Word: pakistanis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...many of its people cruelly callous. Four days after the cyclone hit, East Pakistan's governor, Vice Admiral Syed Mohammad Ahsan, was still downplaying the catastrophe, saying that "only" 16,000 had been killed. Though people were still reported floating alive offshore three days after the cyclone, the Pakistani navy was never ordered to search for survivors. Some 500,000 tons of grain were stockpiled in East Pakistan warehouses, but the 40-odd Pakistani army helicopters that could have airlifted them to the delta sat on their pads in West Pakistan. India, the government explained-falsely-would not allow...
Sheik Mujibir Rahman, the political leader of East Pakistan, has accused the central Pakistani government of "criminal negligence" after the recent catastrophe, adding that "a massive rescue and relief operation, if launched within 20 hours of the disaster, could have saved thousands of lives...
Pray to Allah. There were suggestions that the relief operation was delayed by indifference to the fate of East Pakistanis among government officials in the capital, Islamabad, which is situated far away in the western part of the segmented nation. Bureaucratic truculence also helped. The government insisted for several days that helicopters offered by the U.S., Britain and other nations be flown by Pakistani pilots. West Germany's offer of a fully manned 150-bed field hospital simply went unanswered; the Pakistanis later explained lamely that they would have been unable to feed the German doctors and nurses. Ordinary...