A week and a half after Typhoon Morakot struck, rescue efforts are still in progress and discussion of the future of townships partially or totally destroyed has only begun. Once relief efforts are scaled down, however, this question will become as important — and as prickly — as probing the government’s inept response to the disaster.
It is a question that not only concerns southern Taiwan, but has a bearing on communities across the nation that may be at similar risk of landslides and flooding during torrential rains.
The communities hit hardest by Morakot face a difficult fight to make their hometowns safe, and some experts are concerned that certain areas may not be safe for years to come, if ever, while others want villagers blocked from returning to affected areas for at least three or four months in case of further mudslides.
The head of National Taiwan University’s Global Change Research Center, Liu Chung-ming (柳中明), warns that changes to the environment have wrought permanent damage on some lowland areas that makes them unsuitable for habitation. Areas in Pingtung County have sunk below sea level, putting residents at increasing risk of severe flooding. Liu also believes that sea walls intended to prevent flooding in these areas had the inadvertent effect of retaining Morakot’s floodwaters.
Other academics warn against rebuilding ravaged communities within the next five years, as mountainsides could remain unstable for at least that long.
Part of knowing when or whether it would be safe for villagers to return home is understanding what factors caused the mudslides and flooding. What role did human activity — farming and deforestation, fish farms, overuse of groundwater and construction projects — play? If the government’s rescue efforts revealed appalling inefficiencies, the answers to this question will be no less ugly.
The public will want to know, for example, why Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators blocked a land management bill proposed by the Cabinet in 2004 that was designed to stop activities that exacerbate flooding.
Residents of several Kaohsiung County townships overrun by Morakot’s mudslides fear that a nearby reservoir project was at least partly responsible for the catastrophe in their area, an argument that the Water Resources Agency has rebutted. But locals’ claims that flooding has worsened since construction on the Tsengwen Reservoir began should be looked into.
The reality is that the risk posed by damaging the environment has long been known. Morakot has proven that it can no longer be ignored, and perhaps that the extent of the risk was more than anyone had suspected.
Many communities may feel there is no positive way forward: Those that rely on crops and fish farms may have to choose between giving up their livelihoods or increasing the risk of disasters by continuing land exploitation. Another option, relocation, would involve breaking up communities, while finding new livelihoods in new locations would take time.
The tragedy of relocating entire communities cannot be discounted — particularly when so many of the devastated villages belong to Aboriginal tribes already struggling to retain their identity in the face of decades of social, government and economic pressures to assimilate.
However, communities need to know what it would take, and how long, to guarantee their safety, and if this is even possible. Failing to face these questions now would be a crime as serious as the government’s bungling of rescue efforts.
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In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
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