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Friday, October 8, 2010

[ALOCHONA] Pakistan's ISI, a hidden, frustrating power for US




 
 
Pakistani police commandos cordon off the shrine of Sufi Saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi yesterday a day after two teenage suicide bombers blew themselves up at the shrine killing nine worshippers, including two children, and injuring at least 64.
 
 
Top US defense officials are concerned some elements of Pakistan's main spy agency may be interacting improperly with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, said a Pentagon spokesman.

Colonel David Lapan said Pakistani army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a former spy chief, was aware of US concerns about the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and shared some of them.

Here are some questions and answers about the ISI, the most powerful intelligence agency in Pakistan, a country the United States sees as indispensable to its efforts to tame a raging Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

HOW POWERFUL IS THE ISI?

The shadowy military intelligence agency has evolved into what some describe as a state within a state.

Widely feared by Pakistanis, it is believed to have a hidden role in many of the nuclear-armed nation's policies, including in Afghanistan, one of US President Barack Obama's top foreign policy priorities.

The ISI is seen as the Pakistani equivalent of the US Central Agency (CIA) -- with which it has had a symbiotic but sometimes strained relationship -- and Israel's Mossad.

Its size is not publicly known but the ISI is widely believed to employ tens of thousands of agents, with informers in many spheres of public life.

Hardline elements within the ISI are capable of being spoilers, no matter what position a Pakistani government might take, a reality the US and Afghan governments should take into account if they attempt to exclude Pakistan from negotiations with the Afghan Taliban.

WHAT ABOUT THE ISI'S PAST?
Created in 1948, the ISI gained importance and power during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and is now rated one of best-organized intelligence agencies in the developing world.

The ISI along with the United States and Saudi Arabia, nurtured the Afghan mujahideen, or Muslim holy warrior guerrillas, and helped them win the war. It helped to plan many of their operations and was the main conduit for Western and Arab arms. It later helped create the Taliban.

Although Pakistan officially abandoned support for the Taliban after joining the US-led war against al-Qaeda and Taliban, critics, including Western military commanders in Afghanistan, say it has maintained its ties with, and support for, the Afghan Taliban. The military denies supporting the Taliban but says agents maintain links with militants, as any security agency would do, in the interests of intelligence.

Analysts say the main preoccupation of the ISI, and the Pakistani military, is the threat from nuclear-armed rival India and it sees the Afghan Taliban as tools to influence events, and limit India's role, in Afghanistan.

The ISI was heavily involved in the 1990s in creating and supporting Islamist factions that battled Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir region. Some of those groups have since joined forces with the Pakistani Taliban to attack the state, including the ISI. That militants alliance may be the biggest threat to Pakistan's long-term security, analysts say.

WHAT ABOUT THE ISI'S CURRENT LEADERSHIP?
Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha is the director general of the ISI and a close ally of Kayani. Pasha is seen as anti-Taliban, unlike some of his predecessors, and analysts suggest he is using the ISI to broker some sort of deal between factions of the Afghan Taliban and the Afghan government. Although he is seen as relatively moderate, the ISI is almost certain to come under a new wave of pressure as the United States gets increasingly frustrated with the army's perceived reluctance to go after Afghan Taliban fighters who cross the border to attack Western forces in Afghanistan. But the strategic interests of the ISI, headquartered in a sprawling, well-guarded complex in Islamabad, will invariably come first, analysts say.
 


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[ALOCHONA] Surveillance State: Government Snooping, Prying, and Informing Worse Than You Think



Surveillance State: Government Snooping, Prying, and Informing Worse Than You Think

Tainted character, ruined trust and the disruption of democratic politics are the great achievements of state surveillance.
October 3, 2010  |  
 
 
 
The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper's bullet.

It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now?

That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers, Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil rights movement.  He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been at so many other critical places, recording iconic images of those tumultuous years. 

In addition to photographing moments large and small in the struggle for black civil rights in the South, Withers had another job. He was an informer for the FBI, passing along information on the doings of King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Ben Hooks, and other leaders of the movement. He reported on meetings he attended as a photographer, welcomed in by those he knew so intimately. He passed along photos of events and gatherings to his handler, Special Agent William H. Lawrence of the FBI's Memphis office. He named names and sketched out plans.

In an exhaustive recent report, the Memphis Commercial Appeal detailed Withers's undercover activities, provoking a pained and complex response from the many who knew him and were involved in the civil rights movement.  His family simply refuses to believe that the paper's report could be accurate. On the other hand, Andrew Young, with King during those last moments, accepts Withers's career as an informant, saying it just doesn't bother him.  Civil rights leaders, including King, viewed Withers as crucial to the movement's struggle to portray itself accurately in Jet, Ebony, and other black journals. In that Withers was successful -- and the rest, Young suggests, doesn't matter.  Besides, he told the Commercial Appeal, they had nothing to hide.  "I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side."

Activist and comedian Dick Gregory, hearing Young's comments, turned on his old comrade. "We are talking about a guy hired by the FBI to destroy us and the fact that Andy could say that means there must be a deep hatred down inside of him," he said. "If he feels that way about King only God knows what he feels about the rest of us."

This is the way it is with informers, so useful to reckless law enforcement authorities and employed by the tens of thousands as the secret shock troops of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Surveillance has multiple uses, not the least of which is to sow mistrust, which in turn eats at the cohesion of families, social and political movements, and ultimately the fabric of community itself.

D'Army Bailey, a former Memphis judge and target of FBI surveillance in the 1960s, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the use of informers in everyday life ruptured fundamental civic bonds, fomenting deep suspicion and mistrust. "It's something you would expect in the most ruthless totalitarian regimes.  Once that trust is shattered that doesn't go away."

Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter and now a professor of journalism at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University, pointed out that the black community in the South in the 1960s granted a special trust to black journalists. Indeed, some of those journalists took out an ad in black newspapers in February 1970 pledging not to spy or inform or betray that trust.

"If all that we've been told through these documents that have been released, if that's true, then it puts a... very, very, very heavy, heavy mark not just on [Withers] and his work but on the trust that the black journalists made many years ago with the black community," Caldwell said.

Keeping Tabs on Americans for Fun and Profit

That was then, this is now.  The Withers story is, of course, ancient history, shocking to many, yes, even though it is well known that FBI and police informers permeated the movement in general and King's circle in particular, and illegal wiretaps and bugs snared even the most private conversations of civil rights leaders. But few who thought or wrote about the Withers news found it an especially relevant tale for our present moment.  How wrong they were. 

If, amid anti-communist hysterias and social upheaval decades ago, the U.S. government employed armies of informers and other forms of often illegal surveillance, government and law enforcement agencies today are actually casting a far broader surveillance net in the name of security in a relentless effort to watch and hear everything -- and to far less attention or concern than in the 1960s.

In fact, a controversy in Pennsylvania has just erupted over secret state surveillance of legitimate political groups engaged in meetings, protests, and debates involving subjects of public importance -- natural gas drilling, abortion, military policy, animal mistreatment, gay rights. Such controversies over domestic political spying have surfaced remarkably regularly since September 11, 2001 -- police and FBI informers in mosques, Defense Department surveillance of antiwar groups and even gay organizations, National Security Agency illegal wiretapping, and surveillance of groups planning protests for the political conventions of the major parties. Revelations of such activities have become almost white noise.  All were covered in the media, but cumulatively it's as though none of them ever happened.

The Pennsylvania surveillance case, which is just the latest of these glimpses into the secret surveillance world of our ever more powerful national security state, does not directly involve informers (as far as we know). It marks a different point on what FBI Director Robert Mueller has referred to as the "continuum" -- the whole environment of daily life, really, which in the post-9/11 world has been appropriated by law enforcement officials in the name of "terrorism prevention."

"There is a continuum between those who would express dissent and those who would do a terrorist act," Mueller said ominously in a 2002 speech. "Somewhere along that continuum we have to begin to investigate. If we do not, we are not doing our job. It is difficult for us to find a path between the two extremes."

What does that mean? Just last week, FBI agents raided half a dozen homes of anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago, carting away papers, computers, clothing, and other personal effects, all in the name of investigating "material support of terrorism." The activists, their supporters, and their attorneys have a different view: they see the raids as designed to intimidate and disrupt legitimate political dissent -- points on "the continuum." It is a virtual certainty that evidence of intrusive surveillance will surface as these cases mature.

In Pennsylvania the continuum has meant, most recently, that the state Office of Homeland Security contracted with a small outfit, the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, run by a couple of ex-cops, one from York, Pennsylvania, the other raised in Philadelphia and a veteran of Israeli law enforcement. For the past year, the institute has been providing secret intelligence reports via the state Homeland Security Office to Pennsylvania police departments and private companies in order, the reports say, to "support public and private sector, critical infrastructure protection initiatives and strategies."

Many of these reports focused on groups opposed to Marcellus Shale drilling, which you may not have known was a breeding ground for terrorism. In fact, you may not even know what it is. But particularly in Pennsylvania and New York, Marcellus Shale means big bucks. The shale is part of a 600-mile-long geological formation containing a huge reservoir of natural gas.  Energy companies are seeking to exploit that formation in ways that have raised serious and widespread environmental concerns.  Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, facing severe budget problems, wants to impose a tax on the eager drillers. With Marcellus Shale, there's something for everybody -- except for environmentalists concerned about the impact of drilling on the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Delaware River basin.

Opposition from various environmental groups, then, has threatened to spoil the party. What a surprise to find many of those groups mentioned in one "counterterrorism" report after another. For instance, a report on an "anti-gas" training session in Ithaca, New York, noted that the group conducting the training (part of a radical environmental network) was nonviolent, but should be considered dangerous anyway.

"Training provided by the Ruckus Group does not include violent tactics such as the use of IEDs [roadside bombs] or small arms," a 2009 institute report assured its no-doubt-relieved readers. "The Ruckus Group does, however, provide expertise in planning and conducting demonstrations and campaigns that can close down a facility and embarrass a company." To spell it out: this counterterrorist monitoring institute was providing public-relations alerts for private energy companies at tax-payer expense.

For nearly a decade, 9/11 has been used to justify this kind of "intelligence" provided to corporate and private interests. Such information may have nothing to do with terrorism, but it serves nicely to illustrate how the protection of private profit has trumped concern for real public security. What was missed as institute "analysts" pondered potential Ruckus Group embarrassments to energy companies?

Rendell, who claimed shock and embarrassment when the reports became public this month, has now canceled the institute's $103,000 state contract.  He also insisted that he knew nothing about the contract, and reaffirmed the right of peaceful protest in the United States.

Not so fast. My colleague at the Philadelphia Inquirer Dan Rubin first reported the institute's questionable focus on July 19th. At that time, the state director of homeland security, James Powers, defended the institute's work, citing intelligence warnings about protests at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last year. "Powers said that Institute analysts posed in chat rooms as sympathizers of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, which opposed the summit, and learned where the group would be mobilizing," Rubin wrote. '"We got the information to the Pittsburgh police,' he said, 'and they were able to cut them off at the pass."'

How could Rendell not know about this? Among the many unanswered questions to date: Who received these reports and for what purpose? The state has declined so far to disclose a list of the recipients. But in an email that Powers inadvertently sent to an anti-drilling group, he all but admits that the intelligence operation, at least in part, served corporate drilling interests.

"We want to continue providing this [intelligence] support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies," Powers wrote. (He resigned at the beginning of October amid on-going criticism over the institute's reports.)

The Institute of Terrorism Response and Research was not alone in monitoring the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, of course. The Pennsylvania State Police also kept tabs on those potential demonstrators, funneling information gathered into the state "fusion center," its surveillance and intelligence data hub.

Fusion centers are largely products of the war on terror, a result of the massive waves of federal "security" counterterrorism funding that flowed nationwide in the wake of 9/11. More than 70 such centers now exist around the country, serving to gather "intelligence" from private and law-enforcement sources and state and federal agencies. This information is stored for future use as well as distributed to local police, state police, private corporations, and various public agencies.

In the case of the Pittsburgh G-20 summit surveillance, Pennsylvania's fusion center passed its information on protests and protest groups along to other local and federal law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and the U.S. military. (An instance of this probably resulted in the arrest of Elliott Madison, a self-described anarchist who was supposedly distributing information to demonstrators via Twitter, an activity applauded by U.S. authorities when utilized by Iranian dissidents, but apparently frowned upon when employed stateside.)

The specter of bombs, vandalism, disruption, violence, and anarchy infused these reports and hundreds of arrests were made during largely peaceful protests. Civil rights suits have, not surprisingly, followed in the aftermath of the summit.

Names, Names, and More Names

Here is the continuum at work. A group is singled out by an intelligence report -- a Quaker "cell" opposed to the wars in the Middle East, for instance, or opponents of Marcellus Shale drilling, or those who disagree with G-20 policies. Once the group is identified, federal agencies and state and local police move to insert informers in it and/or aggressively investigate it. Such surveillance, whether done by informers or by agents picking through trash bags, generates names. Names go into databases and are networked nationwide.  Databases grow.

Michael Perelman, one of the principals in the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, defended his group's work by arguing that even peaceful protests have security implications and that the institute did not track individuals. This is disingenuous. The institute and the state fusion center, officially known as the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, may work in parallel worlds, but their methods mirror each other. The state fusion center, run by the state police, provides access to law enforcement nationwide. Names of groups and members of groups are its stock in trade, the meat of all surveillance.  In the same way, the state Homeland Security Office distributed the institute's reports to hundreds of agencies and private companies.  

The tracking of legitimate political groups and people engaged in lawful political activity is, of course, a fundamental corruption of American democracy. Consider what happened in Oakland at the onset of the Iraq war. A peaceful protest at the Oakland port was met by police who opened fire on fleeing demonstrators and bystanders alike, shooting wooden bullets and tear gas canisters. In my book, Mohamed's Ghosts, I report that police had been alerted to potential violence by the California Anti-Terrorism Training Center, a state fusion center tracking political groups -- exactly the same thing done by the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research. About 60 people were injured, including 11 longshoremen, and 25 protestors were arrested. This event was justified by the fusion center's spokesman who claimed that a protest of a war waged against "international terrorism" is itself "a terrorist act."

But the story didn't end there. A month after the initial 2003 protest, demonstrators, led by Direct Action to Stop the War among other groups, held another Oakland protest to denounce the earlier police violence. Leaders of that protest, it turned out, were undercover Oakland police operatives who directed the protest's planning. Deputy Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan shrugged it all off, saying it was important for his department "to gather the information and maybe even direct [protestors] to do something that we wanted them to do."

The identification of dissident political groups, the gathering of names, the manipulation of actual acts -- these are the overt purposes of surveillance and informing. In reality, the goal of all this furtive, fervent activity is not to dismantle terrorist networks but to disrupt legitimate civic and political activity -- and especially, in the post-9/11 world, to identify and infiltrate U.S. Muslim and Middle Eastern congregations, civic groups, neighborhoods, and activist organizations.

Toward that end, the FBI has moved to beef up its ranks of informers. In its 2008 budget, the bureau sought more than $13 million simply to vet and track more than 15,000 working informants, and noted that new informants are signing up every day. Information provided by those informants and by other increasingly ubiquitous and sophisticated surveillance techniques is now funneled to fusion centers -- making it all just a mouse-click away from public and private agencies nationwide.

In the 1960s, when Ernest Withers was an informant, such computer-driven intelligence storage and distribution was only a gleam in J. Edgar Hoover's eye. Nevertheless, in Memphis, where Withers did the bulk of his work, information he passed along helped dismantle the Invaders, a radical group that saw 34 members arrested. Withers also gave government handlers photographs of religious leaders, political activists, and labor organizers, shadow portraits for shadow profiles in the FBI's burgeoning files. These were used by law enforcement authorities in efforts to control the 1968 sanitation workers' strike that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis.

Withers's image of striking Memphis sanitation workers holding aloft an unbroken sea of signs reading "I Am A Man" remains as vivid today as it was half a century ago. That a photographer who documented the segregated South so powerfully labored as a police informer may seem an unnerving contradiction. But Ronald Reagan also served as an FBI informer. So did the ACLU's famed First Amendment lawyer, Morris Ernst. Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, funneled information about the Kennedy assassination directly to J. Edgar Hoover as well.

Informers have multiple, often conflicting motives, and Withers, who died in 2007, is not around to explain or defend himself. The report on his activities during the civil rights movement, his betrayals of the movement's most prominent leaders, and his hand in destroying local activist groups, however, is a powerful reminder of the long history of political surveillance in this country and the corruptions and animus it breeds. Whether it is the FBI's use of informers within the civil rights movement or the state of Pennsylvania's monitoring of legitimate dissent in the post-9/11 world, the ultimate victim of such activity is American civil society itself.

The tainting of character, the undermining of basic trust, the disruption of democratic politics -- these are the great achievements of state surveillance. Thanks to 9/11 and truckloads of homeland security money, the stain of those achievements is now flowing as swiftly and freely as streams of data on a vast fiber optic network.

[Note on sources: Analysis of the use of surveillance and fusion centers at G-20 summits in Pittsburgh and elsewhere may be found in .pdf file format here.  Alarmist police reports disseminated on G-20 threats in Pittsburgh can be found in .pdf file format here.  The 2008 FBI budget document can be seen in .pdf file format here. The Justice Department's Inspector General has just issued a report examining the propriety of FBI investigation and surveillance of domestic political activity; the report, well worth reading, can be found, also in .pdf file format, here.]

Copyright 2010 Stephan Salisbury



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[ALOCHONA] The laureate behind bars



The laureate behind bars

THE

Nobel peace prize committee's announcement on October 8th that they are giving the award to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, will infuriate Chinese leaders. It may well give extra ammunition to hardliners in China who argue that the West is bent on undermining Communist Party rule. This is the same faction that argues the party should take advantage of the West's economic malaise to assert its own interests more robustly.

China reacted with outrage in 1989 when the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, to all appearances as a rebuke to the government for having crushed the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year. Though China regards Tibet as an integral part of the nation, Mr Liu stands apart as an ethnic Han Chinese who has devoted himself to addressing the politics of China proper.

 

Mr Liu is precisely the kind of dissident that the party regards as most threatening. He is a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the Tiananmen protests who has shown no sign of succumbing to the party's intimidation in spite of three periods of incarceration over the past two decades (more than five years in total). He is a mildly spoken literary critic who has created the sort of consensus that is unusual to forge among China's infighting intellectuals. Mr Liu's Charter 08, a document that calls for democracy, was signed initially by more than 300 liberal thinkers (and then by thousands of others online). It struck a reasoned tone to which radicals and moderates alike could subscribe. The debate over "universal values" that it helped to fuel still rages within the party today.

 

Mr Liu was arrested in December 2008, two days before Charter 08 was made public. The authorities chose Christmas Day, 2009, to announce his 11-year jail term for "inciting subversion of state power". The charter and a handful of Mr Liu's online essays were all the evidence that the court required. In May this year he was transferred to a remote prison, 500km (310 miles) north-east of Beijing.

The authorities might take comfort were they to read his essays carefully. In one of them, written in 2006, he said the authorities' attempts to block the spread of sensitive information meant that "a number of famous mainland Chinese dissidents find themselves in the paradoxical position of a backyard bush that blooms on the neighbour's side of the wall: enjoying great international fame but not recognised by the general public in their own country, known only within a small circle of people".  (The full text, along with those of other essays by Mr Liu and his trial documents, can be found on the website of Human Rights in China, a New York-based group.)

 

Mr Liu writes positively about the growth of civil society in China. But he is scathing about the willingness of the Chinese public to bend to party authority, so long as the party continues to provide opportunities (no matter how underhand) to get rich. Mr Liu is despondent about the prospects for a public push for change in China's authoritarian system. "The repression by the dictatorial authorities is, admittedly, one of the reasons, but the indifference of the populace is an even greater cause," he says.

 

There is likely to be much online comment in support of Mr Liu's award in China, but the Nobel prize is unlikely to galvanise any concerted protest action such as the party would find difficult to suppress. There will be an upsurge in demands from abroad for Mr Liu's release. Yet major Western powers are little inclined to jeopardise their relationships with China for the sake of individual dissidents. Just two months after Mr Liu's arrest, Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state, said after a visit to Beijing that she had raised human rights but that "our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."

 

China is a past master of deflecting Western concerns about its treatment of dissidents. In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping spoke dismissively to his colleagues about the West's response to the sentencing in 1979 of a dissident, Wei Jingsheng, to 15 years in prison. "We put Wei Jingsheng behind bars, didn't we?" he boasted. "Did that damage China's reputation? We haven't released him, but China's image has not been tarnished by that. Our reputation improves day by day."

 

The West in the 1980s was eager to court China as an ally in the cold war against the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen and the Soviet Union's collapse, China suddenly faced a lot more pressure on human rights from the West, but it was able to use occasional releases of high-profile dissidents to blunt foreign criticisms. In the past few years, China's rapid economic growth and the West's desire to profit from it has given China more breathing space.

Officials might one day choose an opportune moment to use the release of their Nobel-decorated dissident to win plaudits from Western governments. As Mr Liu has observed, China "has learned that by forcing famous dissidents into exile it kills two birds with one stone: it gives the dissidents a way out and wins favour with the international community; it also gets rid of direct political opponents, and belittles the moral image of dissidents within the country."  Mr Liu will now have to worry about such a fate for himself. 

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/10/nobel_peace_prize



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[ALOCHONA] KOILA HAZAR BAR DHUILEO SADA HOY NA - Florida (USA) BNP President & his wife are arrested for 1 M $ tax misappropriation and corruption [1 Attachment]

[Attachment(s) from Engr. Shafiq Bhuiyan included below]

KOILA    HAZAR    BAR    DHUILEO   SADA   HOY     NA 

 Florida (USA) BNP President & his wife are arrested for 1 M $ tax misappropriation and corruption


Florida (USA) BNP President & his wife are arrested for 1 M $ tax corruption – 9.10.10

He, BNP President, started work as an employee in 1980 in a daily grocery store. Then in 1990 he jointly (with 2 more people) bought a store.

Now this corrupt BNP couple is owner (jointly) of 118 grocery stores by cheating taxes..

KOILA   HAZAR     BAR     DHUILEO     SADA    HOY   NA

Their bail petition was rejected and now they are behind the bar.


Now, Jamat-BNP supporters may blaim  present Awami League(AL) lead govt is behind this arrest and bail rejection (happened in USA by US Govt and court) and 


Let they, Jamat-BNP supporters, call a HARTAL in Florida !!!!

For more detail, please read  attached PDF file and the following link of today's (9.10.10) newspaper link

http://ittefaq.com.bd/content/2010/10/09/news0669.htm



--
"Sustha thakon, nirapade thakon ebong valo thakon"

Shuvechhante,

Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan (ANU)
Auckland
NEW ZEALAND.

Phone: 00-64-9-620 2603 (Res), 00-64-02 1238 5500 (mobile)
E-mail: srbanunz@gmail.com

N.B.: If any one is offended by content of this e-mail, please ignore & delete this e-mail. I also request you to inform me by an e- mail - to delete your name from my contact list.




Attachment(s) from Engr. Shafiq Bhuiyan

1 of 1 File(s)


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[ALOCHONA] Is Pakistan Falling Apart?



Is Pakistan Falling Apart?

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Is Pakistan disintegrating? Are the state and society coming apart under the impact of successive political and natural disasters? The country swirls with rumors about the fall of the civilian government or even a military coup. The great Indus flood has disappeared from the headlines at home and abroad, though millions of farmers are squatting in the ruins of their villages. The US is launching its heaviest-ever drone attacks on targets in the west of the country, and Pakistan closed the main US and Nato supply route through the Khyber Pass after US helicopters crossed the border and killed Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan is undoubtedly in a bad way, but it is also a country with more than 170 million people, a population greater than Russia's, and is capable of absorbing a lot of punishment. It is a place of lop-sided development. It possesses nuclear weapons but children were suffering from malnutrition even before the floods. Electricity supply is intermittent so industrialists owning textile mills in Punjab complain that they have to use their own generators to stay in business. Highways linking cities are impressive, but the driver who turns off the road may soon find himself bumping along a farmer's track. The 617,000-strong army is one of the strongest in the world, but the government has failed to eliminate polio or malaria. Everybody agrees that higher education must be improved if Pakistan is to compete in the modern world, but the universities have been on strike because their budgets had been cut and they could not pay their staff.

The problem for Pakistan is not that the country is going to implode or sink into anarchy, but that successive crises do not produce revolutionary or radical change. A dysfunctional and corrupt state, part-controlled by the army, staggers on and continues to misgovern the country. The merry-go-round of open or veiled military rule alternates with feeble civilian governments. But power stays in the hands of an English-speaking élite that inherited from the British rulers of the Raj a sense of superiority over the rest of the population.

The present government might just squeak through the post-flood crisis because of its weakness rather than its strength. The military has no reason to replace it formally since the generals already control security policy at home and abroad, as well as foreign policy and anything else they deem important to their interests. The ambition of the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, in the next few weeks is to try to fight off the demand by the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, that the legal immunity of President Asif Ali Zardari should be lifted.  Zardari, who owes his position to having been the husband of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007, has a enduring (though unproven) reputation for corruption during his pre-presidential days. Whatever the outcome of the struggle with the Supreme Court,  Zardari is scarcely in a position to stand up to the military leaders who may find it convenient to have such a discredited civilian leader nominally in power.

The military have ruled Pakistan for more than half the time since independence in 1947, but their control has never been quite absolute. The soldiers have never managed to put the politicians and the political parties permanently out of business, so the balance between military and non-military still counts. But there is no doubt about which way the struggle is going. A decisive moment came on  July 24 this year when General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief of staff, was reappointed for another three-year term. The US embassy in Islamabad is said by foreign diplomats and Pakistani officials to have protested vigorously but unavailingly to Washington. It said that keeping General Kayani in place would inflict a fatal wound on democracy and demonstrate that the civilian government could not get rid of its own army commander. In the event, Washington, always a crucial influence in Islamabad, decided that it would prefer to deal with a single powerful figure able to deliver in negotiations over Afghanistan. This was in keeping with US policy towards Pakistan since the 1950s. "We were put under intense pressure to keep Kayani,"� said an aide of President Zardari. "We were left with no choice."�

In one sense, the army never really left power after the fall of General Pervez Musharraf in 2008. It has continued to allocate to itself an extraordinarily high proportion of Pakistan's limited resources. Military bases all over the country look spruce and well cared-for, while just outside their razor-wire defenses are broken roads and slum housing. At the entrance of a base just west of Islamabad last week was an elderly but effective-looking tank as a monument, the ground around it parade-ground clean. A few hundred yards away, a yellow bulldozer was driving through thick mud to make a flood-damaged road passable two months after the deluge, while a side street nearby was closed by a pool of stagnant grey-colored water. At the other end of the country in northern Sindh, a local leader, who like many critics of the Pakistani military did not want his name published, pointed to a wide canal. He said: "This canal is not meant to be taking water from the Indus, but it is allowed to operate because it irrigates land owned by army officers."�

The army projects a messianic image of itself in which it selflessly takes power to save the nation. It likes to contrast its soldierly virtues of incorruptibility and efficiency with the crookedness and ineptitude of civilians. "The army is very good at claiming to be the solution to problems which it has itself created,"� complained a local politician in Punjab. "It is also good at ascribing all failures to civilian governments, which cannot act because the army monopolizes resources." He added caustically that in his area, the floods had arrived on  August 6 and the first army assistance on  August 26.

Politicians and journalists criticizing the army often employ code words where more is implied than stated. But last month, a government minister made a pungent attack on the army that astonished listening journalists. The minister for defense production, Abdul Qayyum Jatoi, directly accused the army of being behind the killing of the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in 2007, and the revered Baluchi leader Nawab Bugti, a year earlier.

"We did not provide the army with uniforms and boots to kill their own countrymen,"�  Jatoi said bluntly, suggesting that the army leaders do their duty by going to defend Pakistan's frontiers and end rumors of a coup. He added: "Not only politicians should be blamed for corruption, rather [army] generals and judges should be held responsible."�

Jatoi's words reflect what Pakistanis say about the army in private, but seldom dare do so in public. He paid a price for his forthrightness, since  Gilani promptly sacked him and he is being accused of high treason in a petition before the courts. He says he does not miss his job very much because all the important decisions in his ministry were in any case taken by the military. Pakistanis are unhappy because every week seems to bring another piece of bad news. The country is highly politicized with millions of people observing with acute interest the struggles for power at the central and local level. Taxi drivers discuss the make-up of the Supreme Court and its future composition. When it comes to open and lively political disputes, Pakistan is more like Lebanon, with its tradition of weak government but free expression of opinion, than Russia or Egypt with their supine and intimidated populations. Political parties in Pakistan are powerful and, given an ineffectual and corrupt administrative apparatus, everybody believes they need somebody of influence to protect their interests. The army likes to denigrate civilian politicians as "feudalists", but in practice, big landowners have limited political power. Politicians gain influence through helping "clients" who need their support and that of their parties. "All politics here is really about jobs,"� says National Assembly member Mir Dost Muhammad Mazari.

Pakistan may not be falling apart, but the floods and the economic crisis – the government is bankrupt and inflation is at 18-20 per cent – means that every Pakistani I meet, be they small farmers, generals, industrialists or tribal leaders, is gloomy about the future. Each negative incident is interpreted as a sign of Pakistan's decline and a menacing omen of worse to come. Two recent scandals, both filmed as they happened and shown on as many as 26 cable television news channels, appear to confirm that the country is saturated with corruption and violence. This explosion of news channels has happened only in the past few years and makes it far more difficult to censor information.

One scandal was the notorious allegation of match-fixing in return for bribes made against Pakistani cricketers touring England. Commentators noted acidly that it was typical of the political system that the highly unpopular head of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Ijaz Butt, could not be dismissed by the defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, because he is the latter's brother-in-law. The scandal was peculiarly damaging because it broke in August just as the government was trying to persuade the world to give it large sums of money for flood relief.

A second scandal, which may have horrified Pakistanis even more than the bribery case in England, took place a few days earlier. News out of Pakistan at the time was all about the devastating floods and it received little international attention, but the gory events were again played endlessly on television. They took place on  August 15 in the city of Sialkot, north of Lahore, where two wholly innocent teenagers called Hafiz Sajjad, 18, and Mohammed Muneeb Sajjad, 15, were misidentified as robbers and lynched by a crowd in the middle of a city street. Uniformed police stood nonchalantly by as men with iron rods and sticks took turns over a period of hours to beat the boys to death. Their mangled bodies were finally hung upside down in the market and the case only became know because a courageous television reporter had accidentally witnessed and secretly filmed what happened.

The Sialkot lynching shows Pakistani society at its worst. It also illustrates what happens when there is a breakdown in the administration of justice. In this case, the local police are reported to have routinely killed alleged criminals or handed them over to lynch mobs. This breakdown in the administration of justice is general. I asked Pashtun tribal elders in a town near Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province what they most needed. They all said governance: some form of effective local government administration. In south Punjab I went to a tribal court where 100 tough-looking Baluchi tribesmen had submitted a land dispute to a respected leader of their tribe. It was a complicated case involving a grandfather's will written in 1985 that left 12 acres of land unequally to the sons of his two marriages. The will was not very precise but nobody cared at first because the land was in the desert. But then one member of the family started to irrigate it and made it productive, leading to a rancorous dispute about ownership. The claimants to the land had chosen binding arbitration by a respected local leader, because a decision would be swift and free. They said that if they went through the state courts, the case could take years and the judges and police could be bribed.

But incidents such as the Sialkot lynching do not mean that the country is slipping into primal anarchy like Somalia. The Western world looks at Pakistan primarily in relation to Afghanistan, the Taliban, extreme jihadi Islam and the "war on terror". In a country of 170 million people there are always episodes that can be used as evidence to illustrate any trend, such as the belief that Pakistan is filled with bloodthirsty Islamic militants bent on holy war. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, which compiles an annual list of failed states, placed Pakistan 10th on the list, claiming that it showed more signs of state failure than Haiti and Yemen, and is only slightly more stable than Somalia and Yemen.

The country's high ranking in the survey tells one more about the paranoid state of mind of Washington post-9/11 than what is actually happening. There is no incentive to play down the "Islamic threat to Pakistan" on the part of any journalist who wants his or her story to be published, think-tankers who need a grant, or diplomats who seek promotion. The influence and prospects for growth of small jihadi organizations are systematically exaggerated. Over-attentive reading of the Koran is seen as the first step on the road to Islamic terrorism. Overstated claims about their activities by fundamentalist Islamic groups are happily lapped up and repeated.

Stories acquire a life of their own, regardless of their factual basis. During the recent floods, the foreign media reported on how militant Islamic groups were prominent and energetic in distributing aid to victims, the suggestion being that they will use their enhanced status to recruit more young men for holy war. This is supposedly what they did during the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, which killed 75,000 people whom it was difficult to reach because they lived high in the mountains. Christine Fair, an expert on Pakistan at Georgetown University in Washington, eloquently demolishes this and other spurious stories about the growth of militant Islam in Pakistan. She cites a survey of 28,000 households in 126 villages in Kashmir in which one-quarter of the inhabitants said they had received aid from international agencies, 7 per cent from non-militant Islamic charities, and just 1 per cent from the Islamic militant groups. Of course, the militantly religious of all kinds are likely to be to the front in helping survivors of any disaster, because most faiths adjure their adherents to help others in a crisis. The only person I met during a visit to flooded areas who could in any way be described as a religious militant engaged in relief work was an amiable German Pentecostalist waiting for a flight in Lahore airport.

Another hardy perennial story about Pakistan claims that because of the undoubted inadequacy of the Pakistani public education system, madrasahs, or religious schools, provide free education to the needy. Once enrolled, the children are supposedly brainwashed to turn them into the future foot soldiers of jihadi Islam. In reality, Pakistani educational specialists say that just 1.3 per cent of children in school go the madrasahs, 65 per cent to public schools, and 34 per cent to non-religious private schools. In recent years, it is the small and affordable private schools that have expanded fastest, mainly because jobs in them are open to educated women prepared to accept low pay. Most jihadis turn out to have been educated at public schools.

Extreme Islamists have seldom done well in elections in Pakistan. Widespread popular support for the Afghan Taliban stems primarily from the conviction that they are essentially a Pashtun national liberation movement fighting a foreign occupation. The Pakistani Taliban was once said to be "60 miles from Islamabad", but such scaremongering ignored the fact that there were three mountain ranges and one of the world's most powerful armies in between the Taliban's rag-tag fighters and the capital. The Pakistani state may not function very well but it is not failing, and – a pity – current crises may not even change it very much.

 


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[ALOCHONA] The new indemnity law unacceptable



Editorial
The new indemnity law unacceptable

 
The just-concluded session of the current parliament, prorogued on Tuesday, saw passage of quite a few of government bills without much discussion, thanks to undemocratic attitude of the governing coalition and the perpetual absence of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party from the House. Subsequently, the people of the country have been deprived of the opportunity to clearly know the contents of the laws made by an otherwise loyal parliament. Still, the media did not fail to take special note of one of the bills passed – Bidduth O Jalanir Druto Sorboraha Briddhi (Bishesh Bidhan) Bill, 2010 – which is absolutely undemocratic and unjust, and therefore anti-people. The law, said to have been enacted for ensuring quick supply of electricity and fuel to the people, stipulates that no court of the country will have the right to take into cognisance for trial of any steps taken under the legislation in question by any authorities, public or private, in the future. In other words, the parliament members belonging to the ruling coalition have enacted in advance, with the opposition MPs absent from the House, an indemnity law to save the skin of the government of the day, and its private sector partners concerned, from the trial of any illegal steps to be taken, and corruption to be committed, in the business of generation and supply of power and electricity.
   
No doubt that the country has been suffering from acute shortage of electricity since long, before the incumbents took office in January 2009. The ruling party was adequately aware of the shortage before the last general elections, for which the party routinely criticised its political predecessors. Moreover, in its election manifesto, the ruling Awami League had marked gas and electricity generation as a priority issue to be addressed immediately after the formation of the government. The party was voted to power about two years ago but its government has done nothing significant about resolving the power crisis. Now, with almost two years of its tenure already over, the government has made the 'special' law to urgently solve the problem, with the 'help' of some private companies, and arranged for indemnity in advance so that they are not tried in the future for any illegal and irregular steps, if taken, in the process of buying or generating power! The very act of making such a law in advance clearly hints that the government and its private sector partners have already planned some illegal and non-transparent steps, understandably to make some quick money, in the name of solving power crisis on an urgent basis. Where was this 'urgency' over the last two years? One wonders if the government deliberately allowed the problem to become more severe only to justify this indemnity to a vicious group of people planning to plunder a huge amount of money from the public exchequer.
   
The concept of indemnity itself is undemocratic, for it ignores the issue of accountability to the people — a core principle of democratic governance. The newly enacted indemnity law is, therefore, unacceptable, completely unacceptable. The politically conscious and democratically oriented sections of society, therefore, need to raise their voice against this indemnity law before the public money is being plundered under it. The power sector, after all, involves a huge amount of money.
 


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[ALOCHONA] AL men attack BNP marchers, kill upazila chairman



AL men attack BNP marchers, kill upazila chairman

 
Boraigram upazila chairman Sanaullah Nur Babu, also a local leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, was killed and 30 others, including four journalists, were seriously injured in an attack allegedly by the activists of Awami League at Bonpara in the district on Friday.
   District unit of the BNP called a dawn-to-dusk general strike in Natore for Sunday in protest against the attack and killing.
   The district BNP announced the programme at a press conference in the evening.
   Witnesses said that a group of ruling party men, mostly activists of Chhatra League and Juba League,
   had mounted the attack on a procession of upazila BNP while it was passing through Bonpara Bazar area at around 11:00am, leaving 30 people, including Sanaullah, critically injured.
   Sanaullah was first taken to Natore sadar hospital and shifted to Rajshahi Medical College Hospital as his condition deteriorated. He died at around 2:00pm, police and locals said.
   Witnesses said the ruling party men led by district AL leader Professor Zakir Hossain and brandishing firearms and other weapons had pounced on the activists of the BNP near Bonpara as they were marching towards the upazila headquarters to attend a scheduled rally. Sanaullah was leading the procession.
   The ruling party men also assaulted four journalists of different dailies and television channels, including Bangladesh Pratidin's Natore correspondent Nasim Uddin, ATN Bangla cameraman Rana Ahmed and Diganta Television cameraman Limon Hossain, witnesses said. They also snatched away two TV cameras.
   The AL activists also vandalised a number of vehicles during the attack, witnesses said.
   Among the injured, upazila Juba Dal president Rafiq Sarder, Boraigram municipality mayor Mohammad Ishaq Ali and some others were admitted to Natore sadar hospital and different local clinics.
   Soon after the attack, upazila BNP brought out a procession in protest at the attack.
   BNP leader and former state minister for land Ruhul Kuddus Talukder Dulu, who was scheduled to attend the rally as chief guest, in his instant reaction on Friday afternoon demanded immediate arrest of the attackers.
   'The ruling party men attacked the BNP leaders and activists without provocation…It was a planned attack,' he alleged.
   He said a tougher movement would be launched if the perpetrators were not given exemplary punishment. The BNP leader also alleged that police had stood by as passive onlookers during the attack.
   Zakir Hossain, information and research secretary of the district AL, denied he was involved in the attack.
   Mohammad Anwar Hossain, officer-in-charge of Boraigram police station, said the situation was under control.
   'Additional police have been deployed in the area to avoid any further trouble,' he said.
 
 


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[ALOCHONA] The Christian Science Monitor



Rachel Corrie was a non-violent peace activist who went to Palestine to show her support for native people. Israel not only killed this unarmed young woman but trying it's usual practice of "Blame the victim" ideology. Here is an update from Christian Science Monitor.

 

The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Rachel Corrie trial continues in Israel, reviving controversial case

Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist, was killed in March 2003 near the Gaza-Egypt border by an Israeli bulldozer. Her parents are suing the Israeli government for a symbolic $1.
Temp Headline Image
Cindy Corrie (l.) and Craig Corrie (r.), the parents of Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, sit together with their daughter Sarah at the District Court in Haifa, northern Israel, March 10. The Corrie family is demanding a symbolic $1 in punitive damages from the state for wrongful killing and negligence.
(Moti Milrod/AP)

By Ben Lynfield, correspondent
posted October 8, 2010 at 12:27 pm EDT
Haifa, Israel —
Seven years after an Israeli military D-9 bulldozer buried American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie under sandy soil near Gaza's border with Egypt, her family has effectively put the Israeli army on trial for her death. The Corrie family is demanding a symbolic $1 in punitive damages from the state for wrongful killing and negligence.
Ms. Corrie, along with other nonviolent volunteers from the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), was trying to block two army bulldozers from demolishing Palestinian homes in Rafah when she was killed March 16, 2003. The commander of the two-man bulldozer team denied seeing Corrie, but ISM volunteers said in affidavits that the bulldozer driver could see her while pushing dirt on her body.
On Thursday it was the turn of Shalom Michaeli, who headed the short-lived military police investigation into Corrie's death, to testify in Haifa District Court. During most of his testimony, Mr. Michaeli was cool and self-confident. But on several occasions his voice rose and he told Corrie family attorney Hussein Abu Hussein to "stop putting words in my mouth."
He said that an army manual specifying that the D-9 bulldozer should not be operated near people was not relevant in a situation of war. "There was war going on between the Israel Defense Forces and all the people in that area," said Michaeli.
In the cross-examination it also emerged that Michaeli ordered only a partial transcript of radio transmissions and that he did not question the operator of a surveillance camera that panned away from the scene only minutes before Corrie was killed.

A symbol of idealism

In death, Corrie, from Olympia, Wash., became a symbol of idealism and self-sacrifice to many and an embarrassment to Israel. But her parents, who sat in the observers part of the courtroom taking notes as translators whispered to them, say the case is not about only accountability for Corrie's death. They have paid about $50,000 for translation alone since the case started early this year.
''This is way beyond the means of someone in Gaza. So few of the people killed in Gaza and the West Bank ever get any sort of day in court. When we have the means and we have the voice because Rachel was an international, that brings with it an obligation to go forward,'' said her father, Craig Corrie.
''The process is both physically and emotionally demanding,'' adds Mr. Corrie, a soft-spoken retired insurance actuary and Vietnam war veteran. ''I think it's something we each feel we need to go through for one reason or another. For me, part of the reason is to keep this from happening to anybody else. You do what you can to save another family this sort of grief."

Was the investigation thorough enough?

After Corrie's death, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised former President Bush a "thorough, credible, and transparent" investigation. But during the course of the trial, evidence has emerged that appears to implicate Israel's Gaza commander in an attempt to obstruct justice.
According to a hand-written military police affidavit from the day after Corrie was killed, the commander of the bulldozer was giving testimony when a colonel dispatched by former southern commander Maj. Gen. Doron Almog interrupted the proceedings and ordered the witness to stop testifying. General Almog, for his part, recently denied that he interdicted the testimony, which attorney Abu Hussein said could have been crucial for assessing whether the bulldozer commander's assertion that he did not see Rachel Corrie was reasonable.
The Israeli military has maintained troops were not to blame for the death and Israel accused Corrie and other ISM volunteers of "illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous" behavior that day. The state's writ of defense stresses that the incident took place in a ''reality of armed conflict in which fierce acts of warfare are conducted."
"The incident in which it is alleged the deceased was struck occurred during an action that is an act of state. The state is exempt from responsibility for activity legally authorized and in good faith."

Israel says Corrie is to blame

The writ blames Corrie herself for the tragedy, saying her presence in Gaza was illegal and that she "willingly endangered herself and/or did not act as a cautious and/or reasonable and/or intelligent and/or guileless person would have acted."
The writ says troops came under attack from a fragmentation grenade an hour before the incident. It also stresses the bulldozer had "limited field of vision."
Judge Oded Gershon has granted state requests to protect some witnesses' identities by having them testify behind a partition curtain that enables the judge and lawyers to see them, but not the observers in the courtroom.
The commander of a second bulldozer that was on the scene at the time of the incident testified Thursday without the Corries being able to see him.
"I did not see how she met her end," said the former commander, who was identified only by his initials, A.S. At another point he added, "I saw her critically harmed, buried in a pile of sand. She was covered up to her knees. What I saw was her upper body."
The Corries are petitioning the Israeli supreme court to remove the partition so that they can see the people who are testifying.
"While Rachel stood in front of a wall to protect the two families huddled behind it, the state is now making the soldiers hide behind a wall that denies us the opportunity to see them. The state of Israel has been hiding for over seven years. Where is the justice?" said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.


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Re: [ALOCHONA] Re: Ershad’s trial a must to deter future attempts at extra-constitutional takeover



Dr. Milon's mother was counselled with fine words but no real actions as the murderer become her kind of democratic struggle's partner.
Killing of the former finance minister M S Kibria of AL government still waiting for trial, again with fine words of democracy and justice.
Jangibad and Mckarthyism will continue and Ahmadia Muslim's will return again as religiously oppressed sect when the so called secular govt. not in power.


--- On Tue, 5/10/10, ezajur <Ezajur@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: ezajur <Ezajur@yahoo.com>
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Re: Ershad's trial a must to deter future attempts at extra-constitutional takeover
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, 5 October, 2010, 7:11 AM

 
In spite of the delusions of AL nothing 'remarkably democratic' has taken place in Bangladesh following the demise of the CTG. And until 'remarkably democratic' practice becomes routine the threat of an autocratic takeover, military interference or plain disastrous chaos remains very, very real. I don't know about the tragedy of Dr Millon's murder. But inspite of the fine words of AL to his mother the case was suspended, according to the same article below, once Ershad joined the coalition.
To cap it all, the nonsensical manner in which, under judicial cover, all blame for the BDR tragedy has peen placed firmly and fully upon the footsoldiers of the BDR, does not bode well at all for the future.
These things have a way of coming back with a vengeance.
 
    
 
 

--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, Isha Khan <bdmailer@...> wrote:
>
> Ershad's trial a must to deter future attempts at extra-constitutional
> takeover
>
> Selina Akhter, mother of the late Dr Shamsul Alam Khan Milon, tells New Age
> by *Shahidul Islam Chowdhury*
>
> <http://www.newagebd.com/2010/sep/16/img2.html>
> DEPOSED military dictator HM Ershad needs to be prosecuted and punished for
> usurping state power, to deter recurrence of extra-constitutional takeover
> in the future, so says Selina Akhter, mother of Dr Shamsul Alam Khan Milon.
> Dr Milon, the then join secretary general of the Bangladesh Medical
> Association, was shot dead on the Dhaka University campus on November 27,
> 1990; he was on his way to attending an anti-Ershad meeting. The killing is
> believed to be orchestrated by the autocratic ruler, to foil the mass
> upsurge for democracy that eventually led to Ershad's downfall.
>
> `The government needs to arrange for the trial of Ershad, to deter
> extra-constitutional takeover of state power in the future,' Selina said in
> an exclusive interview with New Age on Tuesday. `The trial is also essential
> for democratic politics to flourish in Bangladesh.'
>
> Selina, a retired college teacher, said Ershad should also be prosecuted and
> punished for the political killings during his illegal rule, including that
> of his son, and was critical the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist
> Party for defaulting on their promise to do so although both these parties
> alternated in power since the fall of his autocratic regime.
> `It is indeed unfortunate and regrettable that the two parties that were
> in the forefront of the anti-autocratic movement, which resulted in the fall
> of the Ershad regime in the first week of December 1990, should now hobnob
> with him and, in the process, expose their inherent weakness that they are
> incapable of winning elections without his support,' she said.
>
> The politically conscious and democratically oriented sections of society
> need to raise their voice against such hobnobbing by the Awami League and
> the BNP with Ershad, Selina said.
> Following are the excerpts of the interview:
>
> *Your son, Dr Shamsul Alam Khan, was in the forefront of the movement
> against the autocratic regime of Lieutenant General (retired) HM Ershad. Did
> he talk about the movement with you?*
> We would have discussions about the anti-Ershad movement at the dining
> table almost every day during those years. When doctors and other
> professionals joined the movement towards the end of 1990, Ershad set up a
> medical camp with doctors from the army at Suhrawardy Udyan, apparently to
> show that the government could still provide health care to the people
> without the cooperation of civilian physicians.
>
> I remember telling Milon, who was then the joint general secretary of the
> Bangladesh Medical Association, that they should remain alert so as to not
> lose the people's support for the movement. He told me that they were very
> much alert about the government's scheme. Milon told me that he was
> confident about the success of the movement as the people, including
> professional such as engineers, doctors and journalists, were behind it.
>
> *Dr Milon was killed in November 1990 at a time when the autocratic
> regime was trying desperately to contain the movement. Do you think Ershad
> had a hand in the killing?*
> Beyond any doubt. A bullet of a .303 rifle, which is generally used by
> law enforcers, was found in Milon's body. It was a proof that the individual
> who had shot Milon dead was on the government's payroll, and it is
> impossible for a law enforcer to open fire without clearance from the higher
> authorities.
>
> *Was the trial of Milan's killing held?*
> A member of the medical association filed a case about the killing. The
> trial was, however, suspended as some witnesses were declared `hostile'.
>
> *Where does the case stand now?*
> We have tried several times to revive the case. Eminent jurist Dr Kamal
> Hossain assured me that he would look after the case for trial. Some Awami
> League leaders, including Mostafa Jalal Mohiuddin (now a Dhaka city
> lawmaker), also assured me that the trial would be held. The entire process
> was, however, suspended after Ershad had joined the Awami League-led
> alliance.
>
> *The Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party demanded trial of
> Milon's killing during the anti-Ershad movement. Both these parties have
> come been in power since Ershad's fall in December 1990. What has been their
> role vis-à-vis trial of Milon's killing?*
> After Milon's death, top leaders of both the parties demanded trial of,
> and punishment for, the perpetrators and masterminds of the killing.
> However, they hardly took any initiative to hold the trial when in power.
>
> *Many people, including Milon, were killed during the movement against
> Ershad. Do you demand trial of all the political killings of that period?*
> Certainly. I am waiting to see the trial of Milon's killing. Many people,
> including (labour leader) Tajul (Islam) and some students, were killed for
> their involvement in the anti-autocracy movement. The government should hold
> trial of these killings. But it will remain a difficult task if we (family
> members of the dead persons) alone demand trial.
> The government needs to arrange for the trial of Ershad, to deter
> extra-constitutional takeover of state power in the future. The trial is
> also essential for democratic politics to flourish in Bangladesh.
>
> *The Awami League and the BNP were in the forefront of the movement
> against Ershad. In the past 20 years, however, both the parties seem to have
> been engaged in a rat race to win over Ershad's support. How do feel about
> it?*
> It is indeed unfortunate and regrettable that the two parties that were
> in the forefront of the anti-autocratic movement, which resulted in the fall
> of the Ershad regime in the first week of December 1990, should now hobnob
> with him and, in the process, expose their inherent weakness that they are
> incapable of winning elections without his support.
> I don't understand why they (Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina) would need to
> join hands with him (Ershad) forgetting their movement against him.
> Ershad's presence in Bangladesh politics will only hinder the efforts to
> ensure democratic growth of politics. The burgeoning democracy here will be
> threatened if he is allowed to participate in political activities; in fact,
> the government should impose a ban on his political activities as a military
> can never play a role in democratic growth of politics.
> Moreover, Ershad has made it clear that he was and is an opportunist. He
> will leave the Awami League-led alliance without hesitation if he sees signs
> of the BNP coming back to power.
>
> *Do you think the politically conscious and democratically oriented
> sections of society need to raise their voice against the mainstream
> political parties forming and maintaining alliance with Ershad?*
> It will be essential to keep political clean. At the same time, the trial
> of all political killings during Ershad's regime will remain elusive unless
> the people raise their voice in demand for the trial.
>
> *Ershad had military takeover legalised by parliament. The High Court in
> a recent verdict on the fifth amendment to the constitution condemned the
> military rule and recommended that the persons involved in grabbing power
> through martial law should be suitably punished. But the government as well
> as parliament has neither condemned military takeover nor taken steps to
> punish anyone for declaring martial law. What is your comment as a citizen?*
> I do not understand, as I don't have a law background, why trial on
> charges of extra-constitutional takeover of power and killing cannot be held
> under existing laws.
> The law minister said holding Ershad's trial would not be possible unless
> a new law is enacted. If the minister's statement is true, why are they not
> taking any measures to enact a new law? What is their problem if Ershad is
> punished?
>
> *You have been persistent in your demand for trial of Ershad. But Ershad
> has recently claimed that he cannot be tried on charges of declaring martial
> law and the persons who demand his trial are wrongheaded. How do you react
> to his statement?*
> I shall continue to demand Ershad's trial no matter what he says. The
> people need to unite and raise their voice to realise the demand.
>
> *Ershad made the comment after a 35-minute one-to-one meeting with the
> prime minister and Awami League president Sheikh Hasina at her office.
> People believe his comments were influenced by the conversations they had at
> the meeting. What do you think?*
> There is a question in people's mind as to why he would make the
> statement unless there was a discussion on the issue with the prime
> minister.
>
> *The Supreme Court suggested enactment of a law to contain attempts to
> declare martial law. Do you think that attempts to declare military rule can
> be prevented through taking legal measures alone?*
> Taking legal measures is one option. But democracy here will remain
> vulnerable unless the people become united and take collective measures to
> strengthen democracy.
>
> *What role the people in general, the professionals, the workers and the
> students in particular need to play to thwart attempts at military takeover
> and make democracy sustainable?*
> The people need to raise their voice against all autocratic governments
> and undemocratic systems here, no matter which party is in power.
> Unfortunately, we cannot do it due to several shortcomings including lack
> of quality in political leadership. We need to discover new and young
> political leadership. We also need to create an atmosphere that helps young
> patriotic political leadership to emerge.
> We also need to go door-to-door and motivate people so that the military
> rulers cannot mobilise support for themselves.
>
> *Do the politicians and the court in general and the
> democratically-oriented section of the groups in particular need to play any
> role?*
> In fact, they are the key persons in these efforts to thwart attempts at
> military takeover and undemocratic rule in the country.
> The politicians need to play a leading role and make sacrifices to
> strengthen the democratic process as well as to protect democracy so that
> the people's right to elect their government is not stolen in
> extra-constitutional and undemocratic ways. They also need to motivate the
> people to play their due role in protecting democracy.
> The court that declared military rule illegal could instantly punish
> Ershad, the only living military ruler. They can declare any move to
> takeover power through extra-constitutional means illegal anytime.
> But it will be impossible for them to discharge the responsibility if
> they become isolated from the people.
>
> *What do you do currently?*
> It is unbearable to live with memories of Milon's death. I still try to
> unravel the mystery surrounding his death as his killers are still alive and
> continue to hobnob with powerful politicians. Ershad tried to visit me to
> offer support. But I declined.
> Milon's friends and sisters have set up Boyoshshee Kalyan Samiti, a
> non-profit social welfare organisation, to keep me busy. With individual
> donations, we are now running an old home for the helpless and isolated
> elderly people to provide them with mental support and also medical
> treatment. We are trying to involve them in social activities irrespective
> of their caste, creed and religion so that they do not feel alone in
> society. Boyoshshee however requires the government's support to expand the
> programme including establishing a hospital for the elderly people.
>
> http://www.newagebd.com/2010/sep/16/oped.html
>



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