Protest Control as Disaster Relief?

The U.S. military likes to promote the fact that its missions serve humanitarian aims — disaster relief, digging wells, providing medical services in poor rural areas of the world. But a U.S. exercise in Colombia earlier this month illustrates how these actions prepare for doubtful grassroots violence instead of supporting grassroots civilian mutual aid efforts in disasters.

Aid organizations already note that combat troops and humanitarian assistance are often incompatible — as in some areas of Pakistan, where U.S. helicopters ferrying supplies to flood victims might be attacked by nationalist and Taliban forces.

The military is frequently up-front about the public relations purposes of its deployments. “Providing veterinary services while in uniform yields the additional benefit of showing the military in a different light,” a Marine Corp veterinarian said of a deployment from the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima in Covenas, Colombia earlier this month.

But this time, the troops sent to Colombia were also preparing to put down civilians who might be victims of a natural disaster. “U.S. Marines geared up with riot shields, shin guards and batons to show Colombian Marines the basics in non-lethal weapons and riot control. These skills are essential when dealing with a populous [sic] that turns desperate after a natural disaster,” said a Southern Command press release.

“Security and crowd control are chief concerns when providing humanitarian assistance. Colombian Marines also learned proper takedown techniques and enjoyed practical application with both U.S. and Colombian Marines,” SouthCom added.

The perception that in a disaster ordinary people need to be controlled by the government is off the mark, however. A remarkable book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit A Paradise Built in Hell(Viking, 2009) draws on the findings of disaster scholars since the 1950s and on her own fieldwork in New Orleans, San Francisco, Mexico City and New York, to show how the most effective responses to disasters are typically spontaneous and unofficial citizen efforts. Government officials, meanwhile, frequently imagine that the populace will panic and riot in savage behavior, especially if those affected by the disaster are people of color. That’s what led federal and city officials to order armed soldiers and contractors to treat Hurricane Katrina victims like criminals in New Orleans. (This week marks the fifth anniversary of Katrina.) Solnit calls these violence-prone responses “elite panic.”

The U.S. and Colombian officers who designed the exercise this month might have had in mind other contingencies besides natural disasters for using crowd control techniques. While the Marines were practicing nonlethal repression, Latin American activists at the Americas Social Forum in Paraguay discussed the increasing criminalization of social protest, coupled with growing militarization (described in this Free Speech Radio News dispatch).

Those nonviolent protests often target U.S. militarization itself — as does the Women’s and People’s International Summit against Militarization and for Peace, which concludes today with a protest at the Palanquero Air Base in Colombia.

Instead of preparing for natural disasters by increasing military capacity, our representatives in Congress and the Obama administration should back off from investing in the military, get out of the way, and let nonviolent grassroots efforts prosper.