BBC Online Features 3 Pakistan Afghanistan Bangladesh

BBC Online Features 3 Pakistan Afghanistan Bangladesh

Preface
promotional material supplied by a company, and increasingly the use of personal images from social media.
The danger of using agency photographs, is having the same image used over and over again, especially when used in a story relating to house sales, mobile phones, or banks.
Rather than resorting to stock material to illustrate some of my features. I’d use photographs I’d taken specifically for that purpose, such as a woman spraying perfume on her neck for the story about fake goods, or sheep being ferried to safety for the story about floods in Bangladesh.
James Melik London
I was a broadcast journalist in the business programmes at BBC World Service at a time of great financial upheavals and huge changes brought about my technological advances and shifts in consumer attitudes.
But I could never get enthusiastic about the crisis of the euro or bursting tech bubbles. I had colleagues who thoroughly immersed themselves in the intricacies of such events whereas I managed to manoeuver through each with indifference.
The early pages we produced for Online were monitored by a team based in Bush House and bore no resemblance to the pages being published by the other BBC departments.
Looking back at those pages now makes me cringe with embarrassment. Not only because of the naïve page format but also because initially, our editor insisted that our contributions consisted of radio interviews which we’d broadcast, transcribed verbatim. It was with great reluctance, following pressure from above, that he relented and allowed me to write in a style which was more appropriate for the written page.
The Online pages were constantly evolving and one of the best things to happen was merging the BBC World Service output with the rest of the BBC, thereby creating a uniform look and style.
The output mostly consists of short news items, whereas there are also features which look at stories in more depth. As these are researched and usually written by an individual, or sometimes two in collaboration, that person has to ‘own’ it, so it became customary for them to contain a by-line, which is why you see the name of the author beneath the title, which didn’t happen with the earlier published features.
It was quite rewarding to have a by-line. It indicates the work is yours, or that you added value to an original radio piece for it to become necessary to take responsibility for it.
There were some colleagues who didn’t like any of their original interview being used without being credited, but they could have written the feature themselves and had their own by-line on it. There were several attempts to get presenters to multi-task; to turn their radio packages into Online features, but very few could be bothered even when I offered to help them.
Some presenters relished the challenge and colleagues such as Theo Leggett and Russell Padmore immediately spring to mind. Instead of their radio pieces disappearing into the ether they have a catalogue of written work to show for posterity.
An important part of an Online feature is its presentation on the page to encourage people to read it through to the end. If it is pleasing to the eye readers become more engaged and to achieve that, graphs, pie-charts and above all, illustrations play an important role.
Photographs used to illustrate Online pages are usually taken from agencies such as PA, Reuters, Thinkstock and most commonly of all, Getty Images. There can also be stills taken from TV images,
17. Biman Bangladesh Airline
Created a year after the country’s independence from West Pakistan, Biman Airlines is the flag carrier of Bangladesh.
Wholly owned by the government, the decades following its founding were plagued by mismanagement and corruption.
Hossain Mohammad Ershad, a former army chief and President of Bangladesh from 1983 to 1990, was also the head of Biman. After a period of expansion, Biman entered an era of nose-diving profits and slow growth.
A report in 1996 described Biman as poorly managed, overstaffed, and subject to excessive political interference.
Faced with growing losses the government decided to seek a partner to ensure the future of the airline.
can appreciate that not many people have the expertise to run an airline from within the country,’ he explains.
‘If we get a strategic partner, it has a couple of other advantages. One, we have the management expertise from another airline, we can benefit from their experiences, and we can also pool resources of agreements which govern carriage of traffic in between countries.’
Did they have a favoured region of the world that they would like to find a partner in?
‘We have not come to that stage yet. But obviously we would like an airline who would be complimentary to what we are doing rather than competition.
‘We are basically an airline which carries passengers. Over the last year we have leased two aircraft and we expect to take two more before the year is out.
‘So that shows the promise this fast developing market has. At this moment I don’t see us operating freight but a couple of years down the road I think there will be a market for it.’
Because Biman would benefit from the technology and software of a foreign partner, would they need help with something like ticketing, and would it be an advantage if Biman joined an association like One World, of which British Airways is a partner?
‘Whether it is One World or one of the other ones, we would get access to other systems in the market.
‘We are a small airline, so we have to latch onto some other markets, you have to know that market, be visible in that particular market, to have access to it.
‘You could have access to larger partners in the alliance like British Airways so yes, we think British Airways would be complimentary to us.
‘American partners would be of equal help. It depends how they view the Asian market because our biggest strength is the Middle East.
‘An airline which would be interested in this particular part of the world, the Asian market, would most definitely be considered as complimentary,’ he concludes.
Biman Airline to Seek Foreign Partner
Published 2 August 2000
oOo
The troubled state-owned Biman airline has been given the go ahead for privatisation, in which a foreign company will be allowed to buy a 40 per cent stake.
Shahab Sattar, who runs one of the country’s private airlines, says that the Bangladesh business community should have been given the chance to help restructure the airline.
‘We feel confident that given the proper management style it would eventually turn around. But that would mean actually reducing significantly the number of people at Biman.
‘Whoever comes would have to do that. The way that the unions are, with six thousand people, the chances of a foreign company being able to do that are quite difficult.’
The Government believes that Biman needs to find an international investor. But which area of the world should the partner come from?
Rafiqul Islam, managing director of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, says he believes that a partner like British Airways might be good, although one with a presence in the Middle East might be more suitable, adding that Biman was too small to compete internationally.
‘When airlines are tying up with others in alliances, a small airline like us who operates independently is operating at a disadvantage,’ he says.
It appeared as though the government favoured having a foreign partner for Biman. Why would it do that rather than seek a local partner?
‘Biman had a monopoly in Bangladesh for a long time. It has only been about two years that we have a private sector. They are limited to operating within the country and they are very small in size. So you can appreciate that not many people have the expertise to run an airline from within the country,” he explains.
The proposal to offer 40 per cent of the company didn’t result in any interest from foreign airlines, mainly because the government demanded to retain many decision-making rights.
In 2007 Biman was transformed into the largest public company in Bangladesh by the caretaker government.
The previous managing director was appointed CEO of the revised company, and the six directors were appointed from the ministries of civil aviation, foreign affairs, finance, energy, commerce and the cabinet secretary.
They were also the major shareholders of Biman. It is one of the ways ministers line their pockets while they are in office, which contributes to poor governance and corruption.
flight schedules. Anecdotal evidence I have heard from people flying with Biman is horrendous and the only reason
now still fly with them, is because they offer a direct flight to Sylhet, where most Bengalis in east London have families, rather than passengers having to change at Dhaka.
A story about the airline published Online in August 2009 seemed to verify the terrible level of service recounted to me:
Bangladesh Flights Hits Toilet Jam
Biman Bangladesh Airlines made the headlines for quite a different reason when it made the last commercial flight of any DC-10 aircraft.
Crowds gathered at Birmingham airport to watch it arrive on its final journey.
Biman originally said the three-engine aircraft’s final resting place would be the Bruntingthorpe Aviation Museum in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, but it later decided to return it to Bangladesh to be scrapped.
The pilot apologised and said he’d been told to fly back to Dhaka.
A Biman flight from Dhaka to London was delayed by nearly 10 hours because all five of the plane’s toilets were blocked. The airline said staff took two hours to fix the problem, which had been caused by passengers trying to flush away paper cups and other rubbish.
The plane’s departure was then further delayed to fit in with a night flight ban at Heathrow airport.
Wing Commander Asaduzzaman, Biman’s director of engineering, said most of the passengers on the flight had been Bangladeshis returning to London.
‘The flight was delayed because of the toilet jam,’ he said. ‘Passengers threw bottles, tissue papers and female sanitary napkins into all five toilets of the Biman aircraft.
“This material blocked the toilets and there was a jumble in the pneumatic toilet suction system. It was a passenger-created problem. There was no mechanical fault.’
‘We could have taken off at 1600 but there is a night ban at Heathrow airport, so we took off at 2330, he added.
Bangladesh’s Daily Star newspaper said the flight had been carrying more than 200 passengers.
‘It’s a fact that the aircraft of the national flag carrier could not fly only because of faults in its toilets,’ it quoted one of Biman’s pilots saying.
The news came a day after reports that the United Nations had advised staff not to fly Biman because of concerns over safety and flight delays.
The cash-strapped airline has been heavily criticised for its performance in recent years.
It has struggled to pay salaries and fuel bills and to maintain its elderly fleet of aircraft. It has also faced a string of corruption allegations.
Biman’s managing director, Zakiul Islam, told the Daily Star he was unaware of any UN directive, but admitted the airline was having problems managing its flight schedule.
He hoped things would improve once three Boeing aircraft had been added to Biman’s fleet, the paper said.
In July 2018 the Dhaka Tribune reported that the airline was struggling with operating costs and was suffering from a liquidity crisis, and it was only able to pay staff salaries by taking loans from the bank.
‘A number of high-ups commented that the liquidity crisis will persist until the aircrafts, brought in under high-priced leases, can be returned.
“The correspondent identified a multitude of factors contributing to the financial losses of Biman Bangladesh Airlines such as fuel price hikes, fluctuating exchange rates for the dollar, a weak marketing team and a loss of revenue for cargo transport.
‘In 2008, the airlines made a deal with the Boeing aircraft manufacturing company to procure ten planes for a cost of over $2bn.
“The state-owned airline is paying the money in instalments. Six aircrafts have already been added to its fleet, while two more are scheduled to be added later this year. The remaining two will join the Biman fleet in 2019.
‘According to insiders, the airline is also investing in training more pilots, cabin crew, and engineers.
“There are also costs associated with procuring in-flight entertainment systems, ground servers, and other technical upgrades to ensure the smooth operation of the newly-purchased planes.’
I wouldn’t hold my breath that things will improve any time soon. A Tripavisor review published in 2018 said:
‘Biman personal in Dhaka and Sylhet airports are crooks in uniforms. Most countries put criminals in jail but it seems in Bangladesh they are given uniforms and salaried positions in the nation’s airports.’
Even though I have never travelled with Biman, and it is unlikely I ever would, I have experienced the inefficiency at both Dhaka and Sylhet airports, and also the endemic corruption as passengers have to hand over money to take a small piece of luggage on board, or have it confiscated.
I once had a security guard tell me I wouldn’t need my Bangladeshi taka as I was leaving the country. He started to put it in his pocket until I raised my voice, very loudly, and told him it was haram to steal money from passengers.
He very quickly handed it back and ushered me through to the departure lounge.
oOo
Biman Bangladesh Airlines made the headlines for quite a different reason when it made the last commercial flight of any DC-10 aircraft.
Crowds gathered at Birmingham airport to watch it arrive on its final journey.
The Managing Director of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, Masaddique Ahmed, who was also the chief executive officer of the national flag carrier, was relieved from his post on 1 May 2019 with immediate
The decision was taken following allegations of various irregularities and corruption in Biman for the last several years.
18. Discovering Dhaka
I currently live in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, where, according to the 2011 census, a third of the population is Bangladeshi. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was 99 per cent in areas such as Brick Lane and Whitechapel, with one ward actually being renamed Spitafields and Banglatown in 2014.
I met my first Bengali person while sitting in my local park and a lad walked over to me and offered me a swig of vodka from his bottle. I was off work at the time and he called round quite frequently. I became acquainted with many of his friends, especially when I acted as an appropriate adult when they were questioned by police or appeared in court and because of that, I also got to know several of their families.
What began as a distraction while I was unwell, evolved into a passion about everything relating to Bangladesh, from its politics to its economy and its culture.
But unless a news story is about the garment trade or a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions, any contemporary issue about Bangladesh barely registers a flicker on the agenda at BBC World Service; the exception being the programmes broadcast in Bengali by the language service, but they tend to follow the official government line rather than delving into other issues which affect the lives of the country’s 160 million people.
I once proposed writing a feature with a positive angle, rather than the customary tale of doom and gloom, whereupon the BBC Online editor at that time, asked: ‘Will it sell?’
My reaction was one of disdain. Writing a feature based on the potential number of hits it might get didn’t sit comfortably with the BBC mandate to inform, educate and entertain, in a fair and balanced manner.
If a radio or television programme has to reach a specific number of people before it is deemed eligible for broadcast, the Corporation would immediately lose half its output.
Fortunately, the features editor during the greater part of my time writing for BBC Online was Jorn Madslien, who greatly encouraged and supported me, while Tim Weber, the overall editor of the business Online pages, was generally sympathetic to many of my proposals.
I eventually persuaded my World Service editor to fund a trip for myself and my colleague Duncan Bartlett. He was to record stories for radio programmes, and I would write features for BBC Online.
I researched and prepared the stories we were going to cover, arranged interviews with various government officials and heads of organisations, and booked our flights and hotel.
But our visas from the Bangladesh High Commission in London were not ready when I returned to collect them. I had to re-book everything and rearrange the interviews, only to later discover that the visas still hadn’t been issued.
It was frustrating having to go through the re-booking process all over again and my editor was
flights was adding to the overall funding.
I rang the press officer at to find out what was going on. He arranged to meet me the following afternoon; not at his office, but in a café in South Kensington.
A little irregular I thought, but I met him and explained our flights were for that weekend and we couldn’t change them again. He feigned surprise, despite being told of our schedule on numerous occasions. The only way we could get our visas in time, he informed me, was by calling someone into the office to issue them. Anxious to get to Bangladesh, I agreed to hand over a sum of money so he could pay his assistant to return to the office to stamp our passports with the relevant visa.
I ordered another coffee and waited, expecting him to take at least half-an-hour because it was a 15minute walk to his office. He returned in 10 minutes, with our passports duly stamped. It obvious he’d had them in his pocket all the time. It was my first encounter with the corruption I later discovered to be endemic among Bangladeshi officials. When submitting my expenses to the BBC, I euphemistically called the amount I’d handed over a ‘facilitation fee’, though naturally, I hadn’t been issued with a receipt.
I met Duncan at Heathrow airport and we boarded our pre-dawn flight on Emirates Airline. The aircraft was empty on the first leg to Dubai, but when we changed for our onward flight to Dhaka, it was packed with workers returning home. They were some of the four million Bengali men employed in the Middle East and, as many of them were illiterate, I filled out their landing cards.
One of them explained how he was returning home for the first time in two years and he was excited about seeing his daughter, who’d been born since his last visit. He showed me a tatty photograph of a baby and said he’d been married for three years and had only spent 10 weeks with his wife. It seems harsh for families to be separated for such long periods, but for many it’s the only way they can survive financially.
We arrived at the Zia International Airport at five o’clock in the morning, but the blast of heat rising from the tarmac as we stepped out of the aircraft was still enough to cause beads of perspiration to break out on my forehead.
Non-Bangladeshi nationals, comprising of ourselves and a dozen Europeans working in the garment sector, stood in a separate queue to have our passports checked. Thankfully, it was more orderly and far shorter than the shambolic throng gathered in front of the other desks.
You cannot simply walk out of the airport and flag down a taxi. You have to book one inside the terminal at a pre-fixed price, which is naturally far higher than arranging one yourself. We got into a scruffy yellow vehicle and headed to our hotel.
The cool tranquillity of the reception area of the five-star Pan Pacific Sonargoan Hotel was a stark contrast to the noisy commotion we’d encountered, even at that early hour on our journey from the airport.
After making some calls, I headed outside to explore the vicinity adjacent to our hotel, and to purchase local SIM cards for our cell phones.
Armed guards stood to attention and saluted as I left the hotel’s driveway and emerged into the chaos of the intersection immediately outside. The official population of Dhaka is almost 19 million, according to
of the intersection immediately outside. The official population of Dhaka is almost 19 million, according to figures published in 2017, although unofficial estimates put the figure closer to 21 million, including three million living in slums.
A lone barefoot policeman stood in the centre of the junction, forlornly waving a stick and being ignored.
Traffic lights are equally ineffective. A red light simply encourages drivers to put their foot on the accelerator to get across the junction more quickly, while a pedestrian crossing the road requires the dexterity of a matador missing the horns of a charging bull.
With heavily-laden trucks belching thick exhaust fumes, private vehicles blaring horns in the misguided belief that other traffic will make room for them, coaches with men hanging out screaming their destination, battered cabs, brightly decorated rickshaws, and the ubiquitous green CNG baby-taxis, Dhaka is a deafening whirl of turmoil.
But I felt at home. It reminded me of other bustling cities in Asia such as Manila and Jakarta although, as most vehicles in Dhaka are fuelled by compressed natural gas (CNG) rather than gasoline, there isn’t the dense smog one associates with those other capitals.
I prefer to travel in the CNG taxis because not only are they able to weave between the other vehicles, but they also dodge around pot holes in the road. Calling them pot holes is a bit of a misnomer as it contravenes the dictionary definition. They are usually large enough to swallow a small vehicle and should be designated as craters, not pot holes.
No matter how often they are repaired the next monsoon downpour creates even more gaping cavities. Infrastructure in Dhaka is old and too expensive to maintain, and each year the monsoon causes greater flooding because areas surrounding the capital, which once acted as a natural drainage plain, have been built upon so extensively there is nowhere for the water to seep away.
Duncan and I have different ways of working. He retreats to his room at the end of the day, while I leave the hotel and explore. I learn more about a country and its people by talking at roadside stalls, than listening to the opinion of the dignitaries and businessmen we interview.
In Bangladesh, I find people are always willing to talk at stalls selling the sweet tea they call ‘cha’. I recall the first time some men motioned me over to share a cup of tea with them.
One asked if I knew who the richest man in Bangladesh was. He was eager to point out it was Tarique Rahman, the son of the then prime minister Khaleda Zia. They began a vigorous debate about how he’d accumulated his wealth.
One thing you readily notice as you walk around Dhaka, is how young most of the population appears to be.
Apart from students, there are large numbers of children in some form of employment or other; hawking goods between stationery vehicles, selling bottles of water or newspapers and books while others labour on construction sites, or stand on street corners selling single cigarettes from a tray hanging round their neck.
able to recycle. I saw a group of children fighting over half-a-dozen discarded nails, and gave a handful of taka to the youngest lad who’d been bullied and had his few items stolen from him.
Dogs wander everywhere, competing for space on the pavements with vendors selling food or items of clothing; with an abundance of fake brand names on display.
The sale of counterfeit goods isn’t limited to the roadside stalls. Shops inside our international hotel had stacks of illegal DVDs. You find all the latest Hollywood and Bollywood releases as well as box-sets for the most popular BBC programmes. And should you require ‘male enhancement’ tablets, there is Viogra and Tiagra sitting next to the toothpaste.
Certain cultural traits might be a little disconcerting to a westerner, though they are equally prevalent elsewhere across Asia and Africa and you soon become accustomed to them.
But it’s not pleasant to see men crouching next to an open gutter to relieve themselves, nor the distasteful habit of loudly coughing up phlegm and spitting onto the pavements.
We’d stayed at the Pan Pacific Sonargoan Hotel on the recommendation of the BBC Dhaka bureau, and because the head of the BBC Bengali service always stayed there.
On my next BBC trip we stayed at a small hotel in Banini because it was more central, and you could get a better feel for the city and its people. It also saved a lot of money.
After that, I stayed either in Mirpur, close to the Grameen Bank headquarters, or with friends in Uttara.
But I always found time to visit Kawran Bazar, one of the biggest markets in South Asia; a thriving a hive of activity day and night. After discovering it on my first night, it became one of my favourite places in the entire world.
You can find anything and everything you can possibly need, from live goats and chickens to an iron gate, children’s clothes to funeral shrouds, a metal pan to a gold bracelet.
The market is awash with the smell of exotic spices and the stench of rotting fruit, while the ears are caressed with the sounds of Indian songs sold on pirated DVDs or bludgeoned by the hammering of chisels creating designs on wooden furniture.
It’s a colourful, pulsating, exciting blend of humanity, and I make sure I go there every time I visit Bangladesh.
The market can be found just across the road from the five-star Pan Pacific Sonargoan Hotel, and not far from the BBC bureau and the modern Bashundhara complex with its 19 floors and glass lifts transporting customers to the eight retail floors inside the huge atrium.
Although Karwan Bazar is surrounded by the trappings of wealth, a walk through the maze of stalls and workshops brings you face-to-face with the mind-numbing reality of how millions of Bangladeshi people live.
Behind the entire length of the market runs the major commuter and inter-city railway track, and along each side of these tracks, extending as far as the eye can see, you find the surreal world of the shanty town.
town.
Here the hungry and the poor survive in a world hidden from the teeming population of the Bangladesh capital. Their shacks are constructed out of materials they have been lucky enough to find or scavenge; cardboard, jute matting, blankets, bamboo plastered with mud and, for the more fortunate, planks of wood or sheets of corrugated tin.
Most of the people living there have lost their homes and livelihoods and migrated from the countryside in the desperate hope they can find work in the adjacent market or the business district. A fortunate few do manage to work a few days each month, earning a pittance to feed their families, or even to send a few taka back to relatives still living in their home village.
Parents swoop up children when a train approaches, just a metre away from the shacks that have become the only home they know.
After it has passed, they return to play on the tracks. It looks like a scene from a post-apocalypse movie, but appearances are deceptive.
If you close your eyes and listen to the laughter of the children, you can imagine yourself being in a playground in the smart suburb of any city in the developed world. And if you take a look inside one of the shacks, you see how spotlessly clean and tidy most of them are.
These people live in conditions which are unimaginable to most of us, but they do so with a dignity and generosity of spirit which is a humbling experience. Whenever I walk along those tracks, I feel privileged when some of them remember me and greet me like an old friend.
Women crouching outside their tracks, who constantly seem to be cooking a pan of rice or something which resembles cabbage leaves, look up from their pots and smile, men motion me over to share a cup of tea with them, and children follow me as though I am the Pied Piper of Hamelin, curious to see a foreigner in their midst.
They have no concept of the world outside their domain but some of the older children have heard of one foreign place and subsequently think I must be from Pakistan. Those who are able to understand I am from England, call me ‘Londoni’.
Many of these people, who cannot find work, resort to begging. But when I walk along those tracks I have rarely been approached with an outstretched hand.
These people have few, if any, material possessions, yet they don’t clamour around me asking for anything
Quite the opposite. They are anxious to share what little they do have and I am frequently offered a plate of food.
It is difficult to decline their generosity, but it is equally difficult to take anything from them when I can walk into the Pan Pacific Hotel a few minutes’ away, where the money I spend on a coffee and a slice of cake would be enough to feed that family for a week.
Never wanting to offend anyone, I usually decline by indicating that I have a dodgy tummy and cannot eat anything at the moment.
look at it and reflect how much it epitomises the selflessness of the poor.
shanty town can be.
A group of children were reluctant for me to leave and surrounded me to prevent me from doing so.
I discovered why, when one of them returned to join the throng around me. He had gone off in search of something to give me as a gift, and what he’d managed to find was a comb.
It was amusing, because I shave my head, but knowing the Bangla word for bald, I tapped the top of my head and said ‘talu’. I then lifted my shirt and combed the hair on my chest, which made the children, and the adult observers, burst into laughter.
I still have that comb. It’s not worth two cents but it is the most precious gift I have ever received. I look at it and reflect how much it epitomises the selflessness of the poor.
19. Behind the Painted Smile
After one of the Bangladeshi lads I knew in East London returned from a family holiday, he called round and described his exploits with such unbridled enthusiasm, I was captivated and inspired by his tales.
I wanted to experience that aspect of the country myself when I next booked leave at work and I was pleased when his father insisted I stayed in his village.
I disembarked from the small aircraft which ferried me from Dhaka to Sylhet and walked out to the taxis and throngs of people greeting the arrivals.
My welcoming committee consisted of Sulaiman and two of his friends, and the four of us squeezed into a CNG taxi for the hour-long journey to his village.
The first thing I noticed was how hilly the countryside was compared to other regions I’d seen in Bangladesh.
The landscape became more familiar as we headed north; mile upon mile of lush green paddy fields interspersed by brick works and, dotted everywhere, huddles of dwellings built man-made mounds of earth, to keep them above the height of the water during the rainy season when the area is flooded.
Before entering Jawar Bazaar we turned onto a narrow road with paddy fields and ponds on either side. A dusty path led us to a village I liken to an outstretched hand. In the palm are a few buildings, including a school and the local branch of Grameen Bank, while each fingertip has a cluster of between 20 to 30 dwellings.
Each cluster is joined by rudimentary bamboo bridges; so basic, some consist of a single bamboo pole with a handrail about three feet above it, held in place by poles sticking out of the water below. Local people walk across them with the dexterity of a tight-rope walker, whereas I am obliged to shuffle along sideways.
The earth mound on which our destination was located is shored up with an eight-foot brick wall to prevent soil erosion, and access is by 12 concrete steps. At the top of the steps was the building where I was going to stay.
Compared to other structures in the village, it looks like a colonial-era mansion. An elaborate arched portico leads onto a tiled veranda running the entire length of the building, and the central hallway running parallel to it gives access to six family-sized rooms on either side.
The flat roof, where rice can be spread out to dry, and where children play when the ground is too muddy during the monsoon season, is bordered by an ornate balustrade.
I hesitate to call it a kitchen, but one of the rooms was designated for preparing and cooking food in an earthenware oven and, to my delight and relief, there is the added luxury of a western-style toilet and bathroom rather than the traditional open latrine.
A single path running through the village terminated with a mosque at the far end. On either side of
A single path running through the village terminated with a mosque at the far end. On either side of the path live 20 families, some in homes which are little more than one or two rooms built out of reeds or bamboo covered in dried mud, with a corrugated tin roof.
The patriarch of the family I was staying with possessed a serene presence which demanded admiration and respect.
Having endured a hard life for more than 90 years, he was enjoying his twilight years surrounded by his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His wife was only marginally younger and although I couldn’t understand what she was saying, she was evidently inviting me into her home as she took my hand and showed me the corner room in the front of the house where I would be staying.
She was the only female in the village who spoke to me for a couple of days. When others came into the room to place food or a cup of tea in front of me, they kept their eyes lowered and left quickly. However, I did notice several women gathered at the door peeking at me, but they ducked into the shadows the moment I turned my head towards them.
By the time I left the village there was no such reticence and they talked openly about their lives and families. It was later explained to me they would never have been so familiar if I had been a Bangladeshi male, but none of them had wanted to be left out of the unique experience of talking to a European.
The children were also initially reluctant to come into my room, but once they realised that the strange creature from another planet wasn’t going to harm them, they hardly left my side throughout the duration of my stay.
I was certainly a novelty, but part of the attraction was undoubtedly because I couldn’t resist bringing back sweets or toys; a bag of glass marbles, badminton rackets, cricket bats or footballs, whenever I went to the market.
The menfolk were quite different. They congregated in my room every evening where, despite the lack of a common language, we managed to converse extremely well.
The only time I had any real problem and could not put across what I was trying to say, was when attempting to explain that the lump on my shin, which one of the men was curious about, was the result of a skiing accident.
Communication improved with the arrival of Sulaiman’s younger brother who had a few days off from his college.
Hanif and several of his friends spoke enough English to enable me to learn much more about the village culture.
When a dozen men gathered in the house one evening, he described the meeting as the weekly ‘village parliament’, when local issues are discussed and any problems sorted out.
“The Dhaka government has no control over what goes on here,’ Hanif explains, while mentioning that women never take part in the talks and have no influence on the outcome.
Once a month, representatives from all the villages in the area meet to discuss topics such as how to spend money allocated by the district authority. The need for an efficient energy supply and infrastructure
nothing ever gets done.
‘The functionaries have nice big houses and live well,’ Hanif laments, but they don’t do their job.’
People scoff at the empty promises when elections are due. ‘Politicians try to bribe us for votes, a man in the market tells me, adding: ‘We are simple people but we are not stupid people.’ It was a common refrain.
People wandered in and out of my room constantly. At first, I thought it was a little impolite to enter without knocking, but then I realised they were treating me like any other member of the family; which is exactly what I’d hoped would happen.
The only person to treat me with a deference I definitely didn’t deserve, was Saydul, the young man employed by the family to look after the cows and act as a general factotum.
He taught me how to milk cows, although they didn’t take kindly to my clumsy fumbling. I’d then don a traditional lunghi, the cloth men wrap around their waist, and help Saydul wash them in the ponds before they are tethered in the field on a long rope to prevent them straying onto another person’s plot of land. Clean and healthy cows not only produce more milk, they also live longer and give birth to more calves.
I quickly settled into the routine of village life, where women play an integral role in the planting, harvesting, drying, and husking of rice. They pack rice into large sacks for use throughout the year and any excess is sold. Women also look after the vegetables they grow in every available space, while men focus on gathering hay, which is stored and used to feed the livestock during the rainy season, and carry out any repairs which need doing to the home, fishing nets or farm implements.
There are always chores to be done and everybody, regardless of age or gender, takes part with a seemingly cheerful nature which belies the real hardships many of them face. I marvel at the skills and ingenuity village people possess.
Nothing is ever wasted or thrown away. A broken fan is repaired with a hair pin; an old curtain is fashioned into a net for catching fish; electric wires snapped in a storm are spliced together with sticky tape; the spokes of a broken rickshaw are replaced by twisted strands of wire taken from an old umbrella.
Women tend not to leave the village. It is the men who usually go to the market and it came as no surprise to discover many of the older villagers have never ventured beyond Jawar Bazaar itself. It is the largest market in the area and a hive of commercial and social activity. Each time I went to the market I was conscious of being watched, but for no reason other than curiosity. People are not accustomed to strangers in their midst, let alone one with the fair skin of a European.
News of my visit had evidently travelled because many people already knew where I was staying and with which family, and I was approached by a teacher from the local secondary school who asked if I would call in and talk to some of his pupils in English.
On the road to the school stands an imposing property built by a renowned kick boxer who lives in London.
Surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire, it looks most incongruous and would be more
Surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire, it looks most incongruous and would be more suited in Hollywood with its basketball court, figure-of-eight swimming pool and, parked in front of the building, large quad bikes, a jet-ski, and several luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles.
After speaking with some of the pupils, who were a little disappointed I couldn’t tell them anything about Manchester United football players, I joined the headmaster for a cup of tea.
He was proud of his pupil’s achievements but explained how language lessons would be more effective if the school had modern equipment, such as a computer, to enable them to watch films to improve their pronunciation.
When I asked whether he’d ever approached the owner of the large house down the road, he remarked: ‘They’ve never been a friend to the school.’
It seems they have never been a friend to anybody in the area. ‘They come on holiday and think they are clever showing us how rich they are,’ comments one shop owner in the market. Another says he feels sad for them when somebody from the house was throwing 100 taka notes behind him as he walked along the road, leaving people in his wake scavenging for them. Such ostentatious behaviour perpetuates local resentment.
‘People only need so much money to live comfortably,’ says Ibrahim Delwar, a teacher at the local religious school, known as a madrasa.
“When they have more than they need they should help their community. He also says that although some families only manage to survive because of remittances sent home from relatives working abroad, there are others who receive so much that they lose all incentive to work.
‘It makes them idle and it creates a divisive society,’ he says with a sneer.
One of the most refreshing things I notice when staying in a village, is the tranquillity once the day’s activities are over.
Living in an urban environment you forget what total peace and quiet is like. There is no noise from traffic, no aircraft flying overhead; just the crying or laughter of children and the occasional moo from a cow.
At night, when I settle down to sleep under the mosquito net, the only disturbance comes from the geckos, known as a tik-ticky in Bangla because of the noise they make as they scamper across the ceiling, and the croaking of frogs in the nearby ponds.
My sojourns in rural Bangladesh offer a welcome respite from the hectic pace of life in London and I always feel totally reinvigorated after my visits.
However, I am not naïve, and appreciate that village life is far from perfect. Beneath the portrayal of an idyllic existence lurks real hardship and friendly smiles hide serious anxieties.
Village people form allegiances and work together, supressing long-held grievances for mutual benefit, in what is a refined feudal system operating within a strict hierarchy.
Unlike me, they cannot return to a life which offers safe drinking water, an uninterrupted electricity supply and a free health service. But whatever the shortcomings, I eagerly look forward to staying in the
villages and have developed enduring friendships.
20. Bangladesh Coal Divides Region
Apart from the inevitable story about the textile industry, one of the main reasons I’d been able to convince our editor to fund a trip to Bangladesh, was because I’d unearthed a story regarding local opposition to an open-cast coal mine, the size of Manhattan, in the north-west region of Dinajpur.
It was only five lines in the Daily Telegraph, but it caught my eye because it was going to be operated by a UK-based company Asia Energy. The country needed to do something about its energy supply, but displacing 40,000 people didn’t seem the best way to resolve the problem.
While planning our trip, I contacted our stringer in Dhaka to ensure we wouldn’t be encroaching upon any story he might be doing, bearing in mind he only got paid for stories he filed to BBC World Service in London. He insisted the mining story was insignificant and of no interest, and suggested we concentrated on the proposed story we were going to do about textiles.
However, while we were in Dhaka, we went to interview Gary Lye, managing director of Asia Energy.
He was under the impression we’d already seen their promotional video, but we explained we’d not had that privilege.
It was a slick corporate video, produced by none other than Roland Burke, our stringer. Far from being insignificant as he’d said, it explained why he hadn’t been keen for us to delve into the story. I didn’t care whether Burke had made some extra cash, using BBC facilities, but I was most annoyed he’d had the temerity to try to prevent us covering the story.
There was a conflict of interest and that compromised the reputation and integrity of the BBC.
I was also repulsed by Mr Lye’s enthusiasm about how much profit Asia Energy expected to make, while handing only six per cent of those profits to the Bangladesh government.
As we left he gave us a cheery wave and said: You must visit the region sometime’, oblivious to the fact that we’d already made arrangements to do exactly that.
We were supposed to set off for Phulbari at six o’clock but our departure was held up for 90 minutes because Duncan hadn’t slept well. Even at that early hour, it took us over an hour to reach the outskirts of Dhaka because of the congested traffic.
The countryside was flat and the scenery consisted of endless paddy fields and brick works. We had to stop when the engine overheated, which happened all too frequently, and we also came to a virtual halt every time we passed through a town because of heavy congestion caused by busses which carried as many people on top as they did inside, the ubiquitous Tata trucks belching thick black fumes, and tractorlooking vehicles which seemed to be powered by a lawn mower engine.
The only relief to the monotony during our 350 kilometre journey, was crossing the Bangadandhu Bridge, which at the time was the longest in Asia. Our driver had anticipated taking six hours to reach our destination, but it took us eight hours to arrive in Phulbai, not far from the Indian border.
The first thing we noticed when we arrived, was graffiti telling Asia Energy to leave the area. People were reluctant to talk to us initially, thinking we were connected to the company like the only other Europeans they’d come across. But when they understood we were there to present their side of the story they quickly gathered round to voice their concerns.
Our visit was brought to an abrupt halt however, after a furious Gary Lye heard we were in Phulbari interviewing people and we were approached by Asia Energy security guards who told us to leave immediately.
As they were pointing rifles at us, we didn’t argue.
Bangladesh Coal Divides Region James Melik. Published 12 July 2006
As Bangladesh businesses struggle to cope with acute electricity shortages, plans to ensure energy security for the future have been greeted with fear and riots by the inhabitants of Phulbari in the North West Dinajpur district.
London-based Asia Energy is planning to operate an open cast coal mine which will entail relocating an estimated 40,000 people from their homes.
The proposed mining area is the size of Manhattan and will affect more than 100 villages, among them communities of the Santal, Munda and Mahali tribes, and the destruction of acres of fertile agricultural land.
The mining firm has promised to compensate people for loss of land and businesses.
That might be good news for landowners but offers little to the people who work on the land, who claim they will see their homes, their heritage and their culture destroyed.
If the mining project receives government approval, people will either be moved to host villages, or to new homes constructed in an expanded and modernised Phulbari.
One woman says she does not want to move and be treated like a foreigner in another village, whilst a 75-year-old man who has lived in the area all his life, says:
‘What will happen to us if we are forced to move from here? What will happen to our livelihoods? I don’t want us to live like this.
‘Our mosques and holy places and the places we were born will be destroyed. What will happen to the graveyards of our ancestors?’
A local teacher is concerned about the project’s impact on young people. ‘Children and students don’t really believe what they’re being told by the mining company,’ he says. “They know they’re going to be relocated, dislocated and evicted, so they’re worried about their fate.’
One young women says the mine is a good idea because it will create new jobs and she would consider going to work for the mining company.
A local politician, meanwhile, says the mine will be good for the region’s economy and should attract
other companies to invest in the area.
He adds that when farmers lose the use of the land, another job will be waiting for them in the mine.
But the mine will provide only 2,100 jobs whilst it is being constructed, and 1,100 long-term positions.
Gary Lye, chief executive of the mining company Asia Energy, says the region will be better off in the long term.
‘At the moment farmers in the area cannot afford to do what they are doing now.
‘A fact of life is, the coal under the ground is worth much more to everybody than growing rice on the surface,’ he says.
Apart from coal, the mine will also provide co-products such as kaolin, clay, sand, rock and aggregate, which can be put to productive use.
During the 30-year expected life span of the mine, the land will be re-filled as the open pit moves forward, and revert back to agricultural use.
And a huge artificial lake will remain when the mine’s supply of coal has been exhausted.
The company says the lake will be clean and could be used as a safe water supply or for irrigation and fishing
As if to emphasise the energy problems facing the country, the power failed twice whilst Mr Lye was explaining his company’s plan and emergency generators had to be switched on.
The mine will undoubtedly transform the environment.
Waste minerals will be dumped beside the pit and a 500 megawatt power station is envisaged to produce electricity.
Professor Anu Muhammad at Jahangirnagar University isn’t convinced the benefits outweigh social and environmental concerns.
Studies in open pit mining in other countries, and particularly one from Pennsylvania in the United States, found that one river 160 kilometers from the pit was still poisoned three decades later.
‘In a country like Bangladesh, with hundreds of small rivers linked like a huge net, polluted water can travel long beyond the mining area,’ he says.
He is also concerned that a feasibility study was not done by an independent body.
However, Asia Energy says 80 per cent of visitors to its information centre in Phulbari have been positive about the proposals.
That figure contradicts Professor Anu’s own findings, which show only 2 per cent, usually local government officials who will get compensation, are actually in favour of the mine.
Some of Phulbari’s coal will be kept back for use in Bangladesh, replacing several millions of tonnes a year currently imported from India.
However, two-thirds of the coal from the Phulbari mine will be sold abroad.
According to a report by the mining company, this will benefit the Bangladeshi economy by $21bn over 30 years and add one per cent to gross domestic product.
Asia Energy’s Gary Lye says there is no point in building the mine unless the majority of the coal is exported.
‘If you want to have a sustainable new regime of energy development in the country though coal, it has to be economic,’ he says.
Professor Anu acknowledges that Bangladesh needs energy, needs a coal mine, and needs electricity.
He is concerned, however, that coal is a non-renewable energy source and that if it stayed in the country, it would serve the population for 50 or 100 years, rather than the expected 30-year life span Asia Energy is proposing.
Since acquiring the mining rights from BHP Billington, Asia Energy has spent $20m in exploration and preparation costs and is anxious to get permission to proceed.
The government of Bangladesh is set to make a decision within a few months.
But with an election looming, opponents to the scheme are worried it might give its approval without due consideration to the cultural and environmental impact the mine will have on the area.
With the country’s own supply of natural gas dwindling and worldwide oil prices rising, coal may seem an attractive solution in a country where fewer than one in four people have regular supplies of electricity.
000
cancelled after lines were blocked with burning logs. The National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Power, Port and Mineral Resources, led by Professor Anu Muhammad, organised the protests.
According to company officials in London the committee, which has demanded the mine be stopped, had been described by Bangladeshi ministers as an ‘obscure left-wing group’.
Shares in the company fell by 60 per cent and the project was temporarily shelved. I like to think that my feature, widely reproduced in newspapers and mining publications, had some small part to play in upsetting Mr Lye’s greedy ambitions.
On 11 January 2007 Asia Energy changed its name to Global Coal Management, and later GCM Resources, reflecting its investments in coal and uranium projects in other countries.
WikiLeaks showed that American diplomats pressured the Bangladeshi government in 2009 to reopen the project with GCM, but Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced that coal extraction was to be left to ‘future technology as food security and protecting the land of the farmers is the first priority.
GCM is still struggling to get the project underway and in November 2018 it signed a memorandum of understanding with Power Construction Corporation of China.
At its AGM in December, protestors gathered in London and some of them glued themselves to the entrance of GCM’s headquarters. It looks as though the battle is set to continue for some time with no easy solution in sight.
Our driver put his foot on the accelerator to get back to Dhaka as quickly as he could. That was selfdefeating because the faster he drove, the more the engine overheated and the more frequently we had to stop so the engine could cool down and each delay made Duncan more agitated. I didn’t think for one moment we were being followed and thought his reaction was somewhat over dramatic. Driving at speed in the dark on those perilous roads was far more dangerous than having a few security men waving their guns at us.
I actually found it all quite an adventure, but I agreed with his decision to download the interviews as soon as we got back to the hotel and email them to himself. A sensible precaution just in case the original minidiscs should get ‘lost’.
Before we’d even returned to London, Asia Energy had contacted the BBC to say we’d interviewed Mr Lye under false pretences, and demanded we didn’t run the story. Even Roland Burke had the temerity to try to persuade us to drop it, which went against all BBC protocol. He might have been the son of Michael Burke, who’d brought the Ethiopia famine to the world’s attention but, as one BBC manager said, he’d ‘gone native’.
No amount of intimidation or old-boy-network pleas was going to prevent Duncan broadcasting his package, and neither would it prevent me from publishing my feature Online.
A couple of weeks after it was published, security guards and police fired into a group of 30,000 who tried to storm the local offices of Asia Energy, killing six and injuring a further 300.
The deaths led to days of rioting, with roads barricaded with burning tyres and train services
There is further controversy over the proposed coal-fired Rampal power station located close to the Sundarbans in the south of the country. The Sundarbans, which means beautiful forest, lies at the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers on the Bay of Bengal. It is the largest mangrove forest in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The power plant is a joint venture by the newly-formed Bangladesh India Friendship Power Company, but it is strongly opposed by environmentalists.
The plant will need to import about five millions tons of coal a year. Freighters will unload at a port on the bank of the River Poshur, then the coal will be ferried 40 kilometres through the shallow rivers of the Sundarbans. Five vessels so far have sank while making that journey, endangering both the wildlife and the eco-system.
Professor Anu Muhammad says: ‘We have repeatedly urged the government to stop this controversial project. But the government is allowing the plying of big vessels through the river route, the construction of large coal-fired power plant and encroachment of forest lands by land grabbers and business groups. Millions of people will lose their livelihood due to destruction of the forest. The whole population of the coastal area will be affected.
‘The government is pursuing this questionable project in the name of solving power and energy crisis. There is no doubt we have to solve these problems, but the way the government is approaching this issue, it seems that they are more eager to protect the interests of some local and international companies than solving the crisis.
21. Energy for the Masses
Since the oil and gas of the Bay of Bengal are the main resources for our future, it is only expected that our plans on using these resources are judicious. Otherwise, the country will be totally deprived of the huge potentials it possesses. Sadly, one would be astonished to know the attempts that are being made to destroy these natural resources. Without floating any tender based on mutual understanding, the government has decided to lease out the oil and gas blocks of our sea.
‘In order to do so, the government has resorted to the Speedy Supply of Power and Energy Special Act which is essentially an indemnity law. As per this law, no one can seek the court’s assistance in matters of the energy ministry and no civil or criminal case can be filed against it.’
Energy, or to be more precise, an acute lack of it, ranks alongside corruption as a major impediment for Bangladesh not becoming a success story like neighbouring India.
Business struggles to cope with blackouts but they have generators which automatically switch on when the national supply fails; which happens with monotonous regularity.
It’s something you quickly get used to, though it can be frustrating when your computer crashes and you lose work because you haven’t backed it up every five minutes.
Leaning over to pick up a shirt at the back of a roadside stall, my head brushed against the electrical wire strung across the front of the stall to illuminate a couple of light bulbs. I leapt back instantly because I received an electric shock. Looking at the labyrinth of wires strung along the streets in every city, like giant spaghetti sculptures, with loose broken wires dangling down and sometimes emitting sparks, I’m not surprised there aren’t thousands of deaths by electrocution every year.
Maybe there are, but they simply don’t get recorded.
They don’t have that problem of mangled wires dangling dangerously in the countryside. It is estimated 60 per cent of the population isn’t connected to the grid, though it doesn’t take into account the single wire you see leading to a village, which is ingeniously tapped into so every family gets some electrical supply, however intermittent.
Construction began on Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant in November 2017, marking a significant milestone in the process of bringing electricity to every household in the world’s eighth most populous country.
The plant in Roopur, 160 kilometres north-west of Dhaka is due to be commissioned in 2023, and a second plant, begun in 2018 is due to be operational a year later.
The argument for renewable energy such as solar power is strong but when Professor Muhammed Yunus addressed the problem himself, the cost was prohibitive.
He approached the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which not only put up finances to install panels in an experimental project, but also put him in touch with the Solar Power Company in Sri Lanka and Lotus Energy in Nepal.
Dr Yunus formed Grameen Shakti, which translates into rural energy, to tackle the lack of electricity supplies to villages.
The company installed its one millionth solar home system at the end of 2012. ‘Grameen Shakti lights up the rural backwaters’ ran the headlines, at an event attended by the country director of the World Bank.
‘Eight million people light their businesses and homes using solar power,’ Dr Yunus enthused. ‘Mosques and schools in rural districts benefit with solar home systems, while mobile phone shops,
electronic repair shops, agricultural and livestock farms, rural hospitals, vaccination centres, shops, bakeries and rural pharmacies can stay open late at night.’
Amid applause, he continued: ‘It is as if sleepy, dark villages have woken up to a new life, a life of activity and growth which is healthy and clean.’
ging director of Grameen Shakti at the time, said: ‘We started solar home systems because it was the most important and suitable technology for us to adapt and install at the rural level.’
Echoing Dr Yunus’ comments he continued: ‘We thought we could play a very effective role in bringing green electricity for better lighting into homes and this is also better for their children’s education.’ Speaking of women, he said they could work and cook under improved light, watch television and listen to radio, and increase their work hours by taking part in income generating activities at home after dusk.
“Women are the main victims of the energy crisis. They are the ones who suffer most from indoor air pollution, drudgery and other negative impacts of the energy crisis rural areas face around the world. We at Grameen Shakti believe that women should be transformed from passive victims into active forces of good to bring changes in their lives and the communities in which they live.’
Solar home systems introduced by Mr Barua have been an immensely successful innovation. Grameen Shakti won the Right Livelihood Award for its ‘outstanding vision and work on behalf of the planet and its people’.
It also won the Ashden Achievement Award in 2006 and 2008, and was again shortlisted in 2015. Ashden in a charitable trust run by the Sainsbury family in the UK, which champions leaders in sustainable energy to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon world.
Dipal Barua was born in Jobra, where Dr Yunus made his first microcredit loans. The men were so inextricably linked for 34 years, Mr Barua is considered in many circles to be a co-founder of Grameen Bank.
The tribute is mentioned whenever Mr Barua receives a prize and his web pages cite it as one of his achievements, yet Dr Yunus makes no such reference in any of his books.
The split between the two men was acrimonious and shrouded in intrigue and gossip. Official explanations failed to materialise and if they did they were soon repressed. Trying to retrieve archive pages from various Bangladeshi newspapers results in an error code and none of them now available. In true Politburo style, Mr Barua has been expunged from Grameen.
For a while, the Grameen Shakti web page displayed:
About Dipal Chandra Barua. Mr Chandra Dipal Barua is no longer associated with Grameen Shakti. He does not represent Grameen Shakti in any capacity. He is not authorised to discuss any issue relating to Grameen Shakti with any person or organisation. All correspondence on Grameen Shakti
should be addressed to Abser Kamal, Managing Director Grameen Shakti.’
Even that mention of Mr Barua has since disappeared.
The difference a home solar system can make to a family was demonstrated when I stayed in a village near Jawar Bazar in the district of Sylhet. The family I was staying with had a generator which provided all its energy needs; the people living next door couldn’t afford such a luxury.
I was invited into the neighbour’s dwelling one evening and sitting crossed-legged on the floor, I shared their meal of curried chicken and rice. The room was large and sparsely furnished, with a cloth dividing the living and the sleeping area. Nacir worked as a carpenter and earned enough to feed and clothe his wife and three children, but there was nothing left at the end of each week for anything else. His wife had borrowed money from Grameen Bank so she could pay for the tools he needed for his job, which they had since paid back.
They didn’t want to take on another loan despite being encouraged by the bank to do so.
‘We had difficulty making payments for a few months when I was ill and the worry affected the health of my wife,’ Balayet told me as he licked his fingers clean.
“The people at the bank were not pleasant when times were hard for us, but they are friendly and smile when they ask us to have another loan.’
By the time I left, my eyes were smarting and bloodshot with the fumes of the smoke from the kerosene lamp, and I was coughing. When I left the village, I bought a cow for the family I’d been staying with, and a solar system for Balayet and his family. The panel attached to the roof was smaller than a pillow, yet it generated 30 watts, which was sufficient to recharge his mobile phone and light the two bulbs hanging in the room.
When I visited a year later I noticed he’d bought a small television and a dozen neighbours were crowded into his room to watch the national cricket team.
Dr Yunus later explained that after retiring from the UN Development Programme, Dr Farashuddin was appointed as an advisor to Grameen Shakti, supported by the Ruhul Quddus who provided technical knowledge and Dewan Alamgir, who was brought on board to write project documents.
Dr Yunus notes that by 1996 it was time to convert the project into a not-for-profit company and since Dr Farashuddin was leaving, he put Dipal Barua’s name on the company’s memorandum of association as managing director of Grameen Shakti. “This was done as a stop-gap until I could find a full time managing director,’ says Dr Yunus, adding: ‘Usually I put Khalid Sham’s name for such appointments but since his hands were full, this time I gave it to Dipal.’
Dr Yunus is chairman of Grameen Shakti, as he is with every organisation bearing the Grameen name, while the board of directors include his scientist brother Dr Muhammad Ibrahim.
David Roodman spent 11 years as a fellow at the Centre for Global Development and nine before that at the Worldwatch Institute. He also served as senior economic advisor at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
22. Bangladesh Water Crisis
He is a font of knowledge regarding Grameen Bank and refers to the split as ‘a divorce between the number one and two leaders of Grameen Bank, which happened after Mr Barua received the inaugural Zayed Future Energy Prize in 2009.
‘Dipal Barua was a most faithful servant and disciple of Muhammad Yunus for more than 30 years,’ says an insider who has no desire to be seen breaking rank with the Mafia-like secrecy surrounding the Barua affair. “Then he was suddenly gone after receiving the big Zayed prize from Dubai.’
Even with my journalistic guile, it took me a long time to track Mr Barua down and despite telling me to call at certain times, he didn’t answer his phone. I eventually managed to get hold of him after somebody innocently gave me his mobile number. It was a Friday lunchtime and he was walking through a busy market so our conversation was brief. A week later I called him earlier in the day and caught him at home.
‘I have discussed everything with my family and cannot give an interview about Grameen,’ he explains apologetically.
‘I retired voluntarily in December 2009 and used the resources I was given from Abu Dhabi to begin my Foundation. I was involved with Grameen bank from day one and played an important role at the bank, where I held the number two position for 20 years. I did everything with my own hands and my own brain and I want to continue with the memory of loving Grameen bank. But I want to forget the painful episode of my departure. I wish I could say more but I hope you understand my situation,’ he says. ‘You have done your research and you can write your thoughts, but I cannot comment further,’ he added.
The research he mentions hardly merits the appellation. In the absence of concrete facts, the prevailing conjecture has become urban myth. It focusses upon the $1.5m which came with the Zayed Future Energy prize, which was a lot more than Dr Yunus garnered for his Nobel accolade.
With what Mr Roodman succinctly calls the Kremlinology of Grameen, as soon as Barua was no longer working for Dr Yunus, vultures were circling while the corpse was still warm.
Accusations abound about Mr Barua pocketing the prize money, together with stories about skimming profits off sales of solar systems and further financial irregularities.
In addition he was also said to have made a huge fortune from the construction of the new Grameen Bank complex and several other high-rise buildings he was supervising in the suburb of Mirpur. People hiding behind anonymity also blamed him for contributing to the covert and overt political actions to destabilise the bank.
Anybody who has ever met Dipal Barua, which I did on several occasions, would know these malicious anecdotes are totally unfounded.
The oft-quoted refrain of Dr Yunus not wanting anyone around him who might diminish the aura of omnipotence which surrounds him, is a more plausible reason for the resignation of his right-hand man and longstanding friend and colleague.
Mostafa was recommended to us by the BBC bureau in Dhaka to act as our fixer and translator. He’d book transport for us and ensured we reached our appointments more or less on time, depending on the traffic. He suggested we did a story about a water shortage in one of the Dhaka suburbs.
It is somewhat ironic, considering Bangladesh has rivers throughout the entire country, and a monsoon season between June and October, that there is a perennial problem supplying clean water to its population.
A line from the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner comes to mind: ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’
We went to investigate what the government was doing to help the plight of the people in Demra; first taking a taxi, then transferring to rickshaws when the road became impassable to motor vehicles. We knew we were approaching our destination when we came across a water bowser, which the army supplied to deliver drinking water to the suffering residents.
I doubted whether many people in Demra has ever seen a European so it wasn’t surprising we attracted a big crowd.
When I produced my camera, people gathered round to be included in the photograph, so I was able to draw them away from Duncan as he interviewed a barber who had one bucket of water a day to shave his customers, people selling fish who were unable to make ice to keep the produce fresh, dignitaries complaining about broken promises, and angry people saying they had to walk long distances to the bowsers which were only replenished once a day.
The only water is a stream separating the dwellings from the dusty road. Filled with unimaginable horrors, it provided me with my most striking image during my first visit to Bangladesh.
I photographed a young man standing up to his waist in the murky sludge. He kept leaning forward to grope along the bottom of the stream, hoping to find scraps of plastic which he could recycle. After filling the container floating beside him, four or five times a day, he could earn up 100 taka; about one US dollar. Despite such diabolical conditions, he still managed to smile. It was a humbling portrayal of one man’s defiant stance against his poverty-stricken environment.
The environmentalist Mihir Biswas was keen to point out to us the destruction of the wetlands surrounding the city.
Property developers, flouting environmental regulations to build apartment blocks and units for the textile industry, have contributed heavily to the degradation. They ignore the fact that the foundations are not safe and there have been instances of building collapsing, leading to the loss of lives.
Fish stocks are depleted and adjacent paddy fields are inundated with toxic waste. Smaller waterways
are clogged up with sand and garbage and the land no longer acts as a conduit for flood waters to recede, increasing the problem the people of Dhaka face every year during the rainy season.
Iqbal Habib, secretary of Bangladesh Poribesh Adnolon, a forum concerned with the environment, says: ‘Traditionally the canals around Dhaka connected with the four rivers around the city. They acted as water retention areas but the system is now ruined and the city faces severe waterlogging.’
He explains how all the roads in the city look like canals after a little rainfall, causing chaos and more traffic jams.
‘As there is no open space, no wetland and greenery in the city, different parts of the city become heat islands where the temperature increases two to four degrees.’
Without the wetlands to cool them down, people turn to air conditioning and electric fans, increasing the consumption of energy and driving up the carbon footprint of the city.
Each year the Economic Intelligence Unit publishes its Liveability Index. Out of 140 mega cities, Dhaka stood at 139 in 2018. The only city beneath this pitiful position was war-torn Damascus in Syria.
There are laws to protect the environment yet pollution is rising not falling, because of the political and economic power of vested interests.
‘Nobody in the country, at least at the government level, is thinking about sustainable development,’ Rizwana Hasan, a prominent environmental lawyer says.
“The natural resources have been severely degraded and depleted. Tanneries and pharmaceutical plants are part of the problem, but garment factories, a mainstay of the economy and a crucial source of employment, have most clout. When the environment ministry appointed a tough official who levied fines against the textile and dyeing factories, complaining owners eventually forced his transfer.’
The Buriganga River, one of the main waterways in the city, is impressive; apart from the open sewers spewing into it.
We saw vessels carrying cement; people digging into it like a huge mine, carrying it ashore in baskets perched on their head. Each time a man, occasionally a woman, emptied their basket, a foreman handed them one taka. As each round trip took ten minutes a person could earn about six pence an hour.
People unloading bricks could earn more because they didn’t take as long to fill their baskets.
related diseases.
Naturally occurring arsenic is present in drinking water across large areas of the country, much of which is accessed by hand pumps and tube wells. Although deep wells can often reach groundwater of better quality, government programmes to install new wells don’t make it a priority to install them in areas where the risk of arsenic contamination is relatively high.
From 1999 to 2006, international donors, NGOs and the government oversaw a concerted effort to mitigate arsenic contamination in groundwater.
Efforts dissipated after that but there is still a programme of installing wells. However, some national and local politicians divert new wells to political supporters and allies, instead of the people who most need them.
‘If the member of parliament gets 50 per cent of the new allocation and the sub-district chairman gets 50 per cent there’s nothing left to be installed in the areas of acute need,’ explained one government official who spoke to Human Rights Watch on condition of anonymity.
‘Contaminated government tube wells urgently need to be replaced or rehabilitated, before people lose what little faith they have left in the government’s commitment to provide safe water,’ Mr Pearshouse
adds.
Most villages I have visited have one well for the entire community and this water is used for drinking and cooking; and sometimes for bathing children who stand covered in soap as their peers watch bemused.
The principal source of water is the village pond, which serves a multitude of purposes. People fish from them, bathe in them, wash clothes and kitchen utensils in them, wash cows in them, and use them as a toilet. I once refused to dive into a pond, using the fact that I had no clothes to change into as an excuse but nothing would persuade me to immerse myself in such a mire even though it meant being a spoilsport.
m, baibe in them with lathozana kitchen utensils inthem
People in rural areas don’t have to contend with toxic industrial waste polluting their water systems, but they do have to struggle with the issue of arsenic contamination.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch entitled Nepotism and Neglect, published in 2016, Bangladesh’s health system largely ignores the impact of exposure to arsenic on people’s health, with an estimated 43,000 people dying each year from arsenic-related illnesses.
Bangladesh isn’t taking basic steps to get arsenic out of the drinking water of millions of its rural poor,’ says Richard Pearshouse, senior researcher and author of the report.
“The government acts as though the problem has been mostly solved, but unless the government and Bangladesh’s international donors do more, millions of Bangladeshis will die from preventable arsenic
23. Quenching Bangladesh’s Thirst for Tea
Our first work trip to Bangladesh was delayed because of problems getting our work visas, so I couldn’t stay as long as originally intended as I’d promised some lads that I’d be present at their National Record of Achievement (NRA) ceremony, to take photographs of them in their smart attire before they left to attend a party they’d arranged on a boat on the River Thames.
My early departure left Duncan on his own for a couple of days. I arranged for him to stay in a tea plantation, known as a tea garden in Bangladesh, and when he returned to London he submitted a package to the Radio 4 programme From Our Correspondent, which I later posted Online for him.
Quenching Bangladesh’s Thirst for Tea
Bangladesh produces millions of tonnes of tea each year and has its own special tea culture.
But a drought has destroyed large areas of tea estates and now, to the dismay of farmers, the country is considering importing tea from abroad.
The best tea I drank in Bangladesh was made for me by a boy of seven.
With his small hands, he took a tiny glass and washed it in hot water. Then he poured in the tea from a large brown pot and added a spoonful of condensed milk from a tin.
Finally, he stirred in two spoonful’s of sugar and handed me the cup with a grin. I paid him ten taka, about 10p. The usual cost of a cup is only one taka. The Bangladeshis love hot, sweet tea and every year, as the population grows, they drink more.
Nearly all of it comes from the huge tea estates, or tea gardens as they are known, which cover the rolling hills of eastern Bangladesh.
I visited the Shumshernugger garden in the tropical district of Sylhet.
As I pulled up to the gates in a hired minibus, two armed guards straightened their backs and saluted. I stood on the lawn in front of a vast, white timber bungalow where I was greeted by the estate manager, Luftor Rahman, a stocky man in his fifties with kindly patrician manners. He invited me to join him on the veranda.
This time the tea was served in bone china cups. We sipped it as the sun set.
From the balcony we could hear the sound of jackals, drawn to the garden by the smell of jackfruit. I could also make out the shape of fruit-bats, hunting for lychees in the trees.
Mr Rahman wanted to talk business. But first he wanted to know about my name; Duncan. Was I from Scotland he asked? ‘No,’ I replied, but my grandfather was.’ He explained that this tea garden was founded by a Scottish entrepreneur, one Walter Duncan, who
first came to the region in 1858, a year after the Indian Mutiny.
The company which owns the garden is still named Duncan Brothers. It is the largest nongovernment-owned tea producer in the world.
Mr Rahman,’ I asked. “Tea only sells for a penny a cup in Bangladesh, but couldn’t you sell it abroad at a much better price? In a smart restaurant in London or Los Angeles, people would surely pay far more?’
The estate manager sighed and mixed himself a glass of pink gin.
He explained that 75 per cent of the tea which is grown in Bangladesh is drunk within the country. The only significant export markets are Pakistan and Russia. And the farms of Sylhet have a problem.
A drought last year killed one in 10 of the tea bushes, which haven’t yet been replaced.
If domestic demand continues to rise and production cannot be raised, Bangladesh will soon have to import tea from abroad.
Suddenly we were plunged into darkness. Another power cut, a common problem here. Recently one blacked out half the country. Through the gloom, we heard a member of staff running to switch on a generator.
When the lights came back on dinner was served; goat curry and lentil dhal.
The estate’s guest quarters were lavish but the unfamiliar sounds made it hard to sleep. I curled up in bed with a copy of the company magazine: The Duncan. Eventually I must have dozed off.
At half past six, someone wheeled in another pot of hot, fresh tea.
I stepped outside to find Mr Rahman sitting on the balcony in the sunshine, waiting for breakfast. One of his staff stood at his side, bearing a plastic fly-swatter.
We ate fresh mangos and toast and drank yet more tea.
When we reached the fields, we came across dozens of women plucking green leaves from the tea bushes and putting them into heavy sacks on their backs.
The women are all Hindu, a rarity in predominantly Muslim Bangladesh. Their families came here from other parts of the sub-continent a century and a half ago and have remained ever since.
The pickers’ pay is not high, but they are better off than many people who struggle to make a living from the land.
The company offers free health-care and there is even a boarding school for 66 boys.
Lessons start at half eight in the morning and in the afternoons the children play cricket and tabletennis. There are clubs for debating, art and chess.
It feels like an English public school from a distant era; a far cry from the shabby schools in most Bangladeshi villages.
With the benefit of a good education, some of the boys may gain well-paid jobs in the cities.
But their sisters, who cannot go to the school, are likely to follow their mothers into the tea fields for the rest of their lives. The women are praying for a better crop than last year.
24. Jitters over Bangladesh IPO Delay
Once the world’s 5th largest exporter of tea, Bangladesh imported over eight million kilogrammes of tea in 2017, a figure which had risen from two million in 2009.
According to the Daily Observer, among the total of 160 tea garden of the country 37 are sick. But according to unofficial sources, the number of sick industries might be about 70.
Furthermore, the yield per hectare is less in Bangladesh then other major tea growing countries of the world. The yield per hectare in Bangladesh is about 1142 kg against 3000 kg in Kenya and 1500 kg in India.
This wasn’t earth-shattering news, but I wrote the story because we’d used Grameenhone when Duncan Bartlett and I had been to Dhaka on our first trip.
Little did I know that the history of the company was very different to how Yunus describes it in his books, and that his claim Grameen would take over all the shares eventually was disputed by the head of the Telenor, the Norwegian telecoms company which formed a partnership with the banker to provide Bangladesh with a mobile phone service.
Jitters over Bangladesh IPO Delay James Melik. Published 4 March 2009
Investors are getting jittery as the largest corporate company in Bangladesh waits anxiously to see if it gets government approval to raise further funds.
The mobile phone operator Grameenphone is valued at $3.2bn and requires the capital for new investments ahead of the introduction of its 3G services.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is awaiting government instructions before it can give the go-ahead for Grameenphone to offload shares worth $65m in an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
“The approval of the Grameenphone IPO is under process,’ says Farhad Ahmed, the SEC’s director, but investors say the delay may discourage the listing of big companies in the future.
“This delay may dampen market interests,’ maintains Salahuddin Ahmed Khan, former head of the Dhaka Stock Exchange. ‘The SEC should approve the IPO immediately.’
When the idea was first mooted in the summer of 2008, the company planned to raise $300m, but that figure has since been more than halved.
‘Because of the ongoing global slowdown, the sum we are looking for is $125m,’ says Grameenphone’s Oddvar Hesjedal, ‘with $65m from the stock market and $60m from private placement.’
“The money will be raised entirely within Bangladesh,’ he adds. “There is strong support from more than 50 local institutional investors.’
The company admits it is under pressure from shareholders who have already committed themselves to a stake in the company.
Yawer Sayeed, of the local asset management company AIMS, says he placed a large order with issue managers City Global some three months ago.
‘We are locked into our commitment for a full year so, until the share debuts and starts trading, our money is sitting there without earning any interest,’ he says.
He believes the share issue will open up new markets.
‘People want to invest in infrastructure, along with gas and oil exploration,’ he says.
“There are also bridges to be built across our huge rivers, elevated highways, and the deep water port at Cox’s Bazaar,’ he enthuses.
‘We will use the Grameenphone share issue as a showcase for other investments.’
There is concern, however, that the government is now more focused on settling the crisis stemming from the recent mutiny in the border security forces.
At the time, the mutineers said their revolt was over pay and working conditions, but the government now says it was part of a wider conspiracy aimed at destabilising Bangladesh.
Grameenphone is the market leader among six mobile phone operators in Bangladesh, with 21 million subscribers.
The company has bucked the global trend of spiralling plunges and saw its profits rise by 68 per cent in 2008.
Since its inception in March 1997, Grameenphone has built the largest cellular network in the country and nearly 98 per cent of the country’s population is within the coverage area of its network.
It also pays more tax to the government than any other business in Bangladesh.
The company was founded in partnership with Norway’s telecom giant Telenor, after the microfinance banker Professor Muhammad Yunus envisaged how gaining access to the outside world would help the poor in rural villages.
Professor Yunus explains how farmers can determine the best time to sell their produce by keeping in touch with market prices, and how they can get veterinary advice about their animals.
Grameenphone has generated direct and indirect employment for a large number of people over the years.
It has more than 5,000 full and temporary employees, while another 100,000 people are directly dependent on Grameenphone for their livelihood, including retailers and SIM card outlets.
In addition, the Village Phone Program provides a good income-earning opportunity to more than 210,000, most of whom are women.
The programme is an initiative to provide universal access to telecommunications service in remote, rural areas.
At its conception, only one person might have had a phone and other villagers would go to what became known as the ‘phone lady’ who would let them use her appliance to make their call.
Ten years later, the entire Grameenphone network is also enabled to allow access to high-speed internet and data services.
‘The universal use of mobile telephony is a useful tool to lift people out of poverty, because it will help them become better educated,’ Professor Yunus advocates.
The extent to which Grameenphone has transformed the social and business environment of Bangladesh, particularly among the poor in rural areas, cannot be underestimated.
It was the vision of one man, who advanced the idea of introducing mobile phones throughout the country in the belief it could be a potent weapon against poverty. The system was originally going to be called Gonofone and the man with that vision wasn’t Dr Yunus, as people erroneously assume, but a fellow Bangladeshi by the name of Iqbal Quadir.
In his book Banker to the Poor, Dr Yunus explains how his colleague Khalid Shams introduced a young Bangladeshi American graduate called Iqbal, who suggested applying for a license to operate a cellular telephone company in Bangladesh and to take cellular telephones into the villages.
‘People approach me with ideas of what Bangladesh needs but people are far quicker to give ideas than to roll up their sleeves and put them into practice.’ Dr Yunus wrote.
‘Iqbal had done his homework and briefed us fully but I was not sure whether to take him seriously.’
In a somewhat patronising manner, Dr Yunus continues: ‘I did not dismiss him as a bag of hot air, but I wanted to give him time to prove that he was a smart businessman.’
Considering it was Quadir’s idea and Grameenphone wouldn’t exist had it not been for his, dedication and hard work, it is odd this is the only reference Dr Yunus gives to Iqbal when discussing the origins Grameenphone and even then, he only refers to Iqbal by his first name and not his family name.
Reading Yunus’ book, one is left with the impression that the struggle to establish Grameenphone was only undertaken by the friend and colleague who’d introduced Mr Quadir to him.
‘We went through many ups and downs on our way to create a cellular telephone company,’ Dr Yunus writes. ‘Khalid never gave up for Khalid had endless patience.’
That is somewhat unfair and disingenuous.
‘Just a few days before applying for the mobile phone license, he demanded the company be called Grameenphone and I accepted that in his honour,’ Mr Quadir says.
Some might say he is sore that he didn’t receive more credit, but I’ve seen the letters he received from Dr Yunus which corroborate his version of events.
oOo
25. Meeting the Messiah
Nonchalantly leafing through a pile of books stacked on a colleague’s desk in the World Service newsroom, located on the fourth floor of Bush House, I came across Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus.
I flicked through the pages and my interest was aroused when I noticed the words Grameen Telecom. It was the mobile network we’d used when I’d been in Bangladesh with my colleague Duncan Bartlett.
After arriving in Dhaka and booking into our hotel, I’d gone to a nearby shopping mall to purchase local SIM cards for our cell phones and Grameenphone had offered the best pay-as-you-go deal. In the UK, you can purchase a SIM card over the counter at most newsagents or the local corner shop, but in Dhaka you have to fill out a form and provide a passport-size photograph. Then, instead of my signature at the bottom of the form, you leave a thumb print.
I borrowed the book from my colleague and took it home. Not since Les Enfant Terribles by Jean Cocteau, which I read under the bed covers at school, has a book transfixed me so much. Here was the story of a man describing conditions in rural Bangladesh and his fight to lift people out of poverty. His efforts were internationally recognised when he, and the bank he formed to achieve his goals, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
If that wasn’t enough for one mortal being, he then embarked upon a campaign to alter the future of capitalism, calling upon firms to become social businesses.
None of my colleagues were interested in interviewing Professor Yunus when his book was published.
But when I heard he was coming into Bush House to be interviewed on The World Today programme, I jumped at the opportunity of grabbing a few moments with him and made a call to his publicist. I was on tenterhooks until she called back to confirm I would be able to meet him.
A good journalist should always do their homework before an interview. I went a step further and read Creating a World Without Poverty so often, I almost knew it verbatim. That still didn’t prevent me feeling nervous when I went down to the little self-op studio I’d booked on the third floor and waited for Professor Yunus to arrive.
In 25 years of journalism, I’ve met princesses, pop divas presidents, punk icons, armed forces personnel and freedom fighters. Rank and status has never fazed me and I’ve always treated everyone with the same equanimity. That changed when the producer from The World Today programme ushered Muhammad Yunus into the studio.
He is about five foot six inches tall with silver-grey hair, a round face with cheeks that puff out when he smiles, which is frequently, and surprisingly unwrinkled skin for a man who was then approaching 70. He was dressed in a traditional loose collarless cotton shirt featuring a distinctive Grameen check, and a sleeveless jacket.
But what immediately strikes you when you first meet the man, is the mischievous twinkle in his dark eyes.
He looks younger than his actual age and exudes a serenity which comes when someone is at peace with himself, and the world; although he’s clearly not at peace with the plight of poor people. He is one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever come across and on one of those rare occasions in my life, I was in awe of another human being.
If indeed he is human, because I felt as though I was in the company of a Bangladeshi version of Mother Teresa.
I was momentarily choked and couldn’t speak after I greeted him. It probably only lasted a few seconds but, for me, it felt like an eternity. He reached over and gave an avuncular tap on the back of my hand and I instantly took control of my emotions and adopted a more professional approach.
It wasn’t an interview in the customary sense; it was more like a private tutorial at university, or conversations I’ve had with village elders in different parts of the world.
There are people who consider Yunus headstrong and his directness is sometimes considered overpowering. He is on a crusade, though not in a bible-thumping, fist-pounding way.
Beneath his gentle countenance, there is a steely determination and fortitude and he gets his message across with nothing more than the articulate conviction of a zealot and a softly spoken voice.
Furthermore, when I asked him about subjects not covered in his book, there was no hesitation while he thought about the reply. He had the answer on the tip of his tongue and even if the question was personal or awkward, he didn’t prevaricate like many people do when they wish a topic hadn’t been raised. Our conversation ran way over the time which had been allocated to me but he never looked at his watch or hinted that he wanted the session brought to an end.
We only stopped talking when I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him; at least not on that occasion.
The more I learnt about Yunus and his work, the more I became interested and intrigued by both the man, and his personal struggle and commitment to tackle what he believes to be a gross injustice imposed upon millions of people; namely poverty.
But I’ve also come to realise that however idealistic his philosophies are, as fervently outlined in books he has written and the speeches and interviews he gives, some of the people working with him do not share the same level of integrity and there are flaws in the structures he has created to reach his utopian goal.
I have the utmost respect for Yunus but over the years I found myself facing the dilemma of keeping my distance to ensure objectivity while writing his biography, yet remaining close enough to those working within the Grameen group to discover exactly what is going on.
I next met him at the imposing headquarters of Grameen Bank in Dhaka which, at the time, was one of the tallest buildings in the city. Hanging on the wall inside the spacious air-conditioned reception area was a large photograph of a beaming Professor Yunus, standing with his arms outstretched, against a
expanse of water; possibly the sea, a lake, or a flooded field.
The photograph is cropped in such a manner it looks as though Yunus is walking on the water.
It prompted a young American intern to lean over and whisper: ‘Who does he think he is; Jesus Christ?
A somewhat disparaging comment I mused, albeit rather pertinent.
26. Microcredit “Death Trap’ for Bangladesh’s Poor
Admired and maligned in equal measures in at home, Yunus is treated like a rock superstar when he travels abroad and he even managed to upstage President Clinton at an event they both attended in New York.
I was a fervent acolyte of the man and his work but after interviewing him many times, along with members of his family, people he worked with, and people in receipt of the micro-loans offered by Grameen Bank, his image began to lose some of its initial lustre.
The more research I did for the biography, the deeper I delved into the operations of the bank he founded, the murkier the image became. I didn’t want to believe many of the things I uncovered so I double-checked and triple-checked every fact before accepting there was some substance to the criticisms levelled at him and his organisation.
I was extremely disappointed and felt cheated, though I still believe that Yunus himself began with good intentions.
But to achieve them he plagiarised other people’s ideas without giving them due credit, and if people got in his way they were ruthlessly dispatched and written out of the history of the bank and the other companies under the Grameen umbrella.
People must make their own mind up about Muhammad Yunus. All I can do is present both sides of the argument in true BBC World Service style and let them decided themselves after reading my book: Muhammad Yunus: Saint or Sinner?
Like many people, I really believed microcredit provided a perfect solution for alleviating poverty. I was puzzled why my colleague Lesley Curwen didn’t share my enthusiasm, though I later had to admit her scepticism had been fully justified.
It wasn’t until I researched the subject thoroughly while gathering information for my biography of Muhammed Yunus that I discovered the truth was radically different to the picture painted by Dr Yunus during the many interviews I had with him.
On paper, his idea was sound, but in reality it did little to lift people permanently out of poverty and the way his Grameen Bank operates in the far-flung villages across Bangladesh bore little semblance to the blueprint he espoused.
When I put it to him that I had witnessed reprehensible behaviour from the bank’s operatives, and that in some areas the majority of borrowers were men rather than the women he professed to help, he shrugged it off as isolated incidents.
Microcredit ‘Death Trap’ for Bangladesh’s Poor
James Melik. Published 3 November 2010
Joba Rani was a solvent farmer in the north east village of Jamlabaj, but her world turned upside down when early floods swamped her land in April.
Like 20 million other people in Bangladesh, most of them women, Ms Rani had turned to microcredit in an effort to lift herself out of poverty.
Microfinance offers small loans to people who do not normally qualify for traditional banking credit, to encourage entrepreneurship.
For many recipients it is a lifeline, and very often it is the only way for them to establish a business.
But after the total destruction of their crops, villagers like Joba are not in a position to repay their loans.
Yet the microfinance organisations continue to collect the instalments.
Microfinance is not without its critics. Some argue that people can quickly sink into a cycle of debt, with many lenders charging exorbitant rates of interest.
Dr Qazi Kholikuzzaman Ahmad, chairman of PKSF, a body that monitors microfinance, describes microcredit as a ‘death trap’ for the poor.
He explains how poor people often take up the loans without thinking of the consequences, and that 60 per cent of borrowers take loans from several sources.
“There is no understanding that it might take 10 or 20 years to repay their loan,’ he says.
Muhammad Yunus is the most celebrated person in Bangladesh. Yet instead of promoting him as an ambassador for the country, he is reviled and despised by the political elite.
It is widely assumed that this is largely due to the alleged antipathy towards him by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina herself, who reportedly authorised the scrutiny of his Grameen Bank. It has been widely reported that the prime minister’s antagonism towards Dr Yunus began after his attempt to form a political party. Without popular support, that proposal failed.
Microcredit in Focus amid Yunus Spat
James Melik. Published 4 March 2011
Furthermore, from the weekly repayments, some lenders deduct 10 per cent of that payment for compulsory saving schemes, which companies use to lend to other people.
‘Interest on repayments begin at around 15 per cent, but it is a flat rate and can soon rise to anything between 40 per cent and 100 per cent,’ Dr Ahmad says.
Repayments are generally due on loans from the first week after they are taken out, which does not give the borrower enough time to establish any income-earning enterprise.
To cover those first payments, people often resort to taking out a further loan from a different company.
Ms Rani used her loan to buy six cows but after her crops were destroyed she had to sell three of them, at half the market price, to enable her to repay her loan.
‘I was hoping to save the remaining cows but they had to be sold as well,’ she laments.
Women are the main borrowers in the village and they were attracted to microcredit because they could get the loans easily and quickly.
Money is not always used as capital investment. Many people borrow money for cultivation, buying cattle, or a flock of chicks or ducklings.
Villagers are sending their children to work to help them make the repayments.
But when they are still unable to pay enough, the debt collectors insist that they sell their cattle, chickens and other household items.
Selling agricultural land is also considered as a last desperate option.
Villagers often complain of harassment from the debt collectors and there have been allegations of physical assaults.
Because field officers are judged on repayment rates, they sometimes use coercive and even violent tactics to collect instalments on the microcredit loans.
Many villagers finally turn to local usurers; the very people whom Professor Yunus tried put out of business when he made his first loan of $27 (£17) to a group of families in a village in 1976.
Professor Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microfinance and he refers to many of the institutions which have followed his example as ‘the new loan sharks’.
His organisation has a policy whereby loans can be rescheduled in times of natural disaster.
After some particularly harsh floods in Bangladesh, the district administrations requested microfinance organisations to stop collecting instalments for the time being.
But that call has gone unheeded. Dr Ahmad is dismayed. “There are some agencies which take their payments from relief material,’ he says.
The move to oust Professor Muhammad Yunus from the board of Grameen Bank is the latest in a line of criticisms aimed at both him as an individual, and the microcredit system he pioneered.
The central bank says he is past retirement age and was improperly installed in his post.
Dr Yunus said he wanted a ‘graceful exit’ and has started a legal challenge to his sacking from Grameen Bank.
There were allegations that aid money had been wrongly transferred from one Grameen organisation to another in the 1990s. The bank denied those charges and the Norwegian government, one of the bank’s main donors, exonerated Dr Yunus and his Grameen Group.
The microcredit industry has come in for heavy criticism. India’s multi-billion dollar microfinance industry was recently rocked by allegations of aggressive lending and heavy-handed loan collections in the state of Andrah Pradesh.
For a while, it seemed that many companies were on the brink of a mass default until major banks agreed to continue lending to microfinance firms.
In Bangladesh, the government has imposed a limit on the amount of interest which can be demanded on a microcredit loan, some of which can be as small as $20.
Troubles with microcredit began around 2005, when many lenders started looking for ways to make a profit on the loans by shifting from their status as non-profit organisations to commercial enterprises.
In 2007, a Mexican bank called Compartamos became Latin America’s first microcredit bank to go public, and SKS Microfinance, the largest bank of its kind in India, raised $358m (£220m) in an initial public offering.
Professor Yunus says the commercial enterprises with excessive interest rates should not be permitted to call themselves microcredit institutions at all.
‘I founded Grameen Bank in 1983 to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day, microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks,’ he told me as he was travelling between London and Leeds to receive another honorary award.
The basis for the Grameen Bank’s successful microcredit model lies in a number of key
oOo
characteristics.
oOo
Local branches are self-funded by deposits of their local members in taka, the Bangladesh national currency
By serving as a depository for its members, Grameen Bank allows the poor to build their own financial asset base • The bank extends loans to its members at a maximum interest rate of 20 per cent, a fraction of what
many other microfinance organisations charge • Operating on a co-operative model, profits are redistributed to the Grameen Bank’s owner
members or are invested in community projects.
Tensions between Dr Yunus and the government grew to a critical level when a Norwegian television documentary accused him of improperly diverting $96m in funds donated by Norway’s aid agency. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina used this to assert that he was ‘sucking blood from the poor’.
Dr Yunus relinquished his post after the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal.
munity.
Dr Yunus says these features root the Grameen Bank in the community it serves and keeps money, including interest payments, continuously circulating locally.
Microcredit programs seeking to replicate the Grameen model have spread rapidly across the globe. Most, however, replicate only the loan feature.
Few provide the defining features which Grameen Bank says are central to a commitment to building wealth in the community.
Alex Counts of Grameen Bank says that Grameen’s success has managed to change Bangladesh.
‘Bangladesh is not the “bottomless basket case” that then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called it 35 years ago,’ he explains.
‘It is instead, a teacher to the rest of the world.’
Despite the optimism of the microfinance industry about the impact it can have, there are serious questions being raised about its real reach.
One social experiment focused on an Indian state where 50 districts had access to microcredit and a further 50 had no access to such finances.
The study showed that within those districts with access to microcredit, there was no substantial impact on poverty.
There is also the question of new enterprises displacing others in the vicinity.
New enterprises are often too marginal to compete with each other, so where one opens, another has to shut,’ Alun Doran at Oxfam explains.
Mr Doran also says that the centre of gravity for poverty reduction has been moving away from microcredit to credit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
‘With SMEs there is the prospect of employing 20-30 people, and that builds social capital as people earn disposable income which subsequently helps another business,’ he says.
‘Overall, that has a longer-lasting effect on poverty reduction.’
He maintains that Grameen and BRAC, another leading microcredit lender in Bangladesh, do many good things.
But he adds: ‘Microfinance is all too often looked upon as a panacea to cure poverty, and that it is
not.’
was him who was evil and that children like the one I was feeding were blessed by Allah. The women hadn’t understood what I’d said, but they’d certainly got the gist and surrounded me in a show of solidarity.
27. Danone’s Yogurt Strategy for Bangladesh
Danone’s Yogurt Strategy for Bangladesh
James Melik. Published 8 July 2009
When Muhammad Yunus turned his hand to ventures other than microcredit I wanted to learn about his collaboration with the French dairy giant Danone.
Eager to visit this paragon of social business I travelled to Bogra where the Grameen Danone project is integrated into the rural community through its links with the 250 farmers who supply milk the factory.
One farmer explained how he had seven cows, three of which were pregnant.
‘It’s good to know I have a buyer for my milk,’ says Imran. ‘The factory buys it for a fixed price so I know how much I am getting every day but if I sold it in the market the price changes.’
He explains how it takes away the tension.
With four of his cows producing milk he gets 17 litres a day, which earns him 450 taka. The cost of feeding his animals is 250 taka a day, and the profit he earns is more than his peers who don’t have a similar arrangement with the factory.
I later joined a team going around the villages to explain the virtues of the fortified yoghurt that Danone produces.
There was no need to beep a horn to alert people to our presence. News of strangers in their midst spread around the village in minutes.
Curious women appeared, most with a young child or baby held on their hips, with other children clinging onto their saris. Men stood further back as the Danone representative explained the value of nutrition and the purpose of the yoghurt.
To drum up extra interest, the yogurt’s logo, a lion, also makes an appearance, albeit in a costume which must have been very uncomfortable to wear in the humid conditions.
The women were asked to repeat a refrain about the virtues of good nutrition for their children, which resonated with the mantra borrowers have to say in unison at weekly village meetings of Grameen Bank.
They were then asked to name one of the ingredients in the yogurt and when they were correct, they were handed pots of yogurt for their children.
I called out an answer so I could get a pot of yogurt for a young boy who was clinging to my leg. I fed him with the wooden spoon which is handed out to people who don’t want to use their finger because, even though he was about ten years old, he had something which resembled cerebral palsy and he wasn’t able to feed himself.
The lad’s way of communicating and thanking me, was to give me a head-butt. It didn’t bother me at all, but the Danone representative shouted at some women to get the child away from me and when I told him there wasn’t any problem, he said things along the lines of the child being possessed by demons and that he shouldn’t be allowed out of his home.
I don’t recall the exact words I used, but I remonstrated about his malicious remarks and saying it
When French dairy food firm Danone ventured outside the troubled business climate of Europe and the US, it was not expecting to start a business that deliberately avoids paying dividends to shareholders.
But a meeting between Danone’s Franck Riboud and the founder of Grameen Bank, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, led to the opening of a small factory in Bangladesh which does just that.
Danone made a profit of more than $1bn in 2008 and expects that to rise by 10 per cent this year, despite a downturn in sales in Europe.
The company has set its sights on South Asia. But to succeed there, it has to learn how to sell to lowincome customers, many of whom live in the countryside.
In Bangladesh, Danone has teamed up with local experts to build a yogurt factory with a difference; what Professor Yunus calls a social business.
The factory, which produces nutritional yogurt for poor people, is a joint venture between Grameen and Danone.
Danone’s Emmanuel Marchant explains that the enterprise has to make enough money to be sustainable, but it also has a social goal.
‘With a social business you ask “what are the priorities in terms of social needs?” he says.
He admits that Danone’s priorities would usually concentrate on maximising profits and that any social impact would be of secondary importance.
But the factory constructed in Bogra, 200km north of the capital Dhaka, is different.
Figures show that about 50 per cent of children suffer from malnutrition in Bangladesh. In an effort to alleviate the situation, Grameen’s Professor Yunus says his first suggestion was baby food.
‘We eventually zeroed in on yogurt and agreed that it had to be a very small plant,’ he says.
He maintains that local children, often poor and malnourished, benefit from the products the factory produces.
The project is integrated into the rural community through its links with the farmers which serve the factory.
The yogurt company always tries to pay them a little more than they would receive from other customers and a farmer can earn about $60 a week, a considerable sum in rural Bangladesh.
Milk is brought in every day from local villages by a small three-wheeled delivery vehicle and is mixed with locally-grown sugar and other ingredients.
It is then poured into a tank, where it is tested to ensure it does not contain any harmful bacteria.
300,000 children with 30 per cent of their daily micronutrients needs, with 250 women earning a living by selling the fortified yoghurt door-to-door, and 500 farmers selling their milk to Grameen Danone.
Nutrients are added to the yogurt, which is designed to keep fresh for up to a week outside a refrigerator, because few people can afford to chill their food.
Some of the yogurt is distributed to shops, but the unique point about this enterprise is a network of women who take bags of the yogurt around local villages.
When visiting villages for the first time, these women are often accompanied by a representative from Danone, who explains the nutritional benefits of the yogurt.
The yogurt brand is called Shoktidoi, which means energy in Bengali. One cup of yogurt provides 30 per cent of the recommended daily intake of nutrition for children.
To drum up extra interest, the yogurt’s logo, a lion, also makes an appearance, albeit in costume. The scheme is not designed to make a profit, but it does have clear benefits for Danone.
It is a good way for the company to learn how to market food in South Asia; a valuable lesson as it considers whether to enter the huge and lucrative market of neighbouring India
Mr Marchant of Danone is confident the company will keep funding the project, because of the support it has from its investors.
Building a plant which is 100 times smaller than our others is a less risky way of entering a new territory and shareholders understand our vision,’ he says.
Dr Yunus believes other companies should be thinking about how to run a business in a different way.
‘The world has only one pair of glasses, they are profit-maximising glasses. You don’t see the poor and malnourished people,’ he says.
‘When you put on the social business glasses, things change,’ he asserts, ‘You don’t see the moneymaking aspect, but how you can help people.’
He is understandably excited about the project and is currently talking to other companies around the world to start up similar joint ventures in Bangladesh.
Another social enterprise Professor Yunus told me about was a joint venture between the Japanese retailer Uniqlo and Grameen Trust.
I went to the Dhaka headquarters of Uniqlo in the suburb of Gulshan to meet Mizanur Rahman.
I asked how Uniqlo operates differently in Bangladesh, compared to how it runs its business in Europe or Japan, to call itself a social business.
‘Doctor Yunus invited the president of Uniqlo, Tadashi Yanai, to do something for the poor people in Bangladesh,’ he explained. “They came up with the idea of Grameen Uniqlo and began operating in 2010 to provide good quality clothing at affordable prices.’
The initial idea was for 100 Grameen ladies to sell clothes in rural areas to women who were already members of Grameen Bank, and they’d earn a commission on the sales.
“We faced difficulties from the beginning,’ Mr Rahman tells me. “The designs and the price were not working in rural areas and we had to make some changes. For example, in the city we have buttons on the collar of shirts, but they didn’t want to have buttons in the countryside.
To combat losses in rural areas, clothes were sold at higher prices in the four Dhaka Uniqlo stores, in the same way Grameen Danone charges more for its yogurt in cosmopolitan areas than in the villages.
Most Uniqlo products are made in Bangladesh for their stores worldwide, including the one in Westfield in east London which I have frequented.
‘We work with partner factories and have a production team which ensures safety compliance,’ Mr Rahman assures me. Western companies all say the same thing though it is not a policy always adhered to because, without the knowledge of the company placing the order, some of the production might be subcontracted to another factory which has not undergone the same rigorous inspection.
The clothes Uniqlo produce are certainly of an excellent quality, which prompted me to purchase several items to take back to London, especially as they cost only one fifth of what they would back home.
The clothes on sale in Dhaka are not identical to those found in other countries. Uniqlo imports its trademark material into Bangladesh to produce clothing to be sold abroad, but the law states that fabric has to be sourced locally for any items of clothing sold within Bangladesh.
One of the biggest success stories for Uniqlo operating in rural areas, is the sale of reusable sanitary napkins.
‘These have been very popular among poor women, but the idea has not caught on in the capital,’ Mr Rahman says.
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In June 2013, delegates attending a Social Business conference in Dhaka had an opportunity of visiting the Danone factory to see first-hand how the joint venture operated.
Those who took up the offer had an uncomfortable five-hour drive 130 miles (210 kilometres) north of Dhaka to Bogra. The trip involved an overnight stay, with a visit to the factory scheduled the following morning before the long drive back to the capital.
Upon arrival, people who’d paid $300 for the privilege of taking part in this charade, were told the Danone factory was closed for refurbishment and nobody could see it.
The journey to Bogra proved to be a very frustrating experience for them.
I tried to find out whether the factory was still operating but nobody at Grameen was able to supply me with an answer.
I contacted Danone in April 2019, who assured me the joint-venture was very active, supplying
28. Hidden Hunger
carefully between the rotting food in Kawrun Bazar. It gave him a dose of what real life is like for thousands of people in the city he currently called home.
I have no time for executives of charities and NGOs who live in comfort in segregated areas, rather than getting their feet dirty among the people they are ostensibly supposed to help.
Hidden Hunger: Victims of a Failed Millennium Promise
James Melik. Published 17 September 2010
Of all the written features and radio packages I ever did while working at BBC World Service this was personally one of the most satisfying and rewarding.
The purpose was to evaluate the lack of fulfilment of one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG); namely hunger.
I was invited by the Dutch life science company DSM to see how they were addressing the problem in Bangladesh.
It wasn’t going to be a simple plug. I wanted to go behind the story and question why they should spend money on one of the poorest communities in the world.
Millennium Development Goals
• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger • Achieve universal primary education • Promote gender equality and empower women • Reduce child mortality • Improve maternal health • Combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases
Ensure environmental sustainability • Develop a global partnership for development
Two little girls playing in the mud in a Dhaka shanty town are unaware of the Millennium Development Goals that were launched before they were born in order to help millions of children like them.
They belong to the most vulnerable members of society: the hungry and the poor, and they live in a world hidden from the teeming population of the Bangladesh capital.
Some progress has been made on the goals, agreed by governments around the world in September 2000, but many of the targets are way behind schedule.
A special review summit on the goals will convene in New York on 20 September.
With just five years left to achieve the aims, the summit is an opportunity to re-energise the global effort and agree on an action plan to accelerate progress towards meeting the goals in time.
But the outcome of the session is unlikely to make any difference to the children playing in shacks constructed alongside railway tracks behind the sprawling Kawrun Bazar in the heart of the city.
The government periodically bulldozes the shacks, but people, many of whom have lost their homes and livelihoods, flock back in the hope that the men can find work in the adjacent market or business district.
A fortunate few manage to work for a few days each month, earning a dollar a day to feed their families.
Parents swoop up their children every time a train approaches, just a metre away from the shacks that have become the only home they know. After it has passed, they return to play on the tracks.
To an untrained eye, they look as happy and healthy as any child you will see in Europe or the US, but their laughter, and the smiles on their faces belie the reality of their situation.
‘The kids that you see here are suffering from two types of malnutrition,’ says John Aylieff, the country director for the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP).
‘They are underweight for their age, like eight million other children in Bangladesh.’ Many are also suffering from a chronic lack of vitamins and minerals.
“That has a marked effect on the development of their bodies and their brains,’ he says, ‘particularly when those children are under the age of two.’
There is a critical moment that ranges from conception to 24 months; what Mr Aylieff calls the 1,000 day window of opportunity.
Bangladesh initially made progress towards achieving its MDG but the target of halving the proportion of people who suffered from hunger failed to materialise; partly because the country was beset by a number of natural disasters and partly because Bangladesh has a growing population which places an increasing strain on its resources.
John Aylieff, country director of the United Nations World Food Programme based in Bangladesh, set the tone when he extended his hand and asked if I knew our Asia correspondent based in Dhaka, ‘Our children go to the same crèche,’ he said.
Further proof that he lived in his little diplomatic bubble was evident when I suggested I interviewed him in the shanty town which runs along the rail tracks leading in and out of the city. I wanted to include the sound of trains passing every few minutes, when parents swoop playing children off the tracks.
Sound effects make better radio.
He was the country director, supposedly helping the very people who live in the shanty town. Yet not had he ever stepped foot there, he wasn’t even aware it existed. I had great pleasure watching him tread
“That is the critical age for the brain and body’s development for the rest of its life and if you don’t get proper nutrition in that period, then it is a life sentence,’ he says.
You can never recover, no matter how much nutritious food or vitamins or minerals you take in later life.
Bangladesh has made progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, but there has been a levelling out over recent years.
The target of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger is no longer on track.
The country has been beset by a number of natural disasters. Since 2007 there have been heavy floods and two cyclones.
Bangladesh also has a growing population, which places an increasing strain on its resources.
‘We try to get special foods fortified with vitamins and minerals into the bellies of children under the age of two,’ says Mr Aylieff.
‘More than a billion people in the world are hungry today and the World Food Programme is only able to reach 100 million globally per year.’
The financial crisis of the past few years has made Mr Aylieffs job far more difficult.
‘We receive money from donor governments, but we are increasingly forging partnerships, especially with the private sector,’ he says.
One company that has a partnership with the World Food Programme has its headquarters in the leafy town of Heerlen, not far from Maastricht in the Netherlands.
‘We are active, not only in Bangladesh, but also in Kenya and Zambia,’ says Dr Oswaldo da Costa e Silva at the life science firm DSM.
“These partnerships give us the chance to target the neediest of the needy, but these people will also develop and become consumers in a more productive country,’ he reasons.
‘It is a very holistic way of looking at why we are working with the World Food Programme. Our shareholders are interested in us having sustainable businesses and we can only do so if we develop a population.
“Two-thirds of the world’s population, some four billion people, are at the base of the pyramid and half of them are suffering from malnutrition, so we are doing this not only for the benefit of our company, but also supporting the growth of that population,’ he asserts.
By helping people lead healthier lives, getting jobs and having more disposable income, he hopes they will also one day be buying DSM products.
‘We are not only working in the area of life science, biology, pharmaceuticals and vitamins, we also work in the area of materials such as plastics,’ he says.
Citing India, he says there are a lot of people who can now afford cars, so his company can profit there by providing materials with specific functions, to be used in the manufacture of Tata Motors’ Nano car.
Meanwhile, after a successful tender with the World Food Programme, his company supplies the vitamins, minerals and high quality protein, which is added to biscuits that are handed out to children at
vitamins, minerals and high quality protein, which is added to biscuits that are handed out to children at selected schools.
The biscuits are distributed by Sight and Life, a non-profit humanitarian initiative that DSM founded in 1986.
Apart from giving the children a nutritious meal at the start of the day, it also acts as an incentive for them to attend school. This is particularly the case for children from poor families, because it is one less portion of food that has to be prepared at home.
Dr Klaus Kraemer, who heads Sight and Life, says research has shown that children starting the day with a quality meal makes them alert and improves their cognition.
As a result, they obtain better marks at the end of their schooling and that gives them greater opportunities to find work.
He also explains why nutrients such as vitamin A are extremely important, to facilitate the function of a child’s immune system so they can avert diseases such as measles or diarrhoea.
‘Programmes are running in several countries to ensure children have high doses of vitamin A twice a year to avoid unnecessary mortality,’ he says.
There are also feeding programmes for pregnant women, who are taught the importance of giving children a nutritious diet with additional vitamins and minerals.
A proper diet is crucial to achieve many of the Millennium Goals and the mothers and children who are part of the World Food Programme are but a fortunate few.
Apart from obvious humanitarian reasons, governments might come to realise that a healthier world population would create a broader consumer base for their goods and services.
It should offer additional incentives for those attending the Millennium Development Goals summit in New York to strive harder to achieve their aims.
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I was particularly pleased with my radio package, which was broadcast on several outlets, but it was the written feature which proved to be more enduring because of the way it made me approach a subject and report on it.
I’d written the feature and submitted it to Jorn Madslien, our features editor, who wanted me to have another go at it.
What he suggested I changed the way I wrote features in the future, because he wanted me to make it less stilted and more personal.
He encouraged me to be more creative in my writing and for that I shall forever be grateful to him. I received this email from him after submitting the feature a second time:
‘I have subbed your feature – not that it needed much subbing – and it is now scheduled for publication tomorrow.
It is always rewarding and encouraging to get positive feedback and I greatly appreciated it.
passionate yet impassioned illustration of why they matter for real people in poor countries, and with a strong hint at how development breeds development, how economic assistance can lead to economic growth and ultimately to economic rewards.
As such, this is a decent “Economics Light” piece, using micro to illustrate macro, whilst disguising it as a human story – but one with depth. It is without a doubt one of your best pieces yet; hopefully to be followed by many more.’
It is always rewarding and encouraging to get positive feedback and I greatly appreciated it.
29. The Harsh Necessity of Child Labour
In Bangladesh much of the population lives in poverty and child labour is often looked upon as a necessity.
The banter between young lads working on construction sites would suggest they are happy enough with the hand fate has dealt them. I witnessed similar smiling faces when I went to an iron foundry on the outskirts of the city.
The heat is so stifling I found myself gulping in air as the oxygen is sapped by the glowing furnace which is being fanned by two men operating huge bellows. The reflection of the flames upon the glistening bodies of the workers produces a strange effect; they look as though they are cast in bronze.
One man holds an ingot of glowing metal over an anvil while others rhythmically pound it with heavy hammers.
Barefoot boys fill moulds with liquid metal scooped out of a giant cauldron. I wince as I think how it would take just one tiny drop of the bubbling liquid to cripple that young person, a single splash to disfigure him for life or blind him.
The Harsh Necessity of Child Labour
James Melik. Published 29 May 2008
It is not uncommon to walk past a building site and see youths as young as 11 carrying baskets of bricks or cement on their heads.
Mijan has yet to reach his 14th birthday, but he is proud to be doing heavy labour for 12 hours a day, six days a week.
‘If I don’t take home 60 taka ($1) a day, someone in my family will go hungry,’ he says.
For girls, the work tends to be based in the home. An estimated two million domestic workers are employed in the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong alone.
These girls often begin working when they are eight years old and can be subjected to violence and sexual abuse without any formal jurisdiction to protect their wellbeing.
Over 300 deaths of young domestic workers were reported in the press between 2001 and 2008.
Officially, child labour is forbidden in factories which make garments for export, but many children are still drawn into the home-producing garment business.
Thirteen-year-old Mitu Akhtar says she started working with a sewing machine when she was seven years old, and had to give all the money she earned to her parents.
She quit school when she was nine. ‘I’ve never had any time to play with my friends,’ she laments.
Mitu is now being trained in a centre for former child labourers run by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies (BILS).
She is learning to read and write and is picking up the basics of how to use a sewing machine safely and efficiently. She says her ambition is to be a tailor.
Nazrul Khan, the president of BILS, says the focus is on finding children from industrial regions of the country whose parents have lost their jobs.
‘We come to an agreement with the family that, if we educate and train one of their children, and support them to find employment, there will be no child labour in that family,’ he says.
In a primary school near a huge slum in Dhaka, pupils aged between six and 10 include the children of rickshaw drivers and women who break bricks for a living.
“These children are so poor that many of them have not had any food when they arrive in the morning and their clothes are in a terrible condition, like rags,’ says headmistress Afroza Khanan as she introduces me to a class.
Most of the pupils have to go to work as soon as they have finished their lessons, in order to help their parents, by selling cups of tea or other odd jobs.
She is also deeply concerned about the children who do not go to school because they are working.
Sometimes she virtually drags them into the classroom where they face books and blackboards for the first time, and experience the discipline of lessons.
“The sad reality is that these families depend on the children financially,’ she exclaims.
‘What I would like to see is a programme to motivate parents to send their children to school. The government could offer a small sum of money to each student who attends,’ she says with a shrug of her shoulders.
As one of the world’s leading suppliers of ready-made garments, Bangladesh frequently encounters hostile criticism over the use of child labour in its textile industry.
Western retailers rush to assure conscience-stricken consumers that steps are taken to eradicate the practice, and in 2006 the Bangladeshi government passed a new labour law.
It enshrines the rights of young workers to receive a fixed salary, compensation in case of accident, proper holidays and to have access to education.
But that law is only designed to help children in the textile sector, so it does nothing to ease the problem of child labour in one of the poorest countries in the world.
The Bangladesh constitution provides basic education free of charge to all children aged between six and 10, although figures suggest that only 50 per cent currently attend school.
Of those, only one in five continues with secondary education while just one in 25 will eventually proceed to higher education.
The reason for such low attendance is the poor financial circumstances of the most families.
Some reports indicate that in Bangladesh, one in 10 children has a job which takes up most of their waking hours and many suffer from poor health as a result of hazardous conditions.
Child labour is not illegal in Bangladesh, although the law discourages children under the age of 14 from working in factories.
It is not uncommon to walk past a building site and see youths as young as 11 carrying baskets of
their families, I wondered which of the groups was really better off.
kids to school.’
Some politicians support Afroza Khanan’s proposal but so far the government maintains it cannot afford it.
Even if such a scheme was introduced, it would be difficult to determine how many families should receive the money and how it would be paid.
The last time the government examined the issue, it concluded four million children have full or parttime jobs.
The Bangladeshi Labour Institute believes the number is closer to eight million and is rising as the population grows.
‘When society has such a large population who are not educated, who are aggrieved, not skilled, unhealthy and unhappy, it is a threat to social stability and economic growth,’ BILS president Nazrul Khan maintains.
The fear is that the next generation of Bangladeshis will be forced into work at an early age unless something breaks the cycle of poverty.
In a country where at least 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty, child labour is often regarded as a necessity.
Despite the economic progress of the past 20 years, there is little to suggest that society’s attitude is changing
However, if more children can receive an education it might provide future generations with an alternative.
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When I returned to London I walked from the tube station to my home, and as I walked up Globe Road I saw the regular crowd of reprobates hanging around outside the newsagents.
These lads had opted out of college without gaining any qualifications and were not gainfully employed. Some of them had a reputation for dealing drugs, while others were renowned for stealing bicycles. Comparing them to the boys I’d seen in Bangladesh, who were proud to be earning money for their families, I wondered which of the groups was really better off.
30. The Human Cost of Cheap Clothing
products made for the supermarket giant Asda; part of the Walmart empire.
Before writing this feature I gave Asda the opportunity to explain why I’d found their products being manufactured in a sweatshop. It was something they denied, and then I received an email thanking me for not going ahead with publication. Nice try, but I had enough evidence to proceed.
On another occasion, I found young girls, and by young I mean seven or eight or nine years old, helping their mothers put the finishing touches to wedding saris. Small nimble fingers were ideal for sewing the intricate patterns of sequins.
The Human Cost of Cheap Clothing James Melik. Published 25 July 2010
The head of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) arranged for us to visit a factory during my first trip to the country with my BBC colleague Duncan Bartlett. Naturally, the one chosen was one of the most modern and well organised factories in the country.
It provided a crèche, where smiling mothers could leave their babies while they were working; there were fire wardens and extinguishers; and the working environment was free of clutter. We were even shown a room where new workers were being told about their rights and membership of trade unions; written on a blackboard in English.
The only problem was, the workers only spoke Bengali, so it had been contrived for our benefit and that immediately alerted my journalistic antennae.
Some units are state-of-the-art modern factories, but the cost of such establishments is prohibitive. The vast majority of workshops are tucked away in small cramped locations down side streets and they might be an entire floor, or a single room in a building containing shops and apartments. There could be 200 people working at sewing machines, or just a dozen.
Considerable pressure is applied by Western retailers to ensure targets and prices are met and once terms have been approved, the factory owner has an obligation to deliver.
Any increase in the cost of materials, or a disruption in exporting the products due to a strike for example, has to be borne by the factory owner and if deadlines are missed the retailers impose crippling penalties.
When people speak about the low wages earned by textile workers it is not uncommon to hear criticism levelled at factory owners, but pressure from international retailers to keep prices low and to deliver on target plays and integral role and can sometimes have far-reaching consequences.
One of the tactics employed by manufacturers is to out-source part of the order to another workshop.
Conditions in the factory where the order was placed might be up to a standard which satisfies the retailer, but that doesn’t mean those same standards exist in other units sub-contracted to complete orders and the onus should be on the purchaser to ensure where their products are going to be made.
But it is an impossible task to police everything.
Some factory managers sub-contract work without the client’s knowledge. I came across one such unit on the top floor of a small shopping mall in the Dhaka suburb of Banani.
The establishment was cramped, with workers sleeping in the aisles so they could begin working on the machines as soon as their shift began.
Feigning interest in the shirts they were making, and with the prospect of buying one, the person in charge was happy for me to walk around the unit, talking to the workers and taking photographs.
All workers were male, some as young as 12 years old, and the shirts they were manufacturing bore a label which read George. Not until I returned to London did I learn the George logo was associated with
The garment industry uses developing countries to manufacture its products but, according to the British charity Action Aid, cheap fashion comes at a human price.
It says the UK retail company Asda, part of the US giant Walmart, is not paying a decent wage to the workers in south Asia who manufacture its George clothing range.
By decent wage, they mean a living wage; one that covers the cost of food, clean water, healthcare, education, clothing, fuel and transport.
Asda’s Dominic Burch says: ‘We are extremely focused on trying to improve standards in the factories we work with, but we recognise this is a very complex issue.
“There is a sense that Asda is turning a blind eye, or not wanting to do the right thing, which is absolutely nonsense,’ he asserts.
‘If it was as straightforward as putting money into the supply chain then we could have solved this issue 20 or 30 years ago,’ he says.
If a living wage is the ultimate goal, the minimum wage set in Bangladesh by the government would need to double this year, next year and the year after, in order to reach the kind of level Action Aid is calling for.
‘It is a laudable aim but we have to find a sustainable way of doing that,’ says Mr Burch.
‘It would be easy for Asda to walk away from Bangladesh, but we have made a strategic decision to work with people in Bangladesh in the long term.’
He says the retail price you pay for a garment being produced in a factory in the developing world is not the indicator of how conditions are in that factory.
‘It is overly simplistic to suggest that because the item does not cost a lot of money in the supermarket, people are therefore not paid a lot of money at the front end,’ he says.
Like many other high street retailers, Asda joined the Ethical Trading Initiative 10 year ago.
The alliance encourages retailers, brands and their suppliers to take responsibility for improving the working conditions of the people who make the products they sell.
The members make a commitment to ethical trade and adopt a code of labour practice that they
with global labels such as Gap and H&M.’
He explained how labels of well-known global brands are purchased wholesale and affixed to garments according to the wishes of local clients and without the knowledge of the international brand owners.
Asda also pointed out that the label shown on the shirts the BBC saw being packed is a discontinued George logo that has not been used in the UK for more than two years.
‘That in itself calls into question whether this merchandise is a legitimate product destined for our stores,’ Mr Burch decreed.
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expect all their suppliers to work towards.
Such codes address issues like wages, hours of work, health and safety and the right to join free trade unions.
Marks and Spencer has established ‘Ethical Model’ factories which focus on workers’ rights, training for middle management and productivity training for industrial engineers and production line management.
‘Without exception the factories have become more efficient and, as a result, workers’ salaries have been increased,’ says Daniel Himsworth at Marks and Spencer.
“Wages at the factories have increased by at least 12 per cent and in some cases over 50 per cent,” he says.
‘Absenteeism is down by 85 per cent and staff turnover is down by 65 per cent,’ he adds.
Asda is running a similar initiative and workers in the factories involved have seen wage increases of 15 per cent.
‘We are training managers and team leaders,’ says Asda’s Dominic Burch, ‘and by allowing people to extend we empower them.’
Despite the progress in some factories, there are still accusations and counter-accusations of less than savoury practices in the garment industry.
Two years ago the BBC highlighted the appalling conditions in a Dhaka factory making clothes for Zara.
The BBC alerted Inditex, the owner of Zara, and the company’s director of corporate social responsibility flew to Bangladesh to investigate.
Although it transpired that no Zara clothes were being made at that particular factory when he arrived, he agreed it was a dangerous environment and using the clout of a huge multinational buyer, he got the factory moved to new premises.
His intervention led to major changes and the staff in that factory now work in a modern, clean and safe environment.
Companies are usually quick to act when discrepancies are pointed out to them. Within 12 hours of the BBC telling Asda about a tailoring unit on the top floor of a shopping mall, packing shirts bearing the firm’s George logo into cardboard boxes, Asda investigators in Dhaka visited the premises and interviewed workers.
They established that the shopping mall houses a series of small tailoring shops producing garments for the Bangladesh domestic market.
‘As all of the machines are manual, it is not possible to produce garments for the export market,’ says Mr Burch.
‘During the visit, the team did not see garments with the George label or that of any other global brand in the tailoring houses,’ he adds.
‘However, the shops in the mall that sell the garments made in these tailoring units had garments
In 2012, a fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory in the Dhaka suburb of Ashulla, was the deadliest fire in the nation’s history, resulting in the deaths of 112 people.
On some floors managers ordered employees to ignore a fire alarm and made them continue with their work.
People were blocked from escaping by iron grilles on windows and the fire exits were padlocked. Workers managed to break open some windows and leap to safety on the roof of a nearby building while others jumped from upper floors to the ground. The fire was initially presumed to be caused by an electrical short circuit, but it was suspected the fire had been sabotage so no criminal charges were levied at the owners.
The loss of life at the Tazreen factory was eclipsed when the Rana Plaza collapsed on 24 April 2013, leaving 1,134 people dead and many hundreds more injured.
It was a tragedy brought about by corporate corruption and human greed. Sohel Rana, the owner of the nine-story building, added additional floors to the construction without building permission and the authorities turned a blind eye to it.
Five garment factories operated on the third to eighth floors, supplying clothing to retailers in the US and Europe.
The day prior to the collapse some of the floors had been evacuated after cracks appeared in pillars which separated the different levels. The next day, workers were told the building had been checked and it was safe. Several thousand workers were coerced into working.
“They deduct three day’s salary if we don’t work a single day,’ survivor Jannat explained. ‘I cannot afford to lose such a large sum of money.’
The less fortunate workers lost more than money on that fateful day. They lost their lives.
Rescue teams were woefully underequipped to cope with the biggest industrial disaster in the history of the country. Relatives dug frantically with their bare hands as the death toll mounted inexorably with each passing day.
A dust-covered 18-year-old girl staggered forward, asking to borrow a phone so she could let her husband know she was alive; a man collapsed when he heard his wife and two daughters had died; a
addressing safety concerns, the report notes, though problems persist regarding the financing of smaller factories to undertake remediation schemes, as the average cost of remediation is about $600,000m.
The report suggests state intervention in negotiation with international buyers and brands as part of a policy and economic diplomacy, while strengthening the designated government departments to ensure a greater coordination among the department of inspection of factories and the relevant ministries.
In order to reduce the poverty and vulnerability of the affected people, the researchers recommended developing a compensation mechanism at the national and global level which will clarify the assessment criteria and reflect the prevailing socio-economic reality at the sourcing countries.
With ripped limbs and agonising nightmares many of the survivors lost the means of earning a living. The delay in compensation is shameful.
woman asked to have a knife passed to her so she could cut off her trapped arm.
Harrowing stories like that were related by the survivors while distraught relatives waited to see if loved ones were among bodies taken away for identification.
Photographs beamed around the world showed limbs protruding from the rubble and men and women clasping each other in death.
I drove past that pile of rubble in the suburb of Savar one afternoon, on my way back into the centre of Dhaka. A fence has been erected to prevent people sifting through the pile of stones and twisted metal.
I stood with the people who gather there every day and couldn’t prevent my tears falling as I whispered a prayer.
The people waiting are not morbid onlookers, but family members who have never been able to find the body of their husband, wife, sister. There is no closure for them. They stand there every day, waiting for a miracle to happen, for their loved one to rise from the dust like Lazarus.
Dozens of unidentified bodies were buried; unidentified because of the condition they were in, or because family members couldn’t afford to travel to Dhaka from their remote villages and without being able to prove one of the victims was related to them, they will not receive any compensation.
The collapse of Rana Plaza focusses the mind on the heavy price paid when the ineptitude of government officials, the global retailing sector’s insistence on the lowest production costs, and consumer apathy in the West, interconnect with such heart-rending consequences.
The owner of the building was Sohel Rana, a member of the Awami League’s youth party. Together with the engineer who’d helped add three illegal floors to the structure, he was among 41 people arrested..
On 29 August 2017, Rana was sentenced to three years for failing to declare his wealth to the antigraft commission. His trials for murder and other charges have been delayed due to appeals to the higher court.
Finance Minister Abdul Muhith downplayed the impact of the collapse, saying he didn’t think it was ʻreally serious’, after the 500th body was pulled from the debris. ‘It’s an accident and accidents happen everywhere,’ he said.
He assured journalists the country’s biggest source of export income wouldn’t be affected. ‘Steps that we have taken in order to make sure that it doesn’t happen again are quite elaborate and I believe that it will be appreciated by all.’
There has been hand-wringing and soul-searching and promises to inspect factories to improve working conditions, along with numerous pledges to compensate victims. As usual in such cases, there is a lot of words but little action.
Action Aid published ‘Invisible Scars: 5 Years after Rana Plaza’ in April 2018. It states that challenges persist as the High Court’s decision on the compensation issue is yet to be resolved and some argue that payments made so far is monetary support and not compensation in any real sense. Furthermore, in spite of criminal charges against a number of accused, trial proceedings are yet to start.
The formation of the Remediation Coordination Cell (RCC) is an important milestone in terms of
31. Does Bangladesh use Foreign Aid Wisely?
Foreign aid is not an act of generous philanthropy. It always has strings attached, whether implicit or otherwise. The usual mantra is: ‘we supply aid and you support our vision of communism, or capitalism’, and the recipient wags its tail
And aid in building infrastructure is almost always to the advantage of the donor, who might construct a port, road, or a clinic, but only to facilitate the extraction and shipping of natural resources they have permission to exploit.
Meanwhile, aid ostensibly offered to improve the lives of the local population is processed by a government to ensure it gains maximum political advantage, which means supporters of the government reap the benefits while others lose out.
Does Bangladesh use Foreign Aid Wisely?
James Melik. Published 14 June 2009
Bangladesh receives about $2bn in foreign aid each year, but it does not always reach the people it is intended to help.
As in many countries where corruption is widespread, some government officials can be swayed to favour firms which offer them personal payments.
But how can the organisations that donate the money ensure that it is used effectively, especially in places where corruption is a major problem?
Syed Ershad Ahmed, president of the American Chamber of Commerce (ACC) in Dhaka, would like to remove the political influence from the process of awarding contracts.
‘We have to depoliticise our bureaucracy first if we want to see a free and fair business and tender system in Bangladesh,’ he says.
‘Local companies have an opportunity to pay some money under the table, but foreign companies try to maintain transparency as much as possible and that actually puts them at a disadvantage,’ he adds.
The train journey from Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, to the port of Chittagong, can take up to eight hours.
A new track would cut the journey time in half but that would cost tens of millions of dollars; money beyond the scope of the Dhaka government.
That is why it sought help from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), an organisation funded by the governments of Asian countries which aims to raise the standard of living for people in the region.
Many construction projects such as new roads and bridges are funded by foreign money. But the donors rarely pay the contractors directly.
Instead, the cash is channelled through the government and so it’s left to civil servants to decide which local companies get the work.
Accountant Attique-e-Rabani believes that creates a risk that the aid money will be mismanaged.
‘I know the ADB is sitting with the money and they want to pay for the improvement of the railway, but the project is running very slow,’ he says.
He believes people are not interested in working with the ADB because they monitor their projects very closely and want to see some transparency.
Like most foreign donors, the ADB does not pay local contractors directly.
Paul Heytens, the country director in Bangladesh, says that is because the bank tries to respect the independence of the government. ‘I’ve been impressed with the dynamism of the country,’ he says.
Despite being hit by cyclones and some serious flooding, the country’s economy grew by 6 per cent in 2008 against the backdrop of the global financial crisis.
The ADB works through governments and also engages with the spectrum of civil society in its member countries.
‘Any request for assistance needs to be channelled through government, but ultimately, what we are looking for is bankable projects,’ he explains.
‘We look at broader impacts, for example on reducing poverty, benefits that may not be readily quantifiable.
Maintaining political goodwill is clearly important for any organisation to be able to work effectively.
Attique e-Rabani believes there is a risk that aid money will be mismanaged when it is channelled through government officials.
You have to assume there is a level playing field that is fair but when that playing field is government-controlled, that is a difficult assumption,’ he explains.
“Corruption is a big problem across the world and in Bangladesh too,” he asserts, and we haven’t the leadership or the system which will bring it down.’
He maintains that the government holds power in the wrong sense. “They should be the servants to the community. It is not very clear-cut what the policies are,” he says. “They are interpreted by the officers of the government machinery, and they use their discretion.’ Mr Ahmed of the ACC thinks things have got better over the past couple of years, however.
Transparency International, which monitors corruption around the world, agrees the situation has improved in Bangladesh since 2007, when parliamentary elections were suspended by military leaders and an interim government imposed.
An anti-corruption drive led to hundreds of arrests and some politicians and business people were given long prison terms for offering or taking bribes.
According to Bangladesh law, every procurement has to be under an open bidding system.
Mahbubur Rahman, the president of the International Chamber of Commerce, says that although the process by which contracts are awarded has become more transparent, companies often seek contracts
32. Corruption Still Haunts Bangladesh
simply because of the money involved.
‘By and large, those who offer their services to the government sometimes lack the expertise to deliver what they promise,’ he says.
He is also concerned about how much money is filtered through what are ostensibly consultants.
Mr Rahman says there is anecdotal evidence that as much as 60 per cent of aid is spent on these middle-men.
The ADB’s Paul Heytens recognises the challenges of working in Bangladesh, but maintains that success comes through working effectively within the existing framework.
‘We try to harmonise with government priorities,’ he says, ‘In the case of our current strategy and programme, the government’s poverty reduction strategy.’
He agrees, however, that the bank’s aims might not always be the same as the politicians in power in the countries where the bank operates.
At least 40 per cent of Bangladeshis remain in poverty, although foreign aid money has helped to reduce infant mortality and has funded the fight against malaria.
Foreign money has also provided new roads and bridges and schools but, despite years of negotiations, there are no signs of that rapid new train service to Chittagong.
Not all projects are as slow as the new railway.
When all sides are satisfied that contracts can be delivered on time and on budget, things can move rapidly.
But it takes a lot of time and effort to win trust and without that, businesses in Bangladesh will find that lucrative opportunities are passing them by.
As each CNG taxi inches forward, drivers hand over a note to the policeman who is stopping them. When he notices me sitting in the back he waves us through without my driver having to make any payment.
Shabir spends his day walking among the traffic, selling bottles of water. On a good day he makes just over one dollar, but he has to hand some of that to a local policeman. Even on his day off, the policeman still turns up for his remittance.
Corruption is rife at every level of society and is accepted as being perfectly normal, but when it trickles down to the very poorest and most vulnerable it is a disease which ruins the lives and aspirations of honest hard-working people.
Corruption Still Haunts Bangladesh
James Melik. Published 29 July 2009
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During the interview Paul Heytens of the ADB was asked about corruption. He glanced across at the government official who was also present and immediately brought the interview to an end. He wouldn’t utter one more word. Asia Development Bank contacted the BBC to say we had interviewed Mr Heytens under false pretences and that we should not broadcast any of his interview. The silly attempt to gag us was of course, ignored.
At the end of 2008, voters in Bangladesh hoped the new government would continue the fight against corruption.
Four years earlier the country had been languishing at the bottom of the Transparency International list of the most corrupt in the world.
Sheikh Hasina’s Awami league was returned to power in December 2008 after pledges she would stamp out corruption.
But in spite of this, one entrepreneurial group of friends think little has changed.
Last year when they wanted to start an export company, they were constantly frustrated by the bureaucracy involved in setting up their enterprise.
The licence they required before they could begin trading took a year to come through. And it did not come cheap.
‘We returned to the government offices time and time again,’ explains Mr Ahsham, one of the budding entrepreneurs. ‘And each time we had to pay a bribe to a different person.’
There is no fixed amount when money changes hands.
‘It depends on the circumstances and who you are dealing with,’ Mr Ahsham says, insisting that Sheikh Hasina’s government is returning to the old system’.
‘She says good words, but does not put them into practice,’ he says. He believes Sheikh Hasina has the desire to change things, but that ‘others are corrupting her’.
‘We are part of a financial environment which is less than perfect,’ says Syed Ershad Ahmed, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Dhaka.
2005: ranked 158 out of 158 2006: ranked 156 out of 163
2007: ranked 167 out of 179 • 2008: ranked 147 out of 180
He bemoans the fact that companies in Bangladesh can grow without being efficient; a contradiction he believes is due to flaws in the system.
‘If you can achieve success and profit, what incentive is there for a businessman to follow more disciplined procedures?’ he asks.
‘Corruption is a big problem across the world and in Bangladesh too,’ he asserts. ‘But we haven’t the leadership or the system which will bring it down.’
Mr Ahmed would like to see political influence removed from the process of awarding government contracts.
Many construction projects such as new roads and bridges are funded by money from organisations such as the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank, but that money is not paid directory to the contractors.
Instead, the cash is channelled through the government and so it is left to civil servants to decide which local companies get the work.
He asserts that there is inefficiency and wastage when government agencies are involved. ‘Bangladesh is not a poor country but a poorly-managed country,’ he says.
In October 2006 the military-imposed government in Dhaka began an anti-corruption drive that led to hundreds of arrests, with some politicians and business people being given long prison sentences for offering or taking bribes.
Things have improved since then and Transparency International, the body which monitors corruption throughout the world, is confident that when the next league tables are published, Bangladesh will show even further improvements.
In an effort to introduce more transparent accounting, the World Bank funded a course organised by the International Chamber of Chartered Accountants in London.
Shawkat Waresi from the Ministry of Commerce attended the course and admits that accounting procedures in Bangladesh are not up to international standards.
‘As a result, foreign investors are hesitant about putting money into the country,’ he says.
One of the government’s main aims is to encourage international and local investment in the private sector, which it hopes will open up more employment opportunities.
However, the young entrepreneurs feel particularly aggrieved because, without the bureaucracy they have had to face to start their export company, they could have been offering employment to a dozen people months ago.
2018 figures released by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions indicate that In South Asia, Bangladesh ranked the second lowest, only ahead of war-torn Afghanistan.
The Berlin-based graft watchdog listed a host of reasons for the slide to 149 out of 180 countries surveyed, from 143 the previous year, including no commitment to curb corruption; little or no steps to stop high-profile corruption, uncontrolled scams and corruption in the banking and financial sector; and the Anti-Corruption Commission’s (ACC) failure to act effectively.
TIB Executive Director Dr Iftekharuzzaman believes the ACC along with other agencies, could play a vital role in curbing corruption. “There is hardly any example of high-profile corrupt individuals getting punished,’ he says.
ACC Chairman Iqbal Mahmud said: ‘Anyone can make sweeping comments about graft but how do we catch corrupt figures who lives in London?’
He was referring to BNP chief Khaleda Zia’s son Tarique Rahman, who lives in exile in London. Tarique faces 17 years in prison in two corruption cases and a life term for the August 2004 grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina.
According to the Global Financial Integrity, $5.9bn was siphoned out of Bangladesh in 2015 through mis-invoicing and conflict of interest as political and government positions are perceived as a means of making wealth.
In February, in her first address to the nation after being sworn in for her third consecutive term, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced ‘zero tolerance for corruption as a key policy of her new government.
She made similar statements the first time she came into office and again the second time.
It is difficult to see how things will change when there is so much vested interest in ministers to maintain the status quo so they can line their own pockets.
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Bangladesh Corruption Perception Index
(source: Transparency International)
33. Flash Floods Destroy Bangladesh Livelihoods
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Every year Bangladesh experiences severe flooding in the monsoon season between June and September, and every year homes and crops are destroyed and thousands of people lose their lives.
While some defences are built with reinforced concrete, most embankments are composed simply of turf and soil and they crumble whenever water levels increase.
Apart from annual monsoon rains there is the additional problem of melting snow in the Himalaya Mountains, which has become more prevalent with the increase in global warming.
Most of the affected live in the rural areas, though the capital is not immune to severe disruption. The natural drainage plains which surround Dhaka have been extensively built upon and no longer act as a natural conduit for flood water. This also causes contamination of the usual water supply which in turn creates a serious health hazard.
Visiting the country during the rainy season presents its own challenges. Travel between villages can only be achieved by boat and you are constantly splattered in mud.
But it gave me a fresh insight to a perennial problem.
Flash Floods Destroy Bangladesh Livelihoods
James Melik. Published 26 May 2010
The villagers are left without food to sustain them for the next six months, without any surplus rice to sell, and without fodder for their animals
Although the area floods for six months every year and unseasonable storms are common, farmers have been caught unawares as water from overburdened rivers rushes down.
Soon the water rises to cover Mr Ali’s ankles.
Time is tight now, so everyone rushes into the fields to cut the rice before it is completely covered in the murky swamp.
The rice itself is not yet ready for harvesting and the entire crop will be lost, but at least the stalks can be used for animal fodder in the months ahead.
Next, the animals that are stranded in the fields have to be rescued and taken to higher ground. The water continues to rise. Two hours later, it is a metre high and lapping half-way up Mr Ali’s steps.
A man emerges from the water with leeches attached to his legs and there are snakes in the water, yet the children keep on playing in what has become an enormous lake, their carefree existence contrasting sharply with their parents’ concerned faces.
For many families here, selling rice or the milk produced by their cows is often their only form of income, so many fear for the future.
The Dhaka government has contingency plans for such occasions, though there are critics of the service it offers.
Under their Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF) scheme, initiated in 1975 after the famine that affected millions a year earlier, aid is targeted at households that earn less than $5 a month, and which lack agricultural land or productive assets.
When aid is needed, about six million people should benefit from the scheme. But many villagers are unaware of the programme and have never received any aid at all.
‘Government aid disappears before it reaches our region and nobody in our village has ever received anything,’ says Mr Uddin.
According to the World Bank Report, such concerns are widespread.
‘A large share of resources appear not to reach their intended beneficiaries, indicating serous accountability problems,’ the Bank says in a report that outlines how illicit sales en route to the distribution centres, referred to as leakage, is the biggest problem.
What is euphemistically referred to as leakage is simply corruption and theft.
Higher food costs and numerous natural disasters over recent years have also contributed to the difficulties of implementing the government’s programme effectively.
Mr Ali is well aware of the difficulties ahead, so he decides to sell three of his six cows. The money he is paid for the cows should help sustain him for the next half a year and he will also have fewer animals to feed.
But coping this year will do little to help him deal with a problem that keeps on occurring, year after year.
Soggy fields surround Wasib Ali’s village when he wakes at 0530, yet he is not unduly concerned.
Usually the water evaporates in the heat within a couple of hours, so he gets up to release his livestock, which has been locked up for the night to protect it from wild dogs and rustlers.
The ducks flap their wings as they head for the water, but the cows and sheep are more reluctant as they walk down the concrete steps that Mr Ali has built from the front of his house to the land he owns below.
As Mr Ali and his fellow villagers in Habid Pur emerge to begin their daily routines, they are blissfully unaware of the turmoil that is about to be unleashed.
At 0900 Mr Ali goes to the local market at Jawar Bazar to buy some groceries and to chat with his friends over a cup of sweet tea.
As the district has been without electricity for four days Mr Ali has been unable to charge his mobile phone, so it is only when a young boy comes looking for his father that he realises there is problem in the village.
He hastens back, where he finds a hive of activity.
Rather than dry out, the water kept on rising and, within hours, the paddy fields are swamped and the rice damaged beyond repair before it can be harvested.
34. Anthrax Hits Leather and Meat Sectors
Whereas barriers against flooding can be built in the southern regions of the country, it cannot be done in the north.
‘If we prevent the land from flooding us, it will only flood our neighbours instead,’ says local market trader Shakir Chowdhury.
There have been efforts to introduce a strain of rice that can survive under water, and therefore still be harvested, even when submerged by flooding.
Most of those strains tend to originate in China and there is a reluctance to adopt them.
“The problem,’ says Mr Chowdhury, ‘is that we are accustomed to eating one kind of rice and people are not happy to change their cultural habits.’
Meanwhile, families will have to endure the shortage of food and they will have meagre resources, if any at all, to purchase the seeds they need for planting next year.
Farmers in Bangladesh already have a hard time coping with extreme weather conditions and severe flooding, so having an outbreak of anthrax which is affecting the farming, tanning and leather sector is an added burden to an economy which is already fragile.
Anthrax Outbreak Hits Leather and Meat Sectors
James Melik. Published 13 October 2010
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Periodically the floods are particularly devastating and they are headline news across the world for a few days.
Whenever that happens, there are people on the streets of Bethnal Green with buckets, looking for donations to help the people who have lost their livelihoods. I am not implying for one second that these people raising charity do not have the most honest and integral intentions, but having witnessed how little donated aid trickles down to those that really need it, I am most reluctant to place my hand in my pocket.
The best possible way to help, in my own opinion, is to channel any assistance you might wish to give through relatives or family members, so they can purchase grain or cattle to help them survive the natural disaster.
Most Bengali people living in east London have families and friends in Sylhet so this direct approach would be feasible.
It also removes politics from the equation as supporters of whichever party is dominant in any particular area will receive aid before those who support the opposition.
In cases of human suffering everyone should be treated equally but sadly, that is not the what happens.
A strain of bacteria that became famous after it was used as a bio-terrorism weapon is causing immense damage to Bangladesh’s export-oriented leather industry.
Health officials are battling to contain an outbreak of anthrax, which commonly infects livestock.
Anthrax exists naturally in the soil in some parts of Bangladesh. Livestock gets ill after eating contaminated grass, especially during the monsoon season when water brings it to the surface.
The latest outbreak which is hurting the leather industry that depends on raw hides from slaughtered cattle, is thought to have been caused by people slaughtering anthrax-infected cattle and selling or eating the contaminated meat.
Scores of anthrax-infected cattle have died in the last few weeks. The outbreak was first detected in the central district of Sirajganj in August and has now spread to 12 districts.
It has infected about 600 people so far. Officials say all of them have been infected with cutaneous, or skin anthrax, which causes wound-like lesions.
Health officials say cutaneous anthrax is not life-threatening if detected early and there is treatment available.
No humans have died so far, but the anthrax outbreak has caused panic.
As a result, demand for beef and mutton has dropped significantly after consumers stopped buying red meat, with sales down nearly 90 per cent in the past month.
The sharp fall in the number of cattle slaughtered in various slaughtering houses has drastically limited the supply of hides to the tanneries.
There has been a sharp increase in the prices of hides and many tanneries are running out of material.
‘We are using hides from our old stock,’ says Abu Taher, who runs a tannery in Hazaribag, a suburb of the capital Dhaka.
‘But how long we can continue to use it? Those who are raising cows, those who are selling beef and also those who are slaughtering, they are all losing jobs.’
Bangladeshi firms produce both finished leather and leather products. Leather handbags, boots,
Anthrax can enter the human body through intestines (ingestion), lungs (inhalation), or skin (cutaneous) Anthrax has been used for bio-terrorism by mailing letters containing spores
Bangladeshi companies earned $460m (£290m) in leather and leather goods exports last year.
This year was supposed to be even more lucrative as the industry was beginning to recover from the global recession.
Instead, the anthrax outbreak has hit them hard.
‘Due to the anthrax crisis, we lost more than $100m in our export target in the last monthly period,’ says Muhammad Hai, general secretary of the Bangladesh Tanners Association.
‘If this situation continues in this way, it will be difficult for us to continue with the leather business. I am afraid most of the tanneries will be closed.’
Exporters say they are not taking any new orders from their buyers abroad as they afraid that they will not be able to supply them in time.
There are more than 200 tanneries in Bangladesh employing 70,000 people, but millions of others, such as farmers, dairy owners and traders, are directly and indirectly dependent on the cattle industry.
However, officials are confident that they can manage to get through the present anthrax outbreak.
‘I think it is well contained, it is under control,” says Sharful Alam, secretary of the Department of Livestock and Fisheries.
‘Things will improve further with the decision to vaccinate all the cattle in the infected areas. By the middle of October the total vaccination will be completed in infected districts, so the concern of the tanneries should go.’
It is estimated that almost 40 per cent of the country’s annual hide procurement will be done during the Muslim religious festival of Eid-ul-Adha, when millions of cattle will be ritually slaughtered as part of the festival.
The festival is less than two months away, so tannery owners and exporters are anxious. At the moment, they can only hope the anthrax outbreak will subside gradually.
Otherwise it could spell disaster for a Bangladeshi industry worth some $500m to the impoverished country.
By 2017 the leather industry was thriving, though it had become controversial because environmentalist were pointing out how the sector was causing pollution on a major scale.
The government took steps to relocate tanneries from the Dhaka district of Hazaribagh because of the discharge of highly toxic chemicals into the nearby rivers.
Fines were imposed as deadlines went unheeded and the authorities resorted to cutting off utility supplies.
Tanneries gradually moving to Savar but in March 2017 the government announced the move had been delayed and would not be completed until 2019.
Meanwhile, it is reported that 90 per cent workers in the industry die before they are 50 years old and many others have respiratory diseases.
In April 2019 the Daily Star reported how Bangladesh had the potential to expand its share of leather and leather products in the lucrative global market if tanneries were fully compliant with international standards.
‘China is increasingly moving towards high-end markets of leather and related goods, including footwear, and this has created opportunities for countries like Bangladesh. But we will have to be fully compliant,’ said. Professor Abu Eusuf of the development studies department at the University of Dhaka.
Abul Kalam Azad, president of Tannery Workers’ Union, said the sector would not be able to sustain its progress if it was not compliant. ‘It has immense potential and can be a much bigger export earner,’ he said.
According to Professor Eusuf, the leather sector has the advantage to leverage a secure supply of raw hides and skins locally to gain from higher value exports.
He also spoke about the current situation at an industrial estate for tanneries in Savar, where most of the 155 tanners from the capital have moved. Discussing the current scenario of environmental compliance he maintains the capacity of the central effluent treatment plant in the estate was insufficient.
He said solid waste was not treated properly, sludge was not properly managed, the dumping yard was open and poorly managed, and the drainage system in place required more maintenance.
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Anthrax is one of the oldest diseases of grazing animals and is believed to be the Fifth Plague mentioned in the Book of Exodus in the Bible Anthrax is also mentioned in works by Homer, Virgil and Hippocrates German physician and scientist Robert Koch first identified the bacteria which caused the anthrax disease in 1875 French scientist Louis Pasteur developed the first effective vaccine for anthrax in 1881 Humans can become infected by contact with contaminated animals hides, fur, wool or leather Anthrax can enter the human body through intestines (ingestion), lungs (inhalation),
..
35. What Future Awaits Bangladeshi Youth
That the future lies with the youth of the world is a cliché and states the obvious. Young people believe they can change things for the better; and so they should. Unless they challenge the status quo there would never be progress.
Alexander was 18 when he became king of Macedonia and changed the world as it was known at the time. Joan of Arc was but a teenage peasant girl when she led French forces to relieve the city of Orleans.
In more recent history, students who were critical of the scarcity of employment opportunities for university graduates in France demonstrated for reform. Students went on strike and occupied the Paris University at Nanterre before occupying the Sorbonne, the most prestigious of academic establishments.
For two weeks in May 1968 the crisis spread throughout the country as workers went on a general strike. An estimated 22 per cent of the population participated in the shutdown.
At the height of the troubles, the economy of France was almost brought to a halt and President Charles de Gaulle even fled the country for a few hours.
Following the announcement of a general election, the revolutionary fervour faded and the national union of students called off their demonstrations. Although De Gaulle’s party won a majority his personal authority had been dented, which led to him resigning a year later.
Young people were the catalyst for changes in France, just as the hippies and draft-dodgers in America probably had some bearing on the decision for the US to pull out of Vietnam.
However, those achievements pale into insignificance compared to the role young people played in the Arab Spring which swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, prompting regime change in some countries and prolonged violence in others.
the service sectors.
But Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) director Mahabub Hossain says that figure is overly ambitious.
He says 1.2 million jobs will be created each year, but that won’t be enough to cope with the number of people joining the workforce.
‘Economic growth has historically been fuelled by the garment industry,’ he says.
“That sector will continue to grow as China turns even more towards low-cost sources such as Bangladesh.’
Apart from that, the economy is also diversifying.
“There is rapid growth in leather manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry is picking up, and there is a property boom,’ Mr Hossain says, adding the latter has seen a massive rise in the manufacture of bricks and cement.
‘One-third of our workforce is finding employment overseas and that will be another major source of job opportunities,’ he says, citing the need for manpower in the Middle East and China.
But Mr Hossain’s optimism is not universally shared. Kamal Aware is worried about his prospects when he leaves college next year.
‘My brother has a degree in engineering,’ he says, but the boss of one company wants him to pay the equivalent of a month’s wage to get the job. That’s money he doesn’t have and my parents can’t afford it.’
A professor at a university campus in the Dhaka suburb of Uttara, who wishes to remain anonymous, says he gets very disheartened knowing many of his students will leave with good qualifications but still find it hard to find work.
‘Unless the government does more to create jobs, the country could witness scenes similar to those seen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, when young people demanded change,’ he says.
Corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy are often cited as the main stumbling blocks for an improved economy.
Abdur Razzaq, assistant secretary general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, says: ‘Prospects for the young are unlikely to change until the judiciary and anti-corruption commission are totally independent from political interference.’
The London-trained barrister adds that poor infrastructure and energy provision are also major hindrances to growth.
Meanwhile, Mr Hossain says that when firms have to use generators to supply their electricity, it increases the cost of production and decreases their competitiveness in the world market.
There are many who think young people should do more to help themselves, rather than relying upon the government to provide all the answers.
Among them is Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. His Grameen organisation has helped educate thousands of people who now find themselves with a university degree but without employment.
Young people are without work, but there is a lot of work to be done,’ he says.
What Future Awaits Bangladeshi Youth
James Melik. Published 3 December 2012
A recent forum organised by the Dhaka School of Economics and the Bangladesh Economic Association debated the motion: Unemployment of educated youths is a major issue which needs to be addressed to avoid a social crisis.
That might sound alarming, but there is a strong entrepreneurial spirit in the country and not everyone believes the future looks so bleak.
Already the eighth most populous country in the world, the population of Bangladesh is forecast to reach 190 million by 2025, of which 43 per cent will be under the age of 30, according to the US Census Bureau.
Professor Shamsul Alam, of the government’s planning committee, told the forum 10 million jobs would be created under the five-year plan up to 2015, due to growth in manufacturing, construction and the service sectors.
As that has become such a successful business and his expertise in wedding photography has increased, any thoughts of becoming a photojournalist have dissipated.
As that has become such a successful business and his
Grameen has been instrumental in starting a nursing college in collaboration with Glasgow Caledonian University, along with courses in auto-mechanics in conjunction with the Japanese company Autobach.
“These young men can then set up their own auto-repair shops and employ other people like themselves,’ Dr Yunus says.
Khaled Ahmed certainly didn’t sit around waiting for someone to offer him a job.
When he left college he worked briefly for a telecoms company but, after borrowing money from his father five years ago to purchase a good camera, he began taking wedding photographs.
‘I was only an amateur when I began,’ he says. but now I have my own company called Wedding Story, and I employ seven people.
His ambition is to be a photojournalist, but meanwhile, as the only wage earner in his family, he is honing his skills.
“We only have three or four weddings a month, but with the photographs, filming and video editing, that is enough to keep us all fully employed,’ he says.
With a chuckle, he adds: “There will always be weddings, so our future is secure. But I will strive towards my dream until I become a photojournalist with an established agency.’
000
Checking up on Khaled in April 2018 he tells me he now has 25 people permanently working for him and another 10 who work part-time to cater for the 20 weddings they are employed to attend every month.
ecome such a successful business and his expertise in wedding photography has increased, any thoughts of becoming a photojournalist have dissipated.
36. Unsung Heroes
Contrary to what has become an established fact, albeit totally incorrect, Professor Yunus did not invent microcredit, nor was he the pioneer of it in Bangladesh. While he was still in the US contemplating a return to his newly-formed country, Fazle Hasan Abed was drumming up political support in Europe.
A corporate man who’d already had experience lobbying aid agencies while organising relief operations after a cyclone hit East Pakistan in 1970, Abed’s efforts to develop Bangladesh ultimately led to him founding BRAC, which has since become the biggest non-government organisation (NGO) in the world, in terms of the number of people it employs and reaches.
He was knighted by the British government in its 2010 for services in tackling poverty and empowering the poor in Bangladesh and globally.
He initiated and established numerous projects Yunus copied and adapted in his own fight against poverty.
Reading books Yunus has written, you can be forgiven for thinking he personally came up with all the ideas because he doesn’t give credit where it is due. In his book Banker to the Poor, BRAC doesn’t even merit a mention in the index, let alone any reference about it being the first organisation to introduce microcredit, and to oversee support groups for women.
There is a huge difference in the character of the two men. The beaming face of Yunus adorns many a magazine cover and has fronted many videos on YouTube, whereas Sir Fazle is more self-effacing and he can stroll down the street without being recognised.
Soraya Auer greeted me at the BRAC headquarters in the smart suburb of Gulshan in Dhaka and instructed me not to address him as Sir Fazle.
‘At BRAC we have no hierarchy so we discourage the use of sir and madam,’ she says. ‘In Bangladesh, it’s customary to call those older than you sister or brother, or aunt and uncle if in a non-work environment. In an office environment we stick with bhai, shortened from bhaiya, which means brother. Hence, Sir Fazle is always known as Abed bhai,’ she explains before ushering me into an air-conditioned boardroom adorned with framed certificates of the innumerable honorary doctorates and awards he has received, and a long highly polished mahogany table which can seat two dozen people.
Sir Fazle, or Abed bhai, ambles in, greets me warmly, and leans back in one of the luxurious leather chairs. Unlike Yunus, who is always attired in a traditional Bengali costume, Sir Fazle is smartly dressed in a shirt and tie, although he is not wearing his suit jacket.
Educated in the UK, Sir Fazle returned to East Pakistan to work for the Shell Oil Company and quickly rose to head its finance division. ‘I was one of the highest paid young people in the country. It was a cushy job, the sort people dream about,’ he tells me.
When the Bhola cyclone hit the southern coastal regions of Bangladesh in 1970, the devastation had a profound effect on him and the comforts and perks of a corporate executive ceased to have any attraction when put in perspective against the awful conditions many of his countrymen had to endure.
profound effect on him and the comforts and perks of a corporate executive ceased to have any attraction when put in perspective against the awful conditions many of his countrymen had to endure.
Together with some friends, he created the organisation HELP (Heartland Emergency Lifesaving Project) to provide relief and rehabilitation to the worst affected island of Manpura in the Bay of Bengal, which lost three quarters of its population.
‘I became very involved with the affairs of East Pakistan after the cyclone. The country was run by civil servants and an appointed governor, and they were trying to integrate West Pakistani culture by imposing the Urdu language on us,’ he muses as he glances up towards the ceiling.
“The army couldn’t even defend us if we were attacked because it was based in the west. We were the backwaters. All these things contributed to the feeling of alienation from West Pakistan, although there were a group of people who felt that because we are Muslim, we needed to be a part of it. As time went on there was a growing clamour for change. What we wanted was autonomy, so we could use our resources for the benefit of our own people.’
When the struggle for independence from West Pakistan began after the 1970 election results were not recognised, he was faced with a big decision.
‘I either had to move to Calcutta to join the freedom fighters, or go to London to try to mobilise resources and public opinion in Europe. I chose London.’
He was in Chittagong, organising relief for the cyclone victims when the declaration of independence was broadcast by General Ziaur Rahman. His heart skipped a beat when he was picked up by the West Pakistani military and taken to Dhaka, but they’d only done so to install him as a strategically important liaison official in their dealings with the oil companies.
He had to get out of the country and after two weeks in his new post, he took a holiday. His choices of destination were limited as planes were only flying to Karachi or Islamabad in West Pakistan. He booked a flight to Karachi, with the intention of flying from there to Kabul, in Afghanistan, and then onwards to Europe. In Karachi he bumped into a former colleague, who thought Sir Fazle was neglecting his duties in Dhaka. That person informed the chairman of the Shell operations in East Pakistan who in turn, reported Sir Fazle’s presence to the secret police in West Pakistan.
Unaware his movements were arousing suspicion, Sir Fazle travelled to Islamabad and made a courtesy call to his colleagues at the company’s headquarters. Within minutes, two police officers arrived and arrested him. Under interrogation, Sir Fazle maintained he was simply taking a holiday because there wasn’t much work for him to do in Dhaka. Fortunately, he’d had the foresight to purchase a return ticket.
‘I told them that if they wanted me to return then I would straight away,’ he recounts. ‘It was a tense moment but they seemed more interested in the wage slip they found in my baggage. They told me I had to be the most eligible bachelor in East Pakistan. It was an extremely dangerous moment, but the memory brings a smile to his face.
When he was released from the military headquarters where they had taken him, he took a taxi to Peshawar near the northern border. The next day he boarded a crowded bus for the uncomfortable
the bus would be stopped and he would be hauled off. He spent two weeks in Kabul before he could find an empty seat on any flight heading west, which turned out to be Istanbul, and then he was able to continue on his final leg to London.
Back where he had been a student, and in the country where he had taken out citizenship in 1962, the first thing he did was go to Shell’s head office to tender his resignation. He then set up Action Bangladesh and lobbied British Members of Parliament.
‘There was a lot of indifference but there were one or two people who were very good listeners, he says, citing the labour MP Peter Shore as someone who was sympathetic to his cause but who ultimately, could only offer his sympathy.
“The problem was, that just before the Bangladesh thing blew up there had been the Biafra thing,’ Abed says, referring to the Nigerian state of Biafra which went through a bloody war and suffered a devastating famine as it attempted to secede from Nigeria because of economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria.
Biafra lost its fight for freedom, leading people to think the same would happen to the newlyproclaimed Bangladesh.
‘I sold my little flat in London and returned home less than a month after the war finished,’ he tells me, as an assistant walks in and places a cup of tea in front of us; a custom which happens in every office and household you visit in Bangladesh.
Known first as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and later as Building Resources Across Communities, Abed initiated BRAC in 1972 in the district of Sunamganj as a small-scale rehabilitation project to help people returning home after the War of Liberation.
He used the money from the sale of his flat to finance the rebuilding of homes in the Sylhet division, before receiving a donation from Oxfam which enabled him to be even more ambitious. He purchased bamboo from India at a fraction of the regular price and lashed it together to make giant rafts to reach outlying villages surrounded by water. With the bamboo, he built 14,000 houses, far exceeding the number he’d mentioned in the proposal submitted to Oxfam.
Until the mid-1970s, BRAC concentrated on community improvement through village development programmes that included agriculture, fisheries, cooperatives, rural crafts, adult literacy, health, family planning, vocational training for women and construction of community centres.
In 1977, BRAC began taking a more targeted approach by creating Village Organisations to assist the landless, small farmers, artisans, and vulnerable women.
There are fundamental issues that need attention which he has strived to address; one being a reduction in the number of children in a family.
‘Every child should go to school but if you have too many you cannot afford to send them. If you only have two children you can,’ he declares.
Poor families are accustomed to having large families, partly so there are enough children to look
have two children you can,’ he declares.
Poor families are accustomed to having large families, partly so there are enough children to look after parents when they get older. He has worked hard to change that traditional mental attitude.
“A poor person thinks that if he gets work today, his family will eat tonight. If he doesn’t get work the following day, his family will beg, borrow or steal and be half-fed,’ he says.
The importance of putting something aside for those days when there was not any work available is paramount.
‘Their planning cycle is 24 hours. The biggest challenge is to alter that way of thinking and get them to think longer-term. How do you teach family planning to people when they only think about day-to-day survival?’ he asks.
His first step was to encourage people to save, even if only a single taka a week; an important psychological phase in the transition of getting people to think about the future.
‘Eventually, a woman would turn round and say she wasn’t going to have a child the following year and would ask for a packet of birth control pills.’
With modest pride, he talks of how he wanted to have an impact on the nation itself, and rightly believes encouraging people to have smaller families has been one of his greatest achievements.
The first person to work with Sir Fazle when he began his programmes in Sylhet was Khushi Kabir, who’d helped him with his relief efforts after the cyclone.
‘My father was a bureaucrat who retired in January 1971 just before the Liberation War began, so he didn’t have to be pushed into government or take sides,’ she reveals when we spoke in her modest office in the residential Dhaka suburb of Lalmatia. ‘I saw bureaucracy from a different angle. I marched with students, read Marxism and campaigned for human rights. But you didn’t really feel it, it was more of an intellectual pursuit, more a passion, you were not living the life of the people you were campaigning for, she declares.
“I’ve always been an independent woman and although I listened to what people had to say, I didn’t follow conventions. I am very lucky to come from a family which allows me to be the way I am without thinking about what the neighbours would say.’ While telling me this, I have the impression that anybody foolish enough to argue with her would come off second best.
She talks about how she coped when she first left the comfort of her home in Dhaka. ‘In the village I learnt to bathe in a pond and it was a great feat to learn how to change a sari without showing an inch of your skin. I was very impressed with myself,’ she laughs.
When I ask whether it was a culture shock to suddenly find herself living in such primitive conditions, she says she didn’t experience anything like that.
‘It was just different,’ she says, adding: ‘I never learnt to swim. We travel in small boats during the rainy season but I have no fear. I tell myself that if there is a storm I drown. And when I travel on a bus with cows and chickens and goats and oxygen cylinders and anything else they can stuff into it, going along broken roads at breakneck speeds, I tell myself that I can’t drive so whatever happens will happen. I
37. Bangladesh at 40
have no control over events like that.’
She did have control over her work however. One of her first responsibilities at BRAC was to organise separate groups for fishermen, landless peasants and women.
She refers to an economist whom she greatly respects, called Professor Abu Mohammad Shapan Adnan, who returned from Cambridge in the UK, where he studied social and political science, and started working in the department of economics in the University of Dhaka.
She informs me: ‘He was an expert in agrarian structure, peasant economy and society, and the historical struggle for women’s rights.’
He undertook socio-economic research in four villages in different districts with a team of university students and faculty members. Together with Professor Ruman, he started the concept of village studies being carried out by students.
‘Shapan then moved to Chittagong University, where he tried to get further village studies going. That is where Yunus picked up on the idea,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t a new idea Yunus came up with when he took his students into Jobra.
Yunus proposed women formed themselves into self-help groups. He reasoned, they could offer each other moral support and encouragement when they discussed taking out a loan with their husband, or other social issues which affected them. They had to be taught to alter their old way of thinking and, thus prepared, he believed it would empower women in a way they could never achieve individually.
It was, as Khushi Kabir points out, something BRAC had already been doing for several years.
She’d met Yunus long before his experimental Grameen Bank began. ‘When Yunus had some people coming from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, he asked me to join him at his university in Chittagong to talk about organising women into support groups,’ she relates. However, it was a talk which didn’t actually take place because, on that particular day, there was a counter-coup against President Zia.
‘We heard shooting and I recall these American women saying “My God there’s a shooting” and I said no, it’s just firecrackers. Dr Yunus wanted me to talk to his women students about how it is possible for an urban woman like me to go and live in a remote village and work with rural women, forming them into self-help groups. He was toying with the idea of something similar in Jobra. But he didn’t ask me to speak to his students when the shooting happened so I expect he had to explain everything himself.’
BRAC began issuing small loans to villagers several years before Yunus did, so I ask Sir Fazle whether he feels his own valuable contribution in helping the poor in such a manner has been overlooked.
‘We started with savings then moved into microcredit, whereas Yunus started straight away with credit,’ he says.
“The most important thing about Yunus’ work has been his wonderful advocacy for microfinance. He has done a good job spreading the idea around the world and, in doing so, he has become very famous himself.
Sir Fazle speaks without any hint of rancour. If there was any, it was diplomatically disguised.
Politics in Bangladesh is dominated by two women who are fiercely opposed to each other, and whose supporters are aggressively partisan. Both are leaders of a family dynasty and believe their vision is the one which needs to be implemented without any room for compromise.
To understand the dynamics of this country it is helpful to know how this situation came about.
One of the few people of stature who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion is Sir Fazle Abed, the founder of BRAC, the largest NGO in the world, who explained how the political elite evolved after the end of the Liberation War.
The People’s Republic of Bangladesh came into being on 16 December 1971. Sheikh Mujib, thereafter referred to as Bangabandhu, the Father of the Nation, was released by the Pakistani authorities and flown to London on 8 January 1972.
He met the British prime minister and was flown to Delhi by the Royal Air Force, where he met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi before returning in triumph to Dhaka.
He was the provisional president before becoming prime minister. Under his tenure, his party changed its name to the Bangladesh Farmers and Workers Awami League, which was later shortened to the less cumbersome Awami League.
‘People expecting some kind of utopia after liberating themselves from the oppression of West Pakistan were quickly disillusioned and disappointed,’Sir Fazle says.
‘Mujib’s regime nationalised industries and companies, and took control of abandoned land and capital as he initiated reforms aimed at helping millions of poor farmers. However, many of the nationalised assets were plundered by the very people supposedly running them for the benefit of the country’s economy and there emerged a new tier of merchants interested only in bolstering their personal finances.
“Mujib was never going to satisfy each and every group vying for control and influence within the new government. In addition to senior bureaucrats and military leaders, there were also the traders and the new rural elite jostling for power, and each section was lubricating its pockets with the foreign aid flowing into the country.
“The ambitious social programmes performed poorly and turmoil grew among a population seeking an improvement in their living standards. As civil unrest became more aggressive, he responded by increasing his political powers: transforming the government into an authoritarian state and naming himself president. He became a dictator.
Opposition parties were banned and activists arrested and tortured, along with newspaper editors. He reinforced his hold on the one-party state by creating an armed militia called the Rakkhi Bahini, whose members terrorised the countryside and clashed with former freedom fighters angry at not being properly
represented in the government. But the worst criticism came from veterans of the liberation conflict, who accused him of betraying the fight for democracy when he gave an amnesty to the militia who’d sided with Pakistan.
‘My view at the time, was that Mujib should not have become the head of the government. He should have remained an outside figure, a figurehead rather than an official head. I argued with many of my friends who believed that without Mujib they wouldn’t be able to consolidate the country.
‘He was not a person of high intellect. He wasn’t a good administrator. He was an organiser, a rebel rouser, a politician who could organise things in a village, nothing more.’
‘He valued loyalty over competence. He would make you a minister if he thought you were a loyal person, rather than if you were a competent person. We knew all his qualities and his weaknesses. I was disappointed with his administration and the period he was in power. A lot of things went wrong. But he was still popular among the people.’
He concedes it was a very difficult period for Mujib.
“The country was in ruins and although there was some assistance from outside, there was also a lot of opposition. The US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was against us and the World Bank would not come in.
“The only supporters were India, and Russia to some extent. We were not recognised by China or America and we were not a member of the UN,’ he says. ‘We had all kinds of deprivation when we needed external support.’
The dreadful famine in 1974 was exacerbated by US President Nixon barring grain exports to the country in reprisal for Bangladesh exporting jute to Cuba, thereby violating US economic sanctions.
The famine was a major source of discontent against President Mujib’s rule because many people thought it had not necessarily been caused due to a food crisis but instead, to a lack of good governance and outright corruption.
Army officers disenchanted with the performance of the Awami League, broke into the home of President Mujib on 15 August 1975 and assassinated him and his entire family, apart from two daughters.
Sheikh Hasina and her younger sister Rehana survived because they were staying with the Bangladeshi ambassador in Germany when the assassination took place.
Sheikh Hasina was not allowed to attend the funeral of her parents and brothers and remained in exile in India until multi-party politics were re-established and she was elected to lead the Awami League in 1981.
Critics argue she wants to continue her father’s legacy of a one-party state, crippled with nepotism and corruption.
Mujib’s assassination was followed by a series of military coups and counter coups until Major General Ziaur, referred to as President Zia, became president in 1977.
He was the officer who’d broadcast Mujib’s declaration of independence. The years of disorder before he came into power had left the country’s state institutions in disarray, with rampant looting, illegal land
grabbing, civil disorder, and a breakdown in law and order. Rahman took charge of a nation suffering from economic stagnation, severe poverty and food shortages and the chronic unemployment which gave people plenty of excuses to voice their discontent.
The history of Bangladesh would have been different had President Mujib not refrained from carrying out its plan to send General Ziaur Rahman on a posting abroad a few months before his assassination, according to retired Lieutenant Colonel MA Hamid.
“The government didn’t have confidence in his loyalty. He was made deputy chief of army staff but he didn’t have much of a role in the army,’ he says. “The president and senior Awami League leaders considered him a highly ambitious officer who’d exposed his dream of being at the helm of the state when he broadcast the declaration of independence.
“Zia understood that his military career would come to an end if he was sent out on a diplomatic posting. He convinced the president of his loyalty to the government and the result was that the government shelved its plans of sending him abroad.
After Mujib’s assassination, Zia gradually emerged as the most powerful man in the country. ‘He was desperate to become president. I tried relentlessly to make him understand he was too young to become president,’ Hamid proclaims. ‘He was only 41 when he became president. After grabbing the presidency, he stepped into politics, ignoring his pledge to the nation he would not do so. He founded the BNP, allowed anti-liberation forces, including Jamaat-e-Islami, to resume political activities by withdrawing the constitutional ban on them and through martial law proclamations, he frequently amended the constitution, destroying its basic structures.’
“Zia thought socialism was too unwieldy for Bangladesh at that moment,’ BRAC’s Sir Fazle tells me as he reflects on that period in the nation’s history.
‘As an individual he was not bad in the sense that he was ambitious, but he wasn’t ambitious for money. He was very incorruptible in terms of money. He was not after money at all,’ Sir Fazle maintains.
‘He was after power. What he wanted was to serve the country. He had simple tastes. He used to go to the villages all the time and would share simple food with the people he met. He had no love for pomp and ceremony and travelled in a modest motor car rather than a grand limousine.’
Zia initially came into power as a military administrator and Sir Fazle believes his move into politics was an error.
“He should have remained a dictator like Park Chung-hee of South Korea who successfully industrialised his country and improved its economy significantly. The Korean leader didn’t have any problems about democracy. Zia should have followed his example, saying “I’m in power and I’m going to order things around. I want land reform and I want every child in school”. That is what Park Chung-hee did and that is why South Korea had high growth very quickly. The same thing happened in Singapore. The high trajectory of growth was created by these dictatorial leaders and it was good business for their country.
Surprised at hearing somebody expound the virtues of a dictatorship so forcibly, I lean back as Sir
Another caretaker government, another election, and in 2001 the BNP was returned to power. On this occasion it was the Awami League which declared the election a fraud and they began boycotting parliament sessions.
Protests between opposing political activists became more violent. An assassination attempt on Sheik Hasina left 24 dead when grenades were thrown at in her direction in 2004, and the following year there was a spate of small explosive devices aimed mostly at government buildings.
A military-backed caretaker government ran the country from 2006-2008 because the political situation was so malign.
The period was marked by violence and strikes, leading to the imposition of a state of emergency. Many people I spoke to have said this period saw less corruption than previously and would have been happy for the army to remain in charge.
With political activities suspended under the state of emergency, the government worked on a ‘minus-two’ formula which was intended to oust both Hasina and Zia.
The government hoped to recast the political system. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus announced the foundation of a party called Citizens’ Power. Claiming a lack of support, he later rejected entering politics.
The Awami League won the election held in December 2008 and governed with an alliance which included the former military ruler General Ershad.
Fazle warms to the theme. ‘I believe Zia should have done all the right things first: educate children, immunise them so they don’t die, before getting bogged down wanting to be loved by the people. He should not have hankered for love and support,’ he says.
“When I heard Zia’s speech in 1977 in a big open public meeting, he said he was going to bring back democracy and he was trying to get some of the best people into his party,’ he recalls. ‘But democracy means you need money to get elected. Posters have to be printed, people have to know who it is they are voting for.
That was the beginning of the end for Zia as far as Sir Fazle is concerned. ‘Some ministers were asked to raise money from businessmen, so bribery started and became rampant. Some of the money raised for the party went into their own pockets and Zia actually tolerated that,’ he laments. ‘If you are honest yourself but tolerate such things, then you are not really honest. So Zia tarnished his reputation.’
He goes on to explain that Zia had another problem: the army. ‘One of the people who brought him into power was Colonel Taher. He was executed on charges of high treason and murder and people who know the inner workings of the military, even now, look upon Zia as somebody who wasn’t loyal to his friends. He was ruthless in his hunger for power and it was that ruthlessness which ultimately led to his downfall.’
During a visit to Chittagong in 1981 to settle a dispute between local political activists, Zia was assassinated by a group of military officers who’d fought alongside him in the war of liberation. ‘He was perceived by the people as being a good man trying to do the best he could and he was mourned by the largest crowd Dhaka had ever seen,’Sir Fazle reminisces.
Vice-President Justice Abdus Sattar was sworn in as acting president. He declared a national emergency and called for election of a new president within six months, which he won as the BNP’s candidate.
Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad came to power in a bloodless coup on 24 March 1982 and declared martial law, banning political parties and trade unions. He ran the country as a dictator until he formed his own Jatiya Party to represent his interests in the general election of 1986, when it won a controversial parliamentary majority. Another election in 1988 was boycotted by the major opposition parties, leaving the door open for another Jatiya victory.
Following a popular uprising which led to the resignation of Ershad, there was a transition to democracy with the election of the centre-right BNP under the leadership of Khaleda Zia, widow of Ziaur Rahman, with support from the Jamaat-i-Islami party, in the elections held in 1991.
In February 1996 the BNP won a landslide in the national elections boycotted by every other party. New elections in June held under the auspices of a caretaker government produced a victory for the Awami League, headed by Sheikh Hasina.
In what was to become a familiar refrain, the opposition party faced harassment and jailing of its activists. The BNP and other opposition parties abstained from attending parliament, boycotted elections and encouraged strikes.
Bangladesh at 40 James Melik. Published 16 December 2011
After a war lasting nine months and with the aid of India, East Pakistan seceded from West Pakistan and became the independent state of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971.
The country did not have a very auspicious beginning. The war had left three million people dead and a further 10 million displaced in India. There soon followed a great famine which claimed at least another one million lives. As with most famines, the causes of starvation on a mass scale in Bangladesh were multiple.
These included flooding, government mismanagement and so-called distributional failures, whereby food and aid intended for the hungry was stolen and never reached its destination.
The county’s devastated infrastructure and markets were wholly unprepared to deal with the challenges that independence brought.
Furthermore, there was widespread corruption among newly appointed officials. Throughout its history, Bangladesh has had to cope with natural disasters and political unrest.
Forty years later, many of the shortcomings exposed when the country gained its independence are still apparent.
There are at least three major concerns which remain to be addressed if life for the average person is
to improve.
First, corruption is still rife.
A recent Transparency International index measuring perceptions of corruption placed Bangladesh firmly among the worst countries, alongside other nations such as Mozambique and Kazakhstan.
The current government led by Sheikh Hasina came into power in 2009 promising to tackle the problem of corruption.
Many people believe that her attempts to improve the situation have been thwarted by officials who do not want to see a change to the status quo because it will mean they no longer receive the perks to which they have become accustomed.
Second, despite having bountiful natural resources, the lack of proper energy supplies in Bangladesh continues to hamper business.
There are frequently large scale and often violent demonstrations in different parts of Bangladesh over the thorny issue of power and energy supply.
Factories and industries which can afford it supply their own power by using generators but, away from the large urban centres, a consistent source of energy is considered a luxury few can afford.
And finally, the lack of jobs.
With a population of 160 million, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.
It is estimated that by 2020, half of the population will be under 30 years old.
Work needs to be found for the growing number of educated young people who are leaving the countryside to search for work in the cities.
But there are few jobs available and faced with little or no prospects for a better future, people could take to the streets to voice their protest, in much the same way we have witnessed across the Arab world over the past year.
opposition politicians who maintained it targeted her political foes.
Nobody disputes there was a humanitarian argument to investigate and prosecute suspects who committed war crimes during the fight for independence, but international legal figures and human rights organisations frequently raised objections to the proceedings. There was widespread criticism over a lack of fairness and transparency, and there are documented cases of harassment of lawyers and witnesses who were representing the accused. One significant witness was refused entry into the courtroom before being bundled into a police van, then ended up in a prison in India.
There were offers of help from the United Nations to form an international tribunal, which would have given financial aid to the proceedings, and have the authority to issue warrants for Pakistani military personnel to be tried. The tribunal would have been conducted by Bangladeshi and international judges, but the government spurned the idea because sentences would not include the death penalty.
That the tribunal was a tool of a government determined to get convictions was exposed when Judge Huq was found to be colluding with the prosecution, secretly drafting documents and writing to Dr Ahmed Ziauddin, Professor of Law in Brussels and head of the Bangladesh Centre for Genocide Studies:
‘I am afraid about Shahinur (Shahinur Islam, a Tribunal judge) because he is inclined to the international standard. It was in my mind and prosecutors also complained he brought in references to foreign tribunals every day.’
Ziauddin replied: ‘He has to be stopped from doing that or he has to be removed. He has to go because it is too harmful to us’. Furthermore, he collaborated with Huq on an early draft of the judgement in the case of Delwar Hossein Sayeedi, leader of Jamaat. Evidence proves he prepared a framework decision while the defence case was still ongoing.
The government charged one newspaper who reported this information for contempt of court, and another was ordered to stop publishing and its editor charged with sedition.
On 5 February 2013 Abdul Quader Molla was convicted on a number of crimes against humanity and jailed for life. As the law stood, the prosecution had no right of appeal against the sentence. But supporters of the Awami League felt cheated of the punishment they expected and they turned out in their thousands in Shabagh Square in the days after the sentence, to demand that Molla be put to death.
Parliament hurriedly introduced an amendment to allow the prosecution to appeal, and backdated it to July 2009. The Prime Minister declared in parliament that the judges should understand the sentiment of the people’ and the prosecution immediately used this new power to lodge an appeal at the Supreme Court. At the end of this appeal hearing, the court announced that the sentence of death would replace the life sentence on one of the counts.
It showed the Tribunal’s independence was vulnerable to popular pressure and to a government seeking to exploit that pressure. There was an election due in January 2014 and four of the prosecutors were Awami League candidates. Instead of defending the Tribunal’s right to decide on the sentence, the government bent to the demands of the mob and passed what can literally be described as a lynch law.
Efforts were made to save Molla. Appeals were made by the European Union, the British government,
oOo
All emerging democracies face political challenges and Bangladesh was ill-equipped at its inception because there was no established ruling class to govern the country. As noted by Sir Fazle Abed, the men who initially took the reins of power had weaknesses which prevented them from becoming great leaders, and their successors were equally ineffectual in uniting the country.
Instead of pulling together to ensure the success of the new nation, the country remained divided along partisan lines with entrenched loyalties leaving no room for compromise.
A government minister told me: ‘When we are in power we make money and hand crumbs to the opposition. When they are in power they have their turn’.
A shocking admission of overt government corruption. Sheikh Hasina set up the International Crimes Tribunal in 2010, though it drew criticism from
insurmountable obligation on the accused.’
and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, but not even a call from US Secretary of State could alter the government’s determination to proceed with the hanging.
The most common reason for criticising death sentences passed by the Tribunal was that much of the evidence was little more than hearsay. In Molla’s case, there was an eye-witness who was aged 13 at the time. She was accepted by the Tribunal as an honest witness, despite previously telling an investigator she had not been present at all when Molla allegedly directed Pakistani forces to her house.
Justice Sinha evaluated the credibility of an eyewitness who said he saw Molla with a rifle outside an army torture centre, so he noted that the witness was a freedom fighter:
“There is no doubt freedom fighters are the best sons of our soil. Risking their lives they fought against one of the most organised forces in the region, against economic exploitation and for the political liberation of the people of the country. There is no reason to disbelieve the testimony of this vital witness.’
It is recognised that ‘fleeting glance’ identification of this kind requires corroboration, irrespective of the moral calibre of the identifier. It was one of many examples in the judgements handed down at the Tribunal and by the Supreme Court, of an overriding assumption that freedom fighters could do no wrong.
After Molla’s execution there were protest riots in which several hundred people were killed. In political cases like this the death penalty dressed up in judicial form becomes an act of revenge and provokes further rage.
After the hanging of Mir Quasem Ali, the Huffington Post reported:
‘Although the international community initially applauded the establishment of the Tribunal to bring a process of justice and accountability for the international crimes committed during the War of Liberation, hopes for justice quickly transformed into outrage for the grave and persistent violations of due process being committed before the Tribunal.
‘The crimes in the Statute were ill defined, the accused were deprived from their most basic human rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and scandals of political interference and governmental manipulation of the judicial activity tarnished the credibility of the Tribunal.
A reading of Mir Quasem Ali’s sentence demonstrates the gravity of the numerous violations of due process rights during his trial. He was sentenced to death on a single count, but the Tribunal failed to specify the particular conduct that justified Mr Ali’s severe punishment. The Tribunal said first, that he had “planned and instigated” the crime; later it declared that he had “abetted and facilitated”, and finally he was convicted for his “complicity”.
‘It is not possible to determine what was the purported role of the accused in relevant legal terms, and consequently, it is therefore not possible to positively determine whether the Tribunal applied the correct definition of the conduct, of the standards of evidence and punishment.
‘Additionally, and more worryingly, the Tribunal reversed the burden of proof, concluding that “the plea of alibi has to be proven with absolute certainty so as to completely exclude the possibility of the presence of the accused elsewhere”. This reversed a basic fundamental rule of criminal law and placed an insurmountable obligation on the accused.’
38. What Future for Bangladesh?
According to Human Rights Watch, the elections held in January 2014 were the most violent in the country’s history.
The Awami League and the BNP disagreed about the appropriate mechanism to hold free and fair elections. As a result, the BNP and other opposition parties staged hartals and demonstrations beginning in October 2013
A hartal is a general strike, employed as a weapon by both the main political parties whenever they disagree with the policies of whichever party is in power. I deliberately choose the word weapon because the series of hartal imposed during my trip at the end of 2013 became increasingly violent, resulting in the injury and death of many innocent victims.
People who enforce hartals are usually the student and youth wings of the political parties but in reality, they are often rent-a-mob thugs who hurl crude home-made bombs, rip up rail tracks and torch vehicles. There were many harrowing images of badly burnt victims in newspapers and TV channels during my visit, many of them children who were scorched when public transport was set ablaze.
The chief demand for the hartals was the reinstatement of a neutral caretaker government system to oversee elections, which the Awami League had previously supported but then abolished after taking power.
Government institutions, educational facilities and the majority of businesses are closed during a hartal, while traffic throughout the country is brought to a standstill. People can cope with a hartal which lasts one or two days, but when it extends to five days which, together with the weekend, shuts down the entire country for a week, there are serious economic implications. The garment sector, which earns $20 billion a year for the country, is hit hard because exports are halted, and that results in workers not getting paid, or losing their jobs. Farmers who have harvested an entire crop of fruit or vegetables cannot get them to market, leaving them to rot in the blockades outside the cities, which leaves them destitute until the following year when the next harvest is ready.
The World Bank estimates that a hartal costs the country $200 million each day in lost production.
I had a taste of how dangerous it can be when I travelled from Jawar Bazaar to Sylhet airport. I didn’t mind paying double the usual fare because it was important I reached Dhaka so I could catch my flight to London, but it was a fraught journey.
On the way we encountered five roadblocks manned by pro-hartal activists, who laid tree trunks across the road to create a chicane. At one of them, hands reached in to pull my driver out of his seat. I leapt forward and thrust out my BBC pass, telling the biggest looking thug that I was a journalist.
He changed his tone and personally escorted us across the bridge. A scary moment, but nevertheless tinged with a frisson of excitement. We continued, and I caught my flight to Dhaka, where the airport looked as though it was under siege.
looked as though it was under siege.
Recent arrivals had been unable to find any transport to get them home after landing, while those leaving the country had arrived early; sometimes several days early, to ensure they would be at the airport when their flight left.
Hundreds of people were camped out in the car park, creating an aura of a refugee camp.
Activists attacked and killed people who refused to take part in the blockades, as well as security forces and members of the Awami League. The minority Hindu community, long the target of attacks by Islamic extremists, was also singled out for attacks. During the vote itself on January 5, opposition activists targeted officials and attacked schools and buildings serving as polling places.
The government responded by deploying the notorious paramilitary unit, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), as well as the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) and the police.
‘Individually or in joint operations members of these units carried out extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and the destruction of private property,’ says Human Rights Watch.
With BNP’s leader Khaleda Zia under house arrest and widespread arrests of opposition members, more than half of Bangladesh’s parliamentary seats were uncontested. On a low turnout, the Awami League won nearly 80 percent of the seats, leaving the country without a parliamentary opposition.
In February 2018 former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia was sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment for embezzling funds meant for the Zia Orphanage Trust. She was granted bail, which the Supreme Court revoked without giving any reason.
There are many cases still ongoing against her, mostly relating to corruption and receiving kickbacks, which are being heard at a court set up in Kernaignj Central Jail in Dhaka.
Sheikh Hasina has been accused of using the state’s law enforcement apparatus, as well as the judiciary to suppress the voice of the opposition. Local and international rights groups report a deteriorating human rights situation in Bangladesh.
After the imprisonment of the opposition leader it was increasingly difficult for the government to reject allegations of turning into an authoritarian regime.
Police records say nearly 300 leaders and supporters of the BNP were arrested on the day of Khaleda’s verdict. In three months over 3,000 members of the opposition party were put behind bars. The BNP alleges that over 500 of its supporters have been killed and nearly 750 abducted by the police and thrown into jails since 2014. The party claims around 150 more of its missing workers have either been killed in extrajudicial encounters or have been forced to disappear.
A report released by the German think-tank Bertelsmann Foundation said the country is under an autocratic rule.
Listing 13 countries where the political situation had become worse, the report said in five of these countries, namely Bangladesh, Lebanon, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Uganda, ‘democracy has been gradually undermined for years’ and that they no longer meet its minimum standards.
Bangladesh was not suitable for holding elections.
Asif Nazrul, a professor of law at Dhaka University, said the government denied the BNP and other opposition groups permission to hold rallies and processions on security grounds, yet continued to hold large rallies in the run-up to the elections.
‘It’s a government and a political party which believe they are not accountable to anyone,’ he says. ‘It’s a dangerous sign in a democracy.’
In its bid to curtail dissent, the executive’s latest weapon was the digital security law adopted in October 2018 whereby alleged ‘negative propaganda’ became punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Journalists are among the leading collateral victims of the tough methods adopted by the government says Paris-based press advocacy group Reporters Sans Frontiers.
The 2018 election was accompanied by an increase in press freedom violations, including violence by political activists against reporters, the arbitrary blocking of news websites, and arbitrary arrests of journalists.
Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Daily Star, was served with 67 criminal defamation cases and 16 sedition charges. Most of them were lodged by members of the Awami League.
‘It was farcical. Its purpose was to intimidate me and my institution. The message was: if we can do that to the Daily Star and its editor, we can do it to anybody,’ Mr Anam said.
The charges were stayed, which left him wary. ‘A stay means they are frozen in time,’ he said. “If the government felt I was exercising too much press freedom, they could revive the cases or institute new ones. It all depends on how I behave.’
He admits the lawsuits make him more cautious about what he publishes. “The government is increasingly charging and jailing writers using vague new laws against prejudicing the image of the state, threatening national security, and hurting religious belief,’ says Amnesty International.
Speaking at a press conference during a visit to Finland in June 2019, Sheikh Hasina, insisted her government hadn’t prevented anybody from writing.
“Nobody has applied any pressure. They don’t feel good about the continuation of the democratic process. They feel good if there is an undemocratic process, for example, under the emergency government or military government. We haven’t obstructed anyone from writing. Let him write as much as he wants,’ she said.
“I love my country and countrymen. I work for the welfare of my country. If I have this belief, I have no headache about others’ comments, good or bad,’ she added.
‘Isn’t Bangladesh going forward? Isn’t everybody getting the results? Isn’t Bangladesh’s dignity improving globally? It is. Today the whole world looks at Bangladesh and lauds us. Don’t you all feel good about it?’
‘Armed groups and state repression is silencing secular voices in Bangladesh,’ says Olof Blomqvist, the Bangladesh researcher for the London-based human rights group. Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Digital Communications Act is singled out by media workers as particularly harmful.
Communications Act is singled out by media workers as particularly harmful.
Amended in 2013 to allow police to arrest people without a warrant, the section punishes any media perceived to have deliberately attacked religion or undermined the state.
People who post comments on social media are under constant threat, yet according the Law Minister Anisul Huq, the Digital Security Act was formulated to prevent cybercrimes, not curtail the freedom of expression and the press.
However, the Human Rights Watch reported that scores of people had been arrested over the past five years under the act for criticising the government and political leaders on blogs, Facebook and other social media. They were often detained for months before being released pending trial.
‘Bangladeshi citizens have been arrested for criticising the prime minister’s clothes, her foreign policy, her party, or the actions of her cabinet colleagues,’ the report said.
‘Police have acted on complaints made by her political supporters or even on their own. For instance, in April 2018, after a student protest at Dhaka University, a police officer filed a complaint referring to 43 “provocative” Facebook posts, which “many have liked and commented on” that “created a situation which could potentially harm society and create chaos. Monirul Islam, a rubber plantation worker in Srimongol, was arrested for “liking” a Facebook post that criticised the official visit of the prime minister to India, after a party supporter filed a police complaint saying he “was extremely hurt and agitated”.!
When a government is intolerant of free speech it is on the slippery slope of becoming a fascist dictatorship.
Bangladesh is now effectively a one-party state after the elections held in December 2018 saw the Awami League-led coalition win 288 seats, whereas the main opposition alliance dominated by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party secured just six amid accusations of suppression of the opposition, vote rigging and intimidation.
Transparency International said its investigation into the poll found irregularities at 47 of the 50 constituencies surveyed, with fake votes, ballot stuffing, and voters barred from entering polling centres. Dismissing the report, the government said it was lacking in credibility and called the group a puppet of the opposition BNP, despite a BBC correspondent reporting seeing ballot boxes already full of votes prior to the polling stations in Chittagong actually opening.
The European Union wants Bangladesh to address the issues of inclusiveness of the political process, space for civil society and freedom of expression and media.
‘In Dhaka I had meetings on a range of human rights issues including core labour standards, in which Bangladesh needs to make urgent progress,’EU Special Representative for Human Rights Eamon Gilmore said in a statement following his visit to Bangladesh during June 2019.
Any totalitarian state which suppresses opposition and hinders the democratic process increases division within the population and eventually, one day, there will be a backlash.
Some autocratic leaders rule for decades, but you only have to look at the governments which were toppled during the Arab Spring to see how fragile dictatorships can be.
themselves elsewhere.
I followed the fortunes of one young man who managed to get to Turkey, where he was stopped at the border trying to cross into Greece. He spent several months incarcerated but upon his release, he was eventually able to get to Greece and from there, he moved across Europe before settling in France.
It was a harrowing experience and I have the greatest respect and admiration for his efforts.
I love Bangladesh and have met many wonderful people during my numerous visits. I pray for their sake, and the sake of their children, that the political landscape changes and they will be able to live in a safer and more just society one day.
matriarchs of their respective parties, and it is more than probable they’d continue if either of their sons continue the dynastic traditions common in that part of the world.
It’s impossible to say who might come forward to break the impasse but it is widely perceived there needs to be a third party to challenge the existing duopoly; much as Imran Khan has managed to do in Pakistan.
There was a time when people thought Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus might have been the saviour, but even he, with his international prestige, was unsuccessful when he tried to form a new party to replace the current political elite.
Following her election victory, the prime minister urged home ministry officials to work to uproot corruption.
‘Corruption, drugs and militancy gripped our society like deadly diseases when military dictators ruled the country for a long time,’ she said. She added that military dictators indulged corruption and created opportunities for others to be corrupt.
‘No government in the world has increased salaries and other allowances of their staffers to such an extent that we have done. At the same time, the government has taken steps to provide them with better residential facilities. So, we have to remain careful about corruption, she said.
As if to highlight this endemic problem, Deputy Inspector General Mizanur Rahman is reported to have bribed the Anti-Corruption Commission to be cleared in a corruption case.
No amount of posturing will make any difference when corruption is so rooted in the culture of the country and can be found at the very core of the establishment.
Another issue which urgently needs to be addressed is the rule of law. Whatever is said to the contrary, the judiciary is known to have been swayed by political interference during the war crimes tribunals and there is anecdotal evidence that some cases are influenced by sources outside the courtroom.
As for the police, they are notorious for taking bribes and the uniform they wear provides them with a means to augment their salary. This isn’t simply an assumption. I have personally witnessed their behaviour on several occasions and I believe it when I hear stories of people paying to get cases dropped. Pay enough and apparently, even a murderer can walk free.
There are almost daily reports of alleged criminals being killed during crossfire when the police go to arrest someone. It seems to happen frequently when there is a raid on premises housing drug pushers, especially in Chittagong which appears to be the centre of the yabba trade.
It sounds like a scene from Al Capone-era Chicago and one has to wonder whether those people hadn’t paid enough to keep the law enforcers happy, or if it is a way of dispensing with the bureaucratic hassle of taking someone into custody.
With the manifest problems which blight the county and the lack of prospects for a decent future, it’s not surprising that many of the young people I’ve met desperately want to leave to forge a better life for themselves elsewhere.