Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (30 page)

The Bhola Cyclone devastated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The failure of leadership from West Pakistan (now Pakistan) enabled the disaster to feed into an already popular succession movement and is a prime example of a critical juncture event.

Following two hundred years of British rule, East Pakistan was formed in 1947, governed by Western Pakistan, some 1,000 miles away. Despite their shared Muslim religious heritage, the populations of Pakistan’s two territories had significant cultural differences with the predominantly Bengali population of East Pakistan enjoying close cultural relations with Indian Bengalis living near their border (Washington Post, 1971). Differences between East and West Pakistan became politicised during the nation building process; for example, through West Pakistani leaders insisting that Urdu (the lingua franca of West Pakistan) be instituted as the state language (Oldenburg, 1985). Against this background, a popular movement for cultural autonomy had existed in East Pakistan since 1947 and was given a political dimension by the political and economic disadvantages experienced by the Eastern province.

In 1970, Bengalis were living in what would soon become one of the world’s most densely populated nations. Land scarcity forced Bengalis to build homes in areas subject to recurring floods. Increasing numbers pushed southward to clear and settle the Sunderban Forest (what used to be the home to the Bengal tiger), and deep into the south coast, which exposed them to the vagaries of the Bay of Bengal. (Sommer and Mosley, 1973:120)

In 1970, a massive typhoon hit:

On 12 and 13 Nov 1970, a cyclone and tidal waves hit Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) resulting in colossal damages to both human lives and properties. Some 10,000 square miles, covering a number of off shore islands in the Bay of Bengal were affected. Total population affected was approximately 6.4 million and estimated death toll was in the region of 2 million. (MINDEF, 1970)

Soon after the catastrophe, a medical team from Dacca (Dhaka) interviewed survivors who described either a gradual increasing of flood waters over a period of hours or conversely, a sudden ‘thunderous roar followed by a wall of water’. The team reported:

Where the water rose gradually, people scrambled on to roofs of their houses or scaled trees. But the houses frequently gave way, and only the strongest could maintain their grip on the wet and slippery tree trunks in the face of the 90 mile-per-hour winds. In areas where the tidal bore struck suddenly, there was even less hope of withstanding the force of the waves. (Sommer and Mosley, 1973:122)

One witness to the devastation described the scene incredulously:

Flying out to the Bay of Bengal 2–3 days later on persistent reports of massive casualties, the rivers flowing into the ocean seemed clogged by the
carcasses of animals and debris. Nobody believed us when we said these were corpses of human beings, in the thousands and thousands. The Islands of Hatiya and Sandip lost part of their population. Bhola and Manpura (and tens of smaller Islands and coastal areas like Kuakata) were swept almost clean of humans, animals and houses. (Sehgal, 2005)

The central government in West Pakistan was either unable or unwilling to act. Commentator Amir Ayaz suggests that both physical and social distance stayed the hand of the central government:

While a tidal wave of death and destruction swept over the eastern wing, the military government was slow to respond, paralysed by what I can only think of as a sense of remoteness. East Pakistan and its coastal people were just too far away. Which is a bit like the Bheels of Thar and the Koochis and other nomads of Balochistan. Mainstream Pakistan passes them by. Imagine if the water supply of Islamabad were to be closed for two or three days running. The howls of anguish rising as a result would touch the heavens. (Amir, no date)

When the government did finally act, its measures were limited to helping the least affected population, leaving the worst hit areas virtually abandoned. The medical team from Dacca (Dhaka) reported that:

While the minimal amounts of bamboo distributed by the government were adequate for repairing the roof or sides of a house in the more northerly areas, they were wholly inadequate for rebuilding the entire structure, which was necessary in the more devastated coastal regions. The results were pathetic: tiny grass and straw huts, three of four feet wide and high and perhaps six feet long, each housing a family of two to eight persons. (Sommer & Mosley, 1973:125)

Consequently, villagers in less affected areas were soon busy reconstituting the fabric of society, but this was not the case in the worst affected coastal regions. The team observed that:

There the men were usually found squatting despondently in the centre of the village. They lacked all the implements basic to achieving self-sufficiency, and they had no money with which to buy them. (Sommer & Mosley, 1973:127–28)

The Pakistani government’s failure to adequately respond to the devastation of the typhoon gave East Pakistan’s majority party, the Bengali Awami League, a stronger position from which to negotiate. The UNDP supported Sustainable Development Networking (SDN) project explains:

[T]he regime was widely seen as having botched (or ignored) its relief duties. The disaster gave further impetus to the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The League demanded regional autonomy for East Pakistan, and an end to military rule. In national elections held in December, the League won an overwhelming victory across Bengali territory. (SDN, no date)

In December 1970, just one month after the disaster, national elections were held. The Awami League took all but two National Assembly seats reserved for the eastern region, and was suddenly launched as a majority political force on a par with West Pakistan’s People’s Party (Sen, 1973). Ikram Sehgal (2005) argues that the popular moral outrage over the government’s poor response to the disaster catalysed the independence movement:

The Federal Government remained distant, seemingly cold and unfeeling in Islamabad. The perception of little or no relief set the stage for far reaching adverse consequences. The cyclone brought the anti-Pakistan antagonism building up over the years to a head in such circumstances it was sheer madness to go through with the scheduled November 30 elections. The political result was a foregone conclusion, a massive protest against the Federation, as it existed then, later became a mandate against the very continuity of Pakistan as a nation. (Sehgal, 2005)

The election demonstrated Bengali resistance to the continuation of martial law and support for democracy and regional autonomy had coalesced into a powerful political movement. But secession was apparently an act of desperation. Philip Oldenburg (1985) asserts that the Awami leadership would not have been averse to taking a leadership role in a consolidated Pakistan. He points to the fact that the Awami League did not announce secession until the central government reacted to the election results with massive violence. Robert LaPorte (1972) writes that the West Pakistani reaction to the election was to conduct ‘ethnic cleansing’. He explains that in order to crush the autonomy movement, the central government acted to rid the so-called ‘misguided’ Bengalis of the forces that were breaking up the nation. Thus the state proceeded to arrest or kill Awami League leaders leading to a massive exodus of Bengalis to India, and ultimately to India’s decision to engage its army to back the Bengali war of succession. In April 1971 the exiled government took oath with Tajuddin Ahmad as the first prime minister. Sadly independence did not free Bangladeshis from exploitative government, political violence or natural disaster. Nationwide famine struck in 1973 and 1974 (Sen, 1981). Coups, assassinations and claims for one party states have distorted national politics. Bangladesh is now considered to be one of the countries most at risk to the impacts of climate change and her population is highly vulnerable to riverine and coastal flooding as well as drought and food security.

Interestingly, the authors cited here whose work was published in academic journals make no mention of the catastrophic typhoon in their analyses of the events surrounding Bangladesh independence. Whereas the authors published in public forums (NGO report and OP Ed, respectively) write as though the connection
between the failure of the central state to provide for the population following the typhoon, and increased resistance to West Pakistan rule was patently self-evident. It is likely that the relative newness of treating environmental crises as politically significant events, combined with an academic avoidance of anything that could be perceived or misunderstood as environmental determinism, explains why the disaster did not figure in the analyses of the former.

In summary the disaster, set into motion by socio-political policies that forced Bengalis to live in conditions of high vulnerability, swelled the ranks of the discontented and radicalised many. Pakistani state violence against Bengalis, linked to the dominant ideology of the homogenous nation-state, effectively closed space for Bengali manoeuvrability. The disaster pushed popular sentiment towards support for a war of secession.

Hurricane Mitch exemplifies resistance in the social contract before and after a catastrophic event. Political interests both generated vulnerability and risk in Nicaragua and diluted the promise of the reconstruction period which was presented as an opportunity to break from the past and turn reconstruction into a transformative development moment. Despite transformational rhetoric including the decentralisation of development governance after Mitch, material, progressive change has been limited: a missed opportunity for adaptation to enhance progressive development.

The contemporary history of Nicaragua is eventful and dramatic. Michael Pisani neatly summarises some of the extraordinary socio-political shocks sustained by Nicaragua over the course of just 25 years:

It is difficult to discuss present-day Nicaragua without describing the astounding transformation that has taken place in the country over the past generation. In brief, these extraordinary events and changes include 1) insurrection and popular revolution, 2) counter-revolution and low-intensity warfare (the Contra War), 3) 100,000 dead as a direct or indirect result of armed conflict (2.5 percent of the population) and a halving of national output, 4) a period of hyperinflation that reached an annualized 33,000 percent in 1988, 5) socialisation of the economy, 6) privatisation of the economy, 7) debt crisis including a 1990 per capita foreign debt figure of $2,867 in which per capita GDP was $469 or a foreign debt-to-income ration of 6.1 to 1, 8) seven national leaders (1979–2002), and 9) three debilitating natural disasters (the omnipresent 1972 earthquake in Managua and two destructive hurricanes, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and Hurricane Joan in 1988. (Pisani, 2003:112)

Given the role that Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s mishandling of the 1972 earthquake reconstruction played in preparing the Nicaraguan population for popular
insurrection (see
Table 8.
1), it is not surprising that the Sandinistas moved quickly to improve the national system for disaster mitigation and response after gaining power. The Nicaraguan Institute for Territorial Studies (INETER) – which currently houses state scientists in geology, meteorology, geophysics departments, produces the nations’ maps, registers land and provides data for land use policy – was created by legislation signed by the Sandinista government in 1981. In 1982 the government transformed the Nicaraguan Civil Defence into a nationwide network of civilians dedicated to promulgating the revolution amongst the Nicaraguan populace while the US funded Contras attempted to topple the government through low intensity warfare: a clear case of adaptation combining a technical and political ambition. However, the Civil Defence was not merely a propaganda machine; by the late 1980s Nicaragua for the first time had a cadre of at least rudimentarily trained emergency managers (Olson
et al.
, 2001).

In 1990 a peaceful transition in power saw a landslide victory for the neo-liberal National Opposition Union. The new government allowed the Civil Defence to continue its functions proving effective during the Pacific Coast tsunami of 1992, and, after European Union funding helped link the organisation with the scientists of Nicaragua’s Institute for Territorial Studies (INETER, 1998), it performed especially well during Hurricane Cesar (Ibid.). Thus, in Nicaragua, three of the basic elements fundamental to effective disaster mitigation were ostensibly already in place when Hurricane Mitch battered the isthmus: 1) a national institution housing earth scientists and providing early warning; 2) an established national network of civil defence; and 3) an organised citizenry accustomed to working with civil defence. What happened?

What turned Mitch from a natural hazard into a human disaster was a chain reaction of social vulnerabilities created by long-term climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, social inequality, population pressure, rapid urbanization and international debt. (Rodgers, 1999)

Multinational companies financed many of the coffee plantations neatly terraced into the mountainsides of Nicaragua and the banana plantations cared out of the lush coastal regions of Honduras. Both types of plantations were viewed as beneficial economic enterprises but they had the secondary effect of displacing small farmers further into the mountains where they in turn cut down forests to grow subsistence crops[…]But the long term environmental consequences of clear-cutting land for agricultural purposes were never anticipated in the region’s development plans. Potential economic losses were never calculated, nor were mitigating actions taken to reduce the harmful effect of erosion. (Comfort
et al
., 1999:40)