Sea Reclaims Isles--Tragedy of Bangladesh

This place is not water and is not yet solid land. Eight years ago, it did not exist. Now, a result of silt deposited by the emptying Ganges, it is incipient land, only a few inches above the violent waters of the Bay of Bengal.

Early Saturday morning, authorities believe, several thousand impoverished residents of the island’s thatched huts were swept into the sea by giant waves raised by cyclonic winds.

“I lost my two young sons and my small daughter only 1 year old,” said Harunur Rashid, 45. Rashid, a small, extremely thin man wearing a T-shirt and a lungi skirt wrapped around his waist, said he moved to the island five years ago after he lost his land on adjacent Sandwip Island. On Urirchar, he had a small plot of land near an experimental mangrove forest planted by the government.

As he spoke to an interpreter in his native Bengali language, Rashid began to weep. The muscles on his neck tightened and his voice rose to a squeak.

“Each wave was higher than the next,” he said. The family climbed to the roof of their hut. “The house was taken away by the waves. My children floated away.”

Rashid was able to save one son, he said, by clinging to him with one hand while gripping a young mangrove tree with the other. Other family members saved themselves the same way.

The 200 or so people remaining on the island--the only survivors of what Bangladesh President Hussain Mohammed Ershad called the “worst tragedy in Bangladesh history”--told many such harrowing stories. More than 100 saved themselves by cramming into the rafters of one of the island’s two elevated concrete structures. After the water rose more than nine feet, they cut a hole in the ceiling and climbed onto the roof.

Far more people died on Urirchar Island than survived, but the final death count may never be known. There have been widely varying accounts of the number of people killed in the cyclone disaster. Local newspapers place the deaths in the tens of thousands.

Tuesday night, the spokesman for the disaster center at the office of Bangladesh’s chief martial law administrator said the official death count, based on bodies actually viewed by officials, was 1,400.

However, Ershad, who is the chief martial law administrator as well as president as the result of a 1982 military coup, said Tuesday that between 5,000 and 10,000 people have died.

Someone asked Ershad why he should not order the islands--extremely vulnerable to the frequent storms that blow in from the Bay of Bengal--cleared of inhabitants.

“It is not possible to clear the islands because of the population pressures on the land,” he replied. “During the winter season, this is a fine place to live. And where would the people go? The people here depend on God. . . . They just try their luck.”

Manpura Island, not far away, was devastated in a 1970 cyclone that killed as many as half a million people across what was then East Pakistan. It was not as terribly ravaged by this storm--only 21 of its villagers are missing and presumed dead. However, the rice paddies are filled with the salt-water wash of the waves and the crops are lost.

A helicopter tour for American reporters Tuesday showed Urirchar to be the most devastated area. More than a dozen human bodies were strewn as randomly as driftwood on the island’s beaches, along with thousands of bloated animal carcasses.

The disaster center estimated Tuesday night that 139,000 cattle died in the cyclone. Nearly 500,000 acres of cropland was damaged--mostly rice paddies and fields of jute. Where the waters had receded, the land dried in the sun and white salt deposits remained in spots to show where the sea waters had been.

Several large sailing ships, the rectangular-sailed dhows that ply the many waterways of the low-lying river delta, sat in the middle of islands where they had been thrown by the storm.

Patches of Straw

The disaster center spokesman estimated Tuesday that 17,000 homes--mostly thatched huts--had been destroyed. There was no way to tell how many homes were destroyed on Urirchar; with the exception of the two concrete government buildings, all structures were simply wiped from the land.

All that remained of some of the huts were patches of straw on the ground that looked like mats. The sites of others were marked only by mounds of gray, sandy soil where the huts had been raised above the rice paddies. At several of them, sticks were thrust in the ground to represent graves.

It is the holy month of Ramadan in this Muslim country and, in talking to reporters Tuesday, some of the more religiously minded survivors blamed the disaster on those in their communities who have fallen away from Allah.

Standing beneath a banana tree that had been mostly uprooted and bent as if in supplication by the storm, an 85-year-old survivor, Lutfur Rahman, said: “I’ve seen many storms before. This one was not as bad as the one in 1970. We were warned of the storm but we could not leave because of our cattle and houses. You know this came because people have lost their religion. It caused the storm.”

The people know there will be more deadly storms here--there have been 32 in the last 25 years--yet they will not move. When the islands are cleared of people by one storm, new inhabitants arrive to replace them, often after a fight for the land.

“In 1970, only a few hundred survived on this island,” said one of the helicopter pilots who accompanied Ershad and the journalists to Manpura Island. “I believe there were 37,000 lost here.

“But we have an advantage here,” he said bitterly, as he looked out upon the several hundred people gathered to see the president. “We have a high rate of breeding. Now the island is again completely populated.”

Bangladesh has 100 million people and a growth rate of 2.7%--2.7 million more people each year.

It takes only five days to replace 37,000 people.