Bangladesh A Country Under Water

By William E. Smith

"I don't know why God should punish us like this," sighed the weary President of Bangladesh, Hussain Mohammed Ershad, as he looked out a helicopter window at the devastation below. Even by the standards of his perennially destitute country, the punishment this time seemed inordinately cruel. As much as three-quarters of Bangladesh -- a country the size of Wisconsin crowded with 110 million people -- lay under water after it and neighboring India, Bhutan and Nepal were pelted by what may have been the heaviest monsoon rains in 70 years. An estimated 30 million Bangladeshis were left homeless. Many hundreds perished, though the full extent of the casualties will not be known until the waters of the Brahmaputra River recede enough for rescue teams to reach outlying villages.

Even then the crisis will not be over. Already, experts estimate that as many as five hundred thousand new cases of diarrhea are occurring each day, most of them caused by polluted drinking water. Dysentery and perhaps cholera may soon follow. Because the flood has destroyed at least a quarter of this year's food crops, widespread hunger and perhaps pockets of starvation are anticipated.

Yet the most crippling long-term blow to Bangladesh could be the massive damage to its roads, railways, bridges, dikes and buildings. With 17 years of hard-won development all but obliterated, Ershad said grimly, "It is not possible to survive like this. Whatever we have built, most of it is gone. It will take millions and millions of dollars, even billions, to repair the damage."

From his helicopter window, the President could see little last week except a brown ocean of muddy floodwater. In one area, all that protruded from the earth's watery surface were some straw roofs, treetops and a narrow stretch of broken dike-top roadway 20 miles long. At least 220,000 people had taken refuge on this chain of tiny islands, and were building makeshift shanties. Some had managed to bring along their cows and goats, which were being kept alive on a diet of water hyacinths. Elsewhere, survivors were obliged to fight off poisonous snakes that had sought refuge on the same bits of dry land. The bodies of many victims of drowning, disease and snakebite were temporarily placed on rafts, because there was no dry land in which to bury them.

In the capital city of Dhaka, where the President's residence was knee-deep in water, streets had been transformed into canals. Boatmen were charging whatever the market would bear to move people to safe ground, but some clung to the roofs of their flooded huts to ward off looters. Ricksha Driver Mohammed Nasser, 18, boasted that he was making $5 a day carrying passengers through flooded streets. He will need the money: the shanty he shared with his mother and sister was washed away.

As the extent of the damage became known, Ershad appealed for international aid, including food, medicine, water-purification tablets and 3 million tons of grain. "Pray for us," he told visitors. The U.S. pledged some $150 million, much of it in grain, and $60 million was offered by Japan, Britain, France, Canada, Turkey and others. Local relief agencies did what they could. In a northern section of Dhaka, a group of engineering students raised $50, found a boat and poled their way along the main streets distributing food and medicine.

To its founders, who severed East Pakistan's links with West Pakistan after a violent upheaval in 1971 and established it as a separate nation, Bangladesh will always be "Golden Bengal." In reality, however, the low-lying delta country, laced and often lashed by three great river systems, is still a "basket case," the cruel epithet thrust upon it at the time of its independence. A calamitous series of floods, cyclones and war-inflicted suffering have made it a focus of international concern from its inception.

This year's floods follow a devastating inundation in 1987, and worse may be in store. The problem begins beyond Bangladesh in a 600,000-sq.-mi. watershed of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems. All flow through Bangladesh and empty into the Bay of Bengal. The watershed contains the southern slopes of the Himalayas in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan, where the hillsides have been ravaged by deforestation. With the denuded soil no longer able to absorb monsoon rains, the savage runoff increases year by year in speed and volume, bringing with it ever larger loads of silt that end up on the river bottoms of Bangladesh.

India has averted the problem by building dikes to contain the monsoon- swollen rivers, but that has merely pushed the flood problem downstream. B.M. Abbas, a former minister of flood control in the Dhaka government who favors the construction of a vast system of Himalayan dams as a long-term solution, charges that "Bangladesh is being destroyed by its neighbors."

But part of the problem stems from the country's extreme poverty and technological limitations. Untold numbers of poorly designed earthen dikes gave way last week. The embankments lack solid foundations, notes James Conway of the U.N.'s World Food Program, "because they don't even have rocks in Bangladesh." WFP has been donating millions of dollars' worth of wheat a year to the Dhaka government, which gives it to laborers for building dikes in a food-for-work program. Laments Andrei Filotti, a hydraulic engineer who advises Dhaka on flood containment: "We have poured $200 million into these dikes and drainage canals since the mid-1970s, and now there's not much left. We're trying to fight some of the biggest rivers in the world with simple / earth."

Those rivers were already at normal flood levels by mid-August, when one- fifth of Bangladesh is typically covered by floodwaters. Late in the month a sudden and intense rainfall centered in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sent an additional torrent surging southward into the Brahmaputra. Only at the end of August did Dhaka officials realize the magnitude of the danger. Admits Ershad: "We were taken by surprise -- that so much water could come." By Sept. 3, nearly every measuring station on the Brahmaputra had registered record levels.

The result was a degree of paralysis that few nations ever experience. For three days last week, Bangladesh's only transportation link with the outside world was a pair of aging Fokker Friendship propjets that took off from a relatively short taxiway at Dhaka's otherwise flooded international airport, carrying small loads of passengers to and from Calcutta. Roads and railways were cut, and even ferryboats stopped running, because their terminals were flooded. At one point, only a handful of helicopters connected the capital with the rest of the country. By week's end, as the floodwaters started to recede, the Dhaka airport was reopened to permit the arrival of relief supplies.

Now, however, the government faces the all but impossible tasks of distributing emergency food aid to tens of millions of people and preparing for the epidemics that are sure to follow. Already hospitals are filled with victims of flood-related diseases, and raw sewage is contaminating water supplies throughout the country. "God willing, we will not allow anybody to starve," Ershad assured his countrymen during his helicopter visits, though he later remarked to foreign journalists, "How can you feed 30 million people? But we're trying our best."

Others fear that the world will become inured to the country's repeated calls for help. Observed a rural-development expert, Khwaja Shamsul Huda: "Bangladesh cries wolf too often. But this year the wolf is really on our doorstep."

With reporting by Ross H. Munro/Dhaka