The Boston Marathon Is Bombed, Rana Plaza Collapses in Bangladesh, Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests Challenge Erdogan and Snowden Exposes Global Surveillance

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 July 2013 | Reporting Period: 3 April – 2 July 2013

Quarterly Briefing

• Two pressure-cooker bombs explode at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, killing three people and injuring 264; the Tsarnaev brothers are identified as the perpetrators; one is killed in a subsequent manhunt, the other captured after a city-wide lockdown.
• The Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Savar, Bangladesh collapses on April 24, killing 1,127 workers; the disaster exposes the lethal conditions in global supply chains and triggers international demands for factory safety reform.
• Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, leaks classified documents to The Guardian and Washington Post beginning June 5, revealing the scope of American and British mass surveillance programmes; he is identified on June 9 and flees to Hong Kong.
• Turkey’s Gezi Park protests begin on May 31 as a demonstration against an urban development project and rapidly expand into a broad challenge to Prime Minister Erdoğan’s governing style; police use tear gas and water cannon; protests spread to 67 cities.
• North Korea’s Kim Jong-un government sustains a period of heightened rhetoric through April, announcing the suspension of the Kaesong Industrial Complex on April 8 and threatening pre-emptive nuclear strikes; tensions ease somewhat by May.
• The United States confirms on June 13 that its intelligence assessment concludes Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons, including sarin, on a small scale; the Obama administration announces it will provide military support to rebels but does not specify the form.

Prologue: Surveillance, Supply Chains and the City Under Attack

The second quarter of 2013 produced two stories that will outlast the news cycle in which they were born. The first was the Snowden revelations, which in the space of a few weeks transformed a technical debate about intelligence methodology into a global confrontation between the United States and its allies over the boundaries of acceptable surveillance and the rights of digital citizens. The second was Rana Plaza: a building collapse that killed 1,127 textile workers and forced consumers, corporations and governments in wealthy countries to reckon with the human cost embedded in cheap clothing. Both stories connected the Caribbean directly: the region’s residents and diaspora are surveilled by the same systems; its consumers wear the same clothes and its diaspora workers send remittances from countries whose political debates about surveillance and labour rights shape the conditions they work in. The Boston bombing and Turkey’s Gezi protests added further dimensions: the ease with which domestic terrorism can paralyse a major city, and the fragility of the consensus that has sustained secular, Western-aligned Muslim-majority governments.

Boston, Bangladesh and the Two Faces of Globalisation

The bombing of the Boston Marathon on 15 April killed three spectators and injured 264, several of them losing limbs. The perpetrators, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were ethnic Chechens who had lived in the United States for over a decade. Tamerlan was killed in a firefight with police on 19 April; Dzhokhar was captured the same day hiding in a boat in a suburban garden after a city-wide lockdown that was itself unprecedented in American peacetime experience. The attack demonstrated the continuing vulnerability of mass public gatherings to relatively simple terrorist methods and reinforced the security calculus that affects every large public event in tourism-dependent economies.

Nine days later, across the world in Savar, Bangladesh, the eight-storey Rana Plaza building housing five garment factories collapsed, killing 1,127 workers, most of them women producing clothing for Western brands including Primark, Benetton and Mango. The collapse, preceded by visible cracks that managers had ordered workers to ignore, was the deadliest garment industry disaster in history. The political consequences were significant: the European Union and the United States launched separate supply chain accountability initiatives; a multi-brand compensation fund of over $30 million was eventually assembled for survivors and bereaved families. For Caribbean economies considering garment manufacturing as a development pathway, the Rana Plaza disaster was a salutary illustration of the race-to-the-bottom dynamics that can accompany competitive labour-cost manufacturing.

Snowden and the Architecture of Surveillance

The documents that Edward Snowden gave to journalist Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian and to the Washington Post beginning 5 June revealed that the NSA had been collecting the telephone metadata of millions of Americans under a programme authorised by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that a system called PRISM gave it access to internet communications data held by major technology companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. Snowden, who had worked for the NSA via the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, identified himself on 9 June and subsequently flew to Hong Kong. His whereabouts as of this publication are uncertain; he has left Hong Kong and is believed to be seeking asylum, with Moscow as a possible transit point.

The revelations triggered an immediate and intense global debate. European allies, particularly Germany, expressed fury at the scale of surveillance targeting their citizens. Tech companies denied knowledge of the programme. Civil liberties organisations called for a fundamental reassessment of surveillance law. For Caribbean governments and citizens, the revelations were a reminder that digital communications infrastructure is subject to systematic interception by intelligence agencies whose legal frameworks do not extend protection to non-Americans.

Turkey, North Korea and Syria

Turkey’s Gezi Park protests began on 31 May when a small group of environmentalists camped in Istanbul’s Taksim Square to resist the demolition of one of the city’s last green spaces. Police dispersed them with tear gas; within days protests had spread to 67 cities. The movement became a vehicle for broader discontent with Prime Minister Erdoğan’s increasingly assertive governing style and his government’s social conservatism. Erdoğan responded by denouncing the protesters as vandals and provocateurs; his language, which dismissed the movement as marginal, ultimately proved a political miscalculation that galvanised rather than quietened opposition. The protests continued through June and are winding down as this edition publishes, without securing any of their stated demands.

North Korea’s spring of elevated belligerence — which included the closure of the Kaesong industrial complex, threats of nuclear strikes and the declaration of a “state of war” with South Korea — had subsided by May without military incident. Syria’s war continued; the US confirmation of small-scale sarin use on 13 June moved the administration toward direct assistance to rebel forces, though the nature and scale of that support remains unclear as this edition publishes.

Looking Ahead

Snowden’s location and legal status are unresolved as this edition publishes; his asylum options will shape the next chapter of the surveillance debate. Syria’s war has no political solution on the horizon; American military assistance to rebels may change the battlefield balance but almost certainly not the conflict’s fundamental dynamic. Turkey’s political fault line has been exposed; Erdoğan’s response to genuine opposition will reveal much about the direction of the country’s governance. And Venezuela, where Chávez’s death in March left an economy in the hands of Nicolás Maduro with a razor-thin mandate, continues to provide the Caribbean’s PETROCARIBE lifeline from an increasingly uncertain fiscal position.

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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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