The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

  The man who reigns over this pleasure kingdom is Asia’s longest-running ruler, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who has held on to power since 1978. During his tenure, the government has jailed opposition leaders and been accused of torturing “dissidents” for such crimes as writing for antigovernment Web sites.28 With critics kept out of sight on prison islands, Gayoom and his entourage have been free to lavish their attention on the tourism business.

  Before the tsunami, the Maldives government had been looking to expand the number of resort islands to meet the growing demand for luxury getaways. It faced the usual obstacle: people. Maldivians are subsistence fishers, many of whom live in traditional villages scattered throughout the island atolls. This way of life created some challenges because the rustic charm of seeing fish skinned on the beach is definitely not the Maldives scene. Well before the tsunami, the Gayoom government had been trying to persuade its citizens to move to a handful of larger, more heavily populated islands that tourists rarely visit. Those islands were supposed to offer better protection from rising waters caused by global warming. But it was difficult even for a repressive regime to uproot tens of thousands of people from their ancestral islands, and the “population consolidation” program was largely unsuccessful.29

  After the tsunami, Gayoom’s government immediately announced that the disaster proved that many islands were “unsafe and unsuitable for habitation” and launched a far more aggressive relocation program than it had previously attempted, declaring that anyone who wanted state assistance with tsunami recovery would need to move to one of five designated “safe islands.”30 The entire populations of several islands have already been evacuated and more are in process, conveniently freeing up more land for tourism.

  The Maldives government claims that the Safe Island Program, supported and funded by the World Bank and other agencies, is being driven by public demand to live on “bigger and safer islands.” But many islanders say they would have stayed on their home islands if the infrastructure had been fixed. As ActionAid put it, “People are left with no choice but to move as it is a precondition of housing and livelihood rehabilitation.”31

  Attracting further cynicism about the safety rationale was the fact that the government’s concerns evaporated when it came to all the hotels built with precarious architecture on low-lying islands. Not only were the resorts subject to no safety evacuations but, in December 2005, one year after the tsunami, the Gayoom government announced that thirty-five new islands were available to be leased to resorts for up to fifty years.32 Meanwhile, on the so-called safe islands, unemployment was rampant, and violence was breaking out between the newcomers and the original residents.

  Militarized Gentrification

  In a way, the second tsunami was just a particularly shocking dose of economic shock therapy: because the storm did such an effective job of clearing the beach, a process of displacement and gentrification that would normally unfold over years took place in a matter of days or weeks. What it looked like was hundreds of thousands of poor, brown-skinned people (the fishing people deemed “unproductive” by the World Bank) being moved against their wishes to make room for ultrarich, mostly light-skinned people (the “high-yield” tourists). The two economic poles of globalization, the ones that seem to live in different centuries, not countries, were suddenly put in direct conflict over the same pieces of coastline, one demanding the right to work, the other demanding the right to play. Backed up by the guns of local police and private security, it was militarized gentrification, class war on the beach.

  Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within twenty-four hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children.33 The Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters group was hastily convened to deal with the land grabs. One of its first statements declared that, for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”34

  Open land. In colonial times, it was a quasi-legal doctrine—terra nullius. If the land was declared empty or “wasted,” it could be seized and its people eliminated without remorse. In the countries where the tsunami hit, the idea of open land is weighted with this ugly historical resonance, evoking stolen wealth and violent attempts to “civilize” the natives. Nijam, a fisherman I met on the beach in Arugam Bay, saw no real difference. “The government thinks our nets and our fish are ugly and messy, that’s why they want us off the beach. In order to satisfy foreigners, they are treating their own people as if they are uncivilized.” Rubble, it seemed, was the new terra nullius.

  When I met Nijam, he was with a group of fishing people who had just returned from the sea, their eyes bloodshot from the salt water. When I raised the government’s plan to move the small-boat fishers to another beach, several of them waved broad fish-gutting knives and vowed to “gather their people and strength” and fight for their land. At first, they said they had welcomed the restaurants and hotels. “But now,” said a fisherman named Abdul, “because we gave them a little of our land, they want it all.” Another, Mansoor, pointed overhead to the palm trees giving us shade, strong enough to withstand the force of the tsunami. “It was my great-great-grandparents who planted these trees. Why should we move to another beach?” One of his relatives made a pledge: “We will leave here only when the sea runs dry.”

  The influx of reconstruction aid from the tsunami was supposed to offer Sri Lankans a chance to build a lasting peace after suffering so much more than their share of loss. In Arugam Bay, and all along the eastern coast, it seemed to be starting another kind of war, one over who would benefit from those funds—Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim—and, most of all, whether the real benefits would go to foreigners, at the expense of all locals.

  I started to get a sinking feeling of déjà vu, as if the wind was changing and this was about to become another “reconstructed” country slipping back into perpetual destruction. I had heard very similar grievances a year earlier in Iraq, about the reconstruction favoring the Kurds and certain select Shia. Several aid workers I met in Colombo had told me how much more they liked working in Sri Lanka over Iraq or Afghanistan—here, NGOs were still seen as neutral, even helpful, and reconstruction wasn’t yet a dirty word. But that was changing. In the capital, I had seen posters featuring crude caricatures of Western aid workers stuffing themselves with money while Sri Lankans starved.

  The NGOs bore the brunt of the anger at the reconstruction because they were intensely visible, slapping their logos on every available surface along the coast, while the World Bank, USAID and government officials dreaming up Bali plans rarely left their urban offices. It was ironic, since the aid organizers were the only ones offering any kind of help at all—but also inevitable, because what they offered was so inadequate. Part of the problem was that the aid complex had become so large and so cut off from the people it was serving that the lifestyles of its staffers became, in Sri Lanka, a kind of national obsession. Almost everyone I met commented on what one priest called “the NGO wild life”: high-end hotels, beachfront villas and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand-new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children—as if they were visitors from a far-off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation; they were rolling microclimates.

  Seeing this resentment build, I couldn’t help
wondering how long before Sri Lanka went the way of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the reconstruction looked so much like robbery that aid workers became targets. It happened shortly after I left: seventeen Sri Lankans working on tsunami relief for the international NGO Action Against Hunger were massacred in their office near the east-coast port city of Trincomelee. It sparked a new wave of vicious fighting, and tsunami reconstruction was stopped in its tracks. Many aid organizations, fearing for the safety of their staff after several more attacks, left the country. Others shifted focus to the south, the government-controlled area, leaving the harder-hit east and Tamil-controlled north without aid. These decisions only deepened the sense that the reconstruction funds were being spent unfairly, especially after a study conducted in late 2006 found that even though the majority of tsunami-hit homes were still in ruins, the one exception was the president’s own electoral district in the south, where a miraculous 173 percent of the homes had been rebuilt.35

  The aid workers still on the ground in the east, near Arugam Bay, were now dealing with a new wave of displaced people—the hundreds of thousands forced to leave their homes because of the violence. United Nations workers “who originally were contracted to rebuild schools destroyed by the tsunami have been redirected to build toilets for people displaced by the fighting,” reported The New York Times.36

  In July 2006, the Tamil Tigers announced that the cease-fire was officially over; the reconstruction was off, and the war was back on. Less than a year later, over four thousand people had been killed in posttsunami fighting. Only a fraction of the homes hit by the tsunami had ever been rebuilt along the east coast, but of the new structures, hundreds were already punctured with bullet holes, just-installed windows were shattered by explosives and brand-new roofs had collapsed from shelling.

  It’s impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war. The peace had always been precarious, and there was bad faith on all sides. One thing was certain, though: if peace was to take root in Sri Lanka, it needed to outweigh the benefits of war including the tangible economic benefits flowing from a war economy, in which the army takes care of the families of its soldiers and the Tamil Tigers look after the families of its fighters and suicide bombers.

  The enormous outpouring of generosity after the tsunami had held out the rare possibility of a genuine peace dividend—the resources to imagine a more equitable country, to repair shattered communities in ways that would rebuild trust as well as buildings and roads. Instead, Sri Lanka (like Iraq) received what the University of Ottawa political scientist Roland Paris has termed “a peace penalty”—the imposition of a cutthroat, combative economic model that made life harder for a majority of people at the very moment when what they needed most was reconciliation and an easing of tensions.37 In truth, the brand of peace Sri Lanka was offered was its own kind of war. Continued violence promised land, sovereignty and glory. What did corporate peace offer, besides the certainty of landlessness in the immediate term and John Varley’s elusive elevator in the long term?

  Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war. But when that warlike economic model of mass evictions and discarded cultures is imposed in a country that is already ravaged by disaster and scarred by ethnic conflict, the dangers are far greater. There are, as Keynes argued all those years ago, political consequences to this kind of punitive peace—including the outbreak of even bloodier wars.

  CHAPTER 20

  DISASTER APARTHEID

  A WORLD OF GREEN ZONES AND RED ZONES

  Shelve the abiding fiction that disasters do not discriminate—that they flatten everything in their path with “democratic” disregard. Plagues zero in on the dispossessed, on those forced to build their lives in the path of danger. AIDS is no different.

  —Hein Marais, South African writer, 20061

  Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether.

  —Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052

  During the second week of September 2005, I was in New Orleans with my husband, Avi, as well as Andrew, with whom I had traveled in Iraq, shooting documentary footage in the still partially flooded city. As the nightly six o’clock curfew descended, we found ourselves driving in circles, unable to find our way. The traffic lights were out, and half the street signs had been blown over or twisted sideways by the storm. Debris and water obstructed passage along many roads, and most of the people trying to navigate the obstacles were, like us, out-of-towners with no idea where they were going.

  The accident was a bad one: a T-bone at full speed in the middle of a major intersection. Our car spun out into a traffic light, went through a wrought-iron fence and parked in a porch. The injuries to the people in both cars were thankfully minor, but before I knew it I was being strapped to a stretcher and driven away. Through the haze of concussion, I was aware that wherever the ambulance was going, it wouldn’t be good. I had visions of the horrific scene at the makeshift health clinic at the New Orleans airport—there were so few doctors and nurses that elderly evacuees were being left unattended for hours, slumped in their wheelchairs. I thought about Charity Hospital, New Orleans’ primary public emergency room, which we had passed earlier in the day. It flooded during the storm, and its staff had struggled without power to keep patients alive. I pleaded with the paramedics to let me out. I remember telling them that I was fine, really, then I must have passed out.

  I came to as we arrived at the most modern and calm hospital I have ever been in. Unlike the clinics crowded with evacuees, at the Ochsner Medical Center—offering “healthcare with peace of mind”—doctors, nurses and orderlies far outnumbered the patients. In fact, there seemed to be only a handful of other patients in the immaculate ward. In minutes I was settled into a spacious private room, my cuts and bruises attended to by a small army of medical staff. Three nurses immediately took me in for a neck X-ray; a genteel Southern doctor removed some glass fragments and put in a couple of stitches.

  To a veteran of the Canadian public health care system, these were wholly unfamiliar experiences; I usually wait for forty minutes to see my general practitioner. And this was downtown New Orleans—ground zero of the largest public health emergency in recent U.S. history. A polite administrator came into my room and explained that “in America we pay for health care. I am so sorry, dear—it’s really terrible. We wish we had your system. Just fill out this form.”

  Within a couple of hours, I would have been free to go, were it not for the curfew that had locked down the city. “The biggest problem,” a private security guard told me in the lobby where we were both biding time, “is all the junkies; they’re jonesing and want to get into the pharmacy.”

  Since the pharmacy was locked tight, a medical intern was kind enough to slip me a few painkillers. I asked him what it had been like at the hospital at the peak of the storm. “I wasn’t on duty, thank God,” he said. “I live outside the city.”

  When I asked if he had gone to any of the shelters to help, he seemed taken aback by the question and a little embarrassed. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. I quickly changed the subject to what I hoped was safer ground: the fate of Charity Hospital. It was so underfunded that it was barely functioning before the storm, and people were already speculating that with the water damage it might never reopen. “They’d better reopen it,” he said. “We can’t treat those people here.”

  It occurred to me that this affable young doctor, and the spa-like medical care I had just received, were the embodiment of the culture that had made the horrors of Hurricane Katrina possible, the culture that had left New Orleans’ poorest residents to drown. As a graduate of a private medical school and then an intern at a priva
te hospital, he had been trained simply not to see New Orleans’ uninsured, overwhelmingly African-American residents as potential patients. That was true before the storm, and it continued to be true even when all of New Orleans turned into a giant emergency room: he had sympathy for the evacuees, but that didn’t change the fact that he still could not see them as potential patients of his.

  When Katrina hit, the sharp divide between the worlds of Ochsner Hospital and Charity Hospital suddenly played out on the world stage. The economically secure drove out of town, checked into hotels and called their insurance companies. The 120,000 people in New Orleans without cars, who depended on the state to organize their evacuation, waited for help that did not arrive, making desperate SOS signs or rafts out of their refrigerator doors. Those images shocked the world because, even if most of us had resigned ourselves to the daily inequalities of who has access to health care and whose schools have decent equipment, there was still a widespread assumption that disasters were supposed to be different. It was taken for granted that the state—at least in a rich country—would come to the aid of the people during a cataclysmic event. The images from New Orleans showed that this general belief—that disasters are a kind of time-out for cutthroat capitalism, when we all pull together and the state switches into higher gear—had already been abandoned, and with no public debate.