The bad, the ugly and the worst disasters. Tsunami, relocation, and the state forest in Mentawai Archipelago

0563806 - OÚ 2023 FR eng A - Abstract
Darmanto, Darmanto - Rafliana, I. - Samaloisa, R.
The bad, the ugly and the worst disasters. Tsunami, relocation, and the state forest in Mentawai Archipelago.
Paris: EUROSEAS, 2022.
[EuroSEAS Conference /12./. Paris, 28.06.2022-01.07.2022]
Method of presentation: Přednáška
Event organizer: European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) + École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
URL events: https://euroseas2022.org/ 
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : disaster management * tsunami * mentawai * state forest * resettlement
OECD category: Environmental sciences (social aspects)

Our article examines a particular trajectory of social realm which shaped the post-disaster management of the 2010 Mentawai tsunami, and how it further shapes understanding of future risks. The discussion aims to also contemplate on how Mentawaians communities will live with future tsunami threats. Our article is guided by a pivot question of why after a decade, the survivors of the tsunami disaster failed to feel at home in their new place. We proceed by questioning the new and severe social insecurity and vulnerability which later emerged and resulting a ‘relocation disaster’. This leads to the question on how, by carrying such vulnerabilities, would the communities living in the coasts prepare themselves against the next possible Mentawai Megathrust, and which possible scenarios will come along. Drawing from ethnographic research and political discourse analysis and deploying the concept of marginality, we examine our research through the lens of systemic problem of living with disasters, and how space, either old or new settlements are unmade. This includes the Mentawaian social history, the miss-match between scientific knowledge, government actions, and local response over the 2010 disaster. We argue that a long history of local mistrust over external agencies contribute the mistranslation and misjudge the disaster-related-information and produce the bad situatedness for the Mentawaians. The second part describes a decade long unfinished government resettlement project that has been painfully experienced as ‘the real tsunami’ by the survivors. The disastrous post-tsunami intervention, we argue, stems from the combination of a top down approach, the historic marginalization of indigenous Mentawaians, and the designation of the entire Mentawian ancestral land as State Forest. We demonstrate how the three factors have generated the ugly horizontal and vertical conflicts and failed survivors to take agencies in the rebuilding their lives. The third part is to contemplate what the on-going marginalization of Mentawaians and the status of State Forest might have impact the preparedness of Mentawaians in encountering the Mentawai Megathrust. We argue that should the latter two central problems not addressed, we might be forced to accept the unimaginable worst case scenario of future Mentawai disaster.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0341596