[02OCT] Bangladesh Update HEADLINES
- Excerpts: Reality redefined; The chief adviser to the military-driven interim government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, has recently returned from a trip to the United States where he gave a series of talks in New York in addition to addressing a near-empty United Nations General Assembly and attending a reception hosted by the US president, George W Bush. The chief adviser also spoke at a reception given in his honour by a section of the Bangladeshi community of New York. Wherever he went, Fakhruddin stuck to the same message that his government does not have any ambition to remain in power for longer than is necessary and that credible and acceptable elections to the ninth parliament will be held by the end of next year, come hell or high water.That the chief adviser is aware of the fact that there is growing suspicion and wariness about the real motives of his government and its backers, both nationally and internationally, is evident from the fact that he felt it necessary, time and again, to reiterate that his government is not here to stay but that it was working with elections, with the return to a democratic dispensation in mind. While addressing the Bangladeshi community, the chief adviser claimed that he himself was not in favour of the extended stay of an unelected government and that his interim government was working to bring in an elected government as soon as is practicable......MORE
- Excerpts: Pitting beneficiaries against benefactors of corruption;Three of the seven serving and former bureaucrats, who were part of the cabinet committee on purchase that approved the proposal for awarding a contract to Global Agro Trade Company on container handling at the inland container depot in Dhaka and the Chittagong port and summoned by the Anti-Corruption Commission in connection with the GATCO scam case against former prime minister Khaleda Zia, reportedly came up with identical testimonies to the commission's investigation committee on Sunday. According to media reports, each of them claimed that `higher authorities,' meaning the political authorities of the day, had approved the proposal for awarding the contract to GATCO. If there were any manipulations by the political authorities in this particular case, the bureaucrats in question, as servants of the republic who are oath-bound to protect national interest, should surely have taken a strong position against the move. They could have had their opposition made public or even step down in protest. However, we are not aware of any bureaucrat taking such a strong position against the GATCO contract. On the contrary, we have seen some of them actually reaping benefits in terms of getting prestigious postings and transfers, multiple contractual appointments after serving out their tenure, etc from their association with the political authorities in question. It is rather unacceptable that the same bureaucrats who let manipulations by the political authorities in the GATCO affair without a semblance of protest should be summoned to testify in the case.....MORE
- Excerpts: Theocracy in military green;Following the Bangladesh war, the Pakistani State got increasingly militarised and pursued (like India) nuclear weapons development, which invited sanctions from the US. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan of 1979 marked a turning point. Covert US and Saudi operations to arm the Islamist radical mujahedeen against the 'communist enemy' turned General Zia-ul Haq's Pakistan into America's frontline ally, strengthened its military, and increased the weight of religion in society and politics. The mujahedeen, precursors to the Taliban, overran Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan's rulers directed some of the militant Islamists under their influence towards Indian Kashmir after an insurrection broke out there in 1989. Pakistan's sponsorship of jehadi Islam, a part of the West's Cold War strategic hangover, was crucial to the birth and spread of Al-Qaeda.....MORE
- Excerpts: Inflation up, government down; The conventional wisdom is that the rising commodity prices are due to strategic behaviour by certain distributors – aptly referred to as `hoarders' by the media. The essential-foods market in Dhaka is something of an oligopoly, with a relatively small number of companies buying wholesale and reselling to the retailers in the capital. These companies have been able to limit the supply to retailers, and consequently charge increasingly high mark-ups on these goods. On significant food items, price increases typically do not notably reduce demand. The Centre for Policy Dialogue, a Dhaka-based economic think tank, has found that there is a cartel of importers of essential commodities that is in complete control of food imports, and is able to mark up prices at will. Identifying the `hoarders' as the primary inflationary agents, the government has taken three measures to weaken their mark-up power. The first was to reduce tariffs, to make imported foodstuffs more competitive against domestic products. The second was to task various law-enforcement agencies to identify and apprehend the hoarding companies. Finally, the government intervened in the market directly, by deploying the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles to set up fair-price food-sale centres throughout the capital, to sell commodities at prices lower than could be found in the bazaars. The economy's response to these measures has been sluggish, however. From 6.8 percent last July, the inflation rate rose to 7.4 percent in March. Both the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank have expressed concern at the ineffectiveness of the government's approach. The government may have been mistaken in focusing exclusively on hoarders. Various pundits in and out of Bangladesh have argued that the current inflation-rate increases can be ascribed to other factors, most importantly the increases in fuel prices that jack up transportation costs and reduce domestic production. In addition, the ADB has pointed its finger at an economy that has been overheated due to increased remittances, foreign revenue from increased exports, and rapid private-sector credit growth, all of which have exerted strong inflationary pressures on the economy......MORE
- Excerpts: Please ask yourself why REUTERS disparages Bangladesh with the same insults in every article; The Daily Star, a newspaper edited by Mahfuz Anam (the man's editorial skills are rather thin as can be expected from an ex-civil servant), reproduced in its entirety an article with the usual insulting editorial line: " Money sent home by Bangladeshi expatriate workers underpin the economy of the impoverished nation of 144 million people." This style is adopted with zeal in almost every article on Bangladesh by the regional editorial staff in India, such that Bangladesh remains a dirty enigma imprinted in the mind of the reader worldwide. It's a deliberate attempt to delegitimise Bangladesh in the eyes of the world. It's a very successful technique. Sadly, Bangladesh newspapers just play along meekly. Most serious newspapers always put in their own perspective in any news agency reporting. What's wrong with Bangladesh media? ........MORE
- Excerpts:The Corruption Surprise; When Transparency International published its Corruption Perceptions Index—or CPI—for 2007, the leading English daily in Bangladesh greeted the news with a deliberately positive headline: "Bangladesh improves on its graft image: Climbs up to 7th position from bottom of TI's corruption index." Indeed it is an improvement, considering that Bangladesh had tied for the third lowest spot last year. What's important, position or perception? The perception that underlies Bangladesh's gain in rank remains exactly the same as before. Both in 2006 and in 2007 Bangladesh received a CPI score of 2.0. In other words, Bangladesh showed no improvement in corruption between 2006 and 2007. The country's ranking improved only because seven countries of the world became more corrupt this year: Cambodia, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea and Laos. In addition, four new countries (Afghanistan, Tonga, Uzbekistan and Somalia), also with worse corruption than Bangladesh, were added as new entrants to the list.....MORE
- Excerpts: Bangladesh: Bloggers demand release of detained cartoonist;"It has been two weeks since Arifur Rahman's cartoon "Naam" was published which prompted the Bangladesh police to take him to jail and lock him up without pressing any formal charges or allowing him any legal representation in his defense. Arif was picked up from his Uttara residence under Section 54 of Code of Criminal Procedure for drawing the very harmless cartoon that portrayed a widely used naming convention for Bangali Muslim men. The cartoon did not insult the prophet in any way, nor was it Arif's intention, because his own first name is Mohammed (newspaper reports addressed him as Md. Arifur Rahman)."Arifur Rahman is just twenty three years old, who just a month before his arrest, received an award from the government for his cartoon against corruption. The editor of the Daily Prothom Alo apologized for publishing the cartoon but It is interesting to see that the political Islam has been keeping this issue alive and demanding ban of the progressive newspaper Prothom Alo. They have also targeted another popular magazine of Prothom Alo group called Saptahik2000, which had to take their Eid issue from the shelves as the Government banned it for publishing some words of a memoir of an exiled writer Daud Haider. The third world view and E-Bangladesh have more backgrounds on this......MORE
Links Only: - 4 bureaucrats sent to jail
- ACC moves SC for stay of Khaleda bail order
- Foreign aid hindered dev, nourished graft: Mainul
- Hasina seeks to withdraw Tk 7 lakh for tax payment
- Probe into institutional graft from December
- Sohel, Salman sued over Tk 191cr AB Bank loan
- Delwar tries to meet Khaleda over more expulsion
- Bangladesh watching situation in Myanmar closely
- New Bangla political alliance in the offing
Bangladesh Open Source Intelligence Monitors |
