Dont displace us: Super cyclone victims

BHUBANESWAR: Now, the victims of the 1999 super cyclone of Jagatsinghour district have raised their voice against the Posco Steel Project.Urging Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik not to dislocate them once again, they said, they would lose their normal life if they have to move out once again.  “Do not disrupt the semblance of normal life that we have so painfully put together in a little over a decade after the super cyclone,” said a petition filed by 14 villagers whose age varied from 40  to 95.When the 25-foot-high tidal waves swept through the area submerging three blocks of Jagatsinghpur district along with gusting at 300 km per hour, thousands were killed and more than 20 lakh houses were fully or partially damaged.Much of the land was rendered useless for cultivation because of salinity and about 3.7 lakh cattle and 29,000 fishing boats were lost.“In short, our lives and livelihood were paralysed,” the petition said.  The villagers, mostly from Dhinkia, Patna, Gobindpur and Gadkujang said it has taken them years to rebuild their lives and it would be grossly inhuman now to displace them all over again for the ‘highly controversial’ and ‘illegal’  Posco project.  For, it will force them to go through the agony of further  displacement and dislocation and all efforts of rehabilitation after the super cyclone will go down the drain, they wrote to Naveen.The disaster this time would be man-made if the Government goes ahead with the 12 million tonne steel project, the villagers said. The petition said the Government’s decision to displace the communities ravaged by natural disasters is also a fundamental violation of the UN International treaties which advocate a humane consideration of rights of people ravaged by natural disasters, particularly if this has been occurring repeatedly to them in a generation or two.  In case of communities which have been physically displaced by natural disasters, the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement is eminently applicable, they pointed out and sought the Chief Minister’s personal intervention in the matter.