Myanmar and Bangladesh: Cyclone Mocha does what all cyclones do: they destroy everything and attack the poorest and refugees

ROME – There are already a million, and perhaps more, people reduced from one moment to the next to the status of refugees, following the cyclone Mocha which affected an area between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Myanmar. Yet another extreme event linked to increasingly frequent examples of climate change. The affected areas – of which, moreover, Solidarity world speaks often – they are particularly vulnerable, not only in terms of infrastructure, but also due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya ethnic Muslim refugees have been gathering in the area for years, brutally persecuted by the coup regime of Myanmar. The furious winds, the violent rains of the cyclone destroyed hundreds and hundreds of already precarious homes, which were literally swept away by the passage of this latest extreme weather event.

Mass evacuations, entire areas cordoned off. According to one of Bangladesh’s relief officials, the evacuation of 750,000 people in the Asian nation made it possible to avoid the worst. Despite this, many localities are isolated and many road links are currently impassable. In Sittwe, a coastal city in Myanmar (formerly Burma) where 150,000 people live, communications have been cut off and numerous streets have turned into flooded rivers. In various areas there are also reports of houses being unroofed by the violence of the wind and power lines torn down. In a refugee camp in Kyaukphyu, in the Burmese state of Rakhine, in particular, the shells have knocked down numerous rudimentary wooden huts.

The memory of the 2008 typhoon Nargis. For the moment, the death toll is necessarily provisional: three dead people have been confirmed so far, but there is a well-founded suspicion that the death toll could end up being much more serious. In the current state of things, nothing comparable to what happened with the passage of typhoon Nargis in the same area in May 2008: at the time the dead were more than 138 thousand and the damage calculated at 12.9 billion dollars.

Some of the worst hurricanes in history. In reiterating that in the face of such devastating events, the poorest and most marginalized populations pay the highest cost, from the point of view of the number of victims and the extent of the destruction, it is worth recalling the events that over time have made more scared and brought deaths and devastation: from Katrina And Sandy to bhola And Nargis. Even if the Cape Verdean-type hurricane, Irma, born in the Atlantic, considered the most intense observed in that ocean when on August 30, 2007 it reached category 5, with winds at 280 km/h, with gusts up to 360 km/h. in short, it was one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded on Earth in recent decades. To overcome its violence, according to meteorologists, was the cyclone Haiyanwhich devastated the Philippines in 2013.

THE