The Great Bhola Cyclone

Today is the anniversary of the cyclone of 1970 which took the lives of at least 500,000 people in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. In October of that year there had been a smaller cyclone which cost 300 lives and by November 8, 1970, a cyclone was being tracked in the Bay of Bengal and the authorities assumed that people, in anticipation, would move to safer places. However, nobody expected winds of up to 225 kms per hour which occurred at the same time as the highest tides, and the information of the level of destruction took a few days to get to Dhaka and the outside world. On November 13, the Pakistan Observer had a headline, "50 feared lost in coastal cyclone." However, on November 15, the Daily Mirror in London received a garbled message from their East Pakistan 'stringer', Fakhruddin, which read, "Five lacs gone. Definite. No souls sighted Patuakhali. Wave 30 feet. Minimum one crore cattle gone Noakhali." It was only on November 15 that Oxfam asked its Field Director for Eastern India and East Pakistan, Richard Taylor, (a distant cousin of mine) to go to Dhaka as soon as possible and I was among other Oxfam personnel in Bihar, India, who were asked to stand by.

The response of the Pakistan Government itself was very slow mainly because the largely Punjabi-run administration did not mind if Bengalis suffered and died. Even the international response by donor countries was very slow. They did not want to rush in for fear of upsetting the Pakistan Government. Eventually, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was running for office in the national election that had been scheduled for early December that year, toured the devastated region. When he returned to Dhaka, he said at a press conference, "I cannot find words adequate to describe the holocaust which the cyclone and tidal bore have left in their trail. Nor can I adequately convey in words the suffering and the misery of those who have survived. Whole areas have been totally depopulated. In many areas of Patuakhali, Bhola and Noakhali barely 20 to 25 per cent of the total population has survived. The survivors have lost their homes, their crops, their cattle; in fact they have lost all their worldly belongings. They are without clothes, without shelter and in many of the areas without any food or drinking water. The wounds on their bodies are turning septic. They face death from starvation, exposure and disease."

A remarkable book, Catalyst – In the wake of the Great Bhola Cyclone written by Cornelia Rohde, was published earlier this year. She and her husband, Dr Jon Rohde, had been living in Dhaka for over two years when the cyclone struck. Jon was working in the forerunner of ICDDR-B, the Cholera Research Laboratory, and within the two years they had been in Dhaka, the Rohdes and some of their colleagues and friends had a very good network of Bengali friends too. CATALYST is an account of how these friends jointly launched a relief operation which later developed into a longer term rehabilitation and development operation in the island of Manpura. Their experiences, in many cases, changed their lives. The book is full of the carefully preserved diaries and notes which they made at that time and a very large number of black and white photos. They have also been able to benefit from the memories of those who were with them at that time. One indomitable and towering personality in the work at that time was Father Richard Timm, who has lived and worked in East Pakistan/Bangladesh since 1952. Someone else who assisted the relief operations in a magnificent way was Fazle Hasan Abed (now Sir) who was then working with Pakistan-Shell and based in Chittagong.

Cornelia Rohde's book also covers the political tension that built up after the National Election in December 1970 which placed Sheikh Mujib in line to be the Prime Minister of Pakistan. She details how she and Jon visited the Dhaka University area after the genocide of March 25/26 1971 because they wanted to record evidence as they had heard that all international journalists had been expelled. They passed on a lot of information to the American Consul-General, Archer Blood, and later on both Cornelia and Jon wrote to their Senators in the United States about the situation. They left Dhaka in early April and the evidence they were able to give in USA was very powerful and effective.

I strongly recommend people to find ways to read this wonderful book. Any family or friends travelling from Europe and North America to Bangladesh could be asked to buy copies of the book through Amazon.

By September 1971 the Rohdes were working in the refugee camps in West Bengal with the International Rescue Committee and Oxfam (where I was working). Jon popularised what we now know as OR-Saline and set up special malnutrition centres, while Cornelia helped set up as many as 1,000 schools for small children in the refugee camps.

Abed Bhai, as I have always known him, had managed to flee Pakistan and was a key person in the UK raising awareness and raising funds. He returned to independent Bangladesh in early 1972 and I am very proud and glad that Oxfam was one of the first organisations to support the formation of BRAC.

I strongly recommend people to find ways to read this wonderful book.