Globalized Eviction

The second U.S. led attack on Iraq has been justly famous for the destruction of the homes of the innocent. This week, the people of Fallujah will mark the third anniversary of the eviction by bombing of the inhabitants of 36,000 homes. Eviction too is a central experience of the Palestinian people. According to the UN, Israeli military operations have demolished 6,395 homes that had housed over 58,000 people over the past five years, in the Gaza strip alone. In the best reported conflicts in the world, the right to housing has been virtually ignored.

Unfortunately, that right to housing has also been abused across the globe as globalization has accelerated. People are fighting back, however and they are contesting the model of development venerated by the globalizing elites and international lending institutions. As bulldozers stream into local communities, resistance deepens. In most cases, the poor and unrepresented are beaten back by pure oppression, but around every crisis organizations have developed to contest the power behind the act of eviction. Communities have reasserted their own views of development against the advocates of gentrification or ‘beautification’ and have begun to fight for that vision. In doing so, they demonstrate to the world that another world is possible.

We all want to be Shanghai

The scale of globalized eviction is immense. The numbers of people involved are not exactly known as the communities affected are often poorly assessed and constantly changing, but the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) state that between 2001 and 2002 alone, over seven million people lost their homes through force. That number has not decreased. In China in 2004 over 300,000 people faced eviction as the government sought space for facilities to help them stage the 2008 Olympic games. In early 2004, in India, over 150,000 people were evicted in New Delhi and 77,000 in Calcutta. In these two giants of globalized eviction, India and China, governments and business trample on the housing rights of the poor. In doing so, they have provided a shining example for elites across the globe who see in their examples a short-cut to attracting investment, and improving the living standards of the wealthy in the cities.

India have been particularly active in seeking to redesign their urban centres under the guise of modernization and development. In March 2005, the Times of India reported that the government had embarked upon a “facelift” worth $30bn (and funded by international credit). As Prime Minister Singh said, “It will be our effort to give special attention to policies that can encourage urban development and urban renewal. We will actively seek public-private partnership in building urban infrastructure in a planned manner.”

Within months there were reports from Bombay of police forcefully evicting people with no warning and no planned solution to where they were to live, and how. The Washington Post covered the story in a rare excursion for the U.S. media into global housing issues. According to them, 90,000 shanties were demolished, leaving 300,000 people homeless whilst garbage was dumped on the site of the slum to prevent a reoccupation. The authorities defended the evictions as necessary to allow Mumbai to emulate Shanghai, and to ease the pressure on utilities, strained by overpopulation and overuse by business. Yet as one of the evicted said, “I don’t know what the word Shanghai means, but it is an excuse to kick poor people in the stomach.”

It is an excuse that sits well with the globalized elite. The report which stimulated these illegal evictions was authored by McKinsey Consulting in 2003 – who stressed that if Bombay wished to become a “world class city,” they needed to “beautify” the roads as a key component. Presumably McKinsey and the Mumbai government see poor people as an ugly impediment to growth.

This is the example that lenders and business want other nations to follow if the urban third world will continue to afford the quality of life demanded by international businessmen and their local clients.

The Indian people continually prove that they are more than willing to offer another example however. In Delhi 480 out of 500 markets were totally shut down in December 2005 in sympathy with 18,000 homes to be forcibly demolished after a High Court ruling. In Calcutta the same week police met violent resistance to the distribution of eviction notices and had to withdraw. In February, the town of Rajkot in Gujarat responded to the destruction of 500 homes as part of a wider mega-demolition drive.” Local councillors combined with those affected, and some were arrested. A movement against eviction is latent, but growing as the scale of oppression rises.

Cleaning up Africa

Africa has been blighted by the epidemic. In Botswana, the Gana and Gwi bushmen were evicted from their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where as COHRE report, 2,000 now live in “resettlement” camps and are forbidden to return to either their familiar way of life or the eco-system that sustained it. The reason behind the eviction was simple greed. Shortly after the 2002 eviction, the Botswana government granted diamond mining concessions to DeBeers and BHP Billiton on land that used to belong to bushmen, whilst they defended their policy by suggesting that the bushmen had been ecologically destructive and had been spreading diseases via pastoralism.

In 2004, COHRE documented that “forced evictions are being implemented on a daily basis in South Africa by private landowners, companies and various levels and spheres of government.” A National Eviction Survey by the NGO Nkuzi backed this up with a figure of 950,000 evictions of black South Africans from white owned farms since the end of Apartheid. Whilst farmers have been removing small holders so that they can use their acreage, the city of Johannesburg poor residents are routinely evicted without due process to make way for ‘renewal’ and ‘cleaner neighbourhoods.’

The communities in Crest Hill and Blouberg were evicted in December 2005, effecting over 1,000 people, who then were left on the streets to find other accomodation, yet there are voices of opposition. Fair housing groups like COHRE and Nkuzi, along with residents have managed to secure an injunction in the High Court of South Africa against such illegal evictions. After thousands of evictions, a judge ruled this month that the city had been acting ‘unconstitutionally.’ Whether that will restrain developers and the government is unclear. Until then, the growth of shanty towns full of South Africans evicted from the countryside and the urban slums are growing new targets for urban renewal.

Nigeria has been following the Chinese and Indian examples to the letter by uprooting urban communities with no thought for their future. Amnesty International reported a typical eviction in Makoko, Lagos – “[3,000] residents were given no prior notice of the demolition of their homes and property, which took place from 27 – 29 April 2005. Many told Amnesty International representatives visiting the destroyed community that they had been beaten up by law enforcement officials as they tried to prevent the destruction of their entire belongings by government demolition forces. They said that officials set fire to the remains, to ensure that they could not be used to re-build houses.” The same report blamed increasing land values, which made informally acquired lands like Makoko a ready prey for developers – a phenomenon that they say has affected 1.2 million Nigerians in the past five years.

Resisting the tide

Kenya is another centre for infection by globalized eviction. Kibera, a slum district of Nairobi has been earmarked for at least 300,000 evictions, possibly more by the “rainbow coalition” government under Mwai Kibaki. This is partly due to pressure from rising land value, and partly to make way for railways and roads, and it promises to be brutal. Yet here there is cause to hope that community organizing might pose an opposition. On March 1, the East Standard reported on the placement of a “police substation” in Kibera as preparation for evictions. Within hours, “youths [had] fought the officers and chased them away before setting the structure on fire and pushing it to a railway line” whilst riot police had to evacuate the area along with the Nairobi chief of police who had intended to supervise the operation. The evictions, which were sold to the press as “slum upgrading projects” were beaten back by residents who have memories of the murders and rapes that accompanied previous evictions.

Resistance is not a rejection of reform, but an assertion of the desire to influence how such reform occurs. COHRE make it clear that the vast majority of evictions are not accompanied by resettlement at all, far rarer too are evictions in which communities are consulted and given input into their fates. In Chennai, for example, communities that were moved into tower block housing were charged high enough rents to force them back into slums (and some chose to rent out their new “homes” and return to shanties). One result of this is a striking recent World Bank document that accepts some responsibility – but really expresses elite unease over resistance to eviction. Speaking about urban renewal projects in general, it says “Countries with rapidly growing economies were no more successful with slum removal and public housing for meeting the needs of the poorest groups than countries with sluggish economic growth.” Whilst it admits that policies pushed by international credit have caused misery, “the policies do not alleviate the housing problems of the poor and indeed, exacerbate them in many countries. The poor cannot afford much of the public housing that replaces slum dwellings and, thus, the destruction of slum communities often reduces the stock of low-income housing and worsens overcrowding in low-rent units.”

Unfortunately for them, the World Bank never mention the adoption of participatory, community based development as an alternative to centralised, elite instigated projects.

Pom Mahakan

COHRE knows more about this alternative than any other international organization. As they explain, “communities around the world are often more than willing to work with the authorities in formulating feasible alternatives to eviction. Unfortunately, few governments have the insight to appreciate the enormous value of community-driven initiatives.” The community of Pom Mahakan in Bangkok is an excellent, though precarious example.

Pom Mahakan is a small, relatively poor community clustered around the old walls in central Bangkok. In 2003, authorities made them an offer which they thought, the residents could not refuse – eviction with resettlement forty-five minutes outside Bangkok (and therefore far away from their workplaces and friends). Since then, the residents have battled to resist. They protested, built barricades and devised a night-watch system. They enlisted the help of NGOs and suggested a viable alternative which balanced community needs and the city’s, who wanted to build a tourist park without the nuisance of actual life. They even set up a museum of the site and refused to abide by frequent court decisions to proceed with eviction. As of now, Pom Mahakan remains in existence as a community – although one under constant pressure and living in fear. In order to please a few backpackers and construct a park described by COHRE as “the type of place that few people, whether Thai or tourist, would care to visit,” the city of Bangkok has aroused a community response which they cannot easily ignore.

Without community resistance, international law has offered little assistance. Illegal eviction has long been recognized in documents and agreements as a fundamental violation of human rights. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) states that “…the state itself must refrain from forced evictions and ensure that the law is enforced against its agents or third parties who carry out forced evictions.” Whilst “evictions shouldnot result in individuals being rendered homeless or vulnerable to the violationof other human rights”. This is simply ignored by many governments in their quest for riches.

Jean Du Plessis, the assistant director of COHRE describes the current situation as a “global epidemic of forced evictions”. As countries emulate India and China in a race to be more attractive investment “climates” this epidemic spreads and thousands die whilst millions struggle even more simply to survive.

Just for the poor?

Globalized eviction is not just a third world problem that we can read about, campaign about and have sympathy for. The exact same pressures that cause forced eviction and homelessness in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand cause slightly more legal, yet still brutal, evictions in the “west”. In Ontario, Canada, for example, the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations report that the state saw 65,000 eviction applications in 2005, the highest experienced since the government passed a “Tenant Protection Act” in 1998.

In the U.S.A. urban renewal has often acted as a purgative for perceived social problems such as drug use and violent crime. As Charles Shaw described for GNN in June 2005, neighbourhoods such as Kensington, North Philadelphia have been targeted by New Urbanists in alliance with city authorities as potential hotspots for “creative communities,” which has often meant the wholesale eviction of poor, ethnic minority residents. In communities ravaged by mass incarceration due to U.S. drugs policy, it has been possible to ‘sell’ such dispossession as a positive move to rejuvenate areas blighted by poverty. What it means, is the movement of a social problem created by government and the implantation of the wealthy. As a GNN documentary about the area, The Drug War Reality Tour shows, it does not mean a net increase in local “creativity.”

In London too activists and community businesses constantly struggle against property development and gentrification. In Dalston, an area of inner London near the wealthy West End, yet still poor and economically marginal, efforts recently failed to save a locally treasured café marked for extinction, whilst a theatre is currently being occupied for reasons that residents of Pom Mahakan would second. “The council have decreed this theatre and our collective memories must be destroyed to make room for a mega project in which money is at the centre of any decision and those who have no money get nothing. Where profits for developers mean housing and shops that ordinary people, and perhaps those who have lived here all their lives, can’t afford.”

The poor, who are generally described as worthless, diseased and criminal by governments across the world might yet find a globalized resistance to their continued oppression. Until they do, some of the most creative members of the human community have to make way for the implantation of the wealthy, whilst for the dispossessed, their hopes for the future are postponed.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.

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