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A friend of this writer, a commissioned police officer, told this story in one breath after having a conversation with his elder brother over his cell phone after midday prayers on Friday, Nov. 16. It was the first time he had been able to contact his family after Cyclone Sidr struck their village the day before.
The situation is grave in the southern part of Bangladesh; it is also unimaginable to the people who did not witness the real damage. Hundreds of people remain missing 10 days after the cyclone hit; they might have been swept away in the upsurge of water. Almost all the inhabitants in the region have lost everything: their crops, buffaloes, cattle, poultry, shops, businesses, homes, money and valuable ornaments.
Since the storm, in many areas there has been no electricity, which was already insufficient. Survivors are living in the open air. There is no transportation to move them elsewhere, as the roads have also been severely damaged.
Victims allege that rescue efforts by officials of the Department of Disaster Management have been insufficient, both before and after the storm. Because of the ongoing and arbitrary censorship of the print and electronic media, the local press has not shown the real picture of the suffering, and has refrained from critical comments about the failure of the military-backed government to protect and aid the people.
Instead, the media are busy praising the armed forces for their relief work. However, survivors allege that government efforts to rescue the people and their belongings from the ravages of the storm were less than serious.
Storms by different names -- cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, kalboiyshakhi -- are part of the people's lives in Bangladesh, which sits adjacent to the Bay of Bengal. Every year many parts of the country experience natural calamities. People have learned how to suffer and sustain themselves after these natural disasters strike.
On every occasion people lose their assets and property; those with capability and resources work extremely hard to recover from their losses. However, many are left lamenting the loss of life and continuing to suffer because of their incapacity to regain their former positions, despite continuous hard work. All these struggles descend upon the victims every time there is a natural disaster: they have to do or die by themselves.
If the government had a pro-people mindset, the losses in times of natural calamities could be reduced many times over. On one hand, the government does not take responsibility to help restore storm victims to their previous conditions. All they do is distribute insufficient emergency relief, a process riddled with mismanagement and corruption.
On the other hand, the victims suffer exploitation by private opportunist groups as well. Many stories are being reported. In one case a woman living and working in a coastal town was nearly mad to learn the condition of her family, who lived in a seaside village. However, the battery of her mobile phone was exhausted; for a whole week she failed to recharge the battery. Some unscrupulous people introduced a new business in the area, offering to recharge phone batteries at the cost of 50 to 100 takas (US$0.75-1.50), which is nothing short of ridiculous.
Micro-credit organizations have not stopped demanding loan payments from those living below the poverty line, even those who have lost everything, including family members. These people are not in a position even to pay for food, let alone repay their loans.
Despite repeated requests from the homeless starving victims of the disaster, the harassment does not stop, and no one has come to control it or support the helpless people.
The blood-sucking and exploitative mindset of both government and non-government agencies are the manmade storms that the people are compelled to suffer. These storms strike at them daily, destroying and ruining the lives of grassroots people in Bangladesh.
Both the elected and the "caretaker" governments have nourished and cultivated this culture among the country's public servants. Now it has also spread to the private agencies and groups, trapping the poor of Bangladesh in a constant cycle of victimization.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender living in Sylhet in Bangladesh. He has been working on human rights issues in the country for more than a decade, and was a journalist in Bangladesh in the 1990s.)
