East Pakistan: The Politics of Catastrophe

THE face of the Pakistani official was ashen. Fresh from an inspection of the cyclone-ravaged coastline of the Bay of Bengal, he described the scene: "No vulture, no dog, and even no insects were to be found anywhere. Just heaps of human bodies and carcasses." More than two weeks after the storm had shrieked across the low-lying Ganges River Delta, the enormity of the havoc wrought by its 120-m.p.h. winds and 20-ft. waves could still only be sensed, not measured. Toward week's end, some 6,000 Ansar militiamen and volunteers trudged into the flatlands to begin burying, for $2 a corpse, the rapidly decomposing bodies claimed by what Pakistanis have already begun to call "the second Hiroshima."

The official toll of dead and missing stood at 200,000 by week's end, and there were predictions that it would eventually triple or even quintuple. The cyclone was thus guaranteed its place as the 20th century's worst natural disaster. In all, the storm devastated a densely populated, 3,000-sq. mi. area, destroying 90% of the buildings and 90% of the rice crop. In some areas, TIME's Ghulam Malik reported last week, "it was like the beginning of life after Doomsday. People were wandering naked, wailing the names of kin who never responded. At Hatia, survivors wore rags that they found in ponds and ditches. And if they could find no rags, they wore leaves."

A medical team in the Noakhali district told of coming upon a tumble of "eight corpses and hundreds of carcasses. Suddenly, in this grotesque heap, a naked woman's broken body shuddered slightly." The team removed the woman, and managed to restore her to consciousness. Many of the living were almost crazed. At one point, an American helicopter bearing U.S. Ambassador Joseph S. Farland and 10-lb. sacks of rice, molasses and salt was nearly torn apart when it landed among starving Bengalis, who rushed the Ambassador and grabbed at the sacks. As the pilot swung into the air again, the tail rotor cut down three of the mob, seriously injuring them.

Big Danger. Why had the delta's 3,000,000 Bengalis been so unprepared? A U.S. weather satellite's photo of severe weather in the Bay of Bengal had been received in the East Pakistani capital of Dacca more than ten hours before the cyclone struck. A warning --moha bipod shonket (big danger coming)--was broadcast, but someone forgot to include a code number indicating the force of the expected storm.

The worldwide response to the catastrophe was unprecedentedly swift and generous. Less than four days after the cyclone struck, Red Cross supplies were arriving at Dacca airport. Soon the delta skies began to fill with an international fleet of 29 choppers (U.S., British, French, West German and Saudi Arabian), which are the only means of moving supplies rapidly in an area with many canals, few roads and hardly any airstrips. A four-ship British task force anchored in the bay and began choppering food, clothing, medicine and water purification pills to the remote coastal areas. Pledges of aid from 40 countries, ranging from Communist China ($1,200,000) to Monaco ($950), flooded into Red Cross headquarters in Geneva.

Yet, in the face of this, Pakistan's government proved shockingly inept and many of its people cruelly callous. Four days after the cyclone hit, East Pakistan's governor, Vice Admiral Syed Mohammad Ahsan, was still downplaying the catastrophe, saying that "only" 16,000 had been killed. Though people were still reported floating alive offshore three days after the cyclone, the Pakistani navy was never ordered to search for survivors. Some 500,000 tons of grain were stockpiled in East Pakistan warehouses, but the 40-odd Pakistani army helicopters that could have airlifted them to the delta sat on their pads in West Pakistan. India, the government explained--falsely--would not allow the craft to be ferried over 1,000 miles of its territory. President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan waited a total of 13 days before making a formal visit to the Ganges area to see the toll for himself.

Privileged Families. Leaders of East Pakistan's Peking-and Moscow-oriented parties seized on the relief debacle to reinforce their demands for more autonomy for their region. The cyclone aftermath deepened the hate and envy felt by East Pakistan's dark, rice-eating Bengalis for the taller, fairer--and wealthier--wheat-eating Sindhis, Punjabis and Pathans of West Pakistan, the dominant half of the divided Moslem country. Anti-West Pakistan riots among the Bengalis forced ex-President Mohammad Ayub Khan into retirement last year. Successor Yahya, who has scheduled for next week the first general elections since Pakistan won independence 22 years ago, has taken some steps to correct the economic and political imbalance between East and West. But he has a long way to go. In the world's fifth most populous nation (pop. 130 million), a group of "20 families"--nearly all in West Pakistan--control 66% of Pakistan's industry and 80% of its banking and insurance assets. Only two of the enormously privileged 20 bothered to contribute to the disaster relief effort. Their ante: $100,000 each. Yahya has contributed $9,000 from his own pocket and $116 million from the treasury.

No Visas. Even as Yahya was stepping up his relief budget, Islamabad, the national capital, was balking at accepting aid from neighbors. When Indira Gandhi offered help, a Pakistani official told the Indian High Commissioner: "We don't know if it will be needed." The Pakistanis refused Indian helicopters, mobile hospitals and river craft, doubtless because they were worried that New Delhi might look better than Islamabad. Indian Airlines transports loaded with relief supplies were refused permission to land at Chittagong because the crews did not have visas. New Delhi was told to send the stuff by truck instead; less conspicuous.

Officials, however, had no monopoly on insensibility. In Bhola, young Pakistanis in freshly laundered clothes played badminton only 30 minutes away by pedicab from areas where decomposing bodies lay rotting. Few Bengalis bothered to bury the "strangers" from other towns washed up on their beaches. In Patuakhali, British troops dug graves for the dead, while Pakistani soldiers lounged in their barracks.

There was, at least, one bit of luck in the situation. The cyclone of 1876 was followed by an outbreak of cholera that killed 50,000. So far, miraculously, East Pakistan's water supplies seem remarkably free of contamination, and there has been no sign of the feared flare-up of cholera, which is endemic in the area. Health officials speculated that, after decades of living in the Ganges Delta, the Bengalis must be pretty much inured to any calamity--bacteriological, meteorological, or political.

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