NewAge, November
Could an elected government of the Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – as venal as their power politics may be – have ignored the millions of voters of the constituencies along the coast, allowing the opposition to ratchet up discontent, being routinely embarrassed by the media, to leave their Sidr rehabilitation promises unfulfilled a year after the disaster? Perhaps, but they would be punished for it at the ballots, writes Mahtab Haider*
THIS Sunday, it will be one year since cyclone Sidr. On the night of November 15 last year a 12-feet high tidal wave and winds of up to 240km/hour had ripped through the coast of Bangladesh killing more than 3,000 people and leaving millions homeless. One year on, the plight of many of those who survived is as heartrending as the images from the early days of that disaster, when millions were living in temporary shelters, with nothing to eat, and no savings or belongings left to start building their lives again.
According to the UK-based aid agency Oxfam, more than a million survivors who lost their homes and family members to Sidr still remain homeless a year on, their desperate plight an indictment of the often hollow pledges made by the government and the aid agencies. Although a flurry of foreign governments and aid agencies had pledged funds to rebuild homes for the Sidr survivors in the wake of the disaster, only about a quarter of the 78,000 homes that were pledged have been rebuilt to be more resilient for future cyclones.
According to Oxfam, ‘Another 276,000 families have received no reconstruction help and are living in unsafe shelters, built from polythene sheets and salvaged materials. Additionally, landless families living on government-owned land, or Khas areas, are excluded from receiving any government shelter support because they have no official land titles.’ In a documentary on the desperate plight of the Sidr survivors that the aid agency released on Thursday, Mussamat Halima from Barguna describes the plight she shares with many others now living in temporary shelters: ‘People who have land deeds were given houses and those who don’t were not. They had to make do with plastic sheeting they received after the disaster. The sheets are now torn; people are living with ripped pieces of sheeting and broken tin.’
They have braved the monsoon over the past months, but the prospect of a winter without enough warm clothes or a roofed house could be more than many infants and children will be able to survive. The millions of families on the coast make their living from homestead farming and as agriculture workers for other landowners. While the former typically meets food needs, families rely on the money that their men earn in the planting and harvest season by working on larger farms for other basic goods. Sidr’s widespread agricultural damage has made it hard to find work locally, and insecure houses make adults reluctant to seek work far away, lest their children be harmed or their land illegally occupied.
Six months ago, when I reported out of the Sidr-affected area, the situation had been much the same, with local bureaucrats saying that ‘quite enough’ aid had been given to the survivors and they were now milking their misfortune for more money from the aid agencies – a view that is not uncommon among the ruling elite in Bangladesh. Within the first six months, the local administrations and the military-controlled interim government in Dhaka were yet to complete the official formalities for massive amounts of aid pledged by the Indian government as well as the $130 million pledged by an anonymous donor for the Sidr rehabilitation and recovery. Another six months on, the story remains the same.
While it is often true of aid agencies that they will flock into disaster zones along with the international TV networks and in many cases trickle out as the disaster loses its potency to shock the world, rarely do governments neglect a disaster of this scale if only because of the price they pay for such neglect at the next ballots. A great deal has been written in the past on how democracy plays an indispensable role in not only acting as an early warning system against humanitarian disasters, but also how opposition groups and media become the eyes and ears that can take governments to task for failing or faltering in disaster response.
In fact, some of the clearest and most potent examples of how the lack of democracy can make communities more vulnerable to natural disasters are the Bhola cyclone of erstwhile East Pakistan in 1970, and cyclone Nargis – which caused widespread death and devastation in Myanmar earlier this year. In both cases, the military junta ruling the country, military strongman Yahya Khan in Pakistan’s case in 1970 and General Than Shwe and his cabal in Myanmar, first neglected to inform or evacuate communities in the path of a powerful cyclone, and afterwards – whether driven by the characteristic bravado and machismo of military governments across the world – or because of a simple lack of accountability, failed to launch an aid effort commensurate with the disaster at hand.
It was on November 12, 1970 that the Bhola cyclone made landfall in the erstwhile East Pakistan, killing an estimated half a million people, making it the most deadly tropical cyclone in recorded history. In the thana Tazmuddin alone, over 45 per cent of an estimated 350,000 people were killed. A report published on December 1, 1970, in the New York Times reveals that millions of people in the Bangladeshi coast had been completely unaware of the cyclone, even as it had developed for four days in the Bay of Bengal, gradually heading north, with the government mysteriously failing to use its early warning system to predict the storm or to issue public warnings.
In the wake of the Bhola cyclone, General Yahya Khan, the president and chief martial law administrator of Pakistan at the time, ordered a period of national mourning. But that was the bulk of what he and his cabinet did for the survivors. For the first ten days from November 12 only one military aircraft and three crop-dusting aircrafts were assigned to handle relief operations along the devastated coast of Bangladesh. New York Times reports from that period suggest that fleets of aircraft lay idle in West Pakistan, with Karachi claiming that the Indians had refused them passage through their territory; a charge that the Indian government denied. Over a week later, Yahya Khan is reported to have commented that the use of choppers in aid distribution would be pointless as they could not carry supplies.
By the time it dawned on General Yahya Khan that aid efforts were faltering, ten days after the cyclone had made landfall, hundreds of thousands who had survived the 20-foot-high waves had perished. ‘There have been mistakes, there have been delays, but by and large I’m very satisfied that everything is being done and will be done,’ Yahya Khan told the New York Times newspaper on November 22 of 1970. Four months on, about $7.5 million earmarked by the US Congress for cyclone rehabilitation had still not been handed over because of the Pakistani government’s failure to come up with a plan on how it would be distributed.
Thirty-eight years on, Bangladesh as an independent country has come a long way in its cyclone preparedness efforts. But a comparison between the 1970s Bangladesh and present-day Myanmar, and funnily enough, present-day Bangladesh, is loaded with a political significance that is difficult to ignore.
Cyclone Nargis was a category 4 tropical cyclone, implying it was of the similar intensity to cyclone Sidr which hit Bangladesh last year. But while Sidr killed just under 3,500 people, Nargis claimed over 100,000 lives, with fears that this figure could be still higher. It has emerged in the wake of cyclone Nargis that the junta in Yangon did little, if anything, to warn people of the cyclone developing off its coast, and its initial denial of a death toll more than 300, and then its efforts to block aid from Western agencies are all symptomatic of its disregard, even despise, of its own people. In comparison, and I believe this is largely the result of Bangladesh’s 15 years of democracy, widespread media coverage of coming floods or cyclones, and coverage of the ensuing humanitarian disaster has often resulted in massive evacuation efforts and aid efforts afterwards, along with economic programmes such as food-for-work to provide employment in the disaster zone.
It certainly is possible that Bangladesh’s vulnerability to cyclones over the decades has meant that the coast has far more cyclone shelters than Myanmar does, but it would be a fantastic claim to suggest that Bangladesh has enough cyclone shelters to even accommodate 10 per cent of its total coastal population. In fact, the resource-rich Myanmar with a per capita GDP of $1,691 (over triple of that in Bangladesh) would be much more likely to have better-equipped cyclone shelters, if the government had to face up to its actions in the wake of a disaster such as the one that followed Nargis.
It is in line with this thinking to say, perhaps, it would be difficult for any elected government to consider itself so immune to unpopularity that it could ignore the reconstruction and rehabilitation effort needed in the wake of cyclone Sidr as the current regime has. Especially since it is not shortage of funds that is acting as a restraint, when international funds intended for exactly this lay idle for months while the government dragged its feet on the bureaucratic necessities all through this year.
Could an elected government of the Awami League or the BNP – as venal as their power politics may be – have ignored the millions of voters of the constituencies along the coast, allowing the opposition to ratchet up discontent, being routinely embarrassed by the media, to leave their rehabilitation promises unfulfilled a year after the disaster? Perhaps, but they would be punished for it at the ballots. It is not out of benevolence but a longing to be re-elected that would have forced an elected government, any elected government, to act faster.
Contact: mahtabhaider@gmail.com
Posted by Webmaster 
