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.