Hunger strikers at Dhaka garment factory fall sick

Garment workers in a factory at Bangladesh's capital Dhaka fall sick after days of hunger strike over unpaid wages. (Photo: Kollol Mustafa)

At least 40 garment workers in a mass hunger strike in Dhaka have fallen sick as a tense standoff with factory managers entered a fourth day on Thursday with no sign of resolution.

Some of the 1,500 workers, mostly women, began to flag after they began striking on Monday at the start of Eid, the festival ending the month-long Ramadan fast.

Some were placed on saline drips but continued to refuse food or to leave the cramped office of their employer, the Tuba Group, after it failed to pay three months of wages and an Eid bonus.

“I am so sad and frustrated because the management has ruined our Eid and forced us to hunger strike. We won’t give up until our demands are met,” said Rabeya Akter, 35, a sewing machine operator.

Workers in the factory are typically paid between 10,000 taka and 12,000 taka (US$130 - $156) per month including overtime, among the lowest garment wages in the world, but have not been paid since the end of April.

Thousands rally in Bangladesh against attack on nuns

Catholic nuns join a protest rally in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka over recent attack on Catholic nuns in the country. (Photo: Rock Ronald Rozario)

Thousands of Christians protested across Bangladesh on Monday following an attack on nuns in the north of the country earlier this month.

About 2,500 Christians were joined by Muslim and Hindu groups in Rangpur, where the attack took place.  At least 50 men armed with knives and iron bars assaulted and injured two nuns on July 8.

“No way can we accept this heinous attack on these dedicated people,” Father Anthony Sen, secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission in the Catholic diocese of Dinajpur which covers Rangpur, said at the protest. "The culprits must be brought to book immediately and prosecuted in a fast-track court. The government must ensure that this kind of incident never takes place again and that the security of minorities should be guaranteed.”

There were also smaller rallies in other cities across the country including the capital Dhaka, where nuns held hands and lined major roads.

Rohingya banned from marrying Bangladesh nationals

A Rohingya refugee mother with her child in Cox's Bazar of Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s government has banned marriage between Bangladesh nationals and Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, alleging that the latter are attempting to use marriage to gain citizenship.

“We have ordered marriage registrars not to officiate any union between Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingyas and also not to enlist marriage between Rohingyas themselves,” Anisul Haque, Minister of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs told reporters in Dhaka. “We have already published a circular regarding the matter.”

The move comes after the issue was raised during this week’s annual meeting of deputy commissioners and top government officials in 64 districts of the country.

“We have received complaints that Rohingyas wed Bangladeshis and try to use the marriage certificate to gain Bangladeshi passports and other documents,” the minister added.

Haque warned that if any registrar violates the order they would face up to two years in jail.

In an interview with BBC Bangla Service, Haque defended the move when asked whether a government can dictate to whom one can marry.

“This doesn’t mean we are trying to control people’s freedom of marriage. Our intention is to comply with the official marriage registration system and we have clarified that marriage of illegal immigrants including Rohingyas doesn’t fall into that jurisdiction,” he said.

“Rohingyas have no legal status in Bangladesh as of now so they can’t be entitled to the legal option of marriage,” Haque added.

Bangladesh impunity gives minorities little chance of justice

A man walks past the burned-out home of a Hindu family in this file photo (Photo by Antuni David)

It hurts every time I hear about violence against minorities, be it last week’s attack on Hindus by Muslims in the Comilla district, or persecution of Muslims by radical Buddhists in Myanmar.

Perpetrators no doubt have their own compelling reasons to pound on small and powerless groups of people – land disputes, religious bigotry, political conspiracy, ethnic conflicts or blasphemy – but nothing can justify violence as a tool for settling problems. The issue is doubly shameful for a multi-religious nation like Bangladesh with a long history of secular culture.

In most parts of Bangladesh, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists mix easily. While Muslims account for 90 percent of the population, most follow a moderate form of Islam that allows all religions to come together to celebrate religious and national festivals. A sense of interfaith harmony is woven into the social fabric.

But, this is not the whole picture. For decades, many Hindus have struggled for survival amid attacks and pogroms by Islamic fundamentalist groups, political parties and governments. Police and the judiciary have often responded with apathy, thereby emboldening the perpetrators.

The severity of the situation can be seen in the statistics. Major attacks on Hindus, who from partition in 1947 onwards were depicted as enemies of the state, peaked in the 1971 liberation war, when some 70 percent of the three million people killed were Hindu. Numbers reduced dramatically: in 1947, Hindus accounted for 30 percent of the country’s 42 million people, but today they account for only 9 percent of an estimated 160 million.

Their broad support for the Awami League government has only added to perceptions among Islamists that they were enemies of the dominant religion. In 2001, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami Party took over from the Awami League and launched a series of offensives against Hindus. Pledges by the Awami League, on its return to power in 2009, to bring the perpetrators of the killings to justice have never been fulfilled.

The shrinking of Bangladesh’s Hindu population has much to do with the exodus of entire communities. “Minorities never want to leave the country, but they have been forced to leave,” said Rana Dasgupta, a Hindu lawyer and secretary of the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council.

They are not the only minority to suffer, however. Christian churches were vandalized in 1998, and in 2001 an Islamic militant group bombed a Catholic church in the Gopalgonj district during Sunday mass, killing 10. The mastermind of the attack was detained and interrogated but not prosecuted.

Buddhists too have been hit by attacks. In September 2012, a Muslim mob angered by an apparently blasphemous Facebook image allegedly posted by a Buddhist man destroyed about 100 Buddhist homes and 30 temples in the Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar districts. Police detained 250 people but again no prosecutions were made.

Violence against Bangladesh minorities continues unabated, largely because of a culture of impunity against attackers and the failure of legal mechanisms to deliver justice to victims. Tribal groups have been forced to leave the country en masse as the perennial victims of land grabs and violence, with no recourse to compensation. Elements of the government apathetic towards minority rights give their tacit support, and this seeps into the courtroom, where justice is rarely delivered.

Minority leaders are growing more vocal about rights, and campaign for special provisions to protect their communities. They have called on the government to formulate a law to protect minorities from future violence, to create 60 reserved seats in parliament and to transfer cases of violence against minorities to a fast-track court that can resolve them quickly.

It’s time to take these into consideration. The rights of minorities need protecting, and the culture of impunity that allows their tormenters to walk free must end. Failure to do so would be a national disgrace – after all, a nation’s excellence depends on how well it treats its most vulnerable members.

For original opinion piece click Bangladesh impunity gives minorities little chance of justice  

Bangladesh Church must speak out on long running anti-Christian campaign

The Catholic church in Bandarban, southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts is at the center of an anti-Christian campaign (Photo: Chittagong Catholic Diocese website)

Silence is often prudent but at other times it’s plain foolish, as is the case with the Catholic Church and Christians in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), where their deathly silence in response to a long-running anti-Christian campaign is working against them.

In March and April, local newspapers and online media ran a cooked-up story against priests and religious brothers from the Queen of Fatima Catholic Church in Bandarban, the largest and one of the oldest Catholic churches in the CHT.

The report alleged that the priests and religious were sexually abusing tribal girls residing in a Church-run hostel.

To escape the abuses, some 71 girls fled the hostel one night, prompting Church leaders to pay off local officials to cover everything up, it claimed.

The girls actually fled in protest against the woman in charge of the hostel, a tribal woman who the girls say treated them badly. They absconded after several pleas to have the woman replaced fell on deaf ears. The girls later returned after the woman was dismissed.

The concocted abuse story came from local journalists looking to extort money from Church officials and was encouraged by local Muslim leaders who have a history of anti-Christian sentiment.

This is not an isolated case, but part of a game that’s been played against the Church and Christians for nearly a decade. During this time, several Islamist and mainstream newspapers have run fabricated reports accusing Christian missioners of converting thousands of tribals with the lure of money and plotting to turn the CHT into an independent Christian country like Timor-Leste.

The reports also alleged that several Western countries were funding Christian NGO activities to change the religious demography of the CHT to fulfill this agenda.

Church leaders and development activists have told me privately that government intelligence agents have paid them visits asking them how many Christians were in the area and how Christian NGOs were being funded.

Last year, the Hefazat-e-Islam militant group staged two rallies in Dhaka to make 13 demands. Most Christians failed to notice that one of them was a crackdown on “unlawful activities by Christian missioners and NGOs in the CHT”.

Throughout this time, Church leaders have remained silent. They have neither spoken to the authorities nor refuted the baseless claims in the mainstream press. They also didn’t opt for official complaints and protests, not even with regard to the Hefazat-e-Islam rallies.

The CHT, which borders India and Myanmar, is the only mountainous region of Bangladesh. This strategically important area is home to more than 12 indigenous tribes, mostly Buddhist, who have lived there for centuries and been socially and economically neglected for decades.

These peace loving people have seen the systematic destruction of their culture and livelihood since the 1970s when the government started changing the local demography by resettling landless Bengali Muslims who started grabbing tribal lands. The result has been ongoing sectarian conflict in these hills.

Tribals resisted the influx and, with latent support from India, formed a militia group to fight the settlers.

In response, the government turned the area into a military zone. For more than two decades, a bloody bush war between the army and militants claimed hundreds of lives until it ended with the CHT Peace Accord in 1997, which is still to be implemented. To this day, the region is heavily militarized with some 500 army camps.

Christian missioners arrived in the 1950s, and today Christians account for less than three percent of the region’s 1.6 million people.

The Muslim population, however, has increased from less than three percent in 1947 to more than 48 percent today. Tribals are still larger in number, but they are marginal in city centers and most businesses are controlled by Bengalis.

With such a small Christian presence, claims that missioners and NGO’s are trying to create another Timor-Leste are nothing more than ill intentioned fairy tales and simply not possible .

Yet, the rumors are rife and are being fed by local Bengali Muslim groups, who are aggressively anti-tribal.

They are the force behind the occupation of tribal lands by Muslim settlers. They are also backed by civil and military officials, and Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hefazat. All are trying to discredit the Church to divert national and international attention away from the grim political and rights situation for tribals in the CHT.

The war is over, but sectarian clashes between tribals and Muslims and rival tribal groups are still common.

According to a local rights group, Muslims killed 11 tribal men, raped 15 tribal women and burned down more than 100 tribal homes last year. Rights activists also accuse the government and army of keeping unrest alive to legitimize the militarization of the area.

International rights groups including Amnesty International have reported gross human rights violations by Muslim settlers and soldiers on tribal people. These include murder, torture, arson and rape.

Environmental groups allege the region is facing an environmental disaster because of deforestation and tobacco cultivation by the settlers.

Foreigners are generally not allowed in the CHT; but if they are it is usually under close surveillance. It is not because armed tribal groups might kidnap them for ransom, but mostly to stop them seeing what really goes on there.

Like in other parts of the country, Catholics and Protestants have set up dozens of schools, vocational centers, health clinics, and conducted development activities in the CHT to help tribals, non-tribals, Christians and non-Christians alike.

In most other places, Christians are held in high esteem by Muslims for their contributions in the education, health and development sectors, but in the CHT they are being vilified.

One reason is the activities of Christian missioners who have made tribal people more aware of their rights and more vocal.

The Bandarban Church incident is the most recent example of this vilification and could have been a lot worse if local Muslims had believed the stories that were told.

A 1998 mob attack by Muslims on several churches and Christian institutions in the Luxmibazar district of Dhaka during a land dispute between a Catholic school and a local mosque should serve as a gentle reminder as to how vulnerable Christians are.

Church leaders should realize that Christian haters consider their silence as weakness. They should learn from the recent attempt to stoke anti-Christian feelings in the CHT and act strongly and accordingly.

If they don’t take this seriously, they can be assured that the worst is yet to come.

END 

Read original opinion piece here Bangladesh Church must speak out on long running anti-Christian campaign

Remembering Rana Plaza, one year on

The Rana Plaza tragedy sparked strong public outcry and calls to improve factory safety and conditions for Bangladesh’s garment workers. (Photo by Stephan Uttom)

It’s been a year since the Rana Plaza textile complex collapsed, killing 1,135 workers and injuring more than 2,500, making it the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh history.

Fatal accidents are all too common in Bangladesh’s US$20 billion garment industry, the second largest in the world after China's. In the past decade accidents have occurred an average of two to four times per month. It’s ironic—and outrageous—for an industry that employs four million people and fetches 80 percent of country’s annual export income to be so poorly regulated.

About 2,000 workers have been killed in work-related accidents in Bangladesh in the past ten years. These accidents, and the easily preventable deaths that occurred as a result, have largely been due to lax safety standards and atrocious working conditions in the factories. Disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse and the Tazreen Fashions factory fire, which killed more than 100 people in Dhaka in 2012, are a product of the collective negligence of everyone who has benefited from the Bangladesh garment industry. They have occurred under the noses of the authorities, trade bodies and Western buyers, who remained astonishingly silent as workers perished. The catalysts for these events did not just appear over night. Year after year, a wide range of monitoring bodies and agencies put their stamps of approval on thousands of factories, despite the fact that structures lacked proper fire doors, fire escapes, smoke-proof stairways and automatic sprinkler systems.

Some analysts have drawn parallels between the Rana Plaza accident and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York that killed 146 workers and led to lasting safety reforms in the US garment industry. Well, seven times as many individuals died at Rana Plaza. The scale of suffering in the wake of the collapse was almost too much to swallow, even for the most apathetic of companies or governments. It triggered an unprecedented outcry from the media, labor advocates and consumer groups, which is paving the way for long overdue reforms in Bangladesh’s garment industry.

Indeed, a year after the collapse, Bangladesh has seen a major push for changes.

More than 150 mostly European companies have signed the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, while 26 mostly North American companies including Walmart, Gap and Target have formed the separate Bangladesh Alliance for Worker Safety that commits the companies to invest in upgrades in more than 2,000 factories. The Bangladesh government and the International Labor Organization have pledged to conduct safety inspections in the remaining factories.

Under intense pressure from foreign governments—including suspension of US trade privileges for Bangladesh—the government has amended its labor law to make it easier for workers to unionize. To date, more than 100 new trade unions have been registered and workers are speaking out strongly against poor working conditions and walking away from jobs if necessary. Their collective efforts have led to an increase in the minimum wage from $37 to $68 per month.

The owners and managers of Tazreen Fashions and Rana Plaza are being prosecuted for culpable homicide charges in a country where garment manufacturers wield immense political power and have never been held accountable for previous accidents.

These are all positive changes, despite the fact that they have only come about as a result of such a massive loss of lives. But, we would be foolish to believe that everything has been cleaned up and will henceforth be on the straight and narrow.

Though Western brands have begun a major push for safety improvements, they have divided into two oft-feuding groups—those that signed the Accord and those that signed the Alliance—which is an arrangement that analysts say hinders the overall effort.

Members of the Alliance claim that they have so far performed more factory inspections than the Accord brands, while Accord members say that the Alliance’s inspections are far less rigorous. Accord members also say they work closely with trade unions and have input from workers, while Alliance members assert that some Accord brands have not provided wages to workers who were laid off after their factories were temporarily closed following inspections that discovered serious safety violations.

The Alliance has been widely criticized for not being legally binding and for its lack of transparency. The Alliance claims to have inspected about 400 factories so far, but it does not make its inspection reports public. Meanwhile, the Accord has published reports on 10 factories and asserts that it has inspected about 300.

In a sense, the competition appears positive on the grounds that they are attempting to raise the bar higher in terms of safety standards. But at times it also seems like an unappetizing neo-colonial battle in the globalized world.

The Accord inspection reports paint an ominous picture of dangerous conditions in the factories. Inspectors found structural, safety and fire faults in every factory they visited including dangerously heavy amounts of storage, which has led to cracked walls and stressed, sagging support beams. They also found basic fire equipment missing and exit routes that didn’t lead to the outside. Viyellatex, considered one of the best factories in Bangladesh, received multiple citations.

If massive, top-of-the-line factories have such issues, one can only imagine how bad the reality could be in smaller factories. In Bangladesh, there is a vast underworld of small factories operated by subcontractors working for larger manufacturers. These businesses often operate in shoddy apartments, basements, shops and rooftops where underpaid workers sew clothes under fierce pressure from bosses who abuse them and care little for workplace safety.

Unauthorized subcontracting is common. International buyers often know about it, though they don’t admit such things officially. The reality is they can’t stop it.

Flaws of the labor law 

At its core, the labor law is not that worker friendly. Theoretically, workers are free to form trade unions, but in practice it’s not that easy. In a country where corruption is widespread, officials can be discreetly paid off to prevent the formation of a union. Likewise, factory owners can obtain a list of prospective union members from corrupt officials and fire the workers who intended to unionize. If workers take their case to the labor court, justice is rarely the outcome. Most garment workers are too poor to afford protracted unemployment, and the legal system is too expensive and too drawn out for them to stick out their case.

The labor law guarantees $1,282 in compensation from a factory owner if a worker dies or is seriously injured in a workplace accident. But is this money worth a person’s life? For years, the labor law has remained friendlier to owners than to workers, largely because owners wield immense political power. Some have even become parliamentarians or government ministers.

Meanwhile, the government has reportedly raised $16 million in compensation for the victims of Rana Plaza, while the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has raised some $1.8 million. However, some victims’ families say they have received nothing, and not a single family has received the full amount of $1,250 in cash and $19,000 in a savings scheme the government promised.

There is a serious lack of coordination among authorities and various organizations working to help victims and families. No one seems to know when the compensation payments will be made.

“It seems everyone is considering it as an act of charity, not as an act of responsibility,” a labor export said recently.

Rana Plaza could go down in history as a big turning point for the Bangladesh garment manufacturing industry. Like the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York, it might be the wake-up call that international brands and factory owners need.

But if it’s not, and better safety standards aren’t enforced, there’s no telling how many more Rana Plazas there could be.

Read the original opinion piece here Remembering Rana Plaza, one year on

Killing innocents is no mark of a great nation

India's border guards have killed hundreds of people along Indo-Bangla border in the past decades

All living things will die some day. In fact, every day about 150,000 people die around the world because of illness, accident and, increasingly, from war, acts of terror and ethnic or religious conflicts.

In Bangladesh, a growing number have died in the last decade for the most trivial of reasons – gunned down by Indian border guards for allegedly trespassing on Indian territory along a 4,100 km border

About 1,000 people have been killed in the last 10 years at the hands of India’s Border Security Force (BSF). Most have been unarmed Bangladeshi villagers as India maintains a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy.

India and Bangladesh share a common history, and Bangladesh is India’s largest trade partner. The popular culture of India has been enthusiastically embraced across the border. And yet, border guards shoot first and ask questions later.

Ironic, then, that Indian media has claimed that Bangladesh was found to be the most trusted nation in a recent online survey, with Russia a close second. 

If this is the case, then why does the BSF kill so many people along the Bangladesh border? Or to put it another way, if the survey truly reflects the mindset of Indian citizens about Bangladesh, then is there not a disconnect among India’s politicians and government officials?

India has every right to prevent illegal immigration, smuggling and anti-government militant activities, but that right does not extend to the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. There is no justification for a shoot first policy.

The killings went largely unabated and with no formal investigations or punishment – despite high-level talks between the two countries and promises to end the policy – until the death of a teenage Bangladeshi girl more than two years ago.

Felani Khatun, 15, was returning home from a visit to India with her father on January 7, 2011. Neither had travel documents, so they opted to use a bamboo ladder to scale the barbed wire fence installed by the BSF to protect the border.

Felani’s father made it safely across the fence, but his young daughter’s clothes got snagged on the fence and a BSF guard shot her dead.

Her lifeless body hung on the fence for hours, later becoming a symbol for Bangladeshis of the ongoing injustice of the border policy. It prompted an unprecedented global outcry.

In the years that followed, the number of such killings dropped while diplomatic and international pressure increased. And last month, after massive criticism at home and abroad, a trial was started to prosecute the border guard who killed Felani.

Bangladeshis had high hopes for justice, at least in one case among hundreds of others, from the world’s largest democracy. But their hopes were short lived.

A special court in West Bengal last Friday acquitted Amiya Ghosh, the man who killed Felani Khatun.

Outraged Bangladeshis believed that the trial held symbolic value and that if justice was done, then BSF guards would think carefully before they fired on unarmed civilians along the border.

India’s High Commissioner to Bangladesh has said the verdict is not final, but few have any faith that Felani’s killer will ever be brought to justice.

As a much larger, more prosperous neighbor, India must behave more responsibly with its smaller and less powerful neighbors. Moreover, it should set an example in the way it delivers justice, and its future as a superpower is not only contingent upon resolving its disputes with arch-rival Pakistan, but on its relations with all of its neighbors.

It’s worth remembering what Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote: “No man ever got very high by pulling other people down.”

Third World View is the pseudonym for a Bangladeshi journalist based in Dhaka

Click to view original post Killing innocents is no mark of a great nation

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It's time to face the Rohingya issue head on

Rohingyas are one of world's most persecuted and neglected people

Unwanted in Myanmar and unwelcome in neighboring Bangladesh, Rohingya Muslims are literally ‘God’s forsaken’ people.

For decades, they have remained ‘one of world’s most persecuted people’, according to the United Nations, due to years of persecution in Arakan (Rakhine) state in Myanmar, yet their suffering looks set to increase further in the near future with recent hostile moves in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Recent media reports say Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government has reaffirmed a discriminatory two-child policy to control the Rohingya population.

This has sparked outrage from various quarters including the US government, Human Rights Watch and Myanmar’s pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

The move coincides with the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry’s drafting of a strategic plan to tackle undocumented Rohingya refugees that it says are living in the country illegally.

The plan, currently being reviewed by several government bodies, contains 25 proposals including conducting a survey to determine the exact number of Rohingya refugees, forming a taskforce to stop Rohingyas entering the country illegally, and installing an embankment as a barrier along 50km of the Naf River that separates Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Most importantly, for the first time it proposes a special law that will make it a punishable offense to provide shelter and support to "illegal Rohingyas."

The plan needs to be cleared by an inter-ministerial cabinet body, which will not take long. Once in place the government intends to establish detention centers along the border and repatriate illegal Rohingyas back to Myanmar.

“The government is getting strict on Rohingyas because they have tainted the country’s image internationally with their illegal activities. Moreover, the government thinks the international community is not doing enough to press Myanmar on the Rohingya crisis,” said a Foreign Ministry official who did not want to be named.

In the past four decades, thousands of Rohingyas have fled a series of bloody crackdowns and sectarian violence in Rakhine and entered neighboring Bangladesh. Most were eventually repatriated, but 30,000 have refused to leave, for fear of further persecution.

In 1993, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) granted official refugee status to these Rohingyas, which allowed them to stay in two camps in the Cox’s Bazar district, where they depend on government and NGO aid for survival.

The UNHCR, however, estimates there are about 300,000 undocumented Rohingyas, residing outside the official camps; Bangladesh authorities put the number at around 500,000.

Bangladesh has been relatively friendly in the past. Rohingyas look very similar to native Bengali people physically and their language is related to a Bangla dialect spoken in southeastern Bangladesh.

Many have found a home in Bangladesh by utilizing their physical and linguistic similarities. They have married locally, found jobs and run businesses, albeit illegally.

In recent years the local media has reported many unlawful activities allegedly committed by undocumented Rohingyas. These include Rohingyas being arrested in Middle Eastern countries with fake Bangladeshi passports, damaging the environment by forest encroachment, and involvement with militant groups and drug smuggling.

These allegations and revelations which many say taint the country’s image have led to closer and more critical government monitoring of the Rohingya issue.

The government denied entry to thousands of Rohingyas fleeing bouts of deadly sectarian violence in Myanmar in June and October last year. The decision was criticized by the UNHCR, various Western governments and international rights groups.

In August last year, the Bangladesh government banned three international NGOs – Doctors without Borders, Action against Hunger and Muslim Aid UK – from operating among the Rohingyas.

Rosaline Costa, a rights activist and lawyer, says they deserve shelter and support in Bangladesh on humanitarian grounds, but sympathy has been lost because some vested groups have "misused" Rohingyas for their own interests.

“I worked with the UNHCR for eight years … and found that Rohingyas were being abused by several organizations. Rohingyas were also sent abroad illegally, they were recruited by extremist outfits and coerced into illegal activities like robberies, drug-smuggling and the sex trade,” said Costa, coordinator of Hotline Human Rights Bangladesh, adding the government has yet to develop a workable mechanism to deal effectively with the refugee problem.

Professor CR Abrar from Dhaka University’s International Relations department says a solution to the problem has been elusive because no one has ever tackled it properly.

“Bangladesh, Myanmar and the international community have failed to find a solution, because the issue was never part of long-term development plans for this region. What Bangladesh and Myanmar are doing now won’t be effective in the long run because they fail to tackle the root causes and lack efficient policies to redress it,” Professor Abrar said.

The plight of the Rohingya is rooted in history. For hundreds of years they had a happy and peaceful existence which was snatched from them in recent times. Without effective and efficient attention and concerted efforts from all parties involved to address underlying historic, social, economic and political issues that affect their hopes for a better future will remain elusive. Hasty and imprudent efforts won’t improve anything, but will only make things worse.

The Third Eye is a commentator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Click to view original post It's time to face the Rohingya issue head on

  

Time to end modern-day slavery in Bangladesh

Rana Plaza might prove to be the wake-up call required to fix Bangladesh garment sector, but at a huge cost

With the rubble cleared and the dust settled, all seemed quiet at the former eight-story Rana Plaza site, home to a bank, shops and five garment factories before it collapsed last month, killing 1,129 workers and injuring about 2,500.

Only a few dead roses hang from the fence around the building alongside several altars erected by friends and family grieving in the wake of the April 24 tragedy.

On that fateful day, hundreds of dead and wounded were pulled out from among the smashed walls and furniture of the destroyed tower as wailing relatives watched in horror. The scene at the nearby Adhar Chandra High School was equally heart-wrenching, and pathetic.

It was here that authorities gathered bodies. About 300 remain unidentified.

I felt ashamed – as the building owners and factory bosses themselves should – because collectively, as a nation, Bangladesh had demonstrably failed to give any kind of protection to its workers and it had shown this shameful truth in grim close-up for the whole world to see.

That this was not the first ‘accident’ of its kind is perhaps the biggest disgrace.

Nearly 2,000 workers have died in fires, stampedes and other accidents in garment factories in recent times, all tragedies which were avoidable. In none of these cases was a factory owner or boss punished, many of whom appear to be guilty of cutting corners for profit.

Bangladesh’s roughly four million garment workers earn a minimum wage of just US$38 per month, half the level in Cambodia, for example, which itself has received scrutiny over poor labor conditions in recent years.

For the millions of poor Bangladeshis who leave their rural homes to seek financial independence in the shape of a stable job in a garment factory, in reality they are simply condemning themselves to the closest thing to slavery in today’s globalized world.

This is an industry worth $19 billion to Bangladesh, very little of which trickles down to those who put in most of the work and shoulder most of the risk: Not financial, perhaps, but mortal, certainly.

Even in death, Bangladeshi garment workers are treated like slaves. According to current labor law, a factory owner is supposed to pay 100,000 taka ($1,250) compensation for a worker’s death.

Since the industry accounted for 1,129 additional deaths last month there are signs that, finally, some are saying enough is enough as Bangladesh comes under strong pressure from labor groups, the media, some consumers and even some garment buyers which employ the services of factories like those in Rana Plaza.

The US government is holding a hearing which will determine whether Bangladesh will continue to enjoy Generalized System of Preference (GSP) access to the world’s largest economy.

“Bangladesh has two choices. They can go to the future and they can assist in providing safe working conditions, safe factories and programs for fire prevention,” said Congressman George Miller who visited Bangladesh this week as part of the US enquiry into the country’s GSP status. “Or they can struggle in the past and lose the value of the Bangladesh label.”

The European Union, Bangladesh’s largest market by export value, has threatened to revoke duty-free access if the industry doesn’t reform.

In response to the threat of serious damage to the country’s biggest earner, the government has hastily inspected all factories across the country, promised to set up a separate wage board and amended the labor code. Money talks, especially amid threats that it could disappear.

But question marks remain as to whether these changes are substantive or mere window-dressing. Bangladeshi media remains unconvinced.

“Theoretically, laborers can go to court to file a complaint against their bosses. But in practice it is expensive and too lengthy a process that most workers can’t afford it,” said Jafrul Hasan, a lawyer.

Unsurprisingly, the industry body – the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association – appears to be trying to protect their members' interests behind the scenes amid the backlash.

A key dilemma is whether it is right and ethical for global retailers to pull out of Bangladesh altogether? A superficial answer would be ‘yes.’

Just before the Rana Plaza tragedy, the Walt Disney Company – the largest media conglomerate in the world – stopped sourcing products from Bangladesh in the wake of a fire at Tazreen Fashions last year which killed 112 people.

But having profited from these workers for decades, is it really right for companies like Disney to wash its hands of Bangladesh? The result is that this giant company has shunned its responsibility and let slip the leverage it once had to promote tangible reforms for the better.

“On the labor issue, absolutely, buyers have a critical role and they must be engaged,” Wendy Sherman, US undersecretary of state for political affairs, said during a visit to Bangladesh this week.

Major European retailers including H&M, Inditex, Primark, C&A, Tommy Hilfiger and PVH, Tesco, Benetton, Marks and Spencer and Carrefour, have all signed an accord on fire and building safety in Bangladesh.

Tuesday was the deadline to sign onto the accord, but at least 14 North American retailers including Walmart, Gap, Target and JC Penny, joined by Asia’s largest retailer Uniqlo, declined to participate, citing legal concerns.

The agreement demands a five-year commitment from participating retailers to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and pay up to $500,000 per year toward safety improvements.

This amount is nothing to global giants like Walmart. But it would surely contribute to improving the hellish working conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh. It would surely make all the difference for them.

Third World View is the pseudonym of a commentator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh

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A battle for the soul of Bangladesh

Religion and nationalism are locked in a bloody battle for primacy in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is going through turbulent times.

It can partly be blamed on the ongoing political struggle between the main political rivals, the ruling Awami League and the opposition alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). As national elections loom, this impasse has sparked a series of bloody street clashes.

But as well as the usual party political friction, there is also a war of ideology sweeping through the nation between radical Islamists and secularists. It’s a question of primacy: which should come first, religion or nation?

Last weekend, radicals from the Hifazat-e-Islam group marched en masse through Dhaka to parade their staunchly Islamic 13-point agenda.

It includes the death penalty for bloggers who defame Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. They also want an anti-blasphemy law, a mandatory Islamic education system, exclusion of members of the Ahmadi sect from the Muslim faith, abolition of a pro-women development policy and the restoration of a pledge to Allah in the constitution.

It’s a manifesto that would make the country a fully fledged Islamic state, perhaps even a Taliban state.

On Monday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said 'no' to their demand for a blasphemy law. This, unsurprisingly, led to another round of violent clashes and wildcat strikes.

The sworn opponents of the Islamic radicals comprise activists, progressives and secular groups. This loosely connected coalition, which has attracted attention from the international press and garnered massive public support, is no less trenchant in its views or pugnacious in its demands.

It called loudly for the death penalty for those found guilty in the recent war crimes tribunals, most of whom are leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic political party, It also wants confiscation of Jamaat-owned institutions and a ban on Jamaat and religion-based politics.

Its advocates will tell you the nation has suffered repression and victimization in the name of religion for far too long, from the orthodox Hindu Sena era a millennium ago to the effective rule of pro-Islamist West Pakistan in the mid-20^th century.

They will also tell you that Jamaat and its forebears historically supported attacks on Bengali culture and nationalism in the name of Islam; that they sided with the Pakistan army during the 1971 war of independence; and that they have consistently persecuted religious minorities and even moderate Muslims.

Yet although these radical Islamists only represent around 5 percent of the population, their medieval ideologies continue to torment Bangladesh.

And even though the majority of people dislike the country’s dysfunctional political culture, it seems we just can’t get rid of it.

Which brings us back to the endless wrangles between the major political parties – the Awami League, the BNP and the others. For the sake of winning a vote, they will claim to be both nationalist and/or religious – whichever they think people want to hear at the time – although of course they are neither. They are just opportunist politicians who trade on nationalism and religion for personal gain.

Tragically, the history of Bangladesh is littered with monumental blunders; the British partition of India and Pakistan on religious grounds was possibly the biggest of them all. It’s a pity those reactionary forces that still hold us to ransom don’t seem to have learned a thing from those blunders.

The Third Eye is the pseudonym of a commentator based in Dhaka

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A practising Catholic's simple wish

Pope Francis needs to ensure power of the Church handed down to people

In many ways, the new pope is full of surprises -- the first Jesuit, first Latin-American and also the first non-European pope in about 1,300 years.

He is the first Pope Francis and the first to ditch the red papal mozzetta and to wear a simple wooden cross as he emerged onto the balcony of St Peter’s basilica.

The very way Pope Francis presented himself is in contrast to his predecessor Benedict XVI. Does it send a powerful message to local bishops, clergy and religious? Will it change those ‘line breaks’ in the local churches like ours?

I would like to believe these ‘firsts’ are signs of better things to come in the Church.

I take pride in my Catholic faith not for what the Church can do or cannot, but because I’m a member of the world’s largest faith organization. Because I believe that no matter how rich or poor, my joys and hopes, grievances and anxieties count, and there is someone with authority to listen to me.

I am among those faithful whose tiny local Church had no hand in choosing their supreme spiritual leader.

Catholics here are a tiny minority – about 350,000 people in a Muslim-majority country of more than 150 million. In 1986, on the only papal visit to Bangladesh, the late Pope John Paul II called us 'God’s little flock,’ whose life of faith is influenced by a multi-religious culture, a common reality in churches in Asia.

Most of the ‘little flock’ considers the pope no less than a demigod.

Most of us are devout and listen to what the pope says and does, rather than caring who he is or where he comes from. They care little (actually they know little) about the clerical abuses and financial scandals, or the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy haunting the Church at the moment.

They see the new pope as ‘a source of hope and joy’ as he comes from a developing country which they too live in, because like the Vatican, the local Church also needs changes.

All these years, the local Church has been a ‘light of hope’ in the ‘vast sea of Islam,' making significant contributions to education, health and development sectors, especially to the poor.

Besides spiritual nourishment, by improving their socio-economic status the Church has developed a small but devout community of faithful. Thus, the laypeople have grown up.

But sadly, they have failed to find a sturdy position in the Church -- either nationally and locally. From episcopal commissions to parish level or at Church programs, with few exceptions, laypeople are merely participants, not decision-makers.

With due respect to the bishops, clergy and Religious who are close to the people, many of their colleagues think that by the virtue of ordination or religious vows they are the be-all and end-all when it comes to the Church.

It’s not that laypeople are less educated than the clergy or Religious, or they have too little theological and apostolic training opportunities. Not because they know little about Vatican II and changes in the Church it was intended to bring.

There is a fear among many clergy and Religious that empowerment of the laity will decline their power to rule them. Also, they are afraid that laypeople might rise against things that are not going well in many places, like what happened in Europe and America?

I guess this tendency is a legacy of Eurocentric Vatican bureaucracy as well.

But in his sermon during the installation Mass, Pope Francis emphasized the Church’s role as the "protector of the poorest, weakest and vulnerable" and reminded people that "authentic power is service."

Does this signify real hope for the laity in the near future?

With each passing day, the pope's style, words and actions ignite hope and joy in 1.2 billion Catholics around the world.

We have seen some signs of hope, but real change and reform are yet to happen. Our leaders need to realize that authentic power comes from God and lies with people and empowering people they empower themselves.

If that happens during Pope Francis' time, the Church will become not only ‘of and for the poor’ but also ‘for the poor’ in the real sense.

Third World View is the pseudonym of a commentator based in Dhaka

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