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.
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