THIS week the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation flagged a finding that policymakers in Bangladesh should heed. The FAO has pointed out that the rapid degradation of coastal mangroves in Myanmar over the past decades may be largely to blame for the destructive potential of cyclone Nargis, which made landfall in Myanmar three weeks ago, killing over 130,000 people and destroying over 1.5 million homes.
   In 1975 the size of Myanmar’s coastal mangroves in the cyclone affected Ayeyarwady Delta was about 20,000 hectares. Today, the total mangrove cover stands at half of that, that too in a highly degraded state. The FAO has drawn on a growing body of evidence to suggest that the mangroves could have had a tremendous capacity to act as a buffer zone between coastal communities on the delta and the storm surge whipped up by tropical cyclone Nargis on May 2.
   While mangroves, or for that matter any other vegetation, do not prevent inundation during cyclones, dense vegetation could have borne the brunt of the waves of up to 3.5 metres in height, and winds of over 165km/hour that accompanied cyclone Nargis, the FAO has said. The handout also refers to the role that Sundarban played in containing the destructive potential of cyclone Sidr in November last year, which was a Category 4 storm – in the same league as Nargis, but claimed only 4,000 lives.
   ‘Mangroves have been converted to agricultural land and fish ponds. Settlements have been established closer to the sea and the combination of proximity to coastal hazards and lack of a protective forest buffer has increased the risks to human populations in many countries,’ said Jan Heino, the assistant director general of the FAO forestry department.
   As a solution, the FAO advocates policies that are sensitive to maintaining the integrity of mangrove ecosystems across the coast and suggests that development and economic use of coastal land need not be mutually exclusive with the survival of the mangrove eco-systems.
   On the six-month anniversary of cyclone Sidr, the weight of these findings are attaining an increased resonance as the effects of global warming and human induced climate change begin to unravel in the form of rising intensities and frequencies of tropical cyclones. According to the 4th and concluding synthesis report published last year by the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is ‘likely’ that high sea surface temperatures as a result of global warming will lead to increased tropical cyclone activity in the coming decades – a threat that Bangladesh must account for in its climate change adaptations strategies.
   Unfortunately, there is little or no planning on the part of the government that is taking a holistic approach to conservation of coastal mangroves, especially Sundarban. Along the western coastline which is densely populated in pockets, mangroves are being systematically destroyed to make way for shrimp farms for the export-oriented shrimp industry. These shrimp farms are not only resulting in the destruction of mangroves, they are also pushing marginal farmers, who are losing land or employment to rising numbers of shrimp ghers, to rely on other sources of livelihood such as teak extraction. One of the greatest visible testimonies to the destructive power of these shrimp farms is the Chakaria Sundarban in Cox’s Bazar – a 21,000-acre coastal mangrove forest that has been entirely destroyed as a result of donor funded government-policies since the 1980s. While the earliest settlers in Chakaria – a rich mangrove ecosystem – had relied on salt-extraction from seawater to make a living, according to environmentalist Philip Gain in his Last Forests of Bangladesh, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank launched a massive financing campaign for shrimp culture projects in this area in the 1980s. The ADB helped set up over 100 shrimp farms (each eleven acres in size) and financed a 16km embankment to aid the farms, and hot on its heels came a $26.5 million World Bank loan for a shrimp culture infrastructure project. Two decades later there is no mangrove ecosystem to speak of left in Chakaria Sundarban – just a scattering of trees and an exposed coastline.
   These are exactly the fears that are slowly emerging for the much larger but increasingly under pressure Sundarban mangroves. Not only does Sundarban account for a lion’s share of the country’s timber produce, the government’s forest policy focuses exclusively on Sundarban as a resource for revenue and timber, ignoring the role its eco-system can play in sustainable livelihoods for coastal communities not to mention disaster prevention.
   What’s worse, shrimp farms in coastal areas which are already seeing declining land fertility as a result of rising sea levels can also trigger a chain reaction which further pauperises local communities. Shrimp ghers are typically not owned by the small farmers whose land they are built on. Instead the farmer is paid a rent and the shrimp are sold on to merchants who eventually sell to companies that process them before export. So, while the export trade in shrimps is quite profitable, the farmers whose land the gher occupies does not see even a fraction of the money that is earned. Even so, shrimp ghers are multiplying rapidly along the coast. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the farms’ use of saline water to rear shrimp fry causing agricultural land in the adjacent areas to gradually lose their productivity and farmers buckle under the omnipresent pressure to convert their land into a gher.
   According to an ESCAP survey between 500,000-600,000 people living in the coastal areas of Bangladesh depend directly on Sundarban for their livelihood. ‘Many species of commercially important fish breed among the mangrove trees’ submerged roots and the forests help to remove toxins from rivers before they enter the sea.’ A report published by the FAO in 2007 also reveals that ‘research has shown that the economic value of the natural goods and services mangroves provide is many times greater than what their conversion to agriculture or shrimp farming would bring’.
   One of the biggest lessons of the Asian tsunami of 2004, that ranked among the worst natural disasters in recorded history and killed over 250,000 people, was the importance of coastal forestry in curbing the destructive potential of tropical cyclones and tidal surges. According to another FAO report from last year, ‘There is considerable evidence that coastal forests can reduce the force, depth and velocity of a tsunami, lessening damage to property and reducing loss of life. Numerous anecdotes, field surveys and scientific studies in India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand of the 2004 tsunami and other tsunamis show a connection between areas with the highest levels of damage and the absence of coastal forests.’
   As the debate surrounding the conservation of coastal mangroves and the strategies that the government can pursue have been tabled since last November, the government’s knee-jerk reaction has been to first ban all commercial extraction of timber and other products in Sundarban, and then to examine ways in which a coastal afforestation project can be adopted to help the mangroves regenerate. While these are evidently dynamic moves, and there is little reason to doubt the intentions behind them, the reality is that the government has a consistent policy of adopting piecemeal measures for the conservation of Sundarban, much of which remains in the realm of the rhetorical. For one, banning commercial extraction of Sundarban can neither be an enforceable nor a realistic conservation measure, as corruption within the forest department under the Ministry of Environments and Forests, and the limitation they have in terms of manpower and resources, makes it a null decision. Where the government needs to step in is bringing the expansion of shrimp farms, the extraction of homestead timber, and community fishing within the ambit of permissible commercial uses of Sundarban. What they would need to ensure is that large-scale commercial extractions in each of these industries would be heavily curtailed or stopped. The socioeconomic realities of the coastal communities do not allow a fencing-off conservation strategy of Sundarban to be a viable one, especially since it will continue under cover of darkness with the communities paying higher amounts in bribes.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

SIX decades have passed and the painful memory of the great historic transformational event, termed ‘the Nakba’, recurs anew.
   We recall now, with deep sadness and agony, the sad memory of that major catastrophe, which befell the Palestinian people in 1948, committed by a premeditated Zionist scheme, with unlimited support and flagrant collusion by the colonialist powers which were in hegemony over the world at the time.
   Despite the passing of time, oblivion remains unable to accumulate over the grave historic event and incapable to dump that tragedy, the trails and repercussions of which are still haunting the Palestinian people to this very moment, without history stopping for a while to renew the bleeding wound in the body of this question, since then until now.
   Less than two decades later, what remained of Palestine fell in a blitz war that erupted in June 1967; what remained of the land, in addition to what was seized in 1948, was subjected to an oppressive long-term occupation, which is still leaning heavily on every particle thereof after four decades or more, practising all the measures that violate international law and legitimacy, which the occupation insists on trivially ignoring, to arrogantly continue its aggressive measures, including annexation and usurpation of land, annexation, confiscation and Judaisation of the Holy City, a horrible cancer-like settlement, while persisting on the unjust siege it imposes on Palestinian cities and villages, and constructing the Apartheid wall, with what catastrophes it entailed on the Palestinian ground, citizens, economy, unity of society, the educational process, and other details of the various dimensions of human life, let alone other oppressive practices that touch on the daily life of the Palestinian people under occupation at the roadblocks and crossings as well as inside the terrific Israeli jails and prisons.
   All of the forgoing is still persisting while the world and its major powers, who dominate global policy, are watching unmoved; what is worse is that those practices persist under the umbrella of the peace process, the principles of which were signed by both parties in 1993, and which we still pursuing to realise and reach the virtual and honest translation of the concept of comprehensive and just peace, which we hope and aspire it would materialise so tranquillity could be the rule in the land of peace.
   On May 15, 1948 Palestine was the victim of an existential dismemberment process almost totally; it disintegrated politically, socially, economically and demographically, its people displaced from their homeland and their unity shuttered between a minority who remained and a majority who were lost in near and remote exiles and dispersed in the Diaspora, creating the major problem of the refugees who were expelled from their homeland, which is one of the major problems witnessed in modern history that still makes the region prone to potential renewed wars and horrible bloody struggles.
   Vis-à-vis a problem of those dimensions and that degree of gravity, we had had to try the peace gamble; such an option dictates that the party who is armed to teeth has to be convinced that his arsenal will lead only to a larger catastrophe, and that to eradicate the trails of the tragedy of 1948, which led to the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland, requires finding a satisfactory solution for the refugee problem, a solution based on the principle of acknowledging the Right of Return, and compensation for the sufferings of the Palestinian people resulting from their expulsion from their homeland, displacement from their homes and properties inherited from their fathers and forefathers and from places that are instilled in their memory and dreams.
   Vis-à-vis the attempts for pushing the Palestine Question into oblivion, the Palestinian memory remains vigilant not to give in to the overwhelming force that endeavours to make it forget.
   Sixty years on since the Nakba, the various Palestinian generations of all ages are still holding on to their national culture and collective memory, strongly and stubbornly refusing all fictional alternatives for the homeland, and adhering to their legitimate rights to their homeland and land, and to the goals of return and recovery of all their usurped rights on the basis of the resolutions of international legitimacy, in the forefront of which are resolutions 242, 338, 181, 194, and others.
   The occupation of Palestine by the Zionist military force in 1948 was accompanied by a propaganda and ideological campaign, which immediately embarked on promoting a false narrative, to the effect that the Palestinians voluntarily left their land, out of their free will and without coercion, in response to the request of Arab parties whose armies took part in the 1948 war, so as to enable those armies to fight their battles away from the Arab population density lest they get harmed by the exchange of fire and the battles that could have erupted in the areas of population centres.
   However, this fragile and incredible narrative had in no time collapsed vis-à-vis the facts of history. The wider and most solid refute thereof came from Israeli neo-historians, distinguished by bravery and scientific and objective search for historical truth, and by a great moral commitment, which contributed to the collapse of the foundations of the Zionist narrative from within the Israeli society itself.
   Those neo-historians have largely drawn on the Israeli documents themselves, which are periodically released from time to time; these documents constitute the raw material to expose the ethnic cleansing plans against the Palestinians inside Palestine and the operations of genocide and arbitrary transfer that were the essence of the colonialist Zionist plan to take over Palestine, and implemented especially after the Partition Resolution passed by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 and continued incessantly during the first months of 1948 until the middle of that year.
   The foundation of the Zionist idea in its formulation and evolution was based on the confirmation that the realisation of the Zionist dream in creating a state for the Jews in Palestine will not be and will not have the chance to be realised on the ground without the Zionist movement first enforce its strategy that was based on uprooting the Palestinian people from their land by all means and methods, which are essentially based on violence and lack the minimum of humanitarian spirit, moral norms and purity of arms.
   Based on the fact that what happened in Palestine in 1948 was not a voluntary immigration or in response to an Arab request, but a matter that was proposed and planned by the symbols of the Zionist movement since the early thirties of the twentieth century or earlier and approved by the movement’s historical leadership and symbols at the time, who contributed to a specific and systematic plan that had developed over the years to end up with what is known as Plan ‘D’ (Tokhnit Dalet in Hebrew), according to which the Zionist gangs embarked on the massacre strategy and put it into effect in several Palestinian towns and villages.
   That plan was built on a wide data base and on a plenty of accumulated information on urban and countryside Palestinian communities, all their available potentials, including land, population, families, revolutionary activists, transportation roads, agricultural and animal wealth, and other bare and accurate information. The targets of the plan were built on a basic pillar, namely the practice of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Palestine, with killing as the first tool, as the Zionist leaders of the time raised the slogan, ‘kill every Arab you meet’, which evolved later into committing and recommitting massacres and genocide operations in the context of a strategic plan in several sporadic places in the cities and villages of Palestine, whose people, even the unarmed and women, children and elderly had not survived the killing or spared terrorisation and collective transfer practised against them, so the Palestinian land would be a monopoly for the Jews in order to establish their state thereon after the evacuation of the indigenous natives thereof.
   Based on that fact, after a profound reading of the Israeli documents from the Jewish National Fund and the various Jewish military organizations, in the forefront of which is the ‘Haganah’, their archives, papers and the memoirs of the symbols, political leaders and field commanders of the Zionist movement during the recent decades which preceded the horrible historic events of May 1948, including the killings, destruction, terrorisation, rape and mutilation of bodies, alongside a premeditated psychological and information war, the brave Israeli researcher and historian Ilan Pappé concluded the fact that ethnic cleansing was practised against the Palestinians, constituting a crime against humanity, which entails trial if international norms and standards are to apply thereto and which were applied thereafter in other parts of the world, specially during the last decade of the twentieth century.
   Consequently, Pappé ended up to absolutely refuse the concept and term of ‘the Nakba’ to describe what befell the Palestinian people in 1948. The Nakba is a fluid and unspecific term; it refers to the deed itself, which befell a people, rather than to the perpetrator, and fails to name and specify the perpetrator’s crime and thus acts to absolve from responsibility the side that committed the deed and bypasses the victims of the operations who fell as the result of this deed; i.e. the Nakba is a term that could apply to natural disasters and catastrophes like earthquakes and volcanoes, for which nobody is held responsible except the nature itself or even ultra-natural powers. Ethnic cleansing, however, is a concept that refers the responsibility for its perpetration to whoever is the decision-maker and those who practiced it premeditatedly in reality and in history.
   Hence, the concept of the Nakba was accepted by the Israeli official authorities because it implicitly absolves them from their historical responsibility for the military operations they carried out as well as for the massacre strategy they adopted and led to the arbitrary expulsion of Palestinians from their land by force and terrorism to wander aimlessly in the exiles in a tragic journey that is sustained by more wars launched by Israel, which deepened their suffering and contributed to making their problem intricate. The perpetrator in all cases is known and his responsibility for the series of catastrophes is identified and documented since 1948 to this day.
   We, from our position on this available part of historic Palestine, are embarked on several multi-faceted battles.
   While we work to reinforce the steadfastness of our people on their land, we strive with all our capabilities to consolidate our national achievement, i.e. the creation of the Palestinian National Authority on the land of Palestine, and struggle to push forward the project of transforming it into an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as the capital. At the same time, we will continue fighting our political battle in defence of our legitimate rights as represented in preserving the Arab character of Jerusalem, stopping the settlements and the Apartheid Wall, extracting the right of refugees to return to their homeland, and sweeping away the occupation from the land of Palestine.
   We persist now, energetically, on fighting a fierce battle of peace with the purpose of bypassing the Israeli spirit of violence and the force infatuated by its arms, a spirit of violence that is promoted by those who want to evade the prerequisites of peace.
   Peace could not hang on forever and it could not anymore accept the idea of the Israeli evasion and prevarication. There is no doubt that finishing off that spirit of violence cannot be done without adhering to peace itself as the principle and the acceptance by each side of the other. Similarly negotiations cannot go on forever vis-à-vis a dead end.
   The horrible alternative option could not but be the total collapse of the dreams of coexistence and the resumption of the bloody struggle, which kills both the human spirit as well as the spirit of civilization and brings back the ideology and practice of ethnic cleansing to be the eternal shame of its perpetrators at all times.
   Agreement on the historic narrative of what happened in 1948, the adoption of the culture of confession by those who committed the massacres, to apologise for what happened, and to uphold the responsibility for all that happened seems a necessary first step that would pave the way to achieve a just and lasting peace, which makes room for all on the land.
   The article was first published in Arabic by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, on May 15, 2008. Ahmad Qurei is the chief Palestinian negotiator, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and a member of the Central Committee of Fatah.