ON THE night of April 29, slipping inexorably into the 30th, 1991, I stood on the deck of the BNS Osman, a young officer clad in the ceremonial austerity of the Red Sea Rig. It was a moment of professional pride, for I had only recently earned my certificate of competency 鈥� a tangible symbol of merit in a tradition-bound service. I harboured quiet dreams of one day holding charges, of bearing responsibility in a manner passed down through naval lineages. Yet, as history often reminds us, ambition, when untempered by circumstance, is fragile.
The air that evening was thick 鈥� oppressive, not merely in meteorological terms, but in the ancient, foreboding way civilisations have long understood as omens. A warm southern breeze meandered through the coastal night, offering no comfort. Our ships, tied up uneasily at Chattogram鈥檚 naval berths, mirrored our national reality: vulnerable, under-resourced, and spatially constrained. The arrangement was symbolic of a maritime force straining under the weight of geopolitical neglect.
There had been warnings of a storm. The Navy responded not with panic but with discipline 鈥� a hallmark of institutional continuity. Ropes were tightened, lines checked, watches doubled. These were the rituals of a service trained to resist chaos, however futile such resistance might appear against a cyclone. Orders were clear. Men were recalled from shore, families were left behind, and personal safety was subordinated to duty. For those of us without family nearby, the loss seemed less acute 鈥� but that too was a kind of illusion. Loss in service is rarely personal; it is collective.
After the evening meal and routine rounds, the first true howls of the wind began 鈥� elemental, almost metaphysical in their fury. The sea, ever the arbiter of maritime destiny, turned into a violent adversary. 鈥淐lear lower decks鈥� was sounded, and we obeyed, transitioning to PT gear and donning life jackets, partially inflated as per training doctrine. My team moved systematically across the deck, checking and reinforcing berthing hawsers 鈥� lines now groaning under tension. We doubled them where we could. BNS Ali Haider, fumigated and uninhabitable, lay inboard. Her crew had taken refuge aboard our vessel but were ordered 鈥� by blunt command, not consensus 鈥� to return, despite the poisoned air. Institutional imperatives trumped comfort.
Then, in a moment that defied both logic and physics, a gust lifted me into the air and pinned me against the missile launchers. For seconds that felt infinite, I hung there, witnessing a vision no manual or tactical training could have prepared me for 鈥� tree canopies ablaze with static fire, the sky torn open, and nature asserting its supremacy in unambiguous terms.
The tidal surge arrived without ceremony, but with overwhelming authority. The sea rose not in inches, but in yards. Mooring lines began to part like overstressed sinews. And when I looked for land 鈥� land that should have been our constant 鈥� I saw none. Only water. Ships, small craft, and every floating symbol of national sovereignty were adrift, some abandoned to the whims of wind and wave. Still, we held on. Sailors and officers alike, bonded by duty rather than sentiment, fought to maintain order where none existed.
What followed was not merely disaster but disillusionment. The cyclone was natural, but the aftermath revealed the deeper cracks 鈥� bureaucratic inertia, strategic amnesia, and a profound lack of civil-military understanding. We filed reports. We submitted to commissions 鈥� naval, judicial, inter-service. None truly grasped what had occurred. They could not fathom how a tidal surge could dismantle both equipment and esprit de corps. Even our own colleagues, secure in other postings or on sanctioned leave, questioned our narratives.
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The storm that exposed the structure
WE ALL have stories. That night 鈥� April 29, 1991 鈥� we were there. We lived it. Each account, slightly different, shaped by proximity, pain and duty. But behind the variations lies a brutal uniformity: the cyclone wasn鈥檛 the only force we were fighting. And, in hindsight, it wasn鈥檛 even the most dangerous one.
Because the real threat 鈥� the one not etched on satellite maps but carved into policy 鈥� wasn鈥檛 the wind or water. It was the quiet violence of political expediency. While we battled waves, a different storm had already made landfall in Dhaka: one of betrayal, calculation and cold institutional mutilation.
The cyclone killed over 138,000 people. Entire coastal towns were swallowed. And yet, amid the ruins, the armed forces 鈥� under-equipped, overextended 鈥� rose to meet the call. From hauling bodies to air-dropping food, their effort was relentless. And still, barely had the floodwaters drained when Rear Admiral Amir Ahmed Mustafa and Air Vice Marshal Momtaz Uddin Ahmed were sent to premature retirement. Not with ceremony, but with silence. Just an edict 鈥� swift, surgical, and unmistakably political.
This wasn鈥檛 about accountability. The disaster merely provided a pretext. What occurred in the wake of the cyclone was not administrative reform but political deterrence 鈥� executed not to empower institutions but to humiliate them. In times of national trauma, states reveal their true face.
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Strategic neglect: currents beneath the deluge
In the gray aftermath of the cyclone of April 1991 鈥� a convulsion that blurred the boundary between land and sea, man and fate 鈥� the wreckage lay not only in broken villages, but in broken certainties. Beneath the debris, power, that patient trickster, stirred once more, shaping itself in the guise of necessity.
The storm did not alter destiny; men did. In a land where governance wears the tattered cloak of tradition stitched haphazardly with ambition, survival was once more mistaken for strategy. The civilian custodians of authority, brittle yet cunning, did not mourn the devastation. They understood it for what it was: an opening.
The excisions were swift, pitiless. Rear Admiral Amir Ahmed Mustafa, Air Vice Marshal Momtaz Uddin Ahmed 鈥� men bound by service, not scheming 鈥� disappeared like ships swallowed by mist. No court, no cause, no clamour. Only the mute clarity of power, consolidating itself under the pretence of stewardship.
The army was left intact, not from affection, but calculation. A force too dangerous to dismantle, too useful to discard. It was shelved, preserved, as one stores a rifle in the dark, loaded yet hidden. The navy and air force, lesser instruments, were quietly gutted, their vigour suffocated beneath layers of ceremonial respect and purposeful neglect.
And so decay set in 鈥� not as a failure, but as a triumph of another kind. Plans withered unseen; radars remained dreams; ships sailed only in the imagination of forgotten men. Innovation curled inward and died, starved of breath by a leadership that preferred shadows to structure, silence to strength.
This was no accident. The true hand of ambition lies not in what it builds, but in what it allows to rot. There, in the cracks, the truth endures: that fear, not vision, commanded the day.
In Bangladesh, as everywhere that history hurries past in the form of disaster, it is not the surviving monuments that tell the tale, but the absences 鈥� the empty harbours, the abandoned fields, the words left unsaid.
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The night the waters rose
THERE are nights that do not end; they simply withdraw into the corridors of memory, heavy and unspent. The cyclone of 1991 was such a night. But it was not the storm that carved the deepest scars 鈥� it was what emerged in the quiet afterward.
The sea struck without malice; the state, however, moved with method. As the dead floated on the rising waters and the living clutched splintered hope, the real tide came ashore: slow, deliberate, unseen.
On the BNS Osman, young officers stood silent watches, unaware that their futures had already been dismantled 鈥� not by the fury of nature, but by colder, human hands. Their leaders fell without a sound. No inquiry, no reckoning 鈥� only silence, as thick and heavy as the humid air after the deluge. And in that silence, corrosion began.
The army remained untouched鈥攏ot honoured, but reserved, a relic placed high upon a shelf for future use, its potency intact, its purpose deferred.
Thus, the waters claimed more than land, more than life. They swept away ambition itself, eroded the fragile dream that the state might one day outgrow its ancient fears. No storm, however merciless, could have engineered the betrayal that followed.
The disaster was paraded as a civilian triumph; but beneath the hollow proclamations, something colder settled in: fear, disguised as prudence; cowardice, dressed in the rags of governance.
Even now, where the floodwaters once spread their desolation, a greater stillness persists 鈥� an absence heavier than death, thicker than ruin. In that stillness lingers betrayal: the unspoken dread that true independence, true transformation, had come too close 鈥� and had been quietly, ruthlessly, undone.
History, that old trickster, often hides its worst betrayals in plain view. Not in the declarations or the dismissals, but in the budgets never passed, the plans never signed, the futures never permitted to take form. In that sense, the cyclone never ended. It simply moved indoors 鈥� into ministries, into meetings, into minds. And there, it stayed. Quiet. Permanent. A perfect storm.
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Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired Captain of the Bangladesh Navy, was serving aboard BNS OSMAN when the devastating cyclone struck Chattogram and its surrounding coastal areas on April 29, 1991.