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Monday, July 15, 2013

[chottala.com] RONGTULI PRESENTS "Kotodin Pore Ele" 24th August 2013


Dear community members,
We are pleased to announce Rongtuli's next cultural event- "Kotodin Pore Ele" with a tribute to golden years of Bangla Cinema and featuring solo performance by renouned singer from Kolkata -Soumyen Adhikari.
In this musical journey we hope to take you back to the sweet melody of old Bangla songs and the romantic moments of old Bangla Cinema. 
Please save the date for August 24th 2013 and join us for an entertaining, fun and a classic cultural event at 1080 Jefferson St. Alexandria, VA 22314
Thank you,
Rongtuli Team
 
 
 
 


[chottala.com] Fashioning a Coup in Egypt



 
Friday, July 12, 2013
Fashioning a Coup
 
I understand the outrage of honest citizens who went out to protest against Mohamed Morsi on June 30 only to have their efforts branded a coup. When you're in the middle of a crowd of boisterous humanity that stretches farther than the eye can see, nothing exists outside of that overwhelming reality. The feeling of mutual recognition and collective empowerment erases all context and constraints. As well it should. You don't go to a protest to think carefully or make necessary distinctions.
But when you exit the protest and survey the big picture, you do have to face inconvenient facts.
 
One such fact is that the protests were unscrupulously appropriated and packaged for ends I'm pretty sure many protesters find abhorrent. A genuine popular protest and a military coup aren't mutually exclusive.
The massive protests of June 30 came in conjunction with a much larger scheme that began very soon after Morsi took office. This long term project by entrenched state elites seeks more than simply ejecting the Muslim Brothers from power, although that's a highly prized outcome.
 
The overarching goal is to systematically reverse each halting step toward subjecting the state to popular control. As Leon Trotsky wrote long ago, in the aftermath of an uprising state managers will gradually push away the masses from participation in the leadership of the country. Popular depoliticization is the grand strategy.
 
The amazing breakthrough that was the mass mobilization of January-February 2011 shook the grip of the ruling caste on the Egyptian state and toppled its chief, Hosni Mubarak. But, alas, it did not smash that grip. The web of top military & police officers and their foreign patrons, the managers of the civil bureaucracy, cultural & media elites, and crony businessmen firmly believe that ruling over Egypt is their birthright, and its state is their possession.
 
The frightful specter conjured up by January 25 of power-rotation at the top had to be exorcised once and for all, principally by habituating Egyptians into thinking that regular political competition over the state is tantamount to civil war.
 
It's soothing to believe that a popular uprising ejected an incompetent Islamist president. It's not comforting to point out that a popular uprising was on the cusp of doing so, until the generals stepped in, aborted a vital political process, arrested the president, and proclaimed their own "roadmap" for how things will be from now on.
 
The constant equating of democracy with disorder and the positioning of the military as the stabilizer and guarantor, this is the stuff of the resurgent Egyptian counter-revolution.
 
Four Vignettes
In thinking through the trauma of Morsi's ouster by military coup, I want to focus on four vignettes from the last year that complicate the too-neat story of a heroic popular uprising against an unpopular president. These are the August 24 anti-Morsi demonstrations; the broadening of the anti-Ikhwan coalition in October; the theatrical foray by General El-Sisi into the political arena in December; and the military's Machiavellian appropriation of the June 30 protests to activate their coup d'état on July 3.
 
Together, the four snapshots show not a plot spun by a mastermind but an alignment of disparate interests to oust a common enemy: the first outsider president elected from below, not handpicked from above. The fact that this man belongs to the historically excluded counter-elite of Muslim Brothers was an excellent bonus. This made it easy for the ruling caste to draw on a deep reservoir of societal antipathy to the Ikhwan, gleefully casting Morsi as the crazy-theocrat-dictator-in-cahoots-with-the-Americans-and-Qatar-who-will-steal-your-secularism-and-ban-your-whisky.
 
Had it been Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh or Hamdeen Sabahy or any other outsider president, executing the ouster would've been a lot harder but the objective would've been the same. Outsider presidents with no loyalty to the ruling bureaucracy will fail. Insider presidents can stay, provided that they protect the purity of the ruling caste and secure its privileges.
 
August: Revanchism on the Fringes
 
At the time, these manufactured protests against Mohamed Morsi and fronted by Tawfiq Okasha and former MP Mohamed Abu Hamed were laughed off as the ravings of unhinged lunatics working for the security services. In hindsight, the event was the deep state's first revenge thrust against Morsi for activating his presidential powers and wading into the farthest reaches of the deep state, firing intelligence chief Mourad Mowafi and other officials, and a few days later retiring the senior SCAF generals and fatefully promoting Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to Defense Minister.
 
The protests launched the campaign to depict Morsi and the Ikhwan as a sinister cult bent on "infiltrating the state." This of course is an upgraded version of the Mubarak-era canard of the Ikhwan "takeover" of any institution where they won seats in fair-and-square elections, especially in professional unions. "Brotherhoodization of the State"
also made its first appearance in August, quickly migrating to the center of political discourse and becoming a main battle cry of the June
30 mobilization.
 
Simply run your eyes down these 15demands of the August protests mouthed by Abu Hamed to see the origins of the claims hurled against Morsi and the Ikhwan even now after his removal.
 
The protests ultimately drew a small turnout and were quickly forgotten, but they planted the seed that Mohamed Morsi was unpopular and not to be trusted with steering the Egyptian state.
 
October: Mainstreaming anti-Ikhwanism
 
Conventional wisdom has it that Morsi antagonized everyone with his Nov.
21 decrees that revealed dictatorial intentions. In fact, the anti-Morsi mobilization decrying his "monopoly on power" and "Islamization of the state" started a full month earlier in October. A large protest on October 12 dubbed "Accountability Friday" was organized in Tahrir to decry presidential performance after the first 100 days and demand a different constituent assembly. Panicked Ikhwan leaders bussed in their supporters for a counter-demonstration in the square. The sight of pro- and anti-Morsi protesters clashing violently that has become so routine now made its first shocking appearance on that Friday. Islamists tore down the Tahrir stage of Morsi critics, and the FJP headquarters in Mahalla were stormed and torched.
 
Once political conflict took on this street depth, the anti-Morsi coalition grew from a risible revanchist fringe to virtually the entire secular political class and its constituents. Hamdeen Sabahy, Mohamed ElBaradie, and Amr Moussa, who were left in the lurch after the presidential elections now found their footing as figureheads of facile opposition, indulging in reflexive criticism of Morsi rather than the hard work of scrutinizing his policies.
 
Another crucial player joined the bandwagon of the president's adversaries in October: lots of judges. Morsi's first attempt to remove Prosecutor-General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud (a constant revolutionary
demand) threatened deeply entrenched Mubarakist judges and catapulted Ahmed al-Zend to loudly lead this faction. And the Supreme Constitutional Court as an institution objected to its place in the draft constitution, reprising its never-ending conflict with the Islamists since Mubarak's ouster.
 
Media covered the political conflict in alarmist tones, and was a conduit for deep state messages. A major daily "leaked" a supposedly top-secret intelligence document reporting widespread discontent at worsening economic conditions "that threatens national security." The language of "endangering national security" is a recurrent trope in all of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's speeches this year, including his 48-hour ultimatum of July 1. The October report warned that "citizens are eager for political participation, but fear single-party dominance of the political process." Read: the Ikhwan are taking over.
 
December: The Military Speaks
Instead of containing the widening anti-Ikhwan coalition, Mohamed Morsi either underestimated or belittled the gathering opposition to his rule and chose to forge ahead. On November 21 he promulgated a decree that blocked the courts from dissolving the constituent assembly and the upper house of parliament. But rather than spend time persuading the public that he was confronting entrenched interests threatened by the set-up of new institutions, Morsi essentially dumped the decrees on us as you'd drop leaflets from an airplane on a bewildered civilian population. This left the arena wide open for his now diehard and empowered opponents to spin a narrative of a dangerous power grab by a dictatorial theocratic president.
 
The massive street demonstrations against Morsi in November & December crystallized the trends that surfaced in October and revealed a new
element: serious friction in the police-president relationship. Police were ineffectual or absent when more FJP headquarters were attacked across the country. Morsi and Ikhwan powerbroker Khairat al-Shater suspected that police were making themselves scarce around the presidential palace to allow protesters to storm it. Feeling double crossed by Ahmed Gamaleddin, the Mubarakist Interior Minister that Morsi had appointed as a peace offering to the police fiefdom, Morsi and Shater panicked. In a disastrous decision, they sent their cadres to violently break up the protesters' sit-in outside Ittehadeyya Palace on December 5.
 
At that moment, the deed was done. The security apparatus had the Ikhwan right where it wanted them: a sinister cabal that had hijacked the Egyptian state and sicced its ruthless private militia on anyone who dared protest.
 
 
In what has to be one of the more surreal scenes in the Egyptian revolutionary saga, leaders of the state's coercive apparatus held a press conference in which General El-Sisi extended a formal invitation to all parties, including the president, to gather round the general's magnanimous table for a healing national dialogue. Flanked by Gamaleddin, El-Sisi acted the sage monarch, calling his fractious flock to order.
 
The dialogue never took place because the presidency sputtered its objections, but the blunt message got through: the president was not in full control. Between December and June, El-Sisi struck out on his own, periodically issuing portentous warnings about the impending collapse of the state.
 
June: The Pageantry of a Coup
Another surreal scene was the military's use of the June 30 protests to put on a grotesque display of military prowess. Fighter jets flew above Tahrir Square, not to intimidate the massed citizens into going home as in 2011 but to package their mobilization as an assent to military rule.
The planes streaked colors of the Egyptian flag in the sky and drew giant high schoolish hearts (never underestimate the mawkishness of military PR). Helicopters dropped flags on the masses, lending a martial visual uniformity to an essentially diverse populace. Posters of General El-Sisi were held aloft. Police officers in their summer whites gleefully engaged in protest, some theatrically revealing Tamarrod T-shirts beneath their uniforms.
 
 
Aerial footage (only of the anti-Morsi crowds, of course) was sent to anti-Morsi television channels, which broadcast it to the tunes of triumphal cinematic music. Naturally, the protests of those icky other people didn't exist. A military plane was put at the disposal of a film director who's a fixture of the anti-Morsi cultural elite, presumably to make a movie about "Egypt's second revolution," as State TV swiftly christened the June 30 protests. The equally massive June 25 2012 protests against military rule are conveniently dropped from this emerging canonization.
 
The revolutionary invention of the Tahrir Square protest as an authentic political performance was recast as state-sanctioned spectacle.
 
The next act of the pageant was to control the message. Officials enlisted media personalities to banish the term "coup" and hound anyone who used it. A few hours before General El-Sisi's declaration of the coup on July 3, Egyptian media luminaries were contacting foreign media outlets to insist that they not call his imminent announcement a coup.
Military spokesmen and anti-Morsi activists repeatedly and defensively asserted that "15 million protesters" and "30 million protesters" had come out on June 30, not citing the source of their numbers. A former police chief called the numbers "unprecedented in Egyptian history." A giant message saying "It is not a coup" was reflected with green laser on the front of the Mugamma building in Tahrir on July 5.
 
It was quite the bizarre display of hysterical chauvinism. Government officials and establishment elites huffily insisted that the whole world acquiesce in their construction of reality. Foreign ministry officials rounded up ambassadors fromthe Americas to "explain" to them that it's not a coup. Unnamed government officials were tasked with intensifying contact with US Congressmen in Washington for the same purpose. The Ministry of Defense in Cairo invited foreign journalists for more slideshows of the June 30 protests. And now youth activists are being sent on an official mission to London and Washington to "clarify for Western nations and the whole world that the June 30 revolution is an extension of the January 25, 2011 revolution."
 
Rarely has a tenacious establishment been so keen to proclaim its own alleged overthrow. What that establishment wants, of course, is to turn the practice of the Egyptian revolution into a folkloric carnival of people filling Tahrir Square to wave flags and chant "Egypt! Egypt!"
 
Anti-Politics
 
With their July 3 coup, Egypt's new military overlords and their staunch American backers are playing an age-old game, the game of turning the public against the ineluctable bickering, inefficiency, gridlock, and intense conflict that is part and parcel of a free political life, so that a disillusioned, fatigued people will pine for the stability and order that the military then swoops in to provide.
 
The acute but generative political conflict during Morsi's blink-of-an-eye presidency was constantly amplified and then pathologized by the jealous custodians of the Egyptian state, with their repeated invocations of civil war and mass chaos to frighten people away from the vagaries of self-rule.
 
Like clockwork every few months, state agents facilitated the conditions for collective violence, dispatching provocateurs to demonstrations, removing police from the streets, standing back as communal violence broke out, resisting civilian oversight, and then ominously forecasting an impending breakdown of social order. The message is clear: left to your own devices, you will kill each other.
 
The ethos of collective self-confidence, cross-class cooperation, religious co-existence, and creative problem-solving on such magnificent display in the January 25 uprising spells the beginning of the end for the ruling military and civilian bureaucracy. So it had to be replaced with a manufactured mood of resignation and "realism," the false realism that says: accept tutelage or face chaos.
 
As the recently self-designated "eminence grise" Mohamed ElBaradie summed it up, "Without Morsi's removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war."
 
And that is the essence of the anti-political doctrine that worships order, fears political struggle, mistrusts popular striving, and kowtows to force majeure.



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[chottala.com] Death sentence and final statement of Taher, and Ziaur Rahman



Death sentence and final statement of Taher, and Ziaur Rahman
Amin Ahmed Chowdhury, Bir Bikram
In 1976, although General Ziaur Rahman was the only rallying force, yet he like other Forces' Chiefs of the Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force, was one of the three Deputy Chief Martial Law Administrators and not the Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA) as reported in the newspapers. It apparently looks like a minor mistake but it needs to be corrected because it has a bigger connotation. The then President Justice ASM Sayem was the CMLA, who as the President and CMLA as well, confirmed the death sentence of Col Taher. As an eminent jurist he could have at least resigned. He did not do so. The entire command structure of the Bangladesh Armed Forces were then shaken so much that almost all the commanders of the Armed Forces were of the opinion that if Taher remained alive they would not be able to command their troops; rather, they might be killed as it already happened with so many other officers. In that case they were ready to resign almost en-masse - let Ziaur Rahman and Taher command the Armed Forces.
The court proceedings and chargesheet of Taher Trial were not published. But Col Taher's final statement was published in some of the newspapers. In that memorable statement, the immortal Taher frankly said that he wanted Zia to take over as the President and CMLA of the country which Zia politely refused and he (Zia) rather insisted that the government. must continue and let Justice Sayem continue as the President and CMLA. Tactfully, Zia ousted Khandker Mustaque who, with the support of 1st Bengal Lancers and 2nd Field Artillery Regiment wanted to remain as the President and CMLA of the country, dislodging Justice Sayem, the nominee of Gen Khaled Musharraf and Col Shaffat Jamil. The troops of Lancer and Artillery also wanted that Col. Farook and Col. Rashid be brought back from abroad and posted to their original battalions that is 1st Bengal Lancer and 2nd Field Artillery respectively.
Later on, in 1980 Gen. Zia dismissed Col Farook and Col. Rashid from the Army. That means Zia did not use Taher to capture power for himself but requested Col Taher to rescue him from the house arrest where Col Taher wanted to capture power by using the goodwill of Gen. Zia which Zia used to enjoy tremendously both among the troops and the civilian population. In fact, using the excuse of rescuing Zia from house arrest, Col Taher wanted to capture power by force. It was evident by his statement when he mentioned that his troops in the Radio Station were not allowing Zia and Mustaque to enter the Radio Station until Zia succumbed to the demands of the soldiers. Although Col Taher never liked Mustaque, yet he allowed Mustaque to deliver his speech for smooth transition of power to Justice Sayem so that Col Taher could be more assertive. Later on, Zia arrested Mustaque for his mischievous activities.
It was interesting to note that after August 15, especially during the first week of October, 1975, Col Taher fixed the date of his revolution on the night of 6/7 November, 1975 to commemorate the Bolshevic Revolution. To him to be at par with the Bolshevic Revolution was more important than any individual, be it Zia, Khaled Musharraf or Gen MAG Osmany. The November 03 1975 coup gave him a God-gifted opportunity to execute easily his dreamy revolution by motivating loyal troops on a common objective of getting Ziaur Rahman out of house arrest and thereby initiating the Bolshevic-type revolution. Obviously, he did not initiate the revolution immediately but on November 07, 1975, Col Taher was expecting immediate help from Mao Tse Tung of China -- how it is anybody's guess. Ultimately his brave innocent younger brothers Freedom Fighters Bahar, Bir Pratik and Belal, Bir Pratik made a desperate attempt to kidnap Samar Sen to use him as a bargaining chip for rescuing Taher from the gallows. Belal could escape death but on the spot Bahar was killed by on-duty police. These are historical facts.
Since 1974, Col Taher had been looking for an opportune moment to carry out hurricane raids to capture power. It was his dreamy idea which he used to propagate every now and then though nobody took it seriously. Once after August 15, 1975, Col Taher threatened the August coup leaders, by saying that they, posing as heroes, should not fly high because they just highjacked his plan and executed it before he himself could. He was ousted summarily from the Army because of his revolutionary ideas. Yet he used to feel that it was Gen. Khaled who was instrumental in removing him from the Army. Col Taher also said that he warned his troops not to kill/injure officers; yet he expected that while entering the Radio Station or the domain of Col Taher, Zia without hesitation should have endorsed what troops were demanding; otherwise troops might have become violent. He referred that Zia is a traitor -- the other side of the coin of Khaled Musharraf. Why was Khaled's name brought in? Perhaps because in the court proceedings, Khaled's tragic death came in as because he was killed on the first hour of the so-called revolution allegedly by the soldiers loyal to Col Taher, who masterminded the so-called revolution. Was it his last minute justification of that cold-blooded brutal murder of Khaled Musharraf, a legendary war hero and a patriot of the highest order by the people who once served under Khaled so loyally and yet were motivated by the revolutionary ideas of Col Taher to carry out such a heinous crime? How a well-trained commissioned officer could instigate troops in chanting slogans "Sepoy Sepoy Bhai Bhai officerer roktao chai" (All sepoys are brothers and we want the blood of officers). Col Taher's own brother was a corporal; yet he did not kill Col Taher whereas innocent officers of even 19 and 21 years of age or so, including young maiden medical officers and housewives were killed, along with senior officers.
What was the purpose of such senseless killings? Nobody knows except that as it happened in recent past in the Peelkhana carnage 06, 2009, probably systematically to deprive the country of its front-ranking military leadership cadres, creating a terrible vacuum and chaos in the command structure of the troops, making room for any third party to capture power so as to plunder the country's wealth.
Under military law, insubordination is a graver offence - short of mutiny. Putting obstacle or not allowing any superior officer to discharge his official duties is a clear-cut offence. Section 32 of the Army Act refers to that. For committing such an offence of graver nature, a soldier (including an officer) can be punished with 14 years rigorous imprisonment (RI). Under Military Law, a soldier always includes any officer. A soldier can never be a trade union leader. It is forbidden. Even two brothers together cannot submit any complaint but individually. If that is jointly submitted, it is a cognizable offence. If one does this type of grave offence amounting to gross insubordination violating the service rules and regulations, how can that be condoned? If soldiers take arms at their own and defy command, it is a mutiny, punishable with death sentence. Section 31 of the Army Act refers to that. Under the Military Law, Sections 24-58 are the clauses that deal with military offences. All offences of civil nature comes under Section 59 of MBML to be read with the relevant sections of the Penal Code of civil law. In the Penal Code, Section 132 of Civil Law clearly defines abetting mutiny which Col Taher in his own statement said troops loyal to him, defying officers' command in many places and killing officers including their wives or lady doctors, carried out a successful revolution or an armed revolt against the prevailing establishment. If such an offence is committed under the prevailing law (under that law Col Taher used to get his pension), it is punishable with death sentence. This is what Penal Code says - sections 131-135 refers to that. How to condone such offences if allegedly committed by Col Taher as he himself admitted? Some remedial measures or condoning the offence committed must have been there some where in the law book - but that is not to my knowledge.
The military law, that is the Acts of the Army, Navy and Air Force were introduced in the British Indian Armed Forces in 1911, duly approved. After the partition of 1947, the parliaments of India and Pakistan adapted the same law, as it is, including rules regulations and Cantonment Act 1924; so was the case in Bangladesh and with its parliament. Military law is part and parcel of the prevailing civil law of the country. And civil law is always supreme; Army Act Section 94 mentions this. Exerting concurrent jurisdiction, the civil law can prevail upon military law as far as civil offences are concerned. Why did not the then President of the country prevail upon the then military authority if they were influencing court proceedings? It is not very clear. And the then President, unlike Zia who might not bother about civil rights or fundamental of the citizens, was a Chief Justice and an eminent jurist of the country.
Ignorance is bliss. In 1982, the Ministry of Defense published the military law book, titled Manual of Bangladesh Army Law. There is nothing called Army Law, but Army Act or Navy and Air Force Acts are there since the British days and together these make up the Military Law, known as Manual Of Bangladesh Military Law (MBML). Martial law originates from this nomenclature. If the Ministry of Defense does this type of silly mistake, then how is one going to establish rule of law and build traditional Armed Forces especially when we are so casual in military affairs and least bothered to take any appropriate measure? Rather we try to ignore all these silly mistakes which very often makes us a laughing stock in front of the whole world and in the process no wonder we start committing all sorts of faulty activities, creating anomalies everywhere. Let us say, for example, since1972-73 as the then JSD or Jatya Samajtrantik Dal started agitation in establishing 'scientific socialism' in a democratic environment which until today hardly anybody could explain what it is, because immediately they have been looking for, or switching over to, new cheap political slogans so that they could keep people busy coining the new slogans and quietly they could exploit the sentiments of innocent mass population of the country for gradually ascending onto power by any means. Similarly, within traditional Armed Forces in a democratic set-up and environment as per bright ideas of Col Taher, we started propagating about People's Army, or say Productive Army, dismantling the existing traditional Armed Forces, so that soldiers start selling potatoes in the market and, as and when required, in the name of corruption, summarily officers get killed and in that process the Bangladesh Armed Forces are let to wither away.
(The writer, a retired Major General, is a valiant freedom fighter. In this write-up, he recollects the events that took place involving "immortal" Col. Taher and execution of his death sentence, providing, as he notes in his forwarding letter, "an objective analysis to get a factual picture". He can be reached at e-mail: sejdach@gmail.com)
 
Source: http://www.fe-bd.com/more.php?news_id=130804&date=2011-03-30

Cheers!
Nafiz
Dream is not what you see in sleep, Dream is the thing which does not let you sleep
--President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam


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[* Moderator's Note - CHOTTALA is a non-profit, non-religious, non-political and non-discriminatory organization.

* Disclaimer: Any posting to the CHOTTALA are the opinion of the author. Authors of the messages to the CHOTTALA are responsible for the accuracy of their information and the conformance of their material with applicable copyright and other laws. Many people will read your post, and it will be archived for a very long time. The act of posting to the CHOTTALA indicates the subscriber's agreement to accept the adjudications of the moderator]




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