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Sent: Friday, July 4, 2008 10:33:01 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Save Bangladesh
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century -
A special report by Johann Hari
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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