World

Cyclone Batsirai swept out of Madagascar on Monday after killing 20 people, displacing 55,000 and devastating the drought-hit island’s agricultural heartland, leading the UN to warn of a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Madagascar was already reeling from a tropical storm which killed 55 people weeks earlier, and the latest extreme weather event came as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the continent is “bearing both the brunt and the cost” of global warming.

Batsirai made landfall on the Indian Ocean island’s east on Saturday evening bringing heavy rain and winds of 165 kilometres (102 miles) per hour, after drenching the French island of La Reunion.

Jean Benoit Manhes, a representative of UN children’s agency UNICEF in the country, told AFP on Monday that “Batsirai left Madagascar this morning at 7 am (0400 GMT) heading out into the Mozambique Channel.”

Madagascar’s disaster management agency said that Batsirai had left 20 people dead and forced 55,000 from their homes.

UNICEF warned that many of the victims were likely to be children, which make up more than 50 percent of the country’s population.

The cyclone first hit a sparsely populated agricultural area in the country’s east on Saturday, before later weakening. The eastern city of Mananjary was “completely destroyed,” a resident named Faby said. 

– ‘Constant humanitarian crisis’ – 

Batsirai then moved west inland, causing flooding that ravaged rice fields in the country’s central “breadbasket,” UNICEF said.

“The impact of the cyclone does not end today, it will last for several months, particularly the impact on agriculture,” Manhes said.

“The roofs of several schools and health centres were blown off” in the affected areas, UNICEF said.

Batsirai spared the capital Antanarivo and the island’s main port Tamatave, which led to a lower death toll than had been initially feared by the authorities and aid organisations, who had warned that nearly 600,000 people could be affected and 140,000 displaced.

Some 77 percent of Madagascar’s population live below the poverty line and the latest blow comes during a severe drought in the south which has plunged more than a million people into acute malnutrition, some facing famine.

The cyclone partly destroyed the main road linking the island’s north and south, “which will make it difficult to provide access and reinforcements to villages, including in drought-hit areas,” Manhes said.

“Madagascar is in a constant humanitarian crisis,” he added.

Some 10,000 people on La Reunion were left without electricity on Sunday, three days after Batsirai passed through the island, injuring 12 people on its path.

Tropical Storm Ana affected at least 131,000 people across Madagascar in late January, with most of the 55 deaths coming in Antananarivo. Ana also hit Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, causing dozens of deaths.

South Africa’s President Ramaphosa told a summit of African leaders on Sunday that the continent was “experiencing the worst impacts of phenomena associated with global warming such as droughts, floods and cyclones”. 

“Despite not being responsible for causing climate change, it is Africans who are bearing both the brunt and the cost,” he said.

Moroccans were preparing Monday to bury Rayan, a five-year-old boy who spent five days trapped down a well, sparking a vast rescue operation that gripped the world but ended in tragedy.

The boy had fallen down a narrow, 32-metre (100-foot) dry well last Tuesday, sparking a complex earth-moving operation to try to reach him without triggering a landslide.

Well-wishers had flooded social media with messages of sympathy and prayers that he would be extracted alive.

On Saturday night, crowds had cheered as rescue workers cleared away the final handfuls of soil to reach him after the marathon digging operation. 

But grief replaced hope when it turned out that the boy was dead, news announced by the royal cabinet of the North African nation.

King Mohammed VI called the parents to voice his condolences.

The child’s body was taken to a military hospital in the capital Rabat, accompanied by his parents, as villagers started preparing the area around the Douar Zaouia cemetary near Ighrane in anticipation of a large crowd of mourners.

His funeral is to be held on Monday afternoon in his home village of Ighrane, in the impoverished Rif mountains of northern Morocco, a local official and a relative told AFP.

– Nation in shock –

Rayan’s father Khaled Aourram said he had been repairing the well when his son fell in, close to the family home.

The shaft, just 45 centimetres (18 inches) across, was too narrow for Rayan to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky — so earth movers dug a wide slope into the hill.

Rescue crews, using bulldozers and front-end loaders, excavated the surrounding red earth down to the level where the boy was trapped, before drill teams carefully dug a horizontal tunnel to reach him from the side to avoid causing a landslide.

Vast crowds came to offer their support, singing and praying to encourage the rescuers who worked around the clock.

But the boy’s death left Moroccans in shock.

Mourad Fazoui in the capital Rabat mourned what he said was a disaster. “May his soul rest in peace and may God open the gates of heaven to him,” the salesman said.

The Arabic daily newspaper Assabah criticised the digging of unauthorised wells, saying many were used to irrigate cannabis widely grown in Morocco’s north.

Social media across the Arab world were flooded with messages of support, grief, and praise for rescue workers.

“He has brought people together around him,” one Twitter user said.

But one deplored a “dystopic world” where “Arab nations are moved by the rescue of a child in Morocco” while other infants in Yemen and Syria die in famine or conflict.

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