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Friday, January 10, 2014

[mukto-mona] FW: [Diagnose] Authoritarianism and anarchy endanger Bangladesh: Siddiqui




 
From: shadhin071@gmail.com
To: Diagnose@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 10:26:01 -0500
Subject: [Diagnose] Authoritarianism and anarchy endanger Bangladesh: Siddiqui

 
Bangladesh falls in the Totalitarian and Autocratic government rule. Hasina becomes the new Dictator of Bangladesh!!!
 
 

A national election was held. But the opposition parties, leading in the polls, boycotted, fearing a rigged vote. The public shared the doubts — the turnout was abysmal, perhaps 22 per cent instead of the usual 85 per cent. Unopposed, the ruling party won but not before 18 people were shot dead by troops.

More may die amid mounting daily protests demanding a new election, a call supported by the United States, the European Union and the British Commonwealth. But Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina won't listen.
She had refused a neutral caretaker government to conduct a fair election, a routine practice in the past — initiated, in fact, by Hasina herself when she was in opposition. But this time fearing that a temporary handover would become permanent, she changed the law.
She also prevented the leader of the opposition from campaigning. She placed the leader of the third party under detention.
Mid-campaign she had a prominent opposition leader hanged. He had been convicted by a flawed tribunal for war crimes during the bloody birth of the nation's secession from Pakistan in 1971. She ignored pleas of clemency by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
The tribunal's original verdict had been life imprisonment. But Hasina changed the rules to allow an appeal. A court duly ordered the man hanged.
War criminals should be brought to justice but the process has to be impeccably fair and free of political interference. The 10 leading accused before this tribunal have been Hasina's political opponents.
The hanged leader belonged to the Islamic Party, which was banned and barred from the election. Hasina rationalized her hounding of Islamists in the name of secularism, as is the vogue these days from North America through Egypt to Asia.
But her wrath knows no bounds of ideology. Earlier it singed a certified secularist, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus. He's the pioneer banker who popularized microcredit that uplifted tens of thousands of poor, especially women. But he made the mistake of flirting with the idea of running for office. She had him removed from the board of the bank he founded.
Hasina is pondering more hangings.
As many as 152 people have been handed death sentences — members of a border militia that rebelled in Feb. 2009 against the army, killing 74 officers and their family members. The accused said a protest against poor working conditions got out of hand. The army called it a mutiny. The government agreed. Forty-seven defendants died in custody, assumed murdered. The top UN human rights envoy, Navi Pillay, said the entire trial process was a farce. However, Hasina was not going to alienate the army, which in the past has toppled several elected governments.
The opposition, led by Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, will continue street politics. There were 36 nation-wide strikes last year, costing the economy $7 billion. About 300 people were killed in political protests.
There will be more shutdowns in the months ahead, as the opposition pays Hasina back in her own coin — she having shut the country down for 107 days when she was in opposition (2001-06).
She is the daughter of a prime minister, Mujibur Rahman, assassinated in 1975 in a coup. Zia is the wife of a general who led that coup and was himself killed in a counter-coup in 1981. Both women worked together to bring back civilian rule in 1990 but have been battling ever since, each having been prime minister twice.
Both need to go so that the nation of 160 million can get past dynastic politics (the curse of the region — the Nehrus/Gandhis of India, the Bandaranaikes and the Rajapaksas of Sri Lanka, the Bhuttos of Pakistan).
Bangladesh has had a tragic history. Whereas the entire subcontinent paid a huge price for the murderous end of British colonialism in 1947 — India carved into largely Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, leading to sectarian bloodbath in which one million people died — Bangladesh suffered more.
It began as the eastern half of Pakistan, separated by 1,200 kilometres of India. The arrangement, forged in the name of religion, fell apart over the more mundane matter of power. West Pakistan refused to accept the results of an election won by a Bengali from the East. Not only did the army intervene but Z.A. Bhutto (father of the late Benazir Bhutto) worked in cahoots with the army to become prime minister of a truncated Pakistan, rather than accept the electoral verdict. (The Bhuttos would later recast themselves as democrats.)
The Bengali rebels won with the help of the Indian army, sent by then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.
The United States supported the Pakistan army, a Cold War client that was secretly helping Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reach out to China (to help America extricate itself from Vietnam). Nixon referred to Gandhi as "the bitch," and Kissinger called Indians "bastards" and "a slippery, treacherous people," as the White House would later reveal. But Nixon thought no better of the Pakistanis — "just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems" (language not that far off from today's Islamophobic lingo).
Despite its tortured history and contemporary partisanship, Bangladesh became a model of civil society with thousands of small businesses, including its $22 billion a year garment industry. The latter has been in the news since the collapse of a factory last year, killing 1,100. My colleagues Raveena Aulakh, Rick Westhead and others have exposed the sector's Dickensian sweatshops, child labour and corruption. Canadian importers have been shamed into pledging fair trade practices and worker safety. They have a more urgent task: press Ottawa to join other allies in mediating a political compromise and the return to the rule of law. Otherwise, there'll be fewer factories and fewer jobs for the poorest Bangladeshis, fewer profits for Canadian retailers and fewer cheap garments for Canadians.



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