Surviving the second tsunami - Rebuilding After Disasters: From Emergency to Sustainability - page 139

and therefore of any title or right of use they may have had over the land
they occupied before the tsunami. That view only applied to traditional
landholders, mainly fishing communities. It certainly did not apply to
the land occupied by existing tourist resorts.
Klein pointed out that in Arugam Bay on the east coast there had been
disputes between hotel owners and the traditional fishing community.
The hotel owners wanted exclusive use of the beach and to be rid of
the sight of the traditional houses on the beach and the smell of drying
fish. The tsunami came and swept all that away. The hotel owners then
only had to keep the survivors from returning. In addition to the buffer
zone, the national government prepared the 'Arugam Bay Resource
Development Plan'. This plan called for transforming the town, though
most of it was largely undamaged, into a 'boutique tourism destination'.
This $80 million redevelopment was to be financed out of the aid money
raised in the name of the tsunami victims. 11 This was all part of a broader
tourism plan developed two years before the tsunami with the support of
the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
and the Asian Development Bank. While the regional population had
resisted these plans prior to the tsunami, the shock of the disaster gave
the national government the opportunity to pass legislation that paved
the way for privatization of public services, of land and of develop-
ment. TAFREN was put in charge of the implementation of this plan.
'Somehow, in only ten days, and without leaving the capital, the business
leaders on the task force were able to draft a complete national recon-
struction blueprint, from housing to highways.' 11
At Kaipanikuppam in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, 'real estate
agents have been buying up land and selling it on to tourism developers
for ten years.' Their jobs have been made easier by the tsunami. Fishing
catches have reduced dramatically, in part as a consequence of the
tsunami, and this has left local fishing communities in ever-increasing
poverty. This has increased the already great pressure on the community
to capitulate and sell to the developers. In addition, '[t]he village is now
hemmed in on all sides by land that no longer belongs to them, but
urgently needs space to rebuild homes destroyed in the tsunami.' 22
Such opportunistic development, largely focused on tourism, was
the post-disaster norm. In the competition for land between traditional
fishing communities and international hotel chains and their supporting
agencies and governments, there was little doubt about who had the
power to demand the ownership to land, despite any prior claims to the
right to the land.
5 Land has disappeared or become unusable . Particularly in Banda Aceh,
closest to the epicentre of the earthquake that precipitated the tsunami,
the loss of land to the sea was substantial. The land has been rendered
inaccessible by being under the sea or rendered unusable by salinization
of agricultural land or of well water. Under such circumstances, national