LOL.. if things wree so easy, the giant climatist wudnt b such
concerned abt da rise of see level.. and the rich country who r
producing huge amount of carbon-di-oxide wud just popse Bangladesh to
finance to build a 30 ft high damn around da sea!! the sweet watre is
becoming salty, ppl cant drink or use it.. so it wont play any role to
prevent dis if all rivers r made 30 ft deeprer.. we will die, yes die,
in sea water if the ginat carbon-di-ozide producing countries dont
stop doing so.. u know, dis gas is just warming the globe which is
infact the actual reaosn of dis rising of sea level.
On 6/22/08, dina khan <dina30_khan@ yahoo.com> wrote:
> Warning for action
> The result for filling all rivers canals bil jhil & ponds and using deep
> tubule for raising the deep underground deep water for using in irrigation,
> the result of corruption & ignorance, the result of cutting all trees, the
> land of Bangladesh is going down which are the main causes for flood every
> year in Bangladesh & also the causes for sea water coming in Bangladesh &
> for this causes in future the land of Bangladesh will be gone under the sea
> water Bay of Bengal.
> It may call flood of Noah as God 's punishment.
> Advising for action
> 150 millions people of Bangladesh must need to be careful need to be honest
> & quality educated.
> Stop all corruption & try to be all quality educated, stop using deep
> tubule for raising deep under ground water for using & irrigation, dig 30
> feet all rivers canal jhil bils & ponds for holding flood & sky water &
> make 30 feet high barrage in front Bay of Bengal to protect coming sea
> water inside the land of Bangladesh & plan trees every where on the barrage
> & on river both sides.
>
>
> --- On Sat, 21/6/08, R@kiB <rakib.exe@gmail. com> wrote:
>
> From: R@kiB <rakib.exe@gmail. com>
> Subject: [Shadeshi_Bondhu] Special report: Bangladesh is set to disappear
> under the waves by the end of the century
> To: "we_frndz" <we_frndz@yahoogroup s.com>
> Date: Saturday, 21 June, 2008, 7:54 PM
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Bangladesh - 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water!!!!
>
> From The Independent:
>
> Special report: Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of
> the century
> Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, is set to disappear under the
> waves by the end of this century – and we will be to blame. Johann Hari took
> a journey to see for himself how western profligacy and indifference have
> sealed the fate of 150 million peoplewent to see for himself the spreading
> misery and destruction as the ocean reclaims the land on which so many
> millions depend
> Friday, 20 June 2008
> Alamy
>
>
>
> Battling the waves: many Bangladeshis depend on the ocean
>
>
> This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we – you,
> me and everyone we know – are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I
> travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike
> to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers – gaunt,
> creased people – were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what
> we have done to them.
> Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a
> strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped
> growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of
> the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the
> children began to die.
> The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear
> and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.
> Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue
> sari and her grief. "We couldn't drink the water from the river, because it
> was suddenly full of salt and made us sick," she said. "So I had to give my
> children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this
> pond. It's dirty. So we all got dysentery." She keeps staring at its
> surface. "I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and
> you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a
> day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so
> weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning..."
> Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. "He died," she said. Now
> Arita's surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his
> back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His
> distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. "Why did this
> happen?" Arita asked.
> It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal
> power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made
> of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the
> rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling –
> and wiping Bangladesh off the map.
> Deep below the ground of Munshigonj and thousands of villages like it, salt
> water is swelling up. It is this process – called "saline inundation" – that
> killed their trees and their fields and contaminated their drinking water.
> Some farmers have shifted from growing rice to farming shrimp – but that
> employs less than a quarter of the people, and it makes them dependent on a
> fickle export market. The scientific evidence shows that unless we change
> now, this salt water will keep rising and rising, until everything here is
> ocean.
> I decided to embark on this trip when, sitting in my air-conditioned flat in
> London, I noticed a strange and seemingly impossible detail in a scientific
> report. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose predictions
> have consistently turned out to be underestimates – said that Bangladesh is
> on course to lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food
> production by 2050. For America, this would be equivalent to California and
> New York State drowning, and the entire mid-West turning salty and barren.
> Surely this couldn't be right? How could more than 20 million Bangladeshis
> be turned into refugees so suddenly and so silently? I dug deeper, hoping it
> would be disproved – and found that many climatologists think the IPCC is
> way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the
> director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate
> calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else's. He
> believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his
> satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels
> this century – which would drown Bangladesh entirely. When I heard this, I
> knew I had to go, and see.
>
>
>
>
> Even the capital, Dhaka would not survive a massive sea-level rise
>
>
> 1. The edge of a cliff
> The first thing that happens when you arrive in Dhaka is that you stop. And
> wait. And wait. And all you see around you are cars, and all you hear is
> screaming. Bangladesh's capital is in permanent shrieking gridlock, with
> miles of rickshaws and mobile heaps of rust. The traffic advances by inches
> and by howling. Each driver screams himself hoarse announc-ing – that was my
> lane! Stay there! Stop moving! Go back! Go forward! It is a good-natured
> shrieking: everybody knows that this is what you do in Dhaka. If you are
> lucky, you enter a slipstream of traffic that moves for a minute – until the
> jams back up and the screaming begins once more.
> Around you, this megalopolis of 20 million people seems to be screaming
> itself conscious. People burn rubbish by the roadside, or loll in the
> rivers. Children with skin deformities that look like infected burns try to
> thrust maps or sweets into your hand. Rickshaw drivers with thighs of steel
> pedal furious-ly as whole families cling on and offer their own high-volume
> traffic commentary to the groaning driver, and the groaning city.
> I wanted to wade through all this chaos to find Bangladesh's climate
> scientists, who are toiling in the crannies of the city to figure out what –
> if anything – can be saved.
> Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports
> and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is
> a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is
> running out of time.
> "It is clear from all the data we are gathering here in Bangladesh that the
> IPCC predictions were much too conservative, " he said. He should know: he is
> one of the IPCC's leading members, and the UN has given him an award for his
> unusually prescient predictions. His work is used as one of the standard
> textbooks across the world, including at Oxford and Harvard. "We are facing
> a catastrophe in this country. We are talking about an absolutely massive
> displacement of human beings."
> He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the
> ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising,
> so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the
> country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are
> super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from
> within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense
> and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes
> here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline
> inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr
> Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is
> way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to
> understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we
> need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you
> have to take a
> Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility. " In the
> past, he has called it "climatic genocide".
> The worst-case scenario, Dr Rahman said, is if one of the world's land-based
> ice-sheets breaks up. "Then we lose 70 to 80 per cent of our land, including
> Dhaka. It's a different world, and we're not on it. The evidence from Jim
> Hansen shows this is becoming more likely – and it can happen quickly and
> irreversibly. My best understanding of the evidence is that this will
> probably happen towards the end of the lifetime of babies born today."
> I walked out in the ceaseless churning noise of Dhaka. Everywhere I looked,
> people were building and making and living: my eyes skimmed up higher and
> higher and find more and more activity. A team of workers were building a
> house; behind and above them, children were sewing mattresses on a roof;
> behind and above them, more men were building taller buildings. This is the
> most cramped country on earth: 150 million people living in an area the size
> of Iowa. Could all this life really be continuing on the crumbling edge of a
> cliff?
>
>
>
>
> Disease from 2007's floods presages worse to come
>
>
> 2. 'It is like the Bay is angry'
> I was hurtling through the darkness at 120mph with my new driver, Shambrat.
> He was red-eyed from chewing pan, a leaf-stimulant that makes you buzz, and
> I could see nothing except the tiny pools of light cast by the car. They
> showed we were on narrow roads, darting between rice paddies and emptied
> shack-towns, in the midnight silence. I kept trying to put on my seatbelt,
> but every time Shambrat would cry, "You no need seatbelt! I good driver!"
> and burst into hysterical giggles.
> To see if the seas were really rising, I had circled a random low-lying
> island on the map called Moheshkhali and asked Shambrat to get me there. It
> turned out the only route was to go to Coxs Bazar – Bangladesh's Blackpool –
> and then take a small wooden rowing boat that has a huge chugging engine
> attached to the front. I clambered in alongside three old men, a small herd
> of goats, and some chickens. The boat was operated by a 10-year-old child,
> whose job is to point the boat in the right direction, start the engine, and
> then begin using a small jug to frantically scoop out the water that starts
> to leak in. After an hour of the deafening ack-ack of the engine, we arrived
> at the muddy coast of Moheshkhali.
> There was a makeshift wooden pier, where men were waiting with large sacks
> of salt. As we climbed up on to the fragile boards, people helped the old
> men lift up the animals. There were men mooching around the pier, waiting
> for a delivery. They looked bemused by my arrival. I asked them if the sea
> levels were rising here. Rezaul Karim Chowdry, a 34-year-old who looked like
> he is in his fifties, said plainly: "Of course. In the past 30 years,
> two-thirds of this island has gone under the water. I had to abandon my
> house. The land has gone into the sea." Immediately all the other men start
> to recount their stories. They have lost their houses, their land, and
> family members to the advance.
> They agreed to show me their vanishing island. We clambered into a tuc-tuc –
> a motorbike with a carriage on the back – and set off across the island,
> riding along narrow ridges between cordoned-off areas of sand and salt. The
> men explained that this is salt-farming: the salt left behind by the tide is
> gathered and sold. "It is one of the last forms of farming that we can still
> do here," Rezaul said. As we passed through the forest, he told me to be
> careful: "Since we started to lose all our land, gangs are fighting for the
> territory that is left. They are very violent. A woman was shot in the
> crossfire yesterday. They will not like an outsider appearing from nowhere."
> We pulled up outside a vast concrete structure on stilts. This, the men
> explained, is the cyclone shelter built by the Japanese years ago. We
> climbed to the top, and looked out towards the ocean. "Do you see the top of
> a tree, sticking out there?" Rezaul said, pointing into the far distance. I
> couldn't see anything, but then, eventually, I spotted a tiny jutting
> brown-green tip. "That is where my house was." When did you leave it? "In
> 2002. The ocean is coming very fast now. We think all this" – he waved his
> hand back over the island – "will be gone in 15 years."
> Outside the rusty house next door, an ancient-looking man with a long grey
> beard was sitting cross-legged. I approached him, and he rose slowly. His
> name was Abdul Zabar; he didn't know his age, but guessed he is 80. "I was
> born here," he said. "There" – and he points out to the sea. "The island
> began to be swallowed in the 1960s, and it started going really quickly in
> 1991. I have lost my land, so I can't grow anything... I only live because
> one of my sons got a job in Saudi Arabia and sends money back to us. I am
> very frightened, but what can I do? I can only trust in God." The sea stops
> just in front of his home. What will you do, I asked, if it comes closer?
> "We will have nowhere to go to."
> I was taken to the island's dam. It is a long stretch of hardened clay and
> concrete and mud. "This used to be enough," a man called Abul Kashin said,
> "but then the sea got so high that it came over the dam." They have tried to
> pile lumps of concrete on top, but they are simply washed away. "My family
> have left the island," he continued, "They were so sad to go. This is my
> homeland. If we had to leave here to go to some other place, it would be the
> worst day of my life."
> Twenty years ago, there were 30,000 people on this island. There are 18,000
> now – and most think they will be the last inhabitants.
> On the beach, there were large wooden fishing boats lying unused. Abu
> Bashir, a lined, thin 28-year-old, pointed to his boat and said, "Fishing is
> almost impossible now. The waves are much bigger than they used to be. It
> used to be fine to go out in a normal [hand-rowed] boat. That is how my
> father and my grandfather and my ancestors lived.
> "Now that is impossible. You need a [motor-driven] boat, and even that is
> thrown about by the waves so much. It's like the bay is angry."
> The other fishermen burst in. "When there is a cyclone warning, we cannot go
> out fishing for 10 days. That is a lot of business lost. There used to be
> two or three warnings a year. Last year, there were 12. The sea is so
> violent. We are going hungry."
> Yet the islanders insisted on offering me a feast of rice and fish and eggs.
> I was ushered into the council leader's house – a rusty shack near the sea –
> and the men sat around, urging me to tell the world what is happening. "If
> people know what is happening to us, they will help," they said. The women
> remained in the back room; when I glimpsed them and tried to thank them for
> the food, they giggled and vanished. I asked if the men had heard of global
> warming, and they looked puzzled. "No," they said. We stared out at the
> ocean and ate, as the sun slowly set on the island.
>
>
>
>
> AP
> Nasa's James Hansen thinks there may be a 25-metre sea-level rise. This
> would drown Bangladesh entirely
>
>
> 3. No hiding place
> Through the morning mist, I peered out of the car window at the cratered
> landscape. Trees jutted out at surreal angles from the ground. One lay
> upside down with its roots sticking upwards towards the sky, looking like a
> sketch for a Dali painting. Shambrat had spat out his pan and was driving
> slowly now. "There are holes in the ground," he said, squinting with
> concentration. "From the cyclone. You fall in..." He made a splattering
> sound.
> It was here, in the south of Bangladesh, that on 15 November last year,
> Cyclone Sidr arrived. It formed in the warmed Bay of Bengal and ripped
> across the land, taking more than 3,000 people with it. Like Americans
> talking about 9/11, everybody in Bangladesh knows where they were when Sidr
> struck. For miles, the upturned and smashed-out houses are intermixed with
> tents made from blue plastic sheeting. These stretches of plastic were
> handed out by the charities in the weeks after Sidr, and many families are
> still living in them now.
> There have always been cyclones in Bangladesh, and there always will be –
> but global warming is making them much more violent. Back in Dhaka, the
> climatologist Ahsan Uddin Ahmed explained that cyclones use heat as a fuel:
> "The sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have been rising steadily
> for the past 40 years – and so, exactly as you would expect, the intensity
> of cyclones has risen too. They're up by 39 per cent on average." Again I
> circled a cyclone-struck island at random and headed for the dot.
> The hour-long journey on a wooden rowing boat from the mainland to
> Charkashem Island passed in a dense mist that made it feel like crossing the
> River Styx. The spectral outline of other boats could sometimes be glimpsed,
> before they disappeared suddenly. One moment an old woman and a goat
> appeared and stared at me, then they were gone.
> The island was a tiny dot of mud and lush, upturned greenery. It had no
> pier, so when the rowing boat bumped up against the sand I had to wade
> through the water.
> I looked out over the silent island, and saw some familiar blue sheeting in
> the distance. As I trudged towards it, I saw some gaunt teenagers
> half-heartedly kicking a deflated football. From the sheeting, a man and
> woman stared, astonished.
> "I was in my fields over there," Hanif Mridha said. "I saw the wind start,
> it was about eight at night, and I saw everything being blown around. I went
> and hid under an iron sheet, but that was blown away by the wind. The water
> came swelling up all of a sudden and was crashing all around me. I grabbed
> one of my children and ran to the forest" – he pointed to the cluster of
> trees at the heart of the island – "and climbed the tallest one I could
> reach. I went as high as I could but still the water kept rising and I
> thought – this is it, I'm going to drown. I'm dying, my children are dying,
> my wife is dying. I could see everything was under water and people were
> screaming everywhere. I held there for four hours with my son."
> When the water washed away and he came down, everything was gone: his house,
> his crops, his animals, his possessions. A few days later, an aid agency
> arrived with some rice and some plastic sheeting to sleep under. Nobody has
> come since.
> His wife, Begum Mridha, took over the story. Their children are terrified of
> the sea now, and have nightmares every night. They eat once a day, if
> they're lucky. "We are so hungry," she said. The new home they have built is
> made from twigs and the plastic sheet. Underneath it, they sleep with their
> eight children and Begum Mridha's mother. The children lay lethargically
> there, staring blankly into space over their distended bellies.
> Begum Mridha cooks on a lantern. They eat once a day – if that. "It's so
> cold at night we can't sleep," she said. "The children all have diarrhoea
> and they are losing weight. It will take us more than two years to save up
> and get back what we had."
> If cyclones hit this area more often, what would happen to you? Hanif looked
> down. He opened his mouth, but no words came.
>
>
>
>
> AFP/Getty Images
> Life on the edge: a woman and child in their riverside hut in Dhaka as the
> country braced for floods last September
>
>
> 4. Bangladesh's Noah
> In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down
> Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of
> a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook.
> "The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the
> IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated. " Until a few years
> ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people – "but I
> thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings
> that will be under water soon anyway?"
> He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but
> then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But
> then I thought of boats!"
> He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on
> to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity – Shidhulai
> Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance – that is building the only
> schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float.
> We clambered on to his first school-boat, which is moored in Singra. In this
> area there is no electricity, no sewage system, and no state. The residents
> live the short lives of pre-modern people. But now, suddenly, they have a
> fleet of these boats, stocked with medicines and lined with books on
> everything from Shakespeare to accountancy to climatology. Nestling between
> them, there are six internet terminals with broadband access.
> The boat began to float down the Curnai River, gathering scores of beaming
> kids as it went. Fatima Jahan, an unveiled 18-year-old girl dressed in
> bright red, arrived to go online. She was desperate to know the cricket
> scores. At every muddy village-stop, the boat inhaled more children, and I
> talked to the mothers who were beating their washing dry by the river. "I
> never went to school, and I never saw a doctor in my life. Now my children
> can do both!" a thin woman with a shimmering heart-shaped nose stud called
> Nurjahan Rupbhan told me. But when I asked about the changes in the climate,
> her forehead crumpled into long frown-lines.
> I thought back to what the scientists told me in Dhaka. Bangladesh is a
> country with 230 rivers running through it like veins. They irrigate the
> land and give it its incredible fertility – but now the rivers are becoming
> supercharged. More water is coming down from the melting Himalayan glaciers,
> and more salt water is pushing up from the rising oceans. These two forces
> meet here in the heart of Bangladesh and make the rivers churn up – eroding
> the river banks with amazing speed. The water is getting wider, leaving the
> people to survive on ever-more narrow strips of land.
> Nurjahan took me up to a crumbling river edge, where tree roots jutted out
> naked. "My house was here," she said. "It fell into the water. So now my
> house is here –" she motioned to a small clay hut behind us – "but now we
> realise this is going to fall in too. The river gets wider day by day."
> But even this, Nurjahan said, is not the worst problem. The annual floods
> have become far more extreme, too. "Until about 10 years ago, the floods
> came every year and the water would stay for 15 days, and it helped to wet
> the land. Now the water stays for four months. Four months! It is too long.
> That doesn't wet the fields, it destroys them. We cannot plan for anything."
> When the floods came last year, Nurjahan had no choice but to stay here. She
> lived with her children waist-deep in the cold brown water – for four
> months. "It was really hard to cook, or go to the toilet. We all got
> dysentery. It was miserable." Then she seemed to chastise herself. "But we
> survived! We are tough, don't you think?"
> We sat by the river-bank, our feet dangling down towards the river. I asked
> if she agrees with Rezwan that her only option soon will be to move on to a
> boat. He is launching the first models this summer: floating homes with
> trays of earth where families can grow food. "Yes," she said, "We will be
> boat-people. "
> I clambered back on to one of the 42 school-boats in this area. Young
> children were in the front chanting the alphabet, and teenagers at the back
> were browsing through the books. I asked a 16-year-old boy called Mohammed
> Palosh Ali what he was reading about, and he said, "Global warming." I felt
> a small jolt. He was the first person to spontaneously raise global warming
> with me. Can you tell me what that is? "The climate is being changed by
> carbon dioxide," he said. "This is a gas that traps heat. So if there is
> more of it, then the ice in the north of the world melts and our seas rise
> here."
> I asked if he had seen this warming in his own life. "Of course! The floods
> in 1998 and 2002 were worse than anything in my grandfather' s life. We
> couldn't get any drinking water, so the dirty water I drank made me very
> sick. The shit from the toilet pits had risen up and was floating in the
> water, but we still had to drink it. We put tablets in it but it was still
> disgusting. What else could we do?"
> Mohammed, do you know who is responsible for this global warming? He shakes
> his head. That answer lies a few pages further into the book. Soon he, and
> everybody else on this boat, will know it is me – and you.
>
>
>
>
> Getty Images
> Locals work a new pump in Sirajganj, installed after flooding hit water
> supplies
>
>
>
>
> 5. The warming jihad
> What happens to a country's mind as it drowns? Professor Philip Jenkins of
> Pennsylvania State University believes he can glimpse the answer: "The
> connection between climate change and religious violence is not tenuous," he
> says. "In fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold: the
> Little Ice Age."
> Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the northern hemisphere went through a
> natural phase of global warming. The harvests lasted longer – so there were
> more crops, and more leisure. Universities and the arts began to flower. But
> then in the late 13th century, the Little Ice Age struck. Crop production
> fell, and pack ice formed in the oceans, wrecking trade routes. People began
> to starve.
> "In this climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even
> before the Black Death struck," he says. Tolerance withered with the climate
> shocks: the Church declared witchcraft a heresy; the Jews began to be
> expelled from Britain. There was, he says, "a very close correlation between
> the cooling and a region-wide heightening of violent intolerance. "
> This time, there will be no need for imaginary scapegoats. The people
> responsible are on every TV screen, revving up their engines. Will jihadism
> swell with the rising seas? Bangladesh's religion seems to be low-key and
> local. In the countryside, Muslims – who make up 95 per cent of the nation –
> still worship Hindu saints and mix in a few Buddhist ideas, too. In the Arab
> world, people bring up God in almost every sentence. In Bangladesh, nobody
> does.
> But then, as we returned to Dhaka, I was having a casual conversation with
> Shambrat. He had been driving all night – at his insistence – and by this
> point he was wired after chewing fistfuls of pan, and singing along at the
> top of his voice to the Eighties power ballads. I mentioned Osama bin Laden
> in passing, and he said, "Bin Laden – great man! He fight for Islam!" Then,
> without looking at me, he went back to singing: "It must have been love, but
> it's over now...."
> I wondered how many Bangladeshis felt this way. The Chandni Chowk Bazaar –
> one of the city's main markets – was overcast the afternoon I decided to
> canvass opinions on Bin Laden. I approached a 24-year-old flower-seller
> called Mohammed Ashid, and as I inhaled the rich sweet scent of roses, he
> said: "I like him because he is a Muslim and I am a Muslim." Would you like
> Bin Laden to be in charge of Bangladesh? "Yes, of course," he said. And what
> would President Bin Laden do? "I have no idea," he shrugged. What would you
> want him to do? He furrowed his brow. "If Osama came to power he would make
> women cover up. Women are too free here." But what if women don't want to
> cover up? "They are Muslims. It's not up to them."
> A very smartly dressed man called Shadul Ahmed was strolling down the street
> to his office, where he is in charge of advertising. "I like him," he said.
> "Bin Laden works for the Muslims." He conceded 9/11 "was bad because many
> innocents died," but added: "Osama didn't do it. The Americans did it. They
> are guilty."
> As dozens of people paused from their shopping to talk, a pattern emerged:
> the men tend to like him, and the women don't. "I hate Bin Laden," one
> smartly dressed woman said, declining to give her name. "He is a fanatic.
> Bangladeshis do not like this." As the praise for Bin Laden was offered, I
> saw a boy go past on a rickshaw, stroking a girl's uncovered hair gently,
> sensuously. This is not the Arab world.
> The only unpleasant moment came when I approached three women selling
> cigarettes by the side of the road. They were in their early thirties,
> wearing white hijabs and puffing away. Akli Mouna said, "I like him. He is a
> faithful Muslim." She said "it would be very nice" if he was president of
> Bangladesh. Really? Would you be happy if you were forced to wear a burqa,
> and only rarely allowed out of your house? She jabbed a finger at my chest.
> "Yes! It would be fine if Osama was president and told us to wear the
> burqa." But Akli – you aren't wearing a burqa now. "It's good to wear the
> burqa!" she yelled. Her teeth, I saw, were brown and rotting. "We are only
> here because we are poor! We should be kept in the house!"
> I wanted to track down some Bangladeshi jihadis for myself, so I called the
> journalist Abu Sufian. He is a news reporter for BanglaVision, one of the
> main news channels, who made his name penetrating the thickets of the
> Islamist underground. He told me to meet him at the top of the BanglaVision
> skyscraper. As the city shrieked below us, he explained: "In the late 1980s,
> a group of mujahideen [holy warriors] who had been fighting the Soviets in
> Afghanistan came back to launch an Islamic revolution here in Bangladesh.
> They tried to mount an armed revolt in the north and kill the former Prime
> Minister. But it didn't come to much."
> Islamic fundamentalism is hobbled in Bangladesh, because it is still
> associated for most people with Paki-stan – the country Bangladesh fought a
> bloody war of independence to escape from.
> But Sufian says a new generation of Islamists is emerging with no memory of
> that war. "For example, I met a 21-year-old who had fought in Kashmir, whose
> father was a rickshaw driver. He said it was his holy duty to establish an
> Islamic state here through violence. Most were teenagers. All the jihadis I
> met hated democracy. They said it was the rule of man. According to them,
> only the rule of God is acceptable."
> He said it would be almost impossible to track them down – they are in
> prison or hiding – but my best bet was to head for the Al-Amin Jami mosque
> in the north-west of Dhaka. "They are fundamentalist Wahhabis, and very
> dangerous," he said. Yet when I arrived, just before 6pm prayers, it was a
> bright building in one of the nicer parts of town. Men in white caps and
> white robes were streaming in. An ice-cream stall sat outside. I approached
> a fiftysomething man in flowing robes and designer shoes. He glared at me. I
> explained I was a journalist, and ask if it would it be possible to look
> inside the mosque? "No. Under no circumstances. At all."
> OK. I asked a few polite questions about Islam, and then asked what he
> thought of Osama bin Laden. "Osama bin Laden?" he said. Yes. He scowled. "I
> have never heard of him." Never? "Never." I turned to the man standing,
> expectantly, next to him. "He has not heard of Osama bin Laden, either," he
> said. What about September 11 – you know, when the towers in New York fell?
> "I have never heard of this event, either." Some teenage boys were about to
> go in, so I approached them. Behind my back, I can sense the Gucci-man
> making gestures. "Uh... sorry... I don't think anything about Bin Laden,"
> one of them said, awkwardly.
> I lingered as prayers took place inside, until a flow of men poured out so
> thick and fast that they couldn't be instructed not to speak. "Yes, we would
> like Osama to run Bangladesh, he is a good man," the first person told me.
> There were nods. "He fights for Islam!" shouted another.
> The crowd says this mosque – like most fundamentalist mosques on earth – is
> funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As
> I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that
> our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the
> victims to be fundamentalised.
> After half-an-hour of watching this conversation and fuming, the initially
> recalcitrant man strode forward. "Why do you want to know about Bin Laden?
> We are Muslims. You are Christian. We all believe in the same God!" he
> announced.
> Actually, I said, I am not a Christian. There was a hushed pause. "You
> are... a Jew?" he said. The crowd looked horrified; but then the man forced
> a rictus smile and announced: "We all believe in one God! We are all
> children of Abraham! We are cousins!" No, I said. I am an atheist. Everyone
> looked genuinely puzzled; they do not have a bromide for this occasion.
> "Well... then..." he paused, scrambling for a statement... "You must convert
> to Islam! Read the Koran! It is beautiful!" Ah – so can I come into the
> mosque after all? "No. Never."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> AFP/Getty Images
> Children step on board a school boat run by the Bangladeshi charity
> Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha
>
>
> 6. The obituarist?
> In a small café in Dhaka, a cool breeze was blowing in through the window
> along with the endless traffic-screams. The 32-year-old novelist Tahmima
> Anam was inhaling the aroma of coffee and close to despair.
> She made her name by writing a tender novel – A Golden Age – about the birth
> of her country, Bangladesh. When the British finally withdrew from this
> subcontinent in 1948, the land they left behind was partitioned. Two chunks
> were carved out of India and declared to be a Muslim republic – East
> Pakistan and West Pakistan. But apart from their religion, they had very
> little in common. The gentle people of East Pakistan chafed under the
> dictatorial fundamentalism imposed from distant Islamabad. When they were
> ordered to start speaking Urdu, it was enough. Her novel tells how in 1971,
> they decided to declare independence and become Bangladesh. The Pakistanis
> fought back with staggering violence, but in the end Bangladesh was freed.
> Now Anam is realising that unless we change, fast, this fight will have been
> for the freedom of a drowning land – and her next novel may have to be its
> obituary.
> Anam came to Bangladesh late. Her Dhaka-born parents travelled the world, so
> she grew up in a slew of international schools, but she always dreamed of
> coming home. Her passion for this land, this place, this delta, aches
> through her work. About one of her characters, she wrote: "He had a love for
> all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony
> river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching
> blue of the sky over flat land."
> "You can see what has started to happen," she says. The vision of the
> country drowning is becoming more real every day. Where could all these 150
> million people go? India is already building a border fence to keep them
> out; I can't imagine the country's other neighbour – Burma – will offer much
> refuge. "We are the first to be affected, not the last," Anam says.
> "Everyone should take a good look at Bangladesh. This story will become your
> story. We are your future."
> It is, she says, our responsibility to stop this slow-mo drowning – and
> there is still time to save most of the country. "What could any Bangladeshi
> government do? We have virtually no carbon emissions to cut." They currently
> stand at 0.3 per cent of the world's – less than the island of Manhattan.
> "It's up to you."
> Anam is defiantly optimistic that this change can happen if enough of us
> work for it – but, like every scientist I spoke to, she knows that dealing
> with it simply by adaptation by Bangladeshis is impossible. The country has
> a military-approved dictatorship incapable of taking long-term decisions,
> and Dutch-style dams won't work anyway. "Any large-scale construction is
> very hard in this country, because it's all made of shifting silt. There's
> nothing to build on."
> So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the
> people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says,
> "or be blown away to distant shores – casualties and refugees by the
> millions." The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood,
> died in water.
>
>
>
>
> Getty Images
> Hell on wheels: Dhaka in flood last summer
>
>
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