Banglageddon /

The mutiny begins at 9 on Tuesday morning. It is cool by Dhaka standards, yet high above the waking city the pariah kites already circle in the gathering heat. The streets are filling up with ill-tempered traffic, and soon they will be gridlocked. But Seven Mosques Road is empty. This is because at its southern end lies the headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles, where rebel soldiers are butchering their commanding officers and spraying the surrounding streets with bullets.

I am in bed when the mutiny begins, and I wake to the sound of explosions and gunfire. The Bangladesh Rifles, or BDR, are the country’s border security force and their headquarters is a few minutes away by rickshaw. The main gate is swarming with rebels, who shout and brandish their rifles. Bullets ping off nearby buildings. The backstreets are packed with agitated young men, who edge out onto Seven Mosques Road to watch, then scatter when the shooting starts again. They are startled to see a foreign reporter; the world usually doesn’t pay much attention to events in Bangladesh. But then I’m not here for the mutiny.

I have come to report on Bangladesh’s extreme vulnerability to climate change, a looming catastrophe that threatens to make this volatile country more unstable still.

The scenarios are terrifying. A one-meter rise in sea levels could put nearly a fifth of this densely populated nation underwater by 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates. This could mean 30 million refugees. The cyclones that routinely ravage the coastline will grow more frequent and ferocious.
Rainfall patterns will cause more severe floods and droughts. Fed by retreating Himalayan glaciers, the great rivers will swell, unpredictably and destructively, then eventually run dry. Cholera and other diseases will flourish. Crops will die, and millions of people will go hungry.

These scenarios are apocalyptic scenarios, but I find most Bangladeshis too distracted by politics, violence, corruption, poverty, and disease to even begin addressing them.

Then the mutiny starts. I see blood on the street and a man with his head blown apart. I hear reports that the rebels are digging mass graves inside their heavily guarded compound. I watch government tanks roll down Seven Mosques Road. Before long, I am distracted too.

Endgame / Essays / Andrew Marshall