the eastern coast, including Arugam Bay.
The beach was getting crowded. Arugam Bay was zoned as a fishing port, but local hotel owners began complaining that the huts blocked their views, that the fragrance of drying fish turned off their customers (one hotelier, a Dutch expat, told me that “there is such a thing as smell pollution”). Some of the hoteliers started lobbying the local government to relocate the boats and fishing huts to a different bay, one less popular with foreigners. The villagers pushed back, pointing out that they had been living on these lands for generations, and that Arugam Bay was more than a boat launch—it was fresh water and electricity, schools for their children and buyers for their catch.
These tensions threatened to explode six months before the tsunami hit, when there was a mysterious fire on the beach in the middle of the night. Twenty-four fishing huts were reduced to ash. Roger and his family, he told me, “lost everything, our belongings, our nets and ropes.” Kumari and I spoke with many fishing people in Arugam Bay, and all insisted that the fire was arson. They blamed the hotel owners, who obviously wanted the beach to themselves.
But if the fire really was a bid to scare off the fishing people, it didn’t work; the villagers became more determined than ever to stay, and the people who lost their huts quickly rebuilt.
When the tsunami came, it did what the fire couldn’t: 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. In a community of only 4,000, about 350 were killed, most of them people like Roger, Ivan and Jenita, who make their living from the sea.4 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. It was the same up and down the coast: once the rubble was cleared away, what was left was…paradise.
When the emergency subsided and 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 percent of the victims; in some areas the number was closer to 98 percent. 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 devastation should another tsunami strike. On the surface it made sense, but there was a glaring problem with that rationale—it was not being applied to the tourism industry. On the contrary, hotels were being encouraged to expand onto the valuable oceanfront where 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 Arugam 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 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 waters had been enough to sustain their families, but it did not contribute to economic growth as measured by institutions like the World Bank, and the land where their huts once stood could clearly be put to more profitable use. Shortly before I arrived, a document called the “Arugam 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 Arugam 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 Arugam 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 A
rugam 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.5
Missing from all the artists’ impressions and blueprints were the victims of the tsunami—the hundreds of fishing families who used to live and work on the beach. The report explained that 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, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arugam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumari said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.”
When the plan got out, it sparked outrage across the country, and nowhere more than in Arugam Bay. As soon as we arrived in town, Kumari and I stumbled into a crowd of several hundred demonstrators dressed in a kaleidoscopic mix of saris, sarongs, hijabs and flip-flops. They were gathered on the beach and were just beginning a march that would pass in front of the hotels, then on to the neighboring town of Pottuvil, home of the local government.
As they marched past the hotels, a young man in a white T-shirt with a red megaphone led the demonstrators 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!” (Kumari translated from Tamil with apologies.) Another young man, skin toughened by the sun and the ocean, took over megaphone duties and yelled, “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 seemed unlikely that their chants would have much effect. In Colombo I spoke with the director general of the Sri Lankan Tourist Board, Seenivasagam Kalaiselvam, a middle-aged bureaucrat with a bad habit of quoting from his country’s multimillion-dollar “brand personality profile.” I asked him what would become of the fishing people in places like Arugam Bay. He leaned back in a rattan chair and explained. “In the past, in the coastal belt, there were a lot of unauthorized establishments…not constructed according to the tourism plan. With the tsunami, the good thing that happened to tourism is that most of these unauthorized establishments [have been] affected by the tsunami, and the buildings are no longer there.” If fishing people come back and rebuilt, he explained, “We again will be forced to demolish…. The beach will be clean.”
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 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 a lot because they are 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 as 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 their 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 generosity with official aid. In six months, $13 billion was raised—a world record.6
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 stopgap, 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.
Before the Wave: Foiled Plans
The grand plan to remake Sri Lanka predated the tsunami by two years. It began when the civil war ended and the usual players descended on the country to plot Sri Lanka’s entry into the world economy—most prominently USAID, the World Bank and its offshoot the Asian Development Bank. A consensus emerged that Sri Lanka’s most significant competitive advantage lay in the fact that it was one of last places left uncolonized by go-go globalization, a by-product of its long war. For such a small country, Sri Lanka still had a remarkable amount of surviving wildlife—leopards, monkeys, thousands of wild elephants. Its beaches were strangers to high-rises, and its mountains were dotted with Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim temples and holy sites. Best of all, raved USAID, it was “all contained in a space the size of West Virginia.”7
Under the plan, Sri Lanka’s jungles, which provided such effective cover for guerrilla fighters, would be opened up to adventure ecotourists, who would ride the elephants and swing like Tarzan through the canopies the way they do in Costa Rica. Its religions, accomplices in so much bloodshed, would be retrofitted to nourish the spiritual needs of Western visitors—Buddhist monks could run meditation centers, Hindu women could perform colorful dances at hotels, Ayurvedic medical clinics could soothe aches and pains.
In short, the rest of Asia could keep the sweatshops, call centers and frenetic stock markets; Sri Lanka would be there waiting when the captains of those industries needed a place to rest up. 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 f
oreign consultants were convinced, rested with chains like Aman Resorts, which has recently opened two stunning properties on the southern coast, with rooms going for $800 a night and plunge pools in every suite.
The U.S. government was so enthusiastic about Sri Lanka’s potential as a high-end tourism destination, with all the possibilities for resort chains and tour operators, that USAID launched a program to organize the Sri Lankan tourism industry into a powerful Washington-style lobby group. It takes credit for increasing the budget for tourism promotion “from less than $500,000 a year up to approximately $10 million a year.”8 The U.S. embassy, meanwhile, launched the Competitiveness Program, an outpost mandated to advance U.S. economic interests in the country. The program’s director, a graying economist named John Varley, told me that he thought the Sri Lanka Tourist Board was thinking small when it talked about attracting a million tourists a year by the end of the decade. “Personally, I think they could double that.” Peter Harrold, an Englishman who directs the World Bank operation in Sri Lanka, told me, “I’ve always thought of Bali as the perfect comparator.”
There is no question that high-end tourism is a bankable growth market. The overall revenues for luxury hotels, where rooms cost an average of $405 a night, went up a rather striking 70 percent between 2001 and 2005—not bad for a period that included the post–September 11 slump, the war in Iraq and spiraling fuel costs. In many ways, the phenomenal growth of the sector is a by-product of the extreme inequality that resulted from the generalized triumph of Chicago School economics. Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as “superconsumers,” able to carry consumer demand all on their own. Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his “Plutonomy basket” of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. “If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well.”9
