Don’t expect the cyclone in Burma to have benign political side-effects

07 May 2008

Rod Liddle says that there is a natural hope that the interventions of the UN and charities in the disaster-stricken country will open it up. But history does not support such optimism

In the dark early hours of 12 November 1970 a tropical cyclone swung in from the Indian Ocean and made its way, to devastating effect, up the course of the world’s largest delta — the confluence of two huge river courses, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — in what was then East Pakistan. The delta was heavily populated with subsistence farmers and, further, the overwhelming majority of East Pakistan lay on land less than 20 metres above sea level and was thus vulnerable to even a gentle breeze lapping the waters of the Indian Ocean. If you were asked to design the perfect country to be all but wiped out by a weather-driven natural disaster, this would be it: low-lying, densely populated, little or no preventative infrastructure, mired in poverty. If you then placed that country in the worst place in the world for serious ‘storm-surge’ problems — around the fringes of the Indian Ocean, preferably near the mouth of the Ganges (which will act as a natural funnel for the cyclone) — then, for lo, you have East Pakistan; the world’s unluckiest country.

That storm killed between 300,000 and 500,000 people, not counting those who starved to death in the aftermath. It was the worst natural disaster resulting from unfortunate weather that the world had ever — or still has ever — seen. It is also the template for those who believe that disasters such as these, acts of God, can somehow effect monumental political change, that every cloud — even those big, grey, rapidly billowing, weird ones that herald misery — can have a silver lining. The Pakistan government responded to the cyclone with, as one local politician put it at the time, ‘gross neglect, callous indifference and utter indifference’. This was a commonly held view around the rest of the world, principally in the United States and western Europe, but felt with most conviction within Pakistan itself. Enraged by its remote and ineffectual government thousands of miles to the west, East Pakistan went to the polls and elected the pro-independence Awami League by a landslide; after a while, and a short war, the independent state of Bangladesh rose like a phoenix from the ashes. Well, actually, not very much like a phoenix. More like a paraplegic moa. Change, then, effected, or facilitated, by disaster.

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gerry

May 7th, 2008 6:09pm Report this comment

Another contributing factor is, as with the Boxing Day tsunami, that the mangrove swamps which would have afforded some protection, had been destroyed.

Ilan Kelman

May 11th, 2008 9:37am Report this comment

Thank you for an excellent article with solid analysis. Liddle's comments are supported by extensive academic research into "disaster diplomacy" http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org But in this case, the media have been clamouring for the story that Cyclone Nargis will inevitably cause political change in Burma. Liddle avoids that bandwagon, presenting instead a realistic picture.

David Preiser

May 12th, 2008 7:47pm Report this comment

Yes, well said. One also hopes that people will apply this lesson to things like Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University, the New York Philharmonic's appearance in North Korea, and the upcoming Olympics in China. Probably not, though.

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