Hurricane Katrina Drowns New Orleans and Exposes America’s Racial Fault Lines, the 7/7 London Bombings Strike the Capital and Israel Withdraws from Gaza

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 October 2005 | Reporting Period: 3 July – 2 October 2005

Quarterly Briefing

• Hurricane Katrina makes landfall near Buras, Louisiana on August 29 as a Category 3 hurricane; storm surge overwhelms the levee system protecting New Orleans; approximately 1,800 people die, the majority in flooded neighbourhoods in a city whose population is disproportionately Black and poor; the catastrophic failure of federal, state and local emergency response exposes structural inequalities in American society that television images make inescapable.
• Four suicide bombers detonate devices on the London Underground and a double-decker bus during the morning rush hour on July 7, killing 52 people and injuring over 700; the bombers are British citizens of Pakistani and Jamaican origin; a second attempted attack on July 21 fails; the attacks demonstrate that al-Qaeda’s radicalisation has reached deep into Western Muslim communities.
• Hurricane Rita makes landfall on the Texas-Louisiana border on September 24 as a Category 3 storm, striking a region already devastated by Katrina; 120 people die, many in a highway evacuation accident; the oil refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast are severely damaged, causing a fuel supply shock that feeds through to Caribbean energy costs.
• Israel completes its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip on August 22, removing all 21 settlements and approximately 8,000 settlers in a politically contentious disengagement; the Palestinian Authority takes control of Gaza; the withdrawal raises hopes of a peace process but Hamas’s continuing rocket fire from Gaza and Ariel Sharon’s tactical objectives remain disputed.
• Iraq’s constitution is completed and will be put to a referendum on October 15; the drafting process has been contentious, with Sunni Arab communities largely excluded from negotiations; the constitution provides for a federal system that Sunni leaders fear will partition Iraq’s oil revenues against their communities’ interests.
• The G8 Gleneagles summit in July, convened on the eve of the London bombings, agrees to double aid to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010 and to cancel the debt of the world’s eighteen most indebted countries; for Caribbean nations that had lobbied on debt relief and development assistance, the commitments are significant, though their translation into disbursed funds is uncertain.

Prologue: Nature, Terror and the State

The third quarter of 2005 delivered, in concentrated form, two of the most significant tests of state capacity in the post-Cold War era: a natural disaster and a terrorist attack, each of which revealed how the world’s most powerful democracies performed under pressure. The 7/7 bombings on July 7 were absorbed by London with remarkable composure: the transport network was restored within twenty-four hours, the police investigation was swift, the public response was determined rather than panicked. Katrina’s aftermath four weeks later offered the opposite spectacle: a government unable to evacuate its own citizens from a city it knew was below sea level and directly in the path of a forecast storm, unable to supply food and water to survivors for five days, unable to maintain public order in an emergency. The contrast was not lost on the Caribbean, whose governments had their own experiences of what natural disaster management looked like when preparation failed.

Katrina, New Orleans and Caribbean Parallels

The images that defined Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath — elderly Black residents stranded on rooftops; thousands of people dying in the New Orleans Convention Centre without food, water or medical care; the Superdome as a last-resort shelter without sanitation — were images that simultaneously shocked the world and confirmed a pattern that Caribbean observers recognised immediately: the people most exposed to climate-driven disaster were the poorest, the most Black and the least protected by political voice. New Orleans’ vulnerability was not a surprise to its local politicians, its engineers or its residents; the levee system’s inadequacy had been documented, its required upgrades unfunded. The choice to underfund protection for a poor Black city was a political choice, not a natural one.

For the Caribbean, Katrina’s most direct consequence was the disruption to Gulf Coast oil refinery capacity, which briefly drove fuel prices to levels that tested Caribbean energy budgets already strained by elevated crude prices. Jamaica’s Petrocaribe arrangement with Venezuela provided some buffer; the islands without such arrangements felt the full market shock. The longer-term consequence was political: Katrina’s revelation of American infrastructure fragility and racial inequality made Caribbean representations about their own vulnerability to climate change more difficult for the United States to dismiss.

London’s 7/7 and the Caribbean Dimension

The 7/7 bombers included a Jamaican-British man, Germaine Lindsay, who had converted to Islam; his participation introduced a Caribbean dimension to a story that was otherwise primarily about British Pakistani radicalisation. Lindsay had grown up in Huddersfield; his trajectory toward jihadism was similar to his co-conspirators’ despite his different heritage. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the involvement of a Jamaican-born British citizen was a reminder of the complexity of diaspora identity and the ways in which marginalisation in host communities could produce trajectories that had devastating consequences far from their origins. The attacks also, more practically, affected Caribbean visitor numbers to London and created short-term uncertainty about security in a city that was a major hub for Caribbean diaspora travellers.

Looking Ahead

Iraq’s October 15 constitutional referendum will test whether a legitimate political framework can be established that includes the Sunni community; the alternative — a constitution imposed over Sunni objections — would likely deepen the insurgency. Gaza’s future after Israel’s withdrawal depends on whether the Palestinian Authority can establish governance and security in a territory that has been under occupation for 38 years; Hamas’s parallel structures make this uncertain. The 2005 hurricane season is not over; another eight weeks of activity remain; the National Hurricane Centre has predicted an above-average season and its predictions have proved correct. And Katrina’s political aftershocks — Bush’s approval ratings have collapsed — will shape American domestic and foreign policy for the remainder of the administration.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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