[Eight months ago, the collapse of Rana Plaza became the deadliest disaster in
the history of the garment industry, and many of the survivors still face an
uncertain future. The shoddily constructed building pancaked down onto workers
stitching clothes for global brands like Children’s Place, Benetton, C & A,
Primark and many others. Workers earning as little as $38 a month were crushed
under tons of falling concrete and steel. More than 1,100 people died and many
others were injured or maimed.]
By Jim Yardley
 |
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Survivors of Bangladesh Disaster Receive Little Aid: Though the Rana Plaza
collapse eight months ago stirred an international outcry, the people most directly
affected by it are still living with uncertainty.
|
SAVAR, Bangladesh — Inside the single room he shares with his wife and young child,
Hasan Mahmud Forkan does not sleep easily. Some nights he hears the screams of
the garment workers he tried to rescue from the wreckage of the Rana Plaza
factory building. Or he dreams the bed itself is collapsing, sucking him down
into a bottomless void.
A few miles away, at a
rehabilitation center for the disabled, Rehana Khatun is learning to walk
again. She lost both legs in the Rana Plaza collapse and worries that she is
not improving because her prosthetic replacements are bulky and uncomfortable.
She is only 20 and once hoped to save money so she could return to her village
and pay for her own wedding.
“No, I don’t have that
dream anymore,” she said, with a cold pragmatism more than self-pity. “How can
I take care of a family?”
Eight months ago, the collapse of Rana Plaza became the deadliest disaster in
the history of the garment industry, and many of the survivors still face an
uncertain future. The shoddily constructed building pancaked down onto workers
stitching clothes for global brands like Children’s Place, Benetton, C & A,
Primark and many others. Workers earning as little as $38 a month were crushed
under tons of falling concrete and steel. More than 1,100 people died and many
others were injured or maimed.
But while the Rana Plaza
disaster stirred an international outcry — and shamed many international
clothing companies into pledging to help finance safety improvements in other
Bangladeshi factories — the people most directly affected are still living
without any guarantees of help or financial compensation.
Families who lost the
wages of a son or daughter, husband or wife, are struggling.
Those who lost limbs,
like Ms. Khatun, are uncertain if they will ever walk or hold things again. And
many volunteer rescuers like Mr. Forkan and survivors are struggling to deal
with debilitating emotional scars.
Today, Rana Plaza no
longer exists. It is a gaping hole in a busy commercial street, mostly cleared
of rubble, where rainwater has pooled into a small black lake. But the vacant
space still exerts the potency of memory and loss. Banners demanding justice face
the street. Sit-ins or small protests are sometimes held. Leftist parties have
built a crude statue of a hammer and sickle.
There are also people,
often hovering near the periphery, clutching official documents, proof of their
loss, evidence of their claims for compensation. In a poor country like
Bangladesh, a job in a garment factory, despite the low wages, is a financial
toehold for many families. A daughter is sent to work to support her parents,
or to pay to school her siblings.
Now it is the parents or
siblings who come to the Rana Plaza site, trying to get attention and, they
hope, financial assistance.
“We are a poor family,”
said Monju Ara, 40, whose daughter Smriti, 17, died while working on the third
floor of Rana Plaza. “That is why my daughter had to start work. Her wages
helped us educate our younger children. Now we had to stop educating them.”
Ms. Monju Ara stood in a
dirt alleyway beside the Rana Plaza site on a recent afternoon, as others soon
appeared. One girl, Rahima, 9, was still carrying a “missing” poster for her
brother. Another child, Smriti Mahmuda, 7, had lost her father, and her
15-year-old brother had taken a job in an embroidery factory to support the
family. A rickshaw driver with the single name of Alauddin, 43, is now struggling
to support his young daughter after his wife died in Rana Plaza.
“They always say I will
get compensation,” he said, “but they don’t say when.”
Compensation remains a
complicated and contested issue. Bangladesh’s government has made some modest
short-term compensation payments to some victims. Families were given a
one-time payment of $257 when they collected the body of a relative in the days
after the collapse, and the government has established annuities for survivors
who lost limbs — Ms. Khatun gets about $206 a month in interest, more than most
others.
But much of the money
donated to the government for the survivors and the families of the dead has
not been released. Many of these claimants have been told that full
compensation packages will be provided after the process of identifying all the dead is
completed. A special committee appointed by the Bangladesh High Court has
suggested individual compensation packages of roughly $25,000; lobbyists for
factory owners are proposing a far lower figure. The final decision is expected
to rest with the high court.
For now, most of the
short-term compensation has come from the British chain Primark, which has been
paying salaries for survivors and families of those who died. More recently,
Loblaw, a Canadian retailer, announced that it, too, would step in to help with
compensation.
The Bangladesh
Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the powerful
industry trade group, has also provided compensation, according to some
survivors who received a few months’ salary.
But the long-term picture remains muddled.
Other companies have so far refused to participate in a long-term compensation
package, including all of the American brands, but for
many Rana Plaza survivors, the short-term compensation is already running out.
Shukrani, who survived the collapse but lost a daughter, who was working on a
different floor, is almost out of money.
“My other daughter had
appendicitis,” she said. “I had to spend part of my money for her operation.
Now I don’t know how I’ll survive.”
Down the road from Rana
Plaza, at the Center for the Rehabilitation of the Paralyzed, Ms. Khatun and
others spend their mornings trying to learn how to walk or hold a pen with
prosthetics. The nonprofit organization has a long history of helping the
disabled and is now helping several Rana Plaza survivors learn how to use the
prosthetics provided by another donor.
But the prosthetics are
a problem: One man, Saddam Hossain, 27, who was a salesman in a building
adjacent to Rana Plaza, lost his right arm. He had been studying for a graduate
degree in economics and, after his amputation, still took the test in June,
with someone else writing his answers for him. Now he is trying to adjust to
his mechanical prosthetic arm, which is clumsier than Western models.
“I’m an educated man,”
he said. “I want to do a job.”
Ms. Khatun is grateful
for her prosthetic legs but is also struggling with them. She has practiced for
two months but finds them painful. Her legs were amputated above the knee,
making it more difficult. She will need walking sticks, and she has decided to
leave the chaos of the city and return to her village. There, though, the roads
are muddy and difficult to traverse.
She had left the village
after her mother tried to arrange her marriage. The cost of a wedding would
have bankrupted her family, so she came to Savar and found work in Rana Plaza.
She thought she could save up to pay for her own wedding and also educate her
younger brothers.
“I dreamed that I could
see my mother smiling,” she said. “Now it is meaningless to talk about what my
dreams are. I cannot lead a life like normal people. I will have an unusual,
different life.”
Before the Rana Plaza
disaster, many of the workers were already living on the margins. Few had much
education and most struggled to get by on the low wages. They were not
qualified to do much else but work in a sewing factory. But now, for many,
merely stepping back into a factory incites anxiety.
Mohammad Ujjal Hossain,
30, spent three days trapped under a wall of fallen concrete. When rescuers
found him, he handed them his cellphone and told them to call his mother to
tell her he was alive.
“Now, I’m not doing
anything,” he said.
“I went to a factory to
work as a line chief. I worked for a day, but I was filled with fear when I was
inside the building. I worried that this building would also collapse. I quit
after that day.”
And of all those whose
lives are now entwined with Rana Plaza, it is the volunteer rescuers, ordinary
people who rushed forward in a crisis, who have received no financial help at
all. Mr. Forkan, 37, spent three weeks helping firefighters and soldiers pull
bodies out of the rubble. He crawled into the wreckage and freed one woman by
cutting an iron rod that pierced deep into her leg.
But when it was over,
Mr. Forkan found it difficult to return to his ordinary life.
He is an electrician and
regularly works in dangerous situations. But he finds it difficult to
concentrate. He deliberately avoids the Rana Plaza site, detouring around it,
and his wife often has to wake him when he shouts in his sleep.
“We need proper
treatment to return to a normal life,” he said, expressing concern about what
would happen to his family if he could no longer work. “This is my only way to
earn money.”
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.
