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Monday, March 8, 2010

[ALOCHONA] Govt needs to assertively raise BSF excesses with India



Editorial
Govt needs to assertively raise BSF excesses with India

THE incursion into Bangladesh by Indian nationals through different points of the border at Jaintapur in Sylhet on Sunday is neither isolated nor incidental. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Monday, it was the second time in a week that such trespassing into Bangladesh territory took place. A group of Indian nationals also intruded into Bangladesh territory on February 28, also at the behest of the Border Security of Force of India, which eventually led to an exchange of more than 1,000 gunshots between the border guards of the two countries. Earlier on February 14, the BSF shot at three Bangladeshis at the Shreepur stone quarry after the BDR had stopped a group of Indians from fishing in Kendribil inside Bangladesh territory. Again, on February 4, the BSF kidnapped a BDR soldier at gunpoint and released him more than ten hours later, that too after a flag meeting. Meanwhile, the Indian border guards have killed at 17 Bangladeshi civilians in the first two months of the current calendar year. Overall, the BSF seems to be on a campaign of persistent provocation against their Bangladeshi counterparts.
   
The timing of the latest BSF-backed incursion of Indian nationals is also curious, came as it did on the eve of a six-day talks between the chiefs of the two country's borders guards in New Delhi, which began on Monday, where the BDR director general is scheduled to raise, among others, the issues of killing of Bangladeshi civilians by the BSF and push-in of Indian national into Bangladesh territory. Here it is pertinent to recall that the BSF killed a Bangladeshi civilian on January 12, the very day when a Dhaka-Delhi joint communiqué was released in New Delhi during the visit of the Bangladesh prime minister to India, in which the two countries agreed, among others, that 'the respective border guarding forces [should] exercise restraint.' While the BDR has all along done just that, the BSF has never appeared to be under any compulsion to rein its trigger-happy personnel. It is hard to believe that the BSF excesses are taking place beyond the knowledge and without the political backing of the Indian government.
   
As we have written in these columns time and again, the border skirmishes cannot be resolved at the director general-level talks between the border guards of the two countries; these need to be addressed at the highest political level. Regrettably, the Awami League-led government has thus far appeared not adequately assertive in raising the issue of BSF excesses with its Indian counterparts. Worse still, it has appeared somewhat too intent on believing in whatever New Delhi dishes out. That the government has trumpeted the prime minister's recent visit to India as a success although Dhaka has by and large conceded to the many 'requests' from New Delhi in exchange for the latter's oft-repeated assurances for amicable resolution of long-standing disputes that have proven hollow in the past could be a case in point. Be that as it may, the government needs to realise that its counterparts in New Delhi are not doing enough to rein in the trouble-mongering personnel of the BSF. Thus, it needs to seriously and strongly raise the issue with the Indian government so that the trigger-happy BSF personnel are reined in and people in Bangladesh can move about within its territory without any fear or restriction.
 


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[ALOCHONA] Indian BSF kills 838 Bangladeshis in 10 years



Indian BSF kills 838 Bangladeshis in 10 years
 


 
BSF has stepped up its firing in the border areas. So far this year alone, from January 1 till March 2, the India border security force BSF has killed 10 Bangladeshi nationals along the border. Over the past ten years they killed a total of 828 Bangladeshis, that is 838 in the last 10 years and two months.(PROBE News/ New Nation)

According to a study of the human rights organization Odhikar, in the 10 years from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009, a total of 887 persons were killed, 869 injured, 909 abducted and 14 raped along the Bangladesh-India border. Other than that 70 incidents of snatching and loot took place, 229 persons were forcefully pushed into Bangladesh,

184 went missing and 226 were arrested. Of the killed persons, 828 were killed by BSF personnel. The others were killed by miscreants. And according to newspaper reports, over the past two months BSF has killed another 10 Bangladeshis.

At the recently held joint talks, the Prime Ministers of both the countries admited to the agitation along the border. In the joint communique they laid stress of stepping up patrol along the borders and ensuring regular meetings between BSF and BDR. In response to a question in this regard, , Odhikar's Secretary Adilur Rahman Khan tells PROBE, Even when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was in India, BSF tortured and killed a 28-year-old young Bangladeshi cowherd. Around the same time, BSF personnel opened fire on Bangladeshis along the border at Azmatpur of Shibganj upazila in Chapainawabganj. It is being said that the border problems will be resolved through talks. Talks on various levels have been held with India since 1972. But we are also seeing an escalation of killings and violations of human rights along the border."

Adilur Rahman Khan says, "The people of Bangladesh would have been very happy if the Prime Minister would have strongly raised issues and problems of public concern. The people's demands did not feature in the talks. We were extremely distressed that the mater of BSF killings was completely ignored. In fact, BDR and BSF were bracketed together. It was said, BSF and BDF would have to be cautious and frequent meetings would have to be held."

"Referring to the joint communique, I would like to ask in whose interests are these meetings to take place, to protect whose interests? I will naturally look to the security of Bangladeshis first At the same time, the India people are our brothers and sisters and the question of their safety is there too. But at a state level, unilaterally or jointly, if the security of the people of Bangladesh and India is overlooked, that is an unfortunate passive action."

 http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2010/03/09/news0566.htm



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[ALOCHONA] What are we to celebrate on Women’s Day?



What are we to celebrate on Women's Day?

by Farida Akhter

The implicit danger in the institutionalisation of the working women's struggle into an UN event of International Women's Day may become a depoliticising and disempowering process if women remain unaware of history and that of the propertied and powerful classes to disarticulate the historical connection between working class movement and the women's movement.


GERMAN Socialist leader Clara Zetkin has become a household name in the global women's movement because of her declaration of a 'day' for women called 'International Women's Day'. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in 1910 held in Copenhagen, Denmark, Clara's declaration of International Women's Day was indeed international in both spirit and character because her internationalism was akin to workers' in general. Honouring the movement for women's rights and to assist in achieving universal suffrage for women was and still is a working class issue. The proposal was greeted with unanimous approval by the conference of over 100 women from 17 countries.
   
However, on the day International Women's Day was declared in 1910, no fixed date was selected for the observance of the day. The following year, 1911, International Women's Day was marked by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, on March 19. It was very successful event in the countries it was celebrated. In 1913 International Women's Day was transferred to March 8 and this day has remained the global date for International Women's Day ever since. The proposal to select March 8 as International Women's Day was to commemorate the struggles of women workers in different countries. The first recorded organised action by working women took place in New York on March 8, 1857, with hundreds of women in the garment and textile factories staging a strike in protest of low wages, long working hours, inadequate pay, inhumane working conditions and the absence of the right to vote. Similar incidents happened in 1860 women workers formed trade union of their own and in 1908 on March 8; women workers staged protest in New York.
   
We must not be confused that the date of March 8 was the most important thing in declaring International Women's Day. It was rather the acknowledgement of women's struggle in the industrialised countries where women started to appear as the wage earning workforce and faced hardship with appalling working conditions. Their struggle was to make their workplaces better. Women protested and took political actions. They did not appear to seek 'help' as 'victims' rather became the symbol for all women's struggles to improve their lives.
   
For Clara, the interest in women's rights grew in the context of rapid industrialization during the period of the 1880s and 1890s in Germany. During this period women and children were drawn into industry on a large scale. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) was born as the mass workers party. It laid the basis for a socialist led and working class-based women's organisation. In 1891, the first issue of an independent paper Die Gleicheit, subtitled 'for the interests of working women' with its own editorial board, led and coordinated by Social Democratic women, appeared.
   
Till 1908 women did not have freedom of association, thus barring them from party membership and also trade union membership according to laws in Prussia. Women faced very particular problems in the Germany of that time. There was hostility in the party to the involvement and demands of militant women. Many trade unionists saw women workers simply as a threat to their jobs and bargaining position. Clara had to fight against the male hostility and draw women into conscious political action.
   
In Germany, the proportion of women in the workforce increased from 18.5 per cent to 44.3 per cent during the period 1882-1907, but due to campaign for women's membership in the trade unions, it increased by 2,000 per cent between 1895 and 1907.
   
The women leaders in the SPD waged a consistent campaign for women's rights within the party and the trade unions and finally in 1890 secured the right to elect women delegated to party conference from special women's meetings. During the successive years, their painstaking works resulted in the adoption of a comprehensive party programme for the protection of women workers in 1891 and succeeded in establishing a system of permanent women's vertrauenspersonen – women's spokespersons – in the party, whose task was the political education of proletarian women, the organisation of work amongst women in 1892. These are important landmark events that led to the legitimacy of Clara Zetkin's declaration of International Women's Day. She worked hard for more than 20 years prior to the declaration.
   
In the United States, American women socialists demanded political rights for working women and celebrated a Women's Day for the first time in New York honouring the involvement of thousands of women in the numerous labour strikes in the early twentieth century in many major centres such as Montreal, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. These women protested and rallied for the right to vote, a decent wage, and an end to sweat shops and child labour. In 1908, socialist women in the United States convinced their party to designate the last Sunday in February as a day for demonstrations in support of 'woman suffrage' – votes for women.
   
The two most important democratic rights of women were addressed prior to the declaration of International Women's Day – (a) women workers rights to unionise and (b) the right to vote. During the same time, the suffrage oriented bourgeois feminism in Germany was also developing. However, Clara Zetkin wanted an independent working class struggle for women's suffrage. The difference in opinion between Social Democratic women and the bourgeois feminists was over the question of protective legislation for women workers. For the bourgeois feminists 'emancipation' meant the right to freely compete with men on an equal basis inside capitalist society. The Die Gleicheit and the Social Democratic women campaigned for protective legislation for women – whose standards could then be applied to all workers – recognising that women were the weakest and most exploited section of the working class. However, the Social Democratic women did not pose universal suffrage, protective legislation as ends in themselves. For Zetkin the right to vote was to be fought for as part of the struggle to draw working class women into an active fight against capitalism as part to the struggle to draw working women into the battle for socialism.
  
 In 1906, Clara Zetkin presented a paper on Social Democracy and Women Suffrage at a Conference of Women belonging to the Social-Democratic Party held at Mannheim. She said:
   We take our stand from the point of view that the demand for Woman Suffrage is in the first place a direct consequence of the capitalist method of production. It may seem perhaps to others somewhat unessential to say this so strongly, but not so to us, because the middle-class demand for women's rights up to the present time still bases its claims on the old nationalistic doctrines of the conception of rights. The middle-class women's agitation movement still demands Woman Suffrage to-day as a natural right, just as did the speculative philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We, on the contrary, basing our demand on the teachings of economics and of history, advocate the suffrage for women as a social right, which is not based on any natural right, but which rests on social, transient conditions.
   
In her paper Clara gave examples of Russia, Prussia, Austria and other provinces, where women's right to vote was restricted to those who own land and pay taxes. In Sweden women who fulfilled the same conditions of property were allowed to vote in the elections for local bodies. In England, too, women could take part in elections for local bodies; but this again was only under conditions of owning a certain amount of property or paying a certain sum in taxes. Clara said:
   
When we carefully consider all these cases, we find that women do not vote because they are women; they do not enjoy, so to speak, a personal vote, but they only have this right because they are owners of property and taxpayers. That is not the kind of Woman Suffrage which we demand; it is not the right we desire to give a woman, as a burgess of the State, it is only a privilege of property..... But when we demand Woman Suffrage, we can only do so on the ground, not that it should be a right attached to the possession of a certain amount of property, but that it should be inherent in the woman herself, This insistence of the personal right of woman to exercise her own influence in the affairs of the town and the State has received no small measure of support, owing to the large increase in the capitalist methods of production.
   
The present celebration of International Women's Day is guided by the United Nations theme rather than its original history of socialist women's struggles. In the year 1975, which was designated as International Women's Year the United Nations began celebrating International Women's Day on March 8. Two years later, in December 1977, the General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace to be observed on any day of the year by member states, in accordance with their historical and national traditions. In adopting its resolution, the General Assembly recognised the role of women in peace efforts and development and urged an end to discrimination and an increase of support for women's full and equal participation. The growing international women's movement, which has been sponsored by global United Nations women's conferences such as Mexico conference in 1975, has guided a new dimension, with much less political actions and positions, to support for women's rights and participation in the political and economic arenas. The next important step of the United Nations was to adopt the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. It is considered as the essential international tool for achieving women's human rights. More NGOs, rather than women's political organisations, have appeared receiving support from the United Nations and its member countries to achieve women's rights.
   
But what do we see in Bangladesh in terms of women workers and on women's political rights? Women constitute 38.8 per cent of 60.3 million in the civilian labour force (Labour Force Survey 2000 of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics). Women are increasingly entering into job market mainly in readymade garments and allied sector, tea gardens, NGOs, health care services, food processing industry, export processing zones, services sectors and commercial enterprises and informal sector, i.e. construction, agriculture, etc. The majority of women are in the readymade garment factories. The number of garment workers in Bangladesh is 2.5 million, (90 per cent are women) in 5,300 factories.
   
The workers are still struggling hard for a minimum wage. In 1994, the minimum wage for the garment workers was fixed at Tk 930 per month for the unskilled workers and Tk 2,300 for skilled workers. After lots of movements by workers the minimum wage was set at Tk 1,662.50 ($23) per month, whereas the demand from the workers was Tk 5,000 ($70) per month. Even this is not implemented by all the member factories of the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters' Association. The wage of the unskilled workers is very uncertain and still is at a very low level. Most of the garment factories do not follow the labour law and ILO conventions. The workers cannot enjoy the weekly holiday, job security, social security, gratuity or provident fund. In most of the cases the management does not provide appointment/contract letters, identity cards and service books. The transportation facilities are not provided in most cases. The working environment is dangerous and cannot get out of the factories at the time of fire incidents. The provision of sufficient and pure drinking water and toilets for the workers is not ensured despite so much discussion on the issues of compliance from the international buyers. The most recent case of Garib and Garib Sweater Factory is shameful with tragic deaths of 21 workers. The workers could not get out of the factory because of the lock in the heavy gate and blocked stairs. They were suffocated to death.
   
Garment workers who are now organised as informal unions cannot protest openly if they are on the job. Many leaders of the garment workers could not go and visit the Garib and Garib factory after the incident. Police force was deployed to protect the factory from agitation of the workers.
   Regarding suffrage issue, women in Bangladesh have the right to vote and elect their own representatives at all levels. But women are discriminated by the existing constitutional and legal arrangements in denying the right to vote for the representatives for the reserved seats exclusively for women. These seats are indirectly elected by the elected members of the parliament. This is nothing but denial of rights and goes against the principles of equality in the suffrage issue. Women counted as 'numbers' for votes, their right to be elected depends on the social and economic power. Women in the local government bodies are directly elected but have not been given the privilege of working for the people.
   
The implicit danger in the institutionalisation of the working women's struggle into an UN event of International Women's Day may become a depoliticising and disempowering process if women remain unaware of history and that of the propertied and powerful classes to disarticulate the historical connection between working class movement and the women's movement. In the latter case women are social being and not merely 'women'; their struggle is in no way different from working class movement but with added responsibility to fight against patriarchy, masculine world views and global capitalist processes. She is constantly being reduced into a means of cheap labour or consumer. Feminist movement is aware that women's question must be addressed assertively with due attention and focus to women's problems concretely and from the collective social endeavour for human emancipation.
   
A simple way to keep us alert is to ask a question: are we celebrating Clara Zetkin's spirit of the working class women or are we just trying to be the part of the present global regime – celebrating a United Nations event?

   Farida Akhter is executive director of UBINIG. kachuripana@hotmail.com
 


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FW: [ALOCHONA] RE : Staged stoning at Daily Star




 


From: farida_majid@hotmail.com
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [ALOCHONA] RE : Staged stoning at Daily Star
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:21:22 -0500

       What exactly does dhakamailer mean by "staged" stoning? Fatwa instructed stoning of village women does not happen, never took place in Bangladesh. It is an evil anti-Islami conspiracy. Right? There should be more of stoning of women to teach them a lesson. But this kind of BAKSHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL type of propaganda prevents Muslims from following their religion. 
 
       I checked  the Star magazine and found it to be a photo illustration, a sort of art-work for the lead article: "Crime in the Name of Belief."
 
         http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2010/02/04/cover.htm
 
It is NOT presented as a journalistic photo with captions identifying the figures in the photo -- no name, date or place attached to it. It was merely a dramatized photographic art-work to illustrate the topic.
 
      We sure know what "staged" means in the midst of a deluge of pseudonym 'mailer' posts.  We live in a summer camp of raucus 'mela' of mithyaar besaati. It is a cyber mina bazar of lies.
                     Should we take Ayesha Kabir to be Isha Khan 2.0 version? A second coming of Sunita Paul. We have no chaice, do we? This is as good as "staged" stoning!
 
                 Farida Majid
 

To: dhakamails@yahoogroups.com
From: bdmailer@gmail.com
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:39:53 +0600
Subject: [ALOCHONA] RE : Staged stoning at Daily Star

 
RE : Staged stoning at Daily Star
 
 
Ayesha Kabir was so correct ! :
 
 
 
 




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