This has been a year of misfortune for Bangladesh. Vast tracts of the country have twice disappeared under water as a result of heavy monsoons, with a loss of crops and rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs. The cyclone Sidr, which has killed several thousand people and left millions homeless, is one of the worst recorded — carrying off shelters, turning sheets of corrugated tin into lethal weapons while chetai walls are shredded like paper and the mangroves are reduced to driftwood.

This mutable coastline creates a landscape where people live as though in some perpetual primal myth. The exposure of their poor habitations is inseparable from that other, avoidable, disaster of Bangladesh — a political catastrophe of three and a half decades of independence, which has brought more grief than gain to those clinging to the shores of the turbulent Bay of Bengal.

The rulers of Bangladesh have been so involved in struggles for supremacy, rivalries and antique disputes over the liberation war that they can scarcely attend to people — the patient, suppliant poor, who stare out at the world from TV screens and newspapers. “We have lost everything,” the translators recite; a statement that scarcely reveals how little they ever had.

This is ostensibly why, almost a year ago, the Bangladesh army declared a state of emergency and backed a neutral “caretaker” government, nominally headed by the banker Fakhruddin Ahmed. This followed violence at the end of the term in office of a coalition of the Bangladesh National party and the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. The opposition Awami League, secular leaning but no less opportunist, saw the interim administration as favouring the outgoing regime, and did its best to make the country ungovernable. The purpose of the provisional administration is to oversee elections and attack corruption, which for many years placed Bangladesh as the most corrupt country in the world.

The army is in an awkward position. Its head, General Moeen U Ahmed, recently repudiated any suggestion that the Bangladesh military was mimicking Pakistan. Musharraf decapitated the two main political parties when he seized power and sent their leaders into exile. The Bangladesh government also wanted to send the political leaders abroad; only later it decided to imprison them. Musharraf sought to bring together the two main conservative elements in the country — the religious and the military. Bangladesh seemingly follows the same path.

As a result of global warming, Bangladesh — the size of England with more than twice as many people — is threatened with submergence. The thin bodies in makeshift shrouds in Bagherat and Barguna, or washed up in the turbid waters, are only a foretaste of things to come if the unnatural disasters of Bangladesh — mismanagement, corruption and social injustice — are not addressed at the same time as the consequences of omnivorous waves and savage storms. — The Guardian