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50 years ago today was the Bhola cyclone, one of the deadliest tropical storms in world history. It killed up to half a million people in what was then East #Pakistan, and triggered the #Bangladesh liberation war
The Pakistani authorities were negligent & frankly unconcerned about the devastation in their eastern wing. (A bit like President Trump's response to #hurricane Maria in #PuertoRico). Weeks later they held the first democratic election in #Pakistan's history
East Bengali nationalists Awami League @albd1971 campaigned against the failures of the Pakistani state & won one of the most stunning democratic victories ever.
Pakistani military & political leaders refused to accept the election results & sent in the army to massacre Bengali nationalists. The war of liberation went on for 9 bloody months, with powerful governments like the US backing the genocidal Pak attack
But Bangladesh eventually won its freedom, a year after the cyclone, in December 1971. #Bhola is one reason Bangladesh takes natural disasters so seriously, and has built state capacity to tackle such horrors
The #Bhola #cyclone has plenty of lessons about the relationship between disasters & political legitimacy that would help us think through & adapt to the political challenges of #climatechange
Scholars like Nabil Ahmed https://forensic-architecture.org/about/team/member/nabil-ahmed and Mark Pelling https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mark-pellinghttps://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mark-pelling have written about #Bhola
But it was such a seminal event that it deserves to be remembered and more widely. Sharing some of my writing on the tragedy and political effects of the #Bhola #cyclone here @HistoryWO https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/democracy-and-disaster-pakistan-in-bangladesh-1970-and-trump-in-puerto-rico-2017/
This in Himal Southasia @Himalistan https://www.himalmag.com/the-perfect-storm-and-the-final-famine/
Many thanks to @WileyGeography for making this article from #Disasters open access for this week https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/disa.12235
