RUTHFULLY YOURS

I was here almost 50 years ago. I had answered André Malraux’s call to French youth to form an international brigade similar to that of the Spanish Civil War, this time to oppose the crimes of the Pakistani army in what was known as East Pakistan until it declared independence in March 1971. I landed in Kolkata, crossed the border in Satkhira, and ended up 45 miles north in Jessore, which was being pounded by bombs and machine-gun fire.

Then, it hardly qualified as a city. The airport is new. So is the tangle of colonial-era houses, unfinished new buildings and mud huts, and the population of ragged children, zebu cattle dealers, and discouraged beggars. But I recognize the pale sky and the tangy fragrance commingled with cooked coconut oil—and, on leaving the bazaar, the same bleak plain of rice paddies. This is the Bangladesh of my 20s.

Akim Mukherjee was the young Maoist leader who picked me up in Satkhira. Half a century later, I gave his name to Mofidul Hoque of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, the capital. He passed it along to the police, who had some trouble finding Akim—the underground Communists of the time went by a dizzying number of noms de guerre. But now here I am at the village house where Akim and I spent a few nights before taking off over marshes of rice and blood in search of Marxist-Leninist brochures, of which Bangladesh was a major producer—research for my first book, later published as “Les Indes Rouges.”

“My father is dead,” says the 50ish man who answers the door, then introduces himself as Akim’s son. “He often spoke of you . . . a young Frenchman with a yellow jacket. . . . He saved this.” From a plastic sleeve full of yellowed press clippings, he pulls a business card from my French graduate school on which I had scrawled my parents’ address.

“Come see your room,” the son says. “It’s the room in which he died. Nothing has been moved.” On the floor against the wall, near a small altar bearing vials of incense, candles, devotional images and holy bells, are two faded black-and-white portraits of Marx and Lenin, worshipped in this Hindu household on a par with Shiva and Vishnu. As I open the shutter, I jostle the photos. An immense black spider scuttles out from behind these relics.

The old women I meet at the Liberation War Museum are birangona, literally “war heroines.” They owe that status to the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of the Pakistani armed forces. When the natural consequences of those rapes arrived nine months later, President Mujibur Rahman of newly independent Bangladesh made a historic decision: Instead of shunning or ostracizing these women, as would have occurred in most traditional societies, he embraced the victims as if they were his own daughters.

Do the women know that when I met the new president, I was among those who suggested that their suffering, their innocence, but also their resilience, made them natural heroines in the nascent national story? Yes. But what they are most acutely aware of is the continuing effort in the West to criminalize violence against women. These elderly ladies take small steps. Some arrive in wheelchairs, clad in bright saris and wearing their finest nose pins. But what fierce determination to right past wrongs! And what youthful joy in their declarations that they are the vanguard of world feminism!

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is the daughter of Mujibur Rahman. She’s about my age and has led the government since 2009. She knows my story, and that’s why she invited me to the ceremonies marking the centennial of her father’s birth in 1920 and the beginning of the country’s Golden Jubilee. The festivities are postponed because of Covid-19. I bring her a letter from President Emmanuel Macron. Taking precautions, I place it on the tea table separating us, just below the portrait of her father. She reaches out to take it, reconsiders and gives me a complicit smile when her duly gloved chief of protocol rises to open it for her.

The prime minister has the reputation of being an authoritarian leader, implacable with opponents. Dressed in a bronze sari, wearing tortoiseshell glasses that reflect her icy green eyes, she reminds me of Indira Gandhi at the height of her power. But there’s also a playfulness about her as we recall the struggle for national liberation. She feigns surprise when I tell her about the difficulty the police had in tracking Akim Mukherjee. She turns ferocious when I bring up her father’s assassination in a 1975 military coup. The whole family was killed except Hasina and her younger sister, who were abroad.

Heading west from Dhaka, rural Bangladesh begins in Golora, a suburb of Manikganj. Here stands a humble monument, a small mound of dry stones surrounded by a simple brick wall, under which lie the remains of an unknown number of civilians executed during the war’s final hours in December 1971. Researchers agree this was a genocide—a systematic attempt to wipe out a people—but no one knows how many were killed. I urge a group of teens in Golora to ensure that their family stories are told and retold.

Through Facebook I made contact with a woman I call Benazir. She directs a girls’ school in Rajshahi, in the west of the country. She has lived under police protection since she banned the wearing of veils in class. “We need to see our pupils’ faces,” she tells me when we meet in a tiny Dhaka restaurant. She glances at the neighboring tables, too close for comfort, and continues more quietly: “What’s more, we’re not a madrassa. We have Hindu girls, Buddhists, a few Christians, Shiites. You say Shiites are Muslims? OK, that’s true, but they’re in the crosshairs of the Jamaat, that Islamist party the government outlawed because it was serving as a conveyor belt for ISIS.”

I am not at all sure that I was aware 50 years ago of this basic cleft between Pakistan and Bangladesh—the former, the “land of the pure,” with Islamic fundamentalism in its DNA; the latter, a country that, though majority Muslim, is also multifaith and respectful of its minorities. It would be good to keep that in mind, now that the war within Islam is raging across the planet. Bangladesh has a role to play in the face-off between enlightened and fanatical Islam.

No one will ever hear me say there are happy refugees. But as chance would have it, I arrive in Cox’s Bazar—site of the sprawling refugee camps where, for three years, 900,000 Rohingyas have fled anti-Muslim persecution by Burma’s Buddhists and its military junta—days after visiting Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, the landing point for Syrians heading toward Europe. Sad to say, the Europeans do not hold the advantage.

In the 34 camps of Cox’s Bazar, one finds adequate supplies of soap, towels, toothbrushes and water dispensers. Great bamboo walkways have been built to connect the parts of what has become a city in all but name. More than a semblance of a life has been established—with paved paths, clean huts and tiny kitchen gardens that enable families to pursue the subsistence agriculture they practiced at home in Burma.

To be sure, as in Lesbos, there is friction with adjacent villagers, who complain about “native Bengalis” being less well off than the newcomers. But the authorities haven’t buckled. There’s a lesson in the courage of the Rohingya, who have lost everything but their dignity—and another in the humanity of the Bengalis, who have nothing but find the wherewithal to share with the 900,000 residents of a living purgatory.

I have said nothing of Bangladesh’s poverty. Had I forgotten the sweatshops to which the West subcontracts children hardly older than 12—grandchildren of the Mukti Bahini, who fought for independence—for jobs it no longer wants? Had I forgotten the hordes of unemployed people who contend with stray dogs and rodents for bits of food in the Bhashantek dumps in the heart of Dhaka? The capital’s Rupnagar slum burned down to its pilings during my visit. The pestilential cesspool of black water over which the lakeside favela was built is now in the open air. There, enveloped in an evening mist, an ascetic-looking man, clad in loincloth and mobcap, appears to be doing ablutions. But no, he is diving repeatedly into the fetid water and dredging it for bits of steel and iron that he will sell for a few takas at the Kawran Bazar flea market.

In my day, none of that existed. The Buriganga, its flow now slowed by pileups of plastic, was a real river. The Hazaribagh section of the city—where 200,000 people drink, fish and wade on the banks of a marsh made up of detritus and toxic materials—was a semirural suburb where a guild of tanners practiced their thousand-year-old craft. And the ancestors of my cycle-rickshaw driver were Mukti Bahini, who felt no shame about their profession.

Another thing not discussed then but painfully obvious now is that if there is one spot in the world threatened by climatic catastrophe, this is it. Bangladesh is a delta nation, a land of 700 rivers, some of which, like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, originate deep in the subcontinent and meet here to throw themselves into the Gulf of Bengal. It is the spill point of the torrents formed by melting Himalayan ice; in the season of cyclones and heavy monsoons, those torrents raise river levels and trigger landslides of colossal proportions.

The archipelago I remember lying off the shore of Cox’s Bazar is gone. The square islands further north, with their stunted vegetation, are all that remains of a former rice paddy. The herring fisherman, only 30 but looking twice as old, has been forced to move his home three times as the sea has devoured his land. The farmer who has never heard of climate change tells me that a new law in Bangladesh has declared rivers to be legal persons.

And poor Bangladesh, the front line of the war against radical Islam, poverty, migratory chaos and ecological cataclysm, has one more battle to fight—that of sanitation and health. This has always been a land of fever, diarrhea, respiratory ailments and skin diseases traceable to the destruction of air and soil. Endemic are lymphatic filariasis, visceral leishmaniasis, melioidosis, fluke worm, dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis, as well as Nipah and Hendra, viruses that spread from bat droppings and, when transmitted to humans, are fatal in 3 out of 4 cases. And I learned at my own expense that the country’s water, unless boiled, can deliver a fever that left me flat on my back for days at a stretch.

In the midst of all that, the coronavirus rears its ugly head, first in China, then in Europe, then in the U.S. This geographically small country of 160 million people, which at this writing has recorded 30,205 cases and 432 deaths, is taking up the wartime rhetoric of the West and making the hunt for the “invisible enemy” an absolute priority. (On May 14 the United Nations announced Cox Bazar’s first confirmed case.)

The government has canceled the Mujibur Rahman centennial celebration. Homemade masks in all colors and shapes—beaks of birds, muzzles of animals—have appeared in the streets. And a quarantine is closing the country’s land and air borders at the risk of plunging it deeper than ever into the darkness.

Is the move a precaution against a disease that, were it to break out in densely populated cities and camps, would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths? Is it the odd revenge of a people that is defending itself against a plague that, for once, has come from outside and that may be harboring the illusion that, in mounting its defense, it is joining the virtuous circle toward the sunlit uplands of global public health?

I don’t know. Fifty years ago, I was one of the first Westerners to take up the cause of this cursed and splendid country. Now I am taking the last flight out for Europe. I can only hope and pray.

Mr. Lévy is author of “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” (Henry Holt, 2019). This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.