This has been a year of misfortune for Bangladesh. Vast tracts of the country have twice disappeared under water as a result of unusually heavy monsoons, with a loss of crops and rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs. Cyclone Sidr, which has killed several thousand people and left millions homeless, is one of the worst recorded — the wind tears through the country, carrying off shelters, turning sheets of corrugated tin into lethal weapons while chetai walls are shredded like paper and the mangroves are reduced to driftwood.
This mutable coastline creates a landscape where people live as though in some perpetual primal myth. The exposure of their poor habitations is inseparable from that other, avoidable, disaster of Bangladesh — a political catastrophe of three and a half decades of independence, which has brought more grief than gain to those clinging to the shores of the turbulent Bay of Bengal.
The rulers of Bangladesh have been so involved in struggles for supremacy, rivalries and antique disputes over the liberation war that they can scarcely attend to their people — the patient, suppliant poor, who stare out at the world from TV screens and newspapers. ”We have lost everything,” the translators recite; a statement that scarcely reveals how little they ever had.
This is ostensibly why, almost a year ago, the Bangladesh army declared a state of emergency and backed a neutral ”caretaker” government, nominally headed by the banker Fakhruddin Ahmed. This followed violence at the end of the term of office of a coalition of the Bangladesh National Party and the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. The opposition Awami League, secular leaning but no less opportunist than its rivals, saw the interim administration as favouring the outgoing regime, and did its best to make the country ungovernable. The purpose of the provisional administration is to oversee elections and attack corruption, which, for many years, placed Bangladesh as the most corrupt country in the world.
The army is in an awkward position. Its head, General Moeen U Ahmed, recently repudiated any suggestion that the Bangladesh military was mimicking Pakistan. But the similarities are disturbing: Pervez Musharraf decapitated the two main political parties when he seized power and sent their leaders into exile. The Bangladesh government also wanted to send the political leaders abroad; only later it decided to imprison them on corruption charges.
Musharraf sought to bring together the two main conservative elements in the country — the religious and the military. Bangladesh shows signs of following the same path. Unfortunately for Musharraf, far from conservatism, radical Islam became a destabilising force which escaped army control.
Bangladesh has a deserved reputation for military probity — proportionately it has contributed more to United Nations peacekeeping forces than any other country. This year it had almost 10 000 soldiers in places as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sudan, East Timor and Côte d’Ivoire. It would be a tragedy if, while upholding humanitarian values abroad, the army failed to sustain them at home. Yet the rhetoric is disturbingly similar to that of Musharraf — ”free and fair elections”, the ”road to democracy”, a ”clean-up of politics” — as though the dictator of Pakistan had not clearly demonstrated the limits of the cleansing power of the military.
The closeness to the Pakistani model is more poignant given that Bangladesh was, until 1971, a province of Pakistan, and its bloody war of independence cost hundreds of thousands of Bengali lives.
The United States and European Union have rushed to offer humanitarian help in the wake of the cyclone; just as they have sent a stream of emissaries to praise the work of those who claim they can heal the long-unfolding social and economic catastrophe. As a result of global warming, Bangladesh is threatened with submergence. The thin bodies in makeshift shrouds in Bagherat and Barguna, or washed up in the turbid waters, are only a foretaste of things to come if the unnatural disasters of Bangladesh — mismanagement, corruption and social injustice — are not addressed at the same time as the consequences of omnivorous waves and savage storms. — Â