Bangladesh Watchdog

Slave Labor, Wal-Mart and Wahhabism: Bangladesh in turbulence

2013-05-29T22:15:00.000+06:00

NILE BOWIE

The Bangladeshi elite are facing tough decisions in the wake of the Rana Plaza factory to curb the rampant abuse of the work force. Support for the government has been weakening and there has been a disturbing rise in radical Islam.

The streets of Dhaka have been awash with protests, violence, and killing in recent times as the Bangladeshi public expresses its resentment to the exploitation of garment workers in the aftermath of the country’s worst industrial disaster in its history, and the rising tide of Islamists demanding an end to the nation’s secular identity. The public relations departments of major retail transnationals like HnM, Gap, Wal-Mart, and Benetton have been in full defensive mode following the late-April collapse of Rana Plaza, a shoddily constructed building where sweatshop laborers toiled producing all the latest western fashions for export. The collapse took the lives of a shocking 1,127 workers, and still, Wal-Mart and Gap remain opposed to introducing broad agreements that would improve fire and safety regulations in factories, in fear of becoming entangled in legal liabilities; some corporations have refused to pay direct compensation to family members of the victims. Cost-benefit analysis yielded few benefits for the dead, unsurprisingly.

Tens of thousands of protesting Bangladeshi garment workers attempted to make their voices heard in the Ashulia industrial belt on the outskirts of the capital; worker demands for a fairer wage and safe working conditions were met with rubber bullets, stoking opposition and resentment against the ruling Awami League party, which is increasingly seen as a kleptocratic purveyor of the ‘Poverty Industrial Complex’ that promotes retail multinationals setting up shop in the dusty slums of Dhaka. Most garment workers make a miserable $38 per month, hourly wages between 17 and 26 cents. Anyone who has browsed the hangers of H&M or Benetton knows that a single piece of merchandise can pay the monthly wage of a Bangladeshi worker two or three times over. Behind the slick marketing campaigns of these retail giants, and the well-oiled cleavage and abdomens on their billboards, it is impoverished people that bear the burden of vapid consumerism and globalization.

Injustice is stitched into every fiber of the shirts on our backs, and the consumer looking to offset this abuse is faced with few choices. Three million workers are employed in Bangladesh’s garment industry, constituting about 80 percent of the country’s exports. In the face of massive boycotts or retail giants closing their operations, workers would lose their jobs; if they come to work, they are exploited as 21st century slave labor. For the Bangladeshi worker and the Third World man, it is a lose-lose situation. As multinationals rush to damage control after every disaster that interrupts their miserable production lines half-a-world away, it is the retail giants themselves that perpetuate extreme low-wage systems that brutally suppress the collective action of workers aiming to improve their conditions. Wal-Mart, Calvin Klein, Tesco, and their like operate by seeking out the cheapest possible means of production available, often with no safety standards or regulatory oversight, made possible through the politics-business nexus agreeable to the Bangladeshi ruling class.

The Bangladeshi elite found themselves in several ‘Let them eat cake’ moments following the Rana incident; Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith remarked that the disaster wasn’t “really serious”. Sohel Rana, the owner of the Rana Plaza illegally extended the five-storey building to a total of eight storeys without proper consent from the authorities concerned, an act ignored due to Rana’s alleged political connections to the ruling Awami League. The public is now calling for Rana’s execution as reports surface that he ignored the warnings of engineers who examined the building and concluded that it was unsafe.

Following the Rana Plaza incident, and the deadly fire at the Tazreen Fashions complex in November 2012, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina can’t help but look severely out of touch, as she claims that Bangladesh has good conditions for investment. The conditions she is referring to are only ‘good’ for investors and shareholders, reflecting a development orthodoxy that incentivizes global retailers to take advantage of lax safety standards and other sweatshop conditions.

Rising tides of Islamism

The opposition coalition, the Bangladesh National Party, has tightened alliances with hardcore Islamist groups, Jamaat-e-Islami, and its radical offshoot, Hefajat-e-Islam, presenting a notable challenge to the ruling Awami League in elections expected to be held by Janurary 2014. When Bangladesh isn’t making international headlines over industrial disasters, it is attracting worldwide attention for its controversial war crimes tribunal, which has charged leading members of the Jamaat-e-Islami with committing atrocities during the 1971 war for independence, and subsequent civil war. Activists who support the Jamaat-e-Islami party hurled stones and handmade bombs at security forces after verdicts condemning top party leaders to death by hanging were announced.

Opposition supporters call this a politically motivated trial, and it’s easy to see why, several of the individuals charged on a list drafted by the Awami League were between 4 and 8 years old during the war in 1971, severely weakening the credibility of the charges against them.

Although the opposition may have legitimate grievances, they represent a backwards program that would roll back the equal standing of women, make Islamic education mandatory, ban women from mixing with men, and essentially redress Bangladesh in the clothing of Wahhabism, a reactionary and medieval interpretation of Islam championed by Saudi Arabian missionaries throughout the developing world. In 2013, Jamaat demanded that the government pass a 13-point charter that would fundamentally dismantle the secular system promoted by the Awami League, met with pro-secular counter-protests calling the war crimes tribunal too lenient, and a ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami party. The Awami League is facing political pressure from opposing directions in a politically fragmented country, as one group of protesters call for a clamping down on fundamentalist groups, and the other accuses the government of manipulating the tribunal to ensure convictions of prominent opposition leaders.

The Islamists no doubt enjoy notable public support, as tens of thousands take part in mass rallies in support of their causes, putting Dhaka in regular deadlock. Hifazat-e-Islam, considered even more radical, is headquartered in Chittagong, a port city home to hundreds of madrassas that promote the Wahhabi worldview espoused by many of the militants and foreign jihadists active in Syria. The group calls for the introduction of a new blasphemy law that will execute ‘atheist’ bloggers whom they accuse of having insulted the Prophet Mohammed. The Bangladesh National Party’s coalition also includes an Islamist party, the Islamiya Okiyya Jote, which allegedly has connections to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the current climate of deepening religious and political polarization, the ruling party is carefully attempting to put across its pro-Islam credentials, which has resulted in the arrests of four atheist bloggers, but their efforts are ultimately seen as cosmetic to those pro-sharia Islamists who parrot painfully unoriginal political programs better suited to 14th century Arabia. The Awami League’s crackdown on dissent has alienated both secularists and Islamists, especially in the impoverished working classes.

Bangladesh

’s slow morphing into a Caliphate promises uncertainty for the Hindu minority, who have been victimized by radicals that have burned down temples and destroyed deities, as well as the non-Islamist segments of the population who advocate greater modernity. Unfortunately for Bangladesh, both the ruling and opposition political forces fail to offer platforms that would significantly contribute to the furtherance of progressive measures to protect workers’ rights and advance the nation’s economic standing. In the run-up to the general elections, louder and angrier protests are on the cards, especially if Jamaat-e-Islami leaders are executed. The hawks of global retail have shed their crocodile tears and paid lip service to safety standards and pledges to enact across-the-board improvements as they did after the Tazreen fires, only to witness Bangladesh’s worst industrial disaster in the space of less than a year. Fortunately for global retailers, most people tend to forget these disasters in days, and little, if any, dent is made in their profit margins. It’s no surprise that garment workers continue their protests despite heavy-handed police suppression, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

First published in RT.com, May 26, 2013

Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

After Bangladesh, labor unions can save lives

2013-05-27T08:39:00.001+06:00

LANCE COMPA

The factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 workers should be a pivot point for the global apparel industry, moving consumers to demand more accountability from brand-name companies that subcontract production to supply-chain factories around the world. Sadly, the history of workplace tragedies in so many of these factories suggests that after consumers in rich countries express horror and call for reforms, the demands for better worker protections die down and the marketplace for cheap apparel abides. But this cycle can finally be broken if demands for change start to focus on workers’ right to form trade unions.

In the wake of labor abuses and workplace tragedies exposed in the 1990s, many apparel brands created in-house social compliance functions and joined “multi-stakeholder groups” with detailed monitoring and certification programs. But the one-day visits and checklist-style monitoring routine in such efforts have not worked.

This is where workers’ organizing comes in. Social compliance monitors might visit once a year. Government inspectors might come once in 10 years from understaffed and underfunded labor ministries common to most developing countries. But a real trade union can provide the vigilance and voice that workers need for sustained decency at their place of employment, including a workplace that is not a death trap.

In Bangladesh and many other countries, the challenge is getting real unions. Factory managers routinely fire and blacklist workers thought to be union sympathizers. And sometimes worse: In April 2012, apparel union organizer Aminul Islam was found tortured and killed after meeting with workers near a garment manufacturing center outside Dhaka. The crime remains unsolved.

In China and Vietnam, the official labor movement is a branch of government. Unions exist, but the plant personnel director is often the union president, and the unions’ role is to boost production, not to defend workers. Widespread phony unions in Mexico insulate factory owners against the few authentic unions that manage to survive. In many countries, owners often shut down newly organized factories to warn workers away from unions.

Despite these challenges, apparel unions have a toehold in Central America and in other regions and countries, including Bangladesh. But a toehold is not enough to shift the balance of power. Without effective unions, trying to tackle fire safety, living wages, child labor and other problems is a Sisyphean job.

To change the balance of power, consumer pressure, government policies, international labor solidarity, new management policies and other support mechanisms must focus on workers’ organizing and bargaining rights.

One model is taking shape in Honduras. In 2009, responding to U.S. student protests of the closure of newly organized plant, allegedly for anti-union reasons, Fruit of the Loom’s top management committed to honoring workers’ organizing rights. The Kentucky-based company reopened the factory where the union dispute arose, rehired all employees, recognized the union and entered into good-faith bargaining. Now the renamed “New Day” facility has a collective bargaining agreement with higher wages, better conditions, and a strong health and safety committee. Workers have maintained high productivity levels, and the company has added employees.

Fruit of the Loom management told workers in other Honduran factories that they too have a right to organize and that the company will respect their choices. An innovative nonprofit oversight committee coordinated by the nonprofit Global Works Foundation — which asked me to join as ombudsman — is helping nurture positive labor relations in plants. The committee, whose members are chosen by management and the union, provides training programs on freedom of association and collective bargaining. It also helps mediate workplace grievances.

Since the oversight committee established its program, workers have formed genuine unions with the General Confederation of Labour — known as CGT — in other Fruit of the Loom factories with almost 5,000 employees overall. It is the world’s first sustained, companywide independent union organizing in the apparel manufacturing sector.

A stereotype holds that young workers desperate for jobs at any salary will never turn to unions. Some also peddle the “sweatshops are good” argument, saying that they are better than any alternative and that unions would only make factories uncompetitive. But workers belie such typecasting. In China and Vietnam, shop-floor leaders organize strikes and other actions by going around clueless official unions. Given a fair chance, independent unions in Mexico supplant “protection unions” previously chosen by management. The CGT’s success in Fruit of the Loom plants has led to a coordinating group of unions throughout Central America aiming to persuade more firms to respect their organizing rights.

Another stereotype — in many cases all too accurate — has apparel factory owners and managers demonizing unions and taking unbridled reprisals when workers try to organize. The Fruit of the Loom-CGT model in Honduras sends a strong signal to apparel brands and factory owners that companies and real unions can not just coexist but thrive in a globally competitive environment. More important, in light of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh, real unions defending employees inside the workplace can save lives.

First appeared in The Washington Post, May 27, 2013

Lance Compa teaches international labor law at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Bangladesh - Amnesty International Report 2013: The State of the World Human Rights

2013-05-24T09:59:00.002+06:00

HUMAN RIGHTS

KNOW NO BORDERS

Photo: Elite anti-crime team RAB. Rights groups blame RAB for extrajudicial executions and other violation of human rights, but government argues that such incidents have been reduced (but not stopped)

Some 30 extrajudicial executions were reported. State security forces were implicated in torture and other ill-treatment and at least 10 enforced disappearances. Political violence resulted in the death of at least four men. Women continued to be subjected to various forms of violence. The government failed to protect Indigenous communities from attack by Bengali settlers. At least 111 workers died in a factory fire, some allegedly because officials refused to let them leave the premises. More than 20 Buddhist temples and monasteries, one Hindu temple and scores of Buddhist homes and shops were set on fire during a communal attack. One person was executed and at least 45 people were sentenced to death.

Background

In January, the Prime Minister stated that no human rights violations had been committed in the country.

Political violence escalated in December, when opposition parties tried to impose day-long general strikes. At least four people died and dozens of strikers and police sustained injuries. Jamaat-e-Islami demanded the release of their leaders currently being tried on war crimes charges. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) demanded that the forthcoming general elections be held under a caretaker government. Members of a group affiliated with the governing party attacked opposition members, beating and stabbing one bystander to death.

National and international concern about allegedly high levels of corruption were echoed in June when the World Bank cancelled US$1.2 billion credit for the construction of Padma bridge in central Bangladesh, due to the government’s insufficient response to allegations of corruption. An inquiry by the Anti Corruption Commission remained open.

The authorities continued to raise concerns with India over killings of Bangladeshis by Indian border control forces. More than a dozen Bangladeshis were killed by Indian forces while crossing the border into India.

Extrajudicial executions

At least 30 people were victims of alleged extrajudicial executions. Police claimed they had been killed in gun battles with security forces. Families said they had been killed after being arrested by people in plain clothes identifying themselves as Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) personnel or other police. No one was brought to justice for these killings.

RAB personnel allegedly shot dead Mohammad Atear Rahman (also known as Tofa Molla), a farmer, in Kushtia district on 12 September. RAB said he was killed in “crossfire”, although Atear Rahman’s family and other witnesses said RAB had arrested him at his home the previous evening. His body reportedly bore three gunshot wounds, two in the back.

Torture and other ill-treatment

Torture and other ill-treatment were widespread, committed with virtual impunity by the police, RAB, the army and intelligence agencies. Methods included beating, kicking, suspension from the ceiling, food and sleep deprivation, and electric shocks. Most detainees were allegedly tortured until they “confessed” to having committed a crime. Police and RAB allegedly distorted records to cover up the torture, including by misrepresenting arrest dates.

Enforced disappearances

At least 10 people went missing throughout the year. In most cases the victims were never traced. Those bodies that were recovered bore injuries, some caused by beatings.

Ilias Ali, Sylhet division secretary of the opposition BNP, disappeared together with his driver Ansar Ali on 17 April. The government promised to investigate the case but provided no information by the end of the year.

Violence against women and girls

Women continued to be subjected to various forms of violence. These included acid attacks, murder for failing to pay the requested dowry, flogging for religious offences by illegal arbitration committees, domestic violence, and sexual violence.

Aleya Begum and her daughter were arrested without a warrant on 9 September and were allegedly tortured at Khoksa police station in Kushtia district. After two days they were transferred to Kushtia city police station and kept in a dark room. The daughter, a college student, was separated from her mother at night and sexually abused by police officers. The two women were released on 18 September, after appearing in court. Aleya Begum and her daughter shared their story with the media, and were arrested and jailed again on 26 September.

Indigenous Peoples’ rights

As in previous years, the authorities failed to settle Indigenous Peoples’ claims to land that had been seized from them during the internal armed conflict (1975-1997), or recently occupied by increasing numbers of Bengali settlers. Tension between the two communities and the failure of the security forces to protect local Indigenous people against attacks by Bengali settlers led to several clashes and injuries on both sides.

At least 20 people were injured in a clash between Indigenous people and Bengali settlers in Rangamati on 22 September. Local people said security forces came to the scene but failed to stop the violence.

Workers’ rights

Trade union leaders supporting garment factory workers’ rallies against low pay and poor working conditions were harassed and intimidated. One man was killed.

Trade union leader Aminul Islam went missing on 4 April. He was found dead a day later in Ghatail town, north of Dhaka. His family saw evidence of torture on his body and believed he had been abducted by security forces. He had previously been arrested and beaten by members of the National Security Intelligence for his trade union activities.

At least 111 workers died from burns and other injuries, some allegedly because factory officials refused to open the gates to let them escape a fire that broke out at Tazreen Fashion in Savar town, north of the capital Dhaka, in November.

Communal violence

Attacks against members of minority communities took a new turn in late September. Thousands of people protesting against an image posted on Facebook of the Qur’an, which they considered derogatory, set fire to more than 20 Buddhist temples and monasteries, one Hindu temple and scores of homes and shops in the southern cities of Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong.

Death penalty

At least 45 people were sentenced to death. One man was executed in April.

Amnesty International Report 2013:

The State of the World Human Rights

http://files.amnesty.org/air13/AmnestyInternational_AnnualReport2013_complete_en.pdf

Bangladesh's garment industry still offers women best work opportunity

2013-05-24T08:14:00.000+06:00

Women at work in a Bangladeshi garment factory. Photograph: Jonathan Saruk/Getty Images

A revised minimum wage could help women working in harsh conditions who have few other places to go, but employers say they are also suffering as a result of disrupted production

SYED ZAIN AL-MAHMOOD in Dhaka

The bulldozers have moved on and the eight-storey Rana Plaza building,in which more than 1,120 workers died when it collapsed on 24 April, is nothing more than a gaping hole in the ground.

For workers hurrying to their shifts at the scores of garment factories that dot the neighbourhood of Savar, 15km north of Dhaka, it is a grim reminder of the hazardous conditions that prevail in Bangladesh's $20bn apparel industry.

Walking past the fenced-off building site every day, Bangladeshi seamstress Selina Begum, 23, relives the moment the roof crashed down on top of her. She was pulled out by rescue workers after roughly six hours, and she knows she had a narrow escape.

But Begum, who worked at a factory on the Rana Plaza's sixth floor, says she is already scouring the area for work – in a garment factory. "We're poor. I have to work to survive. Unless I go to work at the factory, who will feed me?" she says.

Begum is typical of the 3.6 million women who work in Bangladesh's garment industry. In a country where the per capita annual income is only $850, the $60 per month she earns puts a roof over her head and food on the table – but only just. "It's difficult to get through the month," she says. "It's long hours. But I hope I will earn more as I gather experience."

The government last week announced an immediate review of the minimum wage for the garment sector. The textile ministry is to set up a wage board to fix a new minimum wage for garment workers, who have been agitating for better pay and working conditions in recent months.

"In view of the current circumstances, the government has decided to review the minimum wage, and a wage board has been constituted with representatives of the government, the workers and the garment owners," the jute and textile minister, Abdul Latif Siddiqui, said. "The board will fix the minimum wage, which will be applicable from 1 May."

Analysts say the government has been under severe pressure to improve conditions in the country's largest export industry. Foreign and domestic pressure has been growing since November, after a series of industrial accidents involving garment factories – in which about 1,300 people died people.

Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, says it is a step towards ensuring a decent living wage in the industry. "The workers have been demanding better wages since inflation has been so high recently," she says. "These workers sew the clothes that earn the country foreign currency, so they deserve better."

However, garment manufacturers are unhappy about the timing of the review and the 1 May date for implementation. They suggest that since a minimum wage was fixed as recently as 2010, it should be reviewed at a later date.

"Garment owners are suffering because of missed shipments and disrupted production due to strikes," says Siddiqur Rahman, senior vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. "The government should take that into account and rethink the retrospective implementation of the new minimum wage."

Rozina Akter, 21, a sewing-machine operator who worked at the Phantom Apparels factory on the fourth floor of Rana Plaza, fractured her right foot in the accident. She says she has no alternative but to go back to work as soon as doctors will allow.

Akter arrived in Dhaka three years ago with her family to join the workforce that sews clothes for some of the world's biggest retail brands. She has moved from factory to factory, working seven days a week, eight to 12 hours a day, doing night shifts and overtime. She started at the minimum monthly wage of 3,000 taka ($38.50) but gradually earned more as she gained experienced.

"It's a hard job," she says, but with her level of education – she dropped out of school in the seventh grade – she knows she will have a hard time finding better work. "At least I have a fan over my head and I can live in the city," she says. "I tried to open a tailoring shop back home, but I had to give it up."

Akter's older sister, who lives in the same two-room house with their parents, also works in a garment factory, down the road from Rana Plaza. The family comes from the district of Gaibandha in the north of Bangladesh – where meandering rivers constantly rewrite the geography and seasonal hunger haunts millions of people.

"The river took our home so we had to leave. We decided to come to Dhaka to make a living," says Salma Akter, Rozina's sister. "We pay the rent jointly. Much of what we earn we have to give to the landlord. But we hope we will gradually earn more."

Experts say that while the garment industry has benefited from the cheap labour offered by women – who tend to work for less than men – the industry has reduced the marginalisation of women who were excluded from formal sector jobs.

A World Bank study found in 2008 that compared with other countries, agriculture does not employ as many women in Bangladesh. World bank experts say this is because land-holding size and agricultural productivity have been historically low, leading to low demand for labour.

Studies show that the predominant role of agriculture in the labour market for poorer people has declined as more people head to cities to find work.

According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics data, agricultural employment as a percentage of the workforce declined from 52% in 2002 to 48% in 2010. In the same period, manufacturing employment increased from 10% to 12%.

A USAid-funded study showed that labour force participation for 20- to 24-year-old women more than doubled over the past 10 years – coinciding with the garment boom – but declined for men in the same age group.

"The truth is, there is no other industry that can absorb so many female workers with little schooling or skills," says Ahsan Mansur, executive director of the Policy Research Institute, a Dhaka-based thinktank.

Rozina Akter admits that the Rana Plaza collapse has scarred her. "I didn't want to go to work that morning," she says. "But the supervisors said we'd be docked pay if we didn't go. Then the building owner turned up with some guys who threatened to beat us with sticks if we didn't start working … We went in and started working, but then the power went out and the whole building started to shake. I ran for the stairs. But after I ran down one flight, the roof crashed down around me. I fell and lost consciousness …"

Despite her fear, hunger seems to drive Akter on. "I'll go back to work as soon as I get better," she says with a little smile. "Not all buildings will collapse."

Bangladesh's minimum wageA minimum wage board was formed in the spring of 2010 and a new minimum wage, effective from November 2010, was set in August. The wage board raised the minimum monthly pay for garment workers to 3,000 taka from 1,662.50. Wages increased by 67-81%, depending on job category. The first minimum wage board, set up in 1994, fixed 940 taka as the minimum wage for garment workers. The second board, formed in 2006, raised the minimum to 1662.50.

First appeared in The Guardian, 23 May 2013

Syed Zain Al-Mahmood is an investigative reporter and editor based in Dhaka, Bangladesh

War crimes trials are a defining moment for Bangladesh

2013-05-21T16:25:00.000+06:00

In Bangladesh, a moderate Muslim nation of 160 million people, a revolution is unfolding to keep the country’s secular character alive.

MOZAMMEL H. KHAN

In Bangladesh, a moderate Muslim nation of 160 million people, a revolution is unfolding to keep the country’s secular character alive. For two months now, hundreds of thousands of people from young men and women, aging former guerrilla fighters and grandmothers who still carry the scars of genocide, have occupied Shahbag Square in the capital, Dhaka. The collective anger of a nation, simmering below the surface for more than 40 years, has been called the country’s second war of liberation.

The roots of this resentment lie in the genocide of the Bengali people (of the then-East Pakistan, separated from West Pakistan by 1,600 km) that started in March 1971. The Pakistan Army wanted to overturn the verdict of the only general election in Pakistan, won by the East Pakistani party led by the charismatic leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The Pakistani occupation army and its accused Bengali collaborators, the mullahs of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, imposed a nine-month war of horrors on the Bengalis. The Bengalis fought back in what they saw as a war of liberation. The genocide resulted in an estimated 3 million killed and 200,000 women raped by the occupation forces and their Bengali accomplices, before the Pakistani Army’s humiliating surrender to combined Indian and Bangladeshi guerrilla forces in December 1971.

The government of the newly created state, Bangladesh, started trials of the Bengali collaborators, mostly members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, under a newly enacted law, the International Crimes (Tribunal) Act of 1973. However, the trials were stopped following the tragic assassination of the president and founding father in 1975.

It was not until 2008 when the current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Rahman’s daughter, campaigned on a promise to set up tribunals to try the 1971 collaborators for war crimes. She was swept into power in the fairest election in the country’s history, winning all but 30 seats in a 300-member parliament. In 2010 the war crimes trials finally began.

Among the first to be convicted was a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Quader Mollah (incidentally my own roommate in college days). But instead of the death sentence, Mollah was given life imprisonment with the possibility of a future pardon, if a change of guard takes place at the helm of the state. Hearing that his life had been saved, Mollah turned to the news cameras and, with a huge grin on his face, waved a victory sign to the crowd.

While Mollah was euphoric, liberal and secular Bangladeshis were infuriated. How could a man pronounced guilty of war crimes, accused of raping and shooting 344 civilians to death during the 1971 war, not receive the maximum punishment, the death sentence?

Within hours of the judgment, which was handed down on Feb. 5, ordinary students and bloggers used Facebook and Twitter to rally their contacts. Soon an impromptu gathering of hundreds, then thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands collected at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square.

For weeks, they have been there and despite the gruesome murder of one of the leaders, have kept their movement peaceful. The protesters wanted the government to amend the law to make it possible for the prosecution to appeal the decision of the tribunal, which the parliament did, to bring equity to the law, since only the defendants were able to appeal. In addition, they want a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami as a collaborator that took active part of the genocide.

The mullahs of the Jamaat-e-Islami, on the other hand, label the leaders of the uprising as atheist and anti-Islamic, even though religion and personal faith have no part in the current resurrection of patriotism.

For the first time ever in the Muslim world, there has been a popular uprising against the fascism of an Islamist party that garnered only 3 per cent of votes in the last general election. One would have expected the western intelligentsia to be thrilled at this development and for the media to report from the square. Instead, there have been many distorted reports criticizing the war crimes trials in such major publications as The Economist of London.

The uprising back home has touched the hearts and souls of Bangladeshis around the world, including the estimated 50,000 people of Bangladeshi origin who live in the Greater Toronto Area. Over the past few weeks, rallies organized by Bangladeshi students and attended by hundreds have been taking place in Toronto every weekend to support the historic demonstrations in Shahbag Square, where the spirit of the liberation war is being rekindled.

First published in TheToronto Star, April 16 2013

Mozammel H. Khan teaches engineering at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning and is the Convener of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh

Global Retailers Join Safety Plan for Bangladesh

2013-05-20T22:56:00.000+06:00

STEVEN GREENHOUSE and JIM YARDLEY

Under mounting pressure to improve working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment factories, several of the world’s largest apparel companies agreed on Monday to a landmark plan to help pay for fire safety and building improvements after the collapse last month of the Rana Plaza factory complex, which killed more than 1,100 people.

The agreement, hailed by labor and consumer groups as a major breakthrough, came as the Bangladeshi government also took steps to respond to the April 24 disaster at Rana Plaza outside Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. In the last two days, the government has pledged to raise wages for garment workers and change labor laws to make it easier to form trade unions.

The parallel announcements by global brands and the Bangladeshi government were a significant shift: For years, Bangladesh has seen some of the worst practices in the global garment industry. Wages are the lowest in the world, starting at roughly $37 a month. Factory conditions are often unsafe. Yet global brands have often sought to deflect any direct responsibility for the problems, while the government has often been tepid in protecting worker rights.

But the Rana Plaza disaster, the deadliest in the garment industry’s history, has created tremendous pressure for change. On Monday morning, the Swedish retail giant H&M and Inditex, owner of the popular Zara chain, endorsed the safety plan. Within hours, the large Dutch retailer C&A also joined the agreement, as did the low-cost British retailers Primark and Tesco.

“Fire and building safety are extremely important issues for us, and we put a lot of effort and resources within this area,” said Helena Helmersson, head of sustainability at H&M. “With this commitment we can now influence even more in this issue. We hope for a broad coalition of signatures in order for the agreement to work effectively on the ground.”

H&M is the largest purchaser of garments from Bangladesh, and its endorsement was seen as influential to other brands. The agreement calls for independent, rigorous factory safety inspections with public accountability and mandatory repairs and renovations underwritten by Western retailers. It also enhances the roles played by workers and unions to ensure factory safety.

“H&M’s decision to sign the accord is crucial,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory-monitoring group in Washington that is backed by 175 American colleges and universities. “They are the single largest producer of apparel in Bangladesh, ahead even of Walmart. This accord now has tremendous momentum.”

Labor groups and others were already trying to pressure other big brands, including Walmart and Gap, to sign onto the agreement. “We call on these companies to do the right thing on behalf of the more than 1,250 textile workers killed in Bangladesh factory disasters in the last six months, including Rana Plaza, where the tragedy is still unfolding,” said Philip J. Jennings, the general secretary of the UNI Global Union, the international association of trade unions. “This is black and white, life and death.”

Gap has been the target of an online petition that obtained more than 900,000 signatures in support of the agreement. But the company has resisted signing on, objecting to the agreement’s legally binding nature and arguing that it had already hired a fire inspector and promised $22 million in loans for factory improvements.

PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod, announced it would sign the deal, an expanded version of a proposal that PVH had already signed. The new plan lasts five years, while the previous one was to last only two. PVH also announced on Monday that it would contribute $2.5 million to underwrite factory safety improvements as part of the new plan.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s cabinet on Monday approved changes in labor laws. Gowher Rizvi, a top adviser to Bangladesh’s prime minister, said the changes — which still require approval by Parliament — are part of a broader government effort to come into compliance with international labor standards and improve on-the-job conditions.

“Worker safety and worker welfare have now been brought into the forefront,” Mr. Rizvi said in a telephone interview. He said discussions on these changes predated the Rana Plaza collapse but agreed that the disaster had intensified the pressure for reforms.

“This is the goose that lays the golden egg,” he said of the garment industry’s importance to Bangladesh. “Don’t kill it. We have to strengthen it. We have to nurture it. Nurturing it means fair treatment of the workers.”

Bangladesh

is now the world’s second-leading garment exporter, trailing China. Its low wages and lack of regulation have helped it attract billions of dollars in orders from Western retailers and apparel brands. Not only are wages the lowest in the world, but labor unions, which face impediments in organizing, are largely absent in garment factories. Some workers who have tried to organize unions have been dismissed or harassed.

Mikail Shipar, the country’s labor secretary, said one onerous restriction was removed by the cabinet on Monday. Under the current rules, organizers must present the government with a list of names showing that at least 30 percent of workers in a factory want a union. But that list is then turned over to the factory’s owner to verify the authenticity of the names — a step that some owners have used to engage in union busting and firing union supporters.

The list will no longer be turned over to factory owners, Mr. Shipar said, removing “a major barrier in getting registration of a trade union in a factory.”

Other changes involve benefits. Severance and retirement payments will be increased for workers with longer tenures; annual payments under a welfare fund will be equalized so that every garment worker, regardless of the size of the factory he or she works in, will receive the same amounts.

Government officials also are creating a wage board that would begin discussions between labor and management on setting a new minimum wage for garment workers. Mr. Shipar said the process might take six months, but officials have said that changes would be retroactive to May 1.

Bangladesh

has roughly 5,000 garment factories, employing more than 4.5 million people. Nearly 80 percent are women, many poorly educated and from rural villages. In the past, even the low factory wages were better than working in the fields. But as inflation has risen in the last two years, garment workers have grown increasingly angry about low wages. On Sunday, at least 100 garment factories had to be closed as workers staged protests, demanding higher pay.

By Monday afternoon, the death toll at Rana Plaza had reached 1,127 people. Work crews have almost completed clearing debris and searching for the victims — yet families of missing workers continue to linger.

Local labor groups sifting through the rubble have found labels or documents of brands that were being produced by factories in the building. Several investor, religious, consumer and labor groups are pressing these companies to sign the new safety deal. Companies known to have obtained clothes from the factories include Benetton, Cato Fashions, Children’s Place, el Corte Ingles and Loblaws.

First appeared in The New York Times, May 13, 2013 192 Comments

Steven Greenhouse is the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, having held that beat since October 1995, and Jim Yardley is the South Asia Bureau Chief of The New York Times, based in New Delhi. He arrived in India in 2009, after a six-year posting as a correspondent and bureau chief in China. He joined the Times in 1997 and has also worked as reporter on the metropolitan and national staffs.

Steven Greenhouse reported from New York, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi. Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Bangladesh Bloggers Face Constant Death Threats Since Government Labeled Them 'Atheist'

2013-05-19T14:22:00.002+06:00

Photo by Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images: Islamists burn an effigy of a blogger in Dhaka, Bangladesh, during a Feb. 24, 2013, nationwide strike demanding that the "atheist" bloggers be hanged

EMRAN HOSSAIN

Even though Rasel Parvez is out of prison, he isn't out of danger.

"They have pushed my life to a state in which I cannot walk free. I remain in self-confinement day after day, and my social relations are mostly snapped," said Parvez, 36, in an interview with The Huffington Post.

He is talking about the Bangladeshi government, which arrested him and three other bloggers last month for "derogatory comments about Islam." Parvez, who is currently out on bail, has been branded with the label "atheist" blogger because he dared to criticize the abuse of religion by politicians.

It took Parvez and Subrata Adhikary Shuvo, 24, another arrested blogger, more than a month to obtain bail. The other two -- Mashiur Rahman Biplob, 42, and Asif Mohiuddin, 30 -- remain in jail.

But Parvez's own home in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital city, has become something of a prison, as he fears for his life whenever he steps outside.

After his release from jail, some of his most vociferous critics took to Facebook to offer rewards to anyone who killed Parvez, with one offer as high as $12,871 in U.S. dollars. (Per capita income in Bangladesh in 2010 was $641 a year.)

"Who knows -- some of them may be waiting just outside my house," said Parvez.

His wife, Asma Begum, said she's at her wit's end. She does her best to protect Parvez -- among other things, preventing him from taking phone calls until she has checked the caller's identity.

"His insecurity means the entire family is in danger," Begum said.

"I don't know if he could go to the office again. I am not sure if it is safe now to shift our home and find a new address. And how long should I expect him to live an imprisoned life like this?" she asked.

Newcomers to Bangladesh's blogosphere consider Parvez a first-generation blogger. A graduate in physics from the University of Connecticut, he has tried to use science to challenge religious doctrine in his home country. But he said he has never written anything that was intended to defame the Prophet Muhammad.

The term blogger, let alone "atheist" blogger, was barely known in the country before February of this year, when activists took to a busy intersection in Dhaka, demanding that all war criminals from Bangladesh's 1971 battle for independence be hanged. An online call by bloggers, dissatisfied over the sentencing of a war criminal to life in prison -- even after his complicity in war atrocities was proved -- touched off the protest known as the Shahbagh movement.

Since then, bloggers have found themselves in the cross hairs, with death threats becoming part of the job. One of them was killed in February by Islamist fundamentalists, who justified the murder by saying the blogger was a nonbeliever. More broadly, a massive smear campaign was launched targeting bloggers.

Following a demand by a little-known Islamist party called Hefazat-e-Islam, the government arrested the four bloggers, including Parvez, in early April. Even before any formal charges were brought against them, the men were labeled "atheists" and paraded before the media.

"While standing before the media after my arrest, I could feel how this exposure would endanger my life," said Parvez, adding, "I have yet to get an idea about the extent of the jeopardy I am in. I need to know how well-known I am by the identity of an 'atheist' blogger."

But Parvez started to get a feel for his dangerous situation while in jail. The bloggers were put in a 10x10 foot interrogation room with other prisoners -- including individuals who clearly wished them ill, according to Parvez.

"Three of them had been arrested for a January attack on Asif [Mohiuddin], who needed 56 stitches to close the wounds inflicted in his neck and parts of his body upwards," said Parvez.

Along with Mohiuddin's attackers, the cell also contained a handful of activists with Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamist party whose top leaders are facing war crimes charges. They were furious at the sight of Mohiuddin and proceeded to curse and threaten all the bloggers for approximately two hours, Parvez recalled.

He said the other prisoners taunted them with such threats as, "Even if we could not kill them you, our brothers will definitely succeed. Those standing against our religion deserve to be assassinated."

That wasn't all the bloggers had to endure while incarcerated. When they were transferred to the local prison, the news of their arrival proceeded them, according to Parvez, and other Jamaat-e-Islami supporters, already in prison, gathered to scorn them.

"They knew Asif, as his photograph was published in the media after he was attacked.

They became sure of our identity, seeing Asif with us. They used all kinds of derogatory and dirty language as they talked. They even threatened to harass us sexually; some threatened to rape us," Parvez recollected.

The bloggers were kept confined to their cells around the clock for the first three days.

Now, the government suggests the bloggers should agree to stay in prison for the next five years for their personal security.

"How can I stay in jail for five years when I have kids and a family?" lamented Parvez.

"I have heard about the rewards announced to get my head," he said. "The amount of money promised is enough to encourage at least a thousand killers to get the job done, given that sometimes only 2,000 taka [about $25.74] can get your enemy killed in Bangladesh."

First published by The Huffington Post, May, 18, 2013

Emran Hossain is a journalist with BDNews24.com in Bangladesh. He is a 2013 Daniel Pearl fellow at The Huffington Post as part of a program with the Alfred Friendly Press Partners emran.hossain@huffingtonpost.com

Leaving Bangladesh? Not an easy choice for brands

2013-05-15T17:09:00.002+06:00

Bangladesh factory deaths prompt some retailers to leave, but staying poses challenges too

JONATHAN FAHEY and ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, Business Writers with Associated Press

Bangladesh offers the global garment industry something unique: Millions of workers who quickly churn out huge amounts of well-made underwear, jeans and T-shirts for the lowest wages in the world.

But since the building collapse on April 24 killed at least 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh, becoming one of the deadliest industrial tragedies in history, the industry has gone from one of the country’s greatest assets to one of its biggest liabilities.

”The risk factors have jumped off the charts,” said Julie Hughes, president of the US Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, a trade group that represents retailers who import garments. ”This is worse than what anyone had imagined.”

Working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry have been known to be grim, a result of government corruption, desperation for jobs, and industry indifference. But the scale of this tragedy has raised alarm among executives and customers.

The Facebook pages of Joe Fresh, Mango and Benetton, a few of the brands whose clothing or production documents were found in the rubble of the collapsed building, are peppered with angry comments from shoppers. Some warn they’re going to shop elsewhere now.

Retailers are also facing street protests. In the US, university chapters of United Students Against Sweatshops are helping to stage demonstrations against Gap in more than a dozen cities including Seattle, Los Angeles and New York. The group plans to target other retailers it believes are not committed to stricter standards for Bangladeshi factories.

The rising death toll may force Western brands to make a choice: Stay and work to improve conditions. Or leave and face higher costs, similar or worse worker conditions in other low-wage countries and criticism for abandoning a poor nation where per-capita income is just $1,940 per year.

Most retailers have vowed to stay and promised to work for change. Wal-Mart and the Swedish retailer H&M, the top two producers of clothing in Bangladesh, have said they have no plans to leave. Other big chains such as The Children’s Place, Mango, J.C. Penney, Gap, Benetton and Sears have said the same.

”Today’s economy is global, and it is not a question of if a company like H&M should be present in developing countries,” said Anna Eriksson, an H&M spokeswoman. ”It is a question of how we do it.”

But for some, the risk of being in Bangladesh has become too great. The Walt Disney Co. announced this month that it is stopping production of its branded goods in Bangladesh.

Industry experts predict others will quietly reduce their dependence on the country.

”Almost everybody is going to cut back on what they are sourcing from Bangladesh,” Hughes said. ”Not today, but by a year from now our imports are going to fall. The question is how much.”

But it’s not easy for retailers who make their clothes in Bangladesh to simply leave.

There is no shortage of cheap labor or available garment factories around the world. But it takes months or even years to establish relationships with new factories that retailers can trust to turn out large volumes of garments to their specifications on time.

Even if retailers move their business to other low-cost countries, they still face threats to their reputations.

Of the major garment-manufacturing countries, Bangladesh’s working conditions pose the highest risk to brands, according to Maplecroft, a risk analysis firm based in Bath, England. But Bangladesh ranks somewhat better than many low-cost countries on other labour issues, such as child labour and forced labour.

According to Maplecroft’s Labour Rights and Protection Index, which measures the overall risk of association with violations of labour rights, Bangladesh is the 17th-riskiest country in the world – and less risky than such garment-producing leaders as China, Pakistan, Indonesia and India.

Another reason it’s hard for retailers to leave is that Bangladesh is one of the few places in the world that has enough workers, manufacturing capacity and experience to provide what retailers demand: High volume, low prices, good quality and predictable service.

The garment industry in Bangladesh is the third-biggest exporter of clothes in the world, after China and Italy. There are 5,000 factories in the country and 3.6 million garment workers. Manufacturers have easy access to cheap raw materials, and the country’s political situation has been relatively stable.

And its garment workers command the lowest wages – by far – in the world. The average worker in Bangladesh earns the equivalent of 24 cents an hour, compared with 45 cents in Cambodia, 52 cents in Pakistan, 53 cents in Vietnam and $1.26 in China, according to the Worker Rights Consortium, a worker advocacy group.

On Sunday a Bangladesh cabinet minister said the government plans to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, and a new minimum wage board will issue recommendations within three months.

Between 15 and 25 per cent of the wholesale cost of a garment is for labor. Unlike raw material costs, which can vary, labor is the only major cost that retailers can control.

“It’s a country built for commodity products,” said Janet Fox, who arranged garment manufacturing overseas for J.C. Penney and Under Armour and now works as a consultant. “It’s not a highly skilled labor force, but they can make the basics.”

Bangladesh

has long been a major garment producer, but in recent years its production has soared.

For decades, the global garment trade was controlled with a quota system called the Multi Fibre Arrangement that limited production from developing countries to protect higher-wage workers in developed countries.

When the system ended in 2005, retailers flocked to Bangladesh because of its low wages. Manufacturers scrambled to increase the size of their factories.

Land is scarce in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated countries. It packs 163 million people, about half the population of the US, into an area about the size of the state of Iowa. So the Bangladesh government, desperate to boost employment, looked the other way as companies converted unsuitable buildings into factories or crammed far too many workers and equipment into small spaces, creating fire hazards, labour activists say.

Since 2005, at least 1,800 workers have been killed in the Bangladeshi garment industry in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the advocacy group International Labor Rights Forum.

In November, 112 workers were killed in a garment factory in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. The factory lacked emergency exits, and its owner said only three floors of the eight-story building were legally built. Clothes destined for Disney, Wal-Mart and Sears were found among the building’s remains, though Disney has denied its suppliers used the factory.

But as horrific as that fire was, it wasn’t as bad as the April 24 collapse, the garment industry’s worst disaster. The eight-story Rana Plaza building housing five garment factories collapsed 15 miles north of Dhaka at the beginning of a workday.

The building wasn’t designed to hold factories, and three stories had been added illegally. Most of the victims were crushed by massive blocks of concrete and mortar falling on them.

Then as the death toll was climbing, a fire broke out at a sweater manufacturer on Wednesday in Dhaka, killing eight people including a senior police officer, a Bangladeshi politician and a top clothing industrial official.

Only a few companies, including Britain’s Primark and Canada’s Loblaw Inc., which owns the Joe Fresh clothing line, have acknowledged that suppliers were making clothes for them at the Rana Plaza site and have promised to compensate workers and their families. Loblaw’s CEO said suppliers were making clothes for as many as 30 brands and retailers at the site.

Benetton labels were found at the site, and the Italian fashion brand acknowledged that one of its suppliers had used one of the factories. The company said that before the collapse, the factory had been removed from its list of approved factories.

Mango, whose production documents were found in the ruins, has said it was planning to produce there but hadn’t started.

Clothing retailers often depend on a web of contractors and sub-contractors to produce goods for them. Fabric will be made at one factory, buttons at another, and the item will be sewn together somewhere else. Large orders are often placed with one contractor, who then farms out the work to several smaller factories.

Retailers said they have strict standards that they require their suppliers to follow, but they know little or nothing about conditions at individual factories that make their clothes because there are so many of them.

But retailers are very familiar with the general conditions in the countries where they do business, and their importance to local economies means they can push for improvements. Labour groups and other activists have said last month’s tragedy is just the most extreme evidence that brands haven’t done nearly enough to protect workers.

The retail industry hasn’t released estimates on how much it would cost to upgrade Bangladeshi factories to Western standards. But the Worker Rights Consortium puts the cost at $1.5 billion to $3 billion. If the money was spent over five years, it would be 1.5 to 3 per cent of the $95 billion expected to be spent on clothes manufacturing over that time. Put another way, it’s 10 cents added onto the cost of a T-shirt.

There are limits to what companies can do to improve conditions, though, said Matthew Amengual, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who studies labour regulation and enforcement in developing countries. “Companies have a very important role to play, but they can’t do it just by auditing their supply chain,” he said.

The collapse of the factory in Bangladesh showed how safety issues in the country are in some ways too ingrained and complex for companies to monitor and change. It is much easier for a company to push for more fire extinguishers or make sure fire exits aren’t locked than to judge the structural integrity of thousands of factories.

Experts said if big retailers and the Bangladesh government don’t work together to improve standards and enforce them, more production will gradually move out of the country.

“There are huge risks to stay if there isn’t any progress,” said the Rev. David Schilling, of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of shareholders that pushes companies to be more socially responsible.

Disney, which has said that less than 1 per cent of the factories used by its contractors operate in Bangladesh, said it has told all its suppliers to stop production in the country by the end of March 2014. The company also said it would reconsider its decision if conditions improve.

Others have taken a different approach.

In the wake of the November fire, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, toughened its policies with suppliers. In January, it said that it would cut ties with any factory that failed an inspection, instead of first issuing a warning.

Last month, Wal-Mart said it will be tying some of the compensation of some executives, including CEO Mike Duke, to the success of its compliance program.

Forty garment buyers, including Wal-Mart, H&M, and J.C. Penney, met with labour rights groups on April 29 in Germany to discuss how the industry could improve safety conditions in Bangladesh.

The labour groups are setting Wednesday as the deadline for brands to sign up to a legally binding plan that would require retailers to pay for needed safety improvements and allow independent inspections of the clothing factories in Bangladesh.

Only two companies — PVH, the parent company of such brands as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Tchibo, a German retailer — have signed up to the plan. Gap was close to signing last fall but then backed out and announced its own plan that included hiring an independent fire safety expert to inspect factories.

Adding to the pressure on retailers, Avaaz, a human rights group with 21 million members worldwide, has garnered more than 900,000 signatures on a petition pushing Gap and H&M to commit to the proposal.

“We would rather see companies stay in Bangladesh to compel and fund the renovations that are necessary to turn these deathtraps into safe buildings,” said Scott Nova, executive director at the Worker Rights Consortium.

First appeared in new.Yahoo.com , Sun, May 12, 2013

Jonathan Fahey and Anne d'Innocenzio are Business Writers with Associated Press, Farid Hossain in Dhaka, Bangladesh, contributed to this story

Bangladesh: Islamist Siege

2013-05-14T16:58:00.000+06:00

Islamist seize Dhaka on May 5, 2013

S. BINODKUMAR SINGH

On May 5, 2013, Hefazat-e-Islam (HeI, 'Protectorate of Islam') enforced their 'Dhaka Siege' programme to mount pressure on the Awami League (AL)-led Government to implement their 13-point demands , including the demand to "pass a law providing for capital punishment for maligning Allah, Islam and Prophet Muhammad. and smear campaigns against Muslims". Four civilians were killed and several others injured as cadres of HeI fought running battles with Police across Dhaka, turning the capital into a city of panic. 70,000 Islamists marched down at least six highways and took position at the entry points of the city, stopping road transport and cutting off Dhaka's road links with rest of the country, while they raised slogans of 'Allahu Akbar' (God is great) and "One point, One demand: Atheists must be hanged."

More than 10,000 personnel drawn from the Police, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) jointly launched a drive late on May 5, 2013, to clear demonstrators from Dhaka. As violence moved beyond the capital on May 6, 2013, at least 27 persons, including three Security Force (SF) personnel and a HeI cadre, were killed and several other injured in Narayanganj, Chittagong and Bagerhat Districts. Two of the injured died on May 7 and another one on May 9.

Earlier, on March 9, 2013, HeI Ameer (Chief) Shah Ahmad Shafi had put forward a 13-point demand at the Olama-Mashayekh (Islamic Scholars) Convention organized at the Darul Uloom Hathazari Madrassah Convention Hall in Chittagong District. On the same day, HeI's 'central joint secretary general' Maulana Moinuddin Ruhi, gave the call for theApril 6 rally at the end of a 'Long March' (from Chittagong to Dhaka). During the April 6 rally, the HeI gave the Government an April 30 deadline to meet its demands or face a 'Dhaka Siege' programme, commencing May 5, 2013.

Indeed, in an attempt to clamp down on the HeI cadres on the eve of 'Long March', the SFs arrested 30 HeI cadres from a bus in Palashbari area of Gaibandha District on April 5, 2013, while they were travelling to Dhaka. Subsequently, a clash between HeI and AL cadres at Dhaka city left one person dead and at least another 30 injured. As tension grew, four people were killed between April 6 and May 4, 2013.

Meanwhile, on May 3, 2013, two days prior to the 'Dhaka Siege' deadline, Prime Minister (PM) Sheikh Hasina Wajed addressing a Press Conference in Dhaka, offered a conciliatory response on the 13 demands, observing, "We have already gone through HeI demands. Many of these have already been implemented while some are in the process." Speaking explicitly about the second and 'most important' demand, to "pass a law providing for capital punishment for maligning Allah, Islam and Prophet Muhammad. and smear campaigns against Muslims", the PM stated that the Information and Communication Technology Act, 2009, and the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) already contained provisions for punishment for the offence.

The Government's reply to each of the 13 demands asserts that these demands are nothing more than an attempt by the Islamist forces, backed by the main opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), to hold the country to ransom, as these formations feel the heat of the War Crimes (WC) Trial. Significantly, on May 9, 2013, JeI Assistant Secretary General Muhammad Kamaruzzaman was awarded the death penalty by the International Crimes Tribunal-2 (ICT-2). He was found guilty on five out of seven counts of torture and mass murder committed during the 1971 War of Independence. He is the third JeI leader to face the death penalty, while another one has received a life sentence. ICT-2, constituted on March 22, 2012, delivered the first WC verdict against former JeI leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad alias Bachchu Razakar, on January 21, 2013, awarding a death sentence for killing 14 Hindus, raping two women, torturing two other persons and setting homes ablaze in Faridpur District, his birthplace. A total of nine persons, seven from JeI and two from BNP, have been indicted so far, for War Crimes.

Indeed, Bangladesh has seen a surge in violence since the January 21, 2013, verdict. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) database, the country has recorded 186 fatalities, including 109 civilians, 64 Islamist cadres and 13 SF personnel, in street violence since then (data till May 12, 2013).

Describing the activities of HeI as 'mysterious', Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu, had noted, on May 2, 2013, "The movement of HeI is not to protect the faith of Muslims. They are working as the shadow of JeI and its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), to foil the trials of war criminals." Similarly, Environment and Forest Minister Dr. Hasan Mahmud, on May 7, 2013, asserted that BNP central leaders M.K. Anwar and Sadeque Hossain were behind the May 5 violence in Dhaka. He also blamed central leaders of the BNP-backed students' organizations, the Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) and ICS, for leading the trouble in Paltan, Baitul Mukarram and Motijheel areas of Dhaka during the HeI demonstrations and rally. On May 8, 2013, State Minister for Law, Advocate Quamrul Islam claimed, further, "The BNP-JeI men carried out vandalism, arson and looting during Sunday's violence". He went on to claim that the mayhem in Dhaka city was funded by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan. Two left-leaning parties, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) and the Bangladesher Samajtantrik Dal (BSD), at a joint rally in front of the National Press Club in Dhaka city, demanded an immediate ban on HeI, JeI and ICS, for 'creating anarchy' across the country. The leaders of these two parties also blamed the main opposition BNP for extending support to HeI.

The abrupt emergence of HeI as a formidable disruptive force has largely been seen by the BNP-JeI-ICS front as an opportunity to exploit the current situation to harvest some political gains. With the survival of some of their leaders at stake, they appear willing to drive the country to the brink of chaos in their effort to derail the ongoing WC Trials. At the same time, however, a clear groundswell of opinion - albeit without the attendant violence that characterizes the Islamist protests - in favour of the WC Trials has also been dramatic. A direct and escalating confrontation appears inevitable at this juncture, and it remains to be seen whether the Government has the will and sagacity to manage this evolving crisis, even as it pushes the WC Trials process to a logical culmination. And all this will be necessary before the General Elections, which fall due in December 2013 - January 2014.

First appeared in SouthAsia Intelligence Review, Weekly Assessments & Briefings, Volume 11, No. 45, May 13, 2013

S. Binodkumar Singh is Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

Bangladesh building collapse: How many still missing? Who knows?

2013-05-13T16:39:00.000+06:00

Photo: Relatives search for names of missing garments worker

Photo: Still missing

SABIR MUSTAFA

Numbers have always been a tricky issue in Bangladesh, so much so that there is disagreement over even the total population of the country.

There is always someone ready to raise questions about any "official figure" , whether it is the voter list or death figures from a road accident.

Not surprisingly then, when the eight-storey Rana Plaza collapsed on 24 April with thousands of people working in five garment factories, numbers became a hotly contested issue.

Two sets of figures are now accepted as accurate. Firstly, the number of people rescued alive, which stands at 2,438 and secondly, the number of bodies recovered from the rubble, which stands at more than 1,000 and keeps rising every day.

Calculating in the dark

But there is disagreement over how many are still missing - and hence, the total number likely to have died.

Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble”

More than two weeks after collapse, there is still no agreement on exactly how many workers and staff were present in the building. This has left officials calculating in darkness.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), initially said that 3,200 people may have been employed by the five factories located on the upper floors of the building.

But that figure now looks unrealistic. Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble.

Distrust

Five days after the collapse a woman named Shahina was found alive.

But Shahina could not be rescued, as a fire sparked by metal cutting machines killed her on 28 April. One of the rescuers later died in hospital from burns sustained during the abortive rescue.

It was not expected that more survivors would be found, and rescuers switched their focus to recovering bodies.

Then another round of distrust about numbers was kicked off by none other than Maj Gen Hasan Suhrawardy, the man in charge of the recovery operation at the site.

On 1 May, he told journalists that only 149 people were missing, raising heckles across the social landscape. Even senior government officials expressed doubts about the figure.

Fake names?

Workers rescued from the site said many people had tried to escape down a stairway at the back of the building. They insisted that many bodies lay in that part of the building.

It appeared the general had used a list which local administration officials had stopped using. The police had their own, much larger list, based on people registering names of their missing relatives.

Officials worried that many names were appearing several times in different lists. They also worried that fraudsters might be at work, registering fake names to get compensation.

As a result of the confusion, all lists were taken down and officials stopped talking about the number missing.

'Disappearing' bodies

But more fuel was added to the fire by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Addressing a big rally in Dhaka on 4 May, Mrs Zia accused the government of ''disappearing'' 900 bodies.

The opposition leader did not quote any source, but it reflected a sense of frustration and distrust among relatives of those missing.

Hundreds of relatives of the missing waited at the site everyday, desperate to ensure they at least got the body of their loved one so they could be buried properly.

But rumours soon spread that the army was about to bulldoze the site. Rumours were also spread that trucks removing debris from the site were being used to take away dead bodies.

Anger and frustration spilled over on one or two occasions and relatives, aided by locals, blocked army vehicles carrying debris.

Painstaking work by officials finally calmed the situation. The army made it clear there would be no bulldozing and that every effort would be made to recover any remaining bodies.

The military and fire brigade decided to use heavy equipment sparingly, only after ensuring that no body was left to be recovered.

It is perhaps this painstaking, time-consuming, brick-by-brick search for bodies that has allowed the rescuers to find a woman alive in the rubble on Friday, 12 days after the last survivor was found and 17 days after the building went down.

First appeared in BBC online, 10 May 2013

Sabir Mustafa, Editor, BBC Bengali service

In First Interview Since Bangladesh Factory Collapse, Benetton CEO Confirms Company's Tie To Tragedy

2013-05-10T19:43:00.000+06:00

KIM BHASIN

In his first interview since the deadly collapse of a garment factory complex in Bangladesh, the chief executive officer of Benetton told The Huffington Post that his company had purchased small quantities of shirts from a manufacturer that operated inside the plant.

Chief executive Biagio Chiarolanza said Benetton bought the shirts from a company called New Wave Style, which operated one of the several garment factories inside the Rana Plaza building. The collapse of the building in an industrial suburb of Dhaka last month took the lives of more than 800 people.

“The New Wave company, at the time of the tragic disaster, was not one of our suppliers, but one of our direct Indian suppliers had subcontracted two orders,” said Chiarolanza, speaking via phone from Italy, where Benetton is based.

One of Benetton’s suppliers in India had issues fulfilling orders, and offered the option to relocate a portion of its work to several manufacturers located in Bangladesh, according to a Benetton executive who spoke on condition he not be named. New Wave was one of those manufacturers.

Benetton decided to stop production with New Wave one month before the deadly collapse occurred, due to the manufacturer's inability to meet “strict” quality and efficiency standards, Chiarolanza said.

Chiarolanza, a 20-year Benetton veteran who became CEO in 2010 after spending seven years as head of operations, said his company plans to continue to use factories in Bangladesh to manufacture its wares, asserting that the welfare of workers in poor countries is best served by providing jobs.

"It's not the solution to go outside from Bangladesh or to think in the future we can leave Bangladesh," said Chiarolanza. "I spent some period of my life in this part of the world, and I believe -- I really believe -- Benetton and other international brands can help these countries improve their condition. But we need a safe and happy working environment and we need to have better conditions."

He emphasized that Benetton’s orders from New Wave were relatively small, totaling around 200,000 shirts, and were issued in December 2012 and January 2013. Chiarolanza's account confirmed documents previously obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The shirts were made inside the Rana Plaza building, shipped to the supplier in India and then distributed through Benetton’s "entire distribution network," Chiarolanza said, though he didn't disclose the locations of retail outlets where the clothing eventually landed on shelves.

His explanation came as an attempt to clarify Benetton’s connection to the Rana Plaza disaster in the face of confusion and considerable criticism from labor groups, who have accused the brand of profiting at the expense of low-wage workers in poor countries. For a company that has marketed itself with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” -- a seeming nod to multiculturalism -- the association of its brand with unsafe sweatshops has been particularly uncomfortable.

In its first statement following the collapse, the company claimed that "none of the companies involved are suppliers to Benetton Group or any of its brands." On April 29, as photos from the Associated Press revealed Benetton labels amid the rubble, Benetton acknowledged it had placed a "one-time order" from a manufacturer in the building. The following day, the company said one of its suppliers had "occasionally subcontracted" orders from a shirt-maker at Rana Plaza.

Benetton blamed the confusion on the complexity of its supply chain. The company operates in 120 countries across the globe and works with 700 manufacturers, and suppliers often subcontract work when necessary. It took time to go through all the records and come across the orders made from the Rana Plaza factory, the company claimed.

Chiarolanza's account effectively enhances the image of an enterprise so huge that no one could possibly keep tabs on all of the hands that touch its product -- some of them operating in unsafe conditions beyond the scrutiny of regulators.

According to the Benetton executive, the company commissioned an assessment of New Wave prior to placing its order. That assessment included checks on the manufacturer's ability to meet quality standards and fulfill the order on time, and it looked at issues related to working conditions and safety. Benetton requires that all of its manufacturers sign a code of conduct addressing myriad issues of concern, from child labor to discrimination in hiring and firing practices, he said.

However, the Benetton executive added that the company never conducted a so-called social audit of New Wave -- essentially, a deeper look at the manufacturer's labor conditions and workplace safety -- because Benetton had worked with the supplier for a very short period of time.

The Rana Plaza disaster has renewed the focus of labor groups on the process of social audits, with critics portraying the measures as little more than public relations devices: Companies effectively check off a box that such audits have been conducted without mounting genuine probes aimed at turning up trouble.

Spanish apparel retailer Mango, which had planned to buy samples from one of the contractors at Rana Plaza, confirmed in a statement to The Huffington Post that it had not conducted a social audit either, because it did not yet have a "commercial relationship" with the factory. The company noted that it wouldn't have been able to identify the building's structural problems regardless.

Benetton claims it didn't know the factory building was constructed without appropriate safety permits. According to the company, documentation provided by local government agencies showed no signs of foul play or incorrect building permits there. All the information given to Benetton was completely "in line," the company said.

Chiarolanza said the tragedy has prompted Benetton to add "additional items" to its assessment process: Going forward assessments will more intently examine the structural integrity of the buildings where its products are made.

Between 2 and 4 percent of Benetton’s products are made in factories in Bangladesh, according to the company. Benetton directly manages about half of this production, while relying on outside suppliers -- mostly in China -- for the rest.

Among the reasons Chiarolanza cited for opting to remain in Bangladesh is a need to maintain operations in multiple regions, giving Benetton the capability to quickly produce and deliver products to retail outlets worldwide.

Other countries, such as Laos and Egypt, offer very cheap labor, Chiarolanza said. But Bangladesh presents the best place to make T-shirts and other simple items that are shipped off to large Asian markets nearby, such as China.

"In Tunisia, where we have a direct company-owned factory, we can produce more or less at the same cost," Chiarolanza said. "It's better to divide the production in some countries and factories, so we're nearer to, for example, Asian markets, so we can deliver directly."

Benetton is in talks with the International Labour Organization, which brings together producers, trade unions and NGOs in an attempt to get all stakeholders on board with change in the apparel manufacturing industry, including in Bangladesh. "I can assure everyone that Benetton has always paid special attention to the workers condition, and the environment in which they operate. I believe our long-standing commitment to social issues speaks for itself," said Chiarolanza.

But labor activists remain skeptical of Benetton's commitment to aiding the workers of Bangladesh. Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent organization that monitors labor rights, demanded more than promises.

"If Benetton is serious about preventing future accidents, they will sign a binding, enforceable agreement that requires them to pay for the repairs and renovations needed to make their factories safe," said Nova. "They have made no such commitment and given their track record of public dissembling since the collapse, people can be forgiven for not taking them at their word."

Benetton affirmed its stance on wages in Bangladesh: a low wage is better than no wage at all. Chiarolanza argued the wages provide an opportunity for advancement, particularly for women, since the vast majority of workers in garment factories are female. Nova, though, doesn't accept the status quo in the poverty-stricken nation.

"The wages in Bangladesh are an act of cruelty," he said. "Women cannot support their families on $40 a month. Yes, unemployment is worse, but that is no justification for paying sub-poverty wages that are half of the wages in the next lowest-cost country."

First posted in The Huffington Post, May 09, 2013

Kim Bhasin is a Senior Retail Reporter at The Huffington Post. He previously worked at Business Insider. Kim.Bhasin@huffingtonpost.com

Backlash against Bangladeshi bloggers

2013-05-06T17:03:00.001+06:00

GITA SAHGAL

The bloggers of Shahbagh are facing a backlash – hunted by fundamentalists, denounced in mosques as atheists, arrested by the government. Those abroad are under threat. Meanwhile activists are still demanding justice and cyber movements are using their mobilising power to deal with disasters

This has been a troubling week for those who care about Bangladesh. The April 26 collapse of Rana Plaza, the garment factory building owned by a prominent member of the ruling party, the Awami League, shows the economic costs of the country’s “economic miracle.” Bangladeshi cyber-activists threw themselves into raising funds and helping to buy medicines for hospitals running out of supplies. If lives are being saved, one told me, it is because ordinary people are helping to mobilise relief.

The movement for accountability for war crimes, consists of several generations of activists - from those who feel strongly about the war because they witnessed its atrocities, to the children of victims demanding justice, to younger generations born since the mass movements of the 1990s first demanded war crimes trials. Each generation has experienced a backlash against it from both fundamentalists and the state.

And this is true of the most recent of these movements. The mass populist uprising occupying Shahbag in Dhaka, calling for ‘maximum punishment’ (the death penalty) for war criminals, was sparked by the triumphant V sign made by a convicted man. He saw his life sentence as a victory. At first, the political parties courted the Shahbag movement, with the government promising to rush through legislation that reflected its main demands – allowing the prosecution to challenge the sentence to make it harsher, and amending the law to enable the Jamaat e Islami to be put on trial as an organisation. The Jamaat-e-Islami,the largest Islamist political party in Bangladesh, responded to the conviction and death sentence of the Deputy leader of the party, Delawar Hussein Sayeedi, with a country-wide campaign of violence, with particularly vicious attacks on religious minorities, including killing Hindus and destroying temples and homes. Christian Bangladeshis also reported attacks, but in some cases people were too afraid to make an official report.

Abroad, the conviction was referred to as ‘judicial murder’, to capitalise on the revulsion against the death penalty. But Western criticism of the Tribunal process failed to note also that peaceful opposition to religious fundamentalism was met by death threats, assault and murder. All opposition to them was labelled ‘atheists’, and a label that seemed intended to provoke mass revulsion, promote extra-judicial killings as well as create a climate for laws criminalising blasphemy.

Rajib, a young blogger, activist and professed atheist who was targeted online and then murdered, has become an iconic figure in the movement. The fundamentalists have gone after a number of individual bloggers, beating people up and issuing death threats online or on mobiles. Labelling people as atheists, whether they are or not, puts them at risk of attack, and the bloggers have been targeted as atheists by both Muslim fundamentalists and the government.

In their defense, atheists, humanists and secularists and declared April 25 an International Day to Defend Bangladesh's Bloggers. With some more protests planned on 4th May in deference to the tragedy currently gripping Bangladesh. The young bloggers need all the support they can get, for another fundamentalist group has arisen out of nowhere with a familiar list of fundamentalist demands. On April 7 this group, Hefazat e Islam, staged a mammonth “long march” of half a million people to protest against the mixed sex, peaceful, candlelit gatherings in Shahbagh. They made 13 demands,which contain many of familiar obsessions of fundamentalists. Apart from demanding a defamation law with the highest punishment (in other words making blasphemy punishable by death), Hefazat wants to declare Ahmadiyas to be non-Muslim, attacks practices such as candle lighting and putting up sculptures, opposes sexual mixing and “promotion of Islamophobia among the youth,” wants compulsory Islamic education at all levels and an end to “ungodly education, inheritance laws and unIslamic laws generally.” Christian and other NGOs are attacked for proselytizing and “an immediate and unconditional release of all detained Islamic scholars” is demanded.

Rather than defend the Shahbagh bloggers against fundamentalists, the government has found it expedient to crack down on them. When Hefazat e Islam prepared a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers, the government responded with its own list of those who had “hurt religious sentiments.” Four bloggers have been taken into custody and more arrests are threatened. In order to humiliate and terrify dissenters, the police paraded the bloggers and had them photographed with their computers as if they found a cache of stolen goods. One blogger wrote, “it broke our hearts but it will not break our spirits.” Their accounts have been hacked, whether by non-state or state-backed people it is hard to say. Some bloggers have noticed that their arrested colleagues’ accounts remained active even after they were arrested, and have speculated that “evidence” may have been planted in them.

These demands are nothing new to Bangladesh, where Islamists have been trying to get a blasphemy law passed since the early nineties, when they went after the writer Taslima Nasrin. By labelling all bloggers as atheists, the fundamentalists hope turn the tide of public opinion against them. Throughout the war crimes trials, Jamaat’s strategy has been to say that they are being attacked as Muslims and as an opposition party, and to evade addressing the grave crimes of which they are accused. Their lobbying campaign has been very persuasive for many MPs in Britain, who demanded an invitation to monitor the Tribunal while also instructing the government of Bangladesh that they should not have ‘a retributive process’ but adopt a reconciliation model.

That is why it was heartening to see support for the principle of accountability from MPs from a range of parties. Two British MEPs, Charles Taylor, Conservative, and Jean Lambert of the Green Party, addressed a rally on war crimes in London on 28th April, which passed off peacefully. Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General, who has recently travelled in Bangladesh, acknowledged the strong democratic mandate for the trials and the immense strength of feeling on the issue. She said that if people were assured that life actually meant life, rather than a sentence that could be reversed by a change in government, the issue of the death penalty may not have arisen at all.

Writing in 2002 about the campaign by Jamaat e Islami and other fundamentalist organisations to make blasphemy a criminal offence, Bangladeshi Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain described a three-pronged strategy, “invoking criminal laws to curtail speech by targeted individuals and groups, fomenting a climate of intolerance against them, and mobilising public sentiment for the enactment of draconian new laws – as key tools in their project of silencing expressions of difference, and asserting their vision of a monolithic Islam.” All these elements are present in today’s battles.

The conflict between Bangladeshi secularists and fundamentalists has spread to London’s East End where, on Feb. 8th, at Altab Ali Park, young demonstrators supporting Shahbagh clashed with men from the Jamaat-dominated East London mosque. For older anti-racists, the scenes were remniscent of decades old battles where the police simply protected the aggressors ‘freedom of speech’ and right to threaten and intimidate. Fundamentalist demonstrations from the Jamaat associated East London Mosque have been taking place regularly after Friday prayers, according to activists. Secular Bangladeshis of all religious backgrounds and none were finally able to rally and march outwards from Altab Ali park through Brick Lane and the surrounding streets. It was a suitable demonstration that the secular activists who have been receiving regular death threats have not been cowed into retreat.

Thousands of leaflets have been distributed from the East London Mosque and across the world labelling prominent bloggers as atheists. Sermons have been read attacking atheists, Hindus and suggestive statements made regarding sexual assault. In Bangladesh, fundamentalists paraded a banner which said, ‘we demand the death penalty for atheist bloggers because they use obscene language to criticise Allah, Mohammed and the Quran.’ Statements such as these, along with murderous attacks on atheist and free thinking bloggers, need to be considered alongside the leaflets identifying named individuals as atheists and accusing them of insulting religion, to see whether they amount to incitement to murder. Fundamentalists consider it an obligation for believers to kill apostates; a recent Moroccan fatwa makes this very clear, as does the experience of an atheist from Bangladesh, applying for asylum in Canada.

It is clear that free-thinking activists will be actively targeted first by fundamentalists, and then by the state, so can expect no protection anywhere.

As Asif Mohiuddin, one of the Bangladeshi bloggers said just before his arrest, “To drag religion into politics and playing with it like a football is the real offence towards religion.” Authorities in both London and Dhaka are playing with fire if they think protecting hate campaigns is the same as defending freedom of religion.

First appeared in the openDemocracy.net, 29 April 2013

Gita Sahgal, is a film maker and writer, formerly worked with the Amnesty International. She is founder of the Centre for Secular Space, which opposes fundamentalism, amplifies secular voices and promotes universality in human rights.

From Boston to Bangladesh: 'My heart hasn't stopped breaking'

2013-05-06T00:33:00.001+06:00

MONI BASU, CNN iReport, CNN's Saeed Ahmed contributed to this article

Somewhere high above the clouds over Africa, in seat number 17K, Laura Sherburne learned the awful news of the Boston bombings.

She was supposed to have been there, right at the finish line, captain of a team of volunteer nurses who triage exhausted runners in medical tents. She'd done it last year and signed up again.

But shortly before the race, Sherburne learned she had won an international fellowship and would have to be on a plane the day of the marathon. She cajoled her friend Jane Keefe Chiang to take over the nurses team.

Panic set in on that never-ending Emirates flight from New York after she caught a news flash on an in-flight channel. "Deadly explosion at Boston Marathon finish line."

There was so little information at first. She imagined the worst.

The ache turned to guilt that she wasn't there to help -- guilt squared because she was a nurse.

As her plane landed, Sherburne's head was an emotional cocktail: grief, anger and anxiety, mixed with excitement of being in a foreign land.

It was all about to magnify.

She'd arrived in Bangladesh, one week before that nation's worst industrial tragedy. She did not have to witness the horror in her hometown. But 8,653 miles away, she would not be spared.

A medical mission half a world away

Sherburne, 25, made the journey to Bangladesh with Maryanne Meadows, a neurosurgery nurse she'd befriended at Simmons College in Boston. After nursing school, the two women went to work at Massachusetts General Hospital, where many of the bombing victims were treated.

The pair were part of a rotating team the hospital has been sending to Dhaka to help set up the first bone marrow transplant unit in Bangladesh. Massachusetts General has 60 health projects in 40 countries. The Bangladesh government had approached the hospital to help set up the facility, scheduled to open around August.

Sherburne had never traveled to South Asia before. She experienced the shock that almost every Westerner does after leaving the airport. The assault of hot, heavy, damp air. The unsightly piles of garbage tossed in heaps in open lots, their stench mingling with the heady smells of mustard oil and onion from cooking on the streets.

At her apartment, palmetto bugs scurried across the living room floor and geckos shuttled along the walls.

She might have been reeling from it all had Boston not filled her mind.

After she saw the news on the plane, she'd woken up Meadows, and the two immediately purchased in-flight Wi-Fi so they could get on e-mail and Facebook and check on their friends and family.

Luckily, everyone seemed to be fine.

"It was really hard. I was just trying to focus, but it just kept getting worse," she said. Her brother lives in Watertown, where police finally caught up with bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Through it all, Sherburne was so immersed in the news that she almost forgot she was not actually in Boston. That she hadn't just had a Dunkin' Donuts coffee or gone for a jog along the River.

In her first post on her new blog, "What Would Flo Do?" (named after Florence Nightingale), Sherburne wrote this:

"Given the horrific scenes of Monday, followed by the conclusive events on Friday, my head and heart are still somewhere lost over the Atlantic," she wrote. "I hope, however, to slowly drift back to the Bay of Bengal shores and the work at hand."

Welcome to Bangladesh

She and Meadows settled into their apartment in the neighborhood of Baridhara, which Sherburne described as the Beacon Hill of Bangladesh. It lacks the swank of blue-blood Boston but for Dhaka, it is a luxury. She even has remote-controlled air conditioning and a maid, Shilipi, who cleans and cooks for the two Americans.

Her father had worried so much about his daughter traveling to Bangladesh. The worries heightened after deadly riots erupted over a war crimes tribunal trying Islamist leaders for crimes committed during the nation's 1971 war for independence, when it was known as East Pakistan. Still, he'd been glad to hear his daughter's voice from the other side of the world. Thank God she wasn't on the finish line that day in Boston.

On some days, Sherburne and Meadows found themselves in lockdown in their new home because of security concerns. The opposition party, allied with Islamists, has been calling for nationwide strikes, and tensions have led to violent clashes on the streets. But the nurses were eager to get started with the work at hand.

The challenge of launching a bone marrow transplant unit seemed even greater when Bangladesh decided to put it in a public institution: Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

Sherburne had signed up to do this because she wanted to be out of her comfort zone and to be able to remember always how lucky she was to be at Massachusetts General.

She was reminded the moment she walked into Dhaka Medical.

The hospital has 1,700 beds but on any given day, there could be as many as 4,000 patients sharing beds and spilling into hallways and stairwells. That's not uncommon for public hospitals in this part of the world. They are the only places where desperately poor people can afford medical care.

Sherburne's skills might even make her a doctor at the Dhaka hospital. Some nurses are barely one step above a maid. That's what a doctor told Sherburne upon her arrival.

She'd never been in a hospital so ill-equipped to treat severe cases. In Boston, she changed her latex gloves after seeing each patient. In Dhaka, the hospital could not afford so many gloves, so the nurses used one pair on several patients.

She was appalled by the workload of the nurses; each averaged 25 to 30 patients. In America, that number would likely be somewhere between four and eight.

Sherburne and Meadows began their lectures and their clinical training of 10 nurses.

A horrific industrial accident

On the morning of April 24, the two American women were advised to stay at home. A hartal, the Bengali word for a strike, had been called for that day, and there was potential for more strife.

But the employees at the garment factories housed in Rana Plaza in suburban Savar were exempt from the strike. They were ordered to work, even after an inspection the previous day found cracks in the nine-story building and the structure was deemed dangerous.

Shortly after thousands of men, women, boys and girls showed up that day, the building came tumbling down. They were trapped under a crush of mangled concrete and steel.

Sherburne received a U.S. State Department alert about the building collapse.

"When Boston happened, it was so hard not to be at the scene," she said Thursday from Dhaka. "When this happened, I said, 'Take me to the hospital.' "

But she couldn't leave because of the security risks. Stuck in her home, she watched tragedy unfold again on television.

"My heart hasn't stopped breaking," she said.

She watched as rescue workers pulled out survivors, as time grew short. She knew that after 72 hours, there was little chance of a person surviving without food and water. The death toll would eventually rise to more than 500.

She watched as the plight of the workers became public again; how so many worked under terrible conditions for paltry salaries.

And she watched as a 17-year-old girl was interviewed on a TV station. Rescuers had to amputate her arm to slide her out of the rubble.

When Sherburne was 17, she dreaded Saturdays when she worked a four-hour shift at a dry cleaning shop and made $40. Now, it was difficult to watch the teenage survivor.

"The station called her lucky, and I went numb thinking how at age 17, I would have defined lucky," Sherburne wrote.

"It would have incorporated more than a minimum wage of $38 a month, it would have indicated that if a building was deemed unsafe on a Tuesday, I would not have been forced to return on a Wednesday, and without question it would have included two hands."

Later she questioned why tragedy in her hometown was incessantly on the news but the headlines from Bangladesh had already started to fade even before the rescue operation was over.

"I could tell you more about how much the Boston Marathon bombers' mother shoplifted from a Natick, Massachusetts, mall than how many factory workers were still missing."

Finally released to help

Five days after the catastrophe, Sherburne was allowed out of her house. She went to Dhaka Medical, which had taken in so many of the injured, some now without limbs, some still in life-threatening situations.

She was about to see what she didn't have to in Boston.

She walked into a ward with 53 female patients, their beds pressed together to make room for them all. It was 101 degrees that day, and the electricity was off because of a national grid problem. Some parts of the vast hospital were dark; others parts were dimly lit by emergency generators.

Sherburne wanted to change the patients' dressings, but there wasn't enough bandaging material to do that. So she did what nurses are trained to do. She sat on their beds and comforted them, speaking through a translator.

"How's your pain?" she asked.

"No pain," one said. "Nice to meet you."

For Sherburne, it was another reminder of human resilience.

Each patient mumbled a number. Three. Five. Eight. At first Sherburne didn't understand why.

Then it hit her. They were telling her which floor they had been on when the building hurtled toward the earth.

She reached out and held a woman's hand and noticed they were both wearing the same shade of pink on their nails. They even had identical chips in the polish.

"That's when it stopped seeming American to Bangladeshi and (it) was just a young woman to (another) young woman," Sherburne wrote.

She walked out with the realization that the clothes she was wearing might have been made in one of those factories that collapsed.

She remembers someone asking her if she wanted to see the dead -- the ones who had been brought to hospital but did not survive.

Sherburne declined, politely, but caught a glimpse of a lifeless body being wheeled away. She figured the woman was around her own age.

First appeared in CNN.com, May 3, 2013

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Made in Bangladesh, Not in Bangladeshi Blood

2013-05-04T23:25:00.000+06:00

ANUSHAY HOSSAIN

For me, nothing captures the human tragedy of the recent building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh more poignantly than the image of the man cradling a woman in his arms, her broken body balancing upon slabs of broken factory rubble. As their dead bodies lay in an embrace evocative of a Renaissance period sculpture, the one thing that is glaringly clear is the cost of cheap labor: real human lives.

As a child in Dhaka in the 1980′s, I grew up during the beginning of the Ready Made Garment (RMG) era. As the sector quickly expanded and developed, it thrust thousands of young women into the workforce. On our way to school every morning, we would always see throngs of young Bangladeshi women flood the roads in their neon colored traditional salwaar-kameezes, bright ribbon strings tied in their hair. They were all headed to work in the factories.

I did not know it at the time, but what was happening in Bangladesh was a social revolution, instantly empowering women by making them financially independent, many for the first time in their lives. Today, approximately 3 million women currently work in the sector, and while the extent to which they are exploited within the industry can be debated, few can argue that employment in a garment factory puts food in the mouth of workers, and their families.

Vidiya Amrit Khan, Director of Desh Garments Limited and Director of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Exporters Association (BGMEA), says that the Savar tragedy unfairly casts blame on the garments industry just because of a “few bad apples.” Khan’s late father, M. Noorul Quader, pioneered the 100% export oriented Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry. Today, she runs her family business in Bangladesh, and states that we cannot scapegoat a sector we owe so much to:

I feel so sad and angry that people who are generally not employers of large numbers of people, or involved in mass production, have been making such harmful, and often vicious comments about an industry which has built Bangladesh, and has given so much independence to our women. This sector has grown into a $20 billion industry in about three decades, with 90% of its workforce being women. This is something to be very proud of.

Verane Muyeed, LR Paris‘s Washington, DC Office Manager, worked in the Dhaka garment industry for over a decade, and says that while the sector is not perfect, the role the garment industry has played in empowering Bangladeshi women should not be overlooked:

The fact remains that though micro-finance is heralded as a triumph for helping Bangladesh alleviate poverty, factory work for young women across the country gives families the income, health, and independence that they need to get out of poverty. In my 17 years of experience working with Bangladeshi garments factories, I have seen the evolution of the industry, as the making of garments, the compliances, the working conditions have improved, and are still improving, and empowering a new generation of workers.

Over the last thirty years,

Bangladesh

’s garment industry created a new burgeoning middle class in a country with one of the world’s largest economic gaps. The wealth generated from textiles is the single greatest source of economic growth in

Bangladesh

. While initially tea and jute were the most profitable sectors, that all changed in the 1980′s when the garment industry in

Bangladesh

became the main export sector, and a major source of foreign exchange.

Over the years, the list of global retailers who manufactured their clothes with cheap labor in Bangladesh grew endless, from JC Penny to Mango to Zara to Walmart to H&M to Tommy Hilfiger to Bennetton. Whenever I went abroad as a Bangladeshi, roaming through large Western department stores, and I would come across clothing with the “Made in Bangladesh” label, I would feel my heart swell with pride.

But for all these years, us Bangladeshis have kept a secret. We all have been compliant in covering up the dark underbelly of our country’s booming garment sector. Even though the string of garment fires caused international outcry last year, Bangladeshis knew this was nothing new. Fires had been breaking out in overcrowded factories for decades, long before social media and the Internet let the world know about the deaths.

Savar is different, not only because it is the worst industrial tragedy in Bangladesh’s history, but because it exposes how rampant and deep corruption run in a country where a bribe can buy you what you want, and laws are generally not implemented. What does it say that today Bangladesh is at a point where we cannot even guarantee the workers, who are the backbone of our economy, that they won’t die at their job site from completely preventable causes?

We can point fingers at Western buying companies as much as we want, and of course they have a huge responsibility in all of this. The greed exists on both ends. But the fact of the matter is the responsibility lies with us, with Bangladesh & with Bangladeshis. Garments is the bloodline of our country, and blaming the sector along with its Western buyers is economic suicide Bangladesh cannot afford.

The truth is, we all have blood on our hands. From the Western brands to the Bangladeshis factory owners to the consumer hungry for cheap clothes, we are all guilty. But pointing the finger at the Western buyers is not the solution. If they cannot get their products made in Bangladesh, they will just go somewhere else, like the textile factories have done all through history.

The solution has to come from us. The change has to come from Bangladeshis because the Savar tragedy can happen again, and not just in the garment sector. It can happen anywhere in Bangladesh. Experts estimate currently there are over 6,500 vulnerable buildings in the country, and warn that Dhaka can become unlivable.

Ultimately, the responsibility, with outside help and pressure, must come from Bangladesh because only we the people can bring about genuine, real change. Boycotting products manufactured in Bangladesh is not an option, or the solution, and we all know it. As Sir Fazle Hasan Abed states in his recent editorial, ”Made in Bangladesh should be a mark of pride, not shame.”

But the label on our clothing must also ensure that “Made in Bangladesh” is not made in Bangladeshi blood. No piece of clothing will ever be worth that.

First appeared in Forbes.com, May 02, 2013

Anushay Hossain is a Bangladeshi born-Washington based policy analyst & journalist. She writes the blog, Anushay’s Point

The bloodshed behind our cheap clothes

2013-05-03T23:32:00.001+06:00

Photo: labels of brand trousers found among the debris

KALPONA AKTER, Special to CNN

For workers of Bangladesh, the worst kind of tragedy imaginable struck last week when the Rana Plaza garment factory building -- just outside my home city of Dhaka -- collapsed, killing more than 500 workers. Despite the many warnings of dangerous cracks in the walls reported to supervisors, police and the media earlier in the week, thousands were still sent to work on Wednesday to proceed with business as usual.

There's no question that this building collapse is tragic, but for garment workers, it's not surprising.

I began working in Bangladesh's garment industry at the age of 12, making just $3 a month. I went to work because my father had a stroke and the family needed money to cover basic living expenses. I worked 23 days in a row, sleeping on the shop floor, taking showers in the factory restroom, drinking unsafe water and being slapped by the supervisor.

By the time I was a young woman working at a factory that made clothing for a big U.S. retailer, I knew the time had come for change.

The factory owed my coworkers and me overtime wages, but it wanted to pay us only half of what we had earned, making it even harder for us to support our families. So I helped lead a strike to hold our manager accountable.

I was fired and blacklisted, but my work was far from over. I later learned labor law, English and computer skills so that I could help win justice for garment workers. Today I lead a worker education and advocacy nonprofit that counts tens of thousands of garment workers as members.

The sad reality is that tragedies like this have become business as usual, advanced by some of the most highly profitable American and international corporations in the world.

Last November, 112 workers lost their lives when the Tazreen Fashions factory, which produced garments sold by Wal-mart, Sears and other retailers, caught fire. Much like New York's infamous Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire more than 100 years ago, the workers at Tazreen were trapped inside, with many jumping from upper story windows to try to save themselves. The death toll at Bangladeshi factories stands at nearly 1,000 since 2006, based on estimates by the Bangladeshi government and an advocacy organization.

In the case of these two recent tragedies, there is plenty of blame to go around -- from the Bangladeshi government for looking the other way at safety violations, to the incredibly dangerous circumstances workers face when they try to unionize, to the pressure factory owners and managers are under to turn out high product volume at low prices no matter what.

It is the responsibility of the government of Bangladesh to make a sustained, concerted effort to rectify the dire situation. Strict, well-enforced factory codes and clear support for workers' rights are paramount to protecting Bangladesh's garment workforce.

But more tragedies can be prevented only if the multinational corporations and retailers whose goods are produced at these factories are willing to stand up and do what is right.

A coalition of labor and non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh, Europe and the United States has developed a protocol for an innovative two-year inspection and renovation program to finally make these factories safe -- the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

In addition to facilitating government-supported employer-labor relations and stringent oversight of factory safety management, this protocol focuses on the responsibility of brand owners and retailers to support safety standards.

If Wal-mart and its fellow retailers that count on Bangladeshi labor demand change, we can be sure it will happen. As the protocol states, these corporations must verify that the factories they use comply with applicable safety standards. They must ensure that their pricing of garments makes it feasible for the factories to stick to standards. No longer should a Bangladeshi factory manager feel forced to pressure his employees to work in a deadly environment to meet a corporation's bottom line.

As for the tragedies that have already taken place, these brands should contribute to worker compensation funds for victims and victims' families, including those in the fire at Tazreen. To date, Wal-mart and Sears have refused to contribute. Both companies maintain that subcontractors had used the factory without their authorization, so they are not responsible. I single out Walmart because its past actions have been painfully inadequate. Walmart has refused to sign onto the protocol designed to enhance fire safety and improve factory structures, saying it is putting its own standards in place, which are perfectly adequate. Yet those are Band-Aid measures that are woefully insufficient.

Last fall, Wal-mart refused to admit its connection to the Tazreen factory until my colleagues and I went there the day after the fire and photographed products with Wal-mart's labels in the wreckage. We must no longer tolerate this willful ignorance on the part of multinational corporations about where their goods are produced.

It's high time that companies like Wal-mart, The Gap, and others step up and demand the safety of Bangladesh's garment workers. Too many Bangladeshi workers live and work in fear for their lives each day. The fire safety protocol is a critical first step to making real change, and I urge Wal-mart to become a leader in the fight to save Bangladeshi lives.

First appeared in CNN.com, May 3, 2013

Kalpona Akter, a former child laborer, is executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, a garments workers rights group

Bangladesh Fears an Exodus of Apparel Firms

2013-05-03T19:09:00.001+06:00

Pics: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images: Demonstrators outside Gap’s offices in San Francisco, USA on April 25 sought better working conditions in Bangladesh factories

STEVEN GREENHOUSE, reporting contributed by JIM YARDLEY

A day after the Walt Disney Company disclosed that it was ending apparel production in Bangladesh, that country’s garment manufacturers expressed alarm that other Western corporations might follow Disney’s lead. They feared that could bring about a potential mass exodus that would devastate Bangladesh’s economy and threaten the livelihoods of millions of people.

Mohammad Fazlul Azim, a member of the Bangladesh Parliament and an influential garment factory owner, implored brands not to leave Bangladesh, noting that many factories did comply with safety standards.

“The whole nation should not be made to suffer,” he said. “This industry is very important to us. Fourteen million families depend on this. It is a huge number of people who are dependent on this industry.”

Factory owners in Bangladesh as well as Western apparel retailers have faced intense pressure from governments, consumers and labor groups to improve workplace safety there after a building containing five garment factories collapsed last week outside the nation’s capital, killing more than 430 people.

Several Western retailers indicated that they were considering new plans to ensure factory safety, efforts that would require investing in, rather than abandoning, their operations in Bangladesh. But few have made financial commitments to upgrade unsafe factory buildings or to endorse tougher and deeper inspections. So far, pledging money for relief efforts has been the most common response by big retailers.

Galen G. Weston, the chairman of Loblaw, a major Canadian retailer, said his company wanted more rigorous factory inspections that would for the first time examine the structural integrity of buildings housing these garment factories. He also said Loblaw, which makes the Joe Fresh apparel line, was trying to figure out what more it could do to improve workplace conditions there.

Mr. Weston said he was disturbed that factory managers saw fit to send apparel workers back into the building last week after it had been declared dangerous.

“What role does industry play in propagating a manufacturing culture that would take such risks with people’s lives?” he said. “I’m troubled by the deafening silence from other apparel retailers on this issue.”

Mr. Weston said he was upset that only two out of the nearly 30 Western apparel brands whose goods were manufactured in that building had spoken out about the disaster.

Officials from two nongovernment organizations who attended a meeting in Germany on Monday aimed at improving factory safety in Bangladesh said Thursday that they were confident that several major retailers would soon join a broad plan to ensure fire and building safety in Bangladesh factories. But so far, that plan has been embraced by just PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and the Tchibo Group, a German retailer.

“I’m quite confident that we will get some of the big retail players to sign on to this,” said Jyrki Raina, general secretary of the IndustriAll Global Union, a federation of 50 million workers from 140 countries. “The world will not forgive us. We will all look ridiculous if there is nothing done.”

If a few more retail giants sign on, labor groups are likely to turn up the pressure on others to join the effort or face protests, several officials said. Already, demonstrators have carried signs outside the stores and offices of major retailers that bought apparel from factories in the collapsed building. Mr. Raina said that at the Monday meeting worker advocacy groups and retailers sought to revise the PVH-Tchibo plan so that it would be acceptable to more retailers while still maintaining strong workplace protections.

Several labor advocates voiced optimism that two companies that have taken the lead in creating a compensation fund for the Bangladesh victims and their families — Loblaw and Primark, an Anglo-Irish retailer — would join that plan, which calls for Western retailers and brands to help pay for safety improvements at garment factories.

Walmart, Gap and numerous other retailers have balked at embracing the plan. Retail and labor officials say that is partly because the retailers are concerned about the plan’s binding legal commitments.

Some companies have taken steps on their own. In October, Gap announced a $22 million fire and building safety plan with its suppliers in Bangladesh, without identifying which factories it was using there or how many factories would be improved under the plan. And three weeks ago, Walmart pledged $1.8 million to train 2,000 Bangladesh factory managers about fire safety.

Michael H. Posner, a former assistant secretary of state of human and labor rights in the Obama administration, called Walmart’s contribution “a drop in the bucket when you consider you have a thousand faulty workplaces.”

Some nongovernment organizations estimate that it would cost $3 billion, or $600 million a year for five years, to make the needed fire safety and building improvements to ensure that Bangladesh’s more than 4,000 garment factories were safe. Bangladesh exports about $18 billion in apparel a year.

Mr. Posner, now a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said the Obama administration was not doing enough to address safety problems in Bangladesh. “One of the big gaps here is that governments are standing on the sideline,” he said.

“They’re neither pushing a united strategy among big companies nor pushing hard enough on the Bangladesh government to do the right thing. It’s one thing to convene a meeting, it’s another thing to say to brands, ‘You have to work together to fix this.’ ”

Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Representative George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House Labor Committee, have also urged the administration to do more to push Western companies and the government of Bangladesh to fix factory safety problems.

“You can’t do this piecemeal,” Mr. Levin said. “You have to take the bear by the tail and get everyone to the table. The governments haven’t done that.”

One administration official said it was working on a plan that would provide several million dollars to the Bangladesh government to help strengthen its efforts to regulate factory buildings, especially on fire safety.

Mr. Posner said Disney’s move — apparel represents less than a fifth of the nearly $40 billion in annual sales of its licensed products — might encourage other Western brands to leave Bangladesh. “Now other companies feel they have a green light.”

David Schilling of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility said he generally supported a “stay and improve” — not a cut and run — approach for Western companies in countries like Bangladesh.

“There have to be signals to government and suppliers, especially when you have loss of life, that positive steps have to be taken,” he said. “But you also have to have companies saying, ‘Enough is enough. We’re wanting to see significant change or we can’t source here.’ ”

First appeared in The New York Times, Published: May 2, 2013

Steven Greenhouse is the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, having held that beat since October 1995. As labor and workplace reporter, he has covered many topics, including poverty among the nation’s farm workers, Wal-Mart stores locking in their workers at night, labor’s role in politics, the shortcomings of New York State's workers compensation system and the battles to roll back collective bargaining rights for public employees. His book, "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," was published in April 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf. "The Big Squeeze" was published in paperback in February 2009 and won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize for nonfiction.

Bangladesh Factory Collapse: Is There Blood on Your Shirt?

2013-05-03T00:10:00.000+06:00

VICTOR LUCKERSON

The cheap clothes that Americans buy from retailers every day actually come at a very high price. That cost came into stark relief last week when Rana Plaza, a building housing several garment factories, collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, killing at least 386 workers and injuring many more. With bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, the accident is already “one of the worst industrial accidents in world history,” according to Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium.

The workers who died were producing clothing for American and European consumers and earning only $38 a month, according to the Associated Press. Now the clothing brands and retailers that profited from the cheap labor at Rana Plaza are struggling to wash the blood from their hands, while other brands rethink their role in Bangladesh as a whole. Earlier this week, officials from Walmart, Gap, and about two dozen other retailers and apparel companies met in Germany to begin developing a plan to increase safety across Bangladesh’s garment factories, according to The New York Times. Today Disney, whose goods have been tied to accidents in Bangladesh in the past, announced that it will halt all production of branded merchandise in the country by March 31, 2014, according to the Times.

As the death toll mounts in Bangladesh factory accidents, western companies are feeling more pressure to change their practices. Here’s a list, drawn from both TIME reporting and other confirmed media reports, of companies that have past or present ties to devastating accidents at Bangladesh facilities:

The world’s largest retail giant was listed as a buyer on the website of Ether Tex, one of the garment factories destroyed in the accident. Walmart says they had no authorized production in the facility and will take “appropriate action” if they discover unauthorized production was happening in the factory. In a Reuters report, Ether Tex’s chairman initially said it had been doing sub-contracting work to supply Walmart at the time of the accident, but later said the work had been completed before the incident. In November, a fire at another Bangladesh factory that killed more than 100 was found to be producing products for Walmart stores, among other retailers.

Joe Fresh

The Canadian apparel brand, owned by Loblaw Companies Limited, was being manufactured at the Rana Plaza factory. Loblaw has vowed to provide compensation for families of victims who were making Joe Fresh apparel. The company also plans to send Loblaw representatives to the accident site to support the rescue and aid effort. Loblaw is now pushing for all Canadian retailers to adopt more stringent safety standards through the Retail Council of Canada.

Primark

Primark, a British retailer, has also directly accepted responsibility for receiving goods from the hazardous factory. The company is planning to provide monetary aid for victims’ families. “We are fully aware of our responsibility,” Primark said in a statement. “We urge these other retailers to come forward and offer assistance.”

JCPenney

A JCPenney official said that some of the Joe Fresh products being produced at Rana Plaza would have ended up in JCPenney stores, though the factories had never previously created private label JCPenney merchandise. The company says it has members of its social responsibility team currently on the ground in Bangladesh gathering information from local authorities.

Benetton

Though the Italian fashion brand emphasized that none of its products were recently made in the Rana Plaza factories, one Benetton supplier had subcontracted work to the facility in the past. The manufacturing facility was removed from Benetton’s supply chain before the accident.

Children’s Place

One manufacturer of clothing for the children’s retail chain was located at Rana Plaza, though none of the company’s products were being manufactured there when the building collapsed. A Children’s Place spokesman said the company is fully aware of its responsibilities and will provide “financial and other aid” to people affected by the accident.

Dress Barn

This women’s fashion retailer said that it had not purchased any clothing from the Rana Plaza facility since 2010, according to The Washington Post.

Cato Fashions

Cato Fashions, a women’s fashion brand said that New Wave Bottoms, one of the manufacturers at Rana Plaza, was one of its suppliers, according to the Associated Press. However, New Wave was not producing clothing for Cato at the time of the accident.

The Walt Disney Company

Disney was not producing goods at Rana Plaza, but labor groups in Bangladesh claim to have found Disney apparel in the ruins of the factory destroyed by a fire in the nation’s capital in November. Today Disney announced that it will no longer produce licensed merchandise in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Belarus, Ecuador and Venezuela, according to the New York Times.

First appeared in TIME.com, May 02, 2013

Victor Luckerson @VLuck is a reporter-producer for Time.com covering business and money

The Year Of Living Dangerously: The Bangladesh Liberation War through Raghu Rai's lens

2013-05-02T12:55:00.000+06:00

SALIL TRIPATHI

FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER, what sets apart a war zone from other locations is the imminence of danger. Raghu Rai had gone along with the first column of Indian troops entering what was still officially East Pakistan from the Khulna border in early December 1971. Pakistani forces had retreated to defend the capital, Dacca, as it was then known. But after they had travelled about 50 km, Pakistanis attacked with artillery fire. Rai shot photographs of wounded soldiers being taken away. After the situation subsided, Rai was relieved to find a teashop and decided to have a moment’s respite, although the Indian army major told him to be careful. Just as Rai ordered tea and biscuits, a bullet whizzed past him. “The major shouted for me to lie down,” Rai wrote. “I did, and another bullet went past me. I crawled back to the shop and was told by the shopkeeper that the Pakistani army was on the other side of the railtrack, just half a kilometer away.”

Photographers are meant to be impartial observers, or witnesses. But to the Pakistani sniper, Rai was a participant, entering enemy territory, accompanied by a foreign army. He was a target, fair game. He may have come to record, but he was intervening.

The photographs Rai took during that two-week war, when the Indian army marched to what is now Dhaka and defeated General AAK Niazi’s Pakistani army, are now published in a glossy volume by Niyogi Books, one which commemorates Bangladeshi bravery, and Indian support and generosity, and documents the Pakistani army’s brutality towards civilians.

Having stored away the images for safekeeping, Rai seemed to have forgotten their whereabouts. Two years ago, he excitedly called his friend Shahidul Alam, the gifted Bangladeshi photographer, to say that the lost negatives had been found. This was a huge discovery; Bangladesh was turning 40 in 2011, and the generation that fought for its freedom was fading. Alam, who has made it the mission of his life to document the Bangladeshi saga in all its manifestations by promoting visual culture through his agency, Drik, was himself compiling the works of photographers from Bangladesh and abroad for the book he published in 2011, The Birth Pangs of A Nation. That book includes some of Rai’s photographs and went on to win an Asia Publishing Award last year. (I wrote the sole essay in that book.)

Meanwhile, Rai put together his own collection, with Alam writing its introduction. The Bengal Gallery in Dhaka exhibited Rai’s photographs last December, exposing a new generation of Bangladeshis to the pain their parents’ generation had endured. I went to see the exhibition with a Bangladeshi friend. Many young Bangladeshis paused for a long time before certain images, some taking pictures on their cellphones; for many young visitors, this was their first exposure to the horrors of that war, because for long periods of the past four decades, the country has been ruled by governments that were lukewarm about independence, with coalition partners who had once been hostile to the idea of freedom from Pakistan.

One of Rai’s most telling images was of a mother unable to feed her child because her breast was emaciated. You could count her, and her child’s, ribs. Looking at that photograph, two teenage boys started giggling, as if they had never seen nipples before. Seeing them leer as though the image was vulgar, evoking what could be read as bibhatsa (disgust) in the place of karuna (compassion) or krodha(anger), it was apparent why

Bangladesh

needs to reclaim its history, and why works like Rai’s photographs matter. The war was fought over four decades ago, and Bangladesh has just got around to prosecuting some leaders accused of having committed war crimes. The International Crimes Tribunal is meant to bring the accused to justice, but it also has the purpose of educating the generation that has grown up since the war, about what really happened at that time. For many, the knowledge of the Liberation War comes from stories shared within the family, but for millions of other Bangladeshis, Rai’s photographs can contribute to the growing need for information and understanding about the events of 1971.

Rai’s photographs are now published in a volume, Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom, a 116-page book with 91 photographs, with the introduction by Alam and short texts by Rai describing his two assignments during the war. Rai first went in August to document the stories of refugees, and then again in December, with the Indian army. Those two journeys are distinct—one tells the story of a human tragedy; the other of human conquest, culminating in the Pakistani army’s surrender to Indian forces and Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s triumphant return in 1972.

RAGHU RAI is an elder statesman of Indian photography. Mentored by the legendary Henri Cartier Bresson in 1977, after he joined the elite agency Magnum, Rai is known for his astonishingly intense images, for capturing the essence of drama in people’s lives, finding exceptional stories in that fraction of a second where he spots something extraordinary that the normal eye might miss. Two stand out for me: the day after Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in June 1975, Rai shot a man pushing a cycle with two children on it and a woman behind him, with scores of policemen all around. The caption said: “The situation was normal in Chandni Chowk.” In another, nearly a decade later in India Today, Rai photographed two schoolboys—a Hindu and a Sikh—with arms on each others’ shoulders, walking to school. Taken within days of Operation Bluestar, the caption expressed the hope that such would be the future of Amritsar, and the bitterness and bloodshed would be forgotten. There are other great Rai images—of Mother Teresa, of India’s great classical musicians in an inspired series with Inderjit Badhwar for India Today magazine [Disclosure: I was their colleague at that time, between 1988 and 1991.] and the haunting image of a child being buried in Bhopal, his lifeless eyes admonishing the viewer, symbolising the thousands who died in Bhopal after the methyl isocyanate leak from the Union Carbide plant in December 1984.

A Rai photograph is unique in the way it is interested in the human being—especially the eyes, as Alam points out in his essay for the book. He is able to get close to the subject and focus on the eyes, centering stories around individuals; but through this approach, his photographs suggest ways in which events affect the lives of those who have no control over larger forces.

Rai first went to witness the story of refugees from East Pakistan in August 1971. As he notes, in August “the monsoon was at its peak. The skies were deep grey and it was raining all the way. The border was not just porous, it was overflowing from all sides. The refugees with their meager belongings were pouring in ... they were drenched by the rain, suffering and fatigued. There was a kind of a silence—nobody was talking. There was nothing the others did not know.” Their lives were now lived in public; they were part of a human drama the world was meant to witness. Rai was among those who made sure it did.

What the refugees didn’t speak about was how their crops were burned (Rai shows us scorched land), their homes razed (we see shells of homes), their women raped (in a moving photograph, Rai closes in on a young woman lying on a cot, wearing a sari without a blouse, her eyes still and dry, her belly bigger than her slender frame, indicating the child she is carrying but did not want, personifying the harrowing saga of rapes during that war; by some estimates, there were more than a quarter million rapes). And even though you only see her in the photograph, you get her sense of loneliness—she is possibly shunned because the father of that child she is carrying is a Pakistani soldier. The relentless violence and humiliation the farmers and fisherfolk and boatmen faced are visible in the exhausted faces of the refugees, their wrinkles pronounced, their tears glistening.

The photographs are in black and white. Rai goes close enough to a man’s face to let you count the whiskers on his face. His camera stops near the bloodstains on a sari. The head looks up in another image, and you want to caress the wounded brow. He sharpens the focus on the human being at the centre of the image, separating him from the detritus of what remains of the possessions that he carried with him across the border. The queue of refugees shows some who are wizened, some determined, carrying their children on their shoulders, their possessions on their heads. A little boy walks, wearing only a buttonless shirt, smiling and talking to older boys, oblivious to his surroundings. They are leaving their past, walking to a different future.

Future’ and ‘safety’ lie across the river, to cross which the boatman may demand the last bag of rice the refugee is carrying. Times are bad, but business is business. There are ten million of them, overwhelming the Indian state—for some time, Tripura has more refugees than residents. They live in large pipes and in makeshift tents. Rai shows a stack of pipes, their interiors dark, except for the men who raise their heads and stare back at this odd man taking their photographs. They live on rations, forming orderly queues which go out of focus as Rai fixes the lens on the few in the front of the queue. Children are bathed, old people die, rain lashes the landscape, diseases spread easily and are fought by stubborn nurses and doctors working selflessly, round-the-clock, in the camps.

In many ways, Rai brings to life Allen Ginsberg’s haunting poem, September on Jessore Road:

Millions of babies watching the skiesBellies swollen, with big round eyesOn Jessore Road – long bamboo hutsNo place to shit but sand channel ruts Millions of fathers in rainMillions of mothers in painMillions of brothers in woeMillions of sisters nowhere to go

The lives of these “millions” are lived in the open: nothing is confidential, nothing secret. Rai witnesses it, clicks the image, preserves it, recording it for posterity.

However close to reality a photographer gets, essentially he stays aloof, detached, distinct. Susan Sontag reminds us in On Photography (1977) that while real people are out there killing other real people, the photographer remains firmly behind the camera. Non-intervention is critical. She writes: “Part of the horrors of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of the Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayonetting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where a photographer has the choice between a life and a photograph, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who records cannot intervene.”

To intervene or not is a moral choice: the veteran Newsweek correspondent Edward Behr had a point when he titled his memoir of reporting from the war in what was then Belgian Congo, Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English? (1978). For the photographer, as it is for the reporter, the story is more important than finding relief for the victim. Kevin Carter, the South African photographer who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of a starving child in Sudan crouching, bent, almost supine on the ground, while a vulture waited, took his own life a year later. And in his suicide note he wrote of how he was tormented by images of war and starvation.

There is a human narrative in the dry statistic that ten million refugees crossed the border and came to India. This book tells some of those stories. What would Sontag make of Rai’s images? To be sure, they are intrusive. To be sure, the photographer is in control, not the subject. To be sure, the subject’s narrative will now be public in a manner that Rai chooses to depict the story. And yet, Rai honours the subject, photographing her with humility, so that the hero that emerges is not the photographer, but the refugee. And this is not because Rai hasn’t tried hard—the composition is impeccable, as is the way Rai lets natural light fall on a face to illuminate it, the way he allows shadows to darken moods, and the way eyes glisten and shine in the images.

In Regarding The Pain of Others, Sontag’s 2003 book that can be seen as a follow-up to On Photography,where she continues her arguments about photography, but brings them to a closure with provocative questions, she wrote: “Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”

Wars affect everyone, but women and children bear the brunt because they are rarely among the combatants, and they face the consequences of decisions others have taken on their behalf, without asking them. Rai’s triumph lies in how well he shows the effect of war on women. There is the woman with her head covered, gnarled fingers resting on her knees, over which she places her chin. A woman carries her sole surviving pot in her right hand and the breastfeeding infant in the left, a gamchhacovering her torso. Another woman, older, sitting in a tattered palki, is being carried by two men with taut muscles. A windswept rice field with a coconut tree in the background, and an old woman walking, with her back bent at a right angle, a stick guiding her forward, her feet bare. Another girl, not yet a woman, bare-chested, stirring a pot, her hair wet. A naked child lying on the ground, between the large pipes in which families have taken shelter. And that image, of the mother holding tight her child whose ribs you can count. The child looks at the mother’s emaciated breast. The mother herself is skeletal and realises she can’t feed her child. Pathos has rarely been captured so movingly; and yet, responses vary—in Dhaka, those young men at the art gallery giggled when they saw her.

RAI Is A STORY-TELLER, who likes to focus on the human drama. If Associated Press’s Joe Rosenthal took the memorable picture of six determined soldiers valiantly raising the American flag on Mt Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, consecrating a military conquest by endowing it with patriotism, Rai shows his soldier spending a quiet moment in a village playing with a rabbit. Does that make Rai’s soldier more human? Or is this tranquil moment what the soldier needs before he can knock down the doors of collaborators’ huts, and beat the hell out of the men who have acted as informers for the Pakistani army? Rai’s photography sidesteps that question.

Rai’s great contemporary, the late Kishore Parekh, who went to the same war, and was often at the same place shooting the same people, saw the war differently. In

Bangladesh

: A Brutal Birth (1972), which collects Parekh’s photographs of the war, there are several images similar to Rai’s—but many are more brutal. Parekh’s book is now out of print, but a dedicated fan has uploaded it on the website Scribd, from where it can be downloaded free of cost. Rai shows hungry children crying out for food; Parekh shows a dead boy lying on the road, the bottom half of his body soaking in blood. Parekh’s soldiers don’t play with a rabbit; they knock down doors, beat up people, look inside the lungis of men to see if they are concealing any weapons. Rai’s Mukti Bahini guerrillas ride a cycle-rickshaw with their guns, smiling at the photographer. Parekh’s are meting out instant justice to those who helped the Pakistani army during the war. In Parekh’s universe, death is real: a crow picks at the open wounds of a dead body.

Parekh’s soldiers are loading weapons, ready to battle. Rai shows the cloud of dust that the army trucks emit as the convoy leaves for the battlefront. Both show wounded soldiers carried by their comrades; the resignation in the eyes of a Pakistani soldier who is unsure what the enemy will do to him, as he is being laid on a stretcher with Indian soldiers carrying him to a field hospital; the anxiety of an Indian jawan, being calmed by his compatriots as medics treat him. And there are ghastly images of dead bodies—adults and children, lying in ponds and along riverbeds. Faced with that finality, Rai doesn’t hesitate—he shoots. But in the way Rai has composed that specific shot, it seems as if he has paused to consider lighting, and shot the bodies with sunlight resting on their torsos, granting them some dignity as they lie in a ditch. Parekh, too, shows dead bodies, but he horrifies you by bringing you closer to a dead face, reminding the viewer that there is nothing glorious in such a death. The contrast between Rai’s vision and Parekh’s is clear: for Parekh, photography is the means to record reality, however unpalatable; for Rai, photography is imbued with a purpose, to capture the human spirit.

Rai ends triumphantly, taking us to the public surrender ceremony, where a confident General Jagjit Singh Arora strides purposefully towards the desk, alongside the Pakistani General Niazi keeping his eyes low, unable to look at the camera, trying hard not to betray any emotion. (In Parekh’s book that photograph appears only once, taken from some distance, as the men walk to the tent). Later Parekh takes us to the streets of old Dhaka, where the Mukti Bahini guerrillas have some unfinished business to deal with. Parekh is right behind them as they crouch and move stealthily towards abandoned homes from where snipers have fired, as they remain unwilling to surrender. A single shoe lies abandoned in the lower right corner of the photograph, suggesting someone escaped in a hurry. Surrender or not, we are at war.

Parekh’s book ends with a beautiful image of two boys chasing a calf in a mustard field, almost presaging Rai’s image of the Hindu and Sikh boy in Amritsar 13 years later, seeking to remind the viewer of a happier, more innocent time. A pastoral, more pleasant past will become the future; the future won’t mean an escape from the past. Parekh’s image is black-and-white and you can’t see the shining, overpowering yellow of the mustard set on a bright green field, but the sun does the trick, making the mustard shimmer even in a black-and-white image. Rai’s focus is on people, though, and his final image is of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, greeting his people from atop a flower-bedecked truck, flanked by Tajuddin Ahmed who had run the government-in-exile. Over a dozen supporters have crammed the top and the truck tries to make its way to a political rally, amid what can only be described as a sea of humanity.

There is a story in these pictures—a neat beginning, middle and end. Both Rai and Parekh witnessed the war. Parekh, more the journalist, wanted to ensure that nothing he saw would get forgotten; Rai, more the artist, wanted his pictures to tell the human story. Both chose to record, not to intervene. But what they recorded forced the world to intervene. And it is stories of such interventions—of George Harrison and Ravi Shankar packing Madison Square Garden at the Concert for Bangladesh, of the international community’s warm-hearted relief for the refugees, of the courage of Indian soldiers and Mukti Bahini warriors—that ended the tyranny the Pakistani army had unleashed.

Sontag implored her readers to react to the images they saw—to reflect, to pay attention, and to learn from the mass suffering. What caused it? Where did the responsibility lie? “Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?” she asked. Parekh’s photographs forced us to think 40 years ago; the discovery of Rai’s negatives, and indeed the publication of this volume, remind us why those questions are still relevant.

First appeared in The Washington Post, 1 May 2013

Salil Tripathi is a Contributing Editor at The Caravan. He is a columnist at Mint, and a London-based author who writes for major international newspapers

Bangladesh Needs Strong Unions, Not Outside Pressure

2013-05-01T23:23:00.002+06:00

FAZLE HASAN ABED

BANGLADESH

, my country, is again in tears. Last week in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, the capital, a poorly constructed building that housed garment factories and other businesses collapsed. More than 300 have been confirmed dead, and the final death toll could well exceed 700.

Bangladesh

is no stranger to disasters, both natural and man-made. Still, this is one of the saddest chapters since we won our independence in 1971, precisely because the tragedy could easily have been prevented. Structural weaknesses had been found but not fixed. The victims were among the most vulnerable in our society — hardworking people making an honest, but meager, living. Many died manufacturing clothing for Western brands.

I appreciate the unease a Westerner might feel knowing that the clothes on his or her back were stitched together by people working long hours in dangerous conditions. It is natural that people in richer countries are now asking how they can put pressure on Bangladesh and its manufacturers to improve the country’s dismal safety record.

But ceasing the purchase of Bangladeshi-manufactured goods, as some have suggested, would not be the compassionate course of action. Economic opportunities from the garment industry have played an important role in making social change possible in my country, with about three million women now working in the garment sector. I have dedicated my life to alleviating entrenched poverty, and I know that boycotting brands that do business in Bangladesh might only further impoverish those who most need to put food on their tables, since the foreign brands would simply take their manufacturing contracts to other countries.

The rise of manufacturing here has had good effects. In the past, for example, a poor family’s vision for a newborn daughter’s future was often to marry her off as young as possible, since the dowry paid to a husband’s family grows as a daughter gets older. Even after the dowry was outlawed in 1980, the practice continued. A girl would often be married off as young as 13, and would never leave her village, never know a brighter future for herself or her children.

Partly because many women and their daughters now take garment industry jobs — even in factories where workers’ rights are virtually nonexistent — families living in poverty have changed their vision of the future. More have acquired long-term goals, like educating their sons and daughters, saving and taking microloans to start new businesses, and building and maintaining more sanitary living spaces.

Many outsiders think only of calamity when they hear the word Bangladesh — of factory fires, cyclones, floods and poverty. But the true Bangladesh is also the birthplace of microfinance and home to a robust civil society. It has seen rapid gains in living standards: maternal mortality is one-quarter of what it was in 1990; early childhood mortality is one-fifth of what it was in 1980, and we have eliminated the gender gap in primary and secondary school enrollment.

These remarkable gains will mean little if we allow tragedies like the one at Savar to continue. The law must work for everyone, rich and poor, landless laborer and factory owner alike. We must not allow those who benefit from the exploitation of the vulnerable to continue to treat life so cheaply.

What, then, is the solution? The changes must come first from Bangladesh itself. My country will require new political will to hold accountable those who willingly put human lives at such grave risk. It will also require the support of factory owners; civil society organizations, including my own; and the private sector, including Western buyers.

The solutions start with the workers themselves; they must be allowed by their employers to unionize, so they can engage in collective bargaining and hold their employers responsible for basic standards of pay and safety. Their organized power is the only thing that can stand up to the otherwise unaccountable nexus of business owners and politicians, who are often one and the same.

Western buyers, instead of squeezing factory owners on price, should finance better safety standards. The point needs to be made in the marketplace overseas that safety improvements are not so expensive that they can be used as an excuse for raising prices to the consumer. And consumers who are shocked by the working conditions need to realize that a playing field where the price tag is the only standard for a purchase is not a level one when workers’ lives are at stake.

At the same time, the owners themselves cannot be let off the hook, for there is no excuse for criminal negligence. But they cannot be trusted to voluntarily do all that they might. In a country with 100,000 factories in and near the capital, and three million workers in its garment industry, an inspection force numbering 18 people only invites unconscionable lapses on the part of unscrupulous employers. The inspection force must be increased drastically, and it must vigorously enforce safety standards.

The government, finally, must stop neglecting worker safety issues, even as it steps up enforcement. But that will be extremely difficult to accomplish as long as there is an unholy web of employers and politicians colluding to avoid responsibility for criminal negligence; that, in the end, is what trapped thousands of workers in the flimsy factory building that collapsed on them in Savar. Those workers cannot be forgotten until these issues are resolved.

“Made in Bangladesh” should be a mark of pride, not shame. Bangladeshi civil society stands ready to work with the authorities to make this so. In the 1970s, during the early years of my country’s nationhood, Bangladesh was suffused with the energy of the struggle for independence, a yearning for freedom from exploitation. From this energy came microfinance, community health work, and other social innovations that, combined with new economic opportunities in export industries like textiles, have transformed the lives of tens of millions of poor people, particularly women.

Today I grieve with my fellow countrymen, but I also raise my voice to say that this must not continue. As we mourn our losses, let us rekindle that spirit of liberation.

Article first appeared in the New York Times, United States, April 29, 2013

Fazle Hasan Abed, winner of prestigious international awards is the founder and chairman of the antipoverty organization BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

Fast, Cheap, Dead: Shopping and the Bangladesh Factory Collapse

2013-05-01T15:03:00.000+06:00

Photo: Wong Maye-E, AP

BRYAN WALSH

The collapse of a factory building near Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed at least 362 people, is almost certainly the worst accident in the history of the garment industry. It’s worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that you learned about in American history class and which helped lead to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. It’s worse than the 1993 Kader Toy Factory fire in Bangkok, which killed 188 people, nearly all of them women and teenage girls. It’s worse than the Ali Enterprises Factory fire in Karachi, which killed at least 262 people — and which I’m guessing nearly all of us had forgotten about, or never knew it occurred, even though the disaster happened only eight months ago.

Bangladeshi officials are still investigating the causes behind the factory’s collapse on April 24, although Sohel Rana, the building’s owner, was arrested over the weekend as he attempted to flee the country. There’s no shortage of possible reasons — building codes in Bangladesh are too rarely enforced and corruption in the country is rampant. Nor, sadly, are such disasters rare. A major fire in a textile factory in Dhaka killed over 100 people just last November. While thousands of Bangladeshi protesters have taken to the streets in the wake of the building collapse, and the political opposition has called for a national strike on May 2, there’s little hope that the catastrophe will be the last that the country’s garment workers suffer.

The clothes that the doomed workers in Dhaka were laboring over when their factory collapsed include some Western brands, like Primark and Joe Fresh. Is there anything we as clothing consumers can or should do about these deaths? In a post written last week as the dead were still being tallied in the building collapse, Slate’s economics blogger Matthew Yglesias suggests, not really:

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody. The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine. American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.

Yglesias was raked over the coals by, as he put it in a later piece, just about the entire Internet. (This one was particularly good.) Yglesias was guilty of, at the very least, bad taste — the economic wonkery can wait until the dead have been counted. He makes the neoliberal point, just as the sweatshop defenders did during the Nike Wars of the 1990s, that Bangladesh’s low, low cost of doing business has helped the country take needed textile jobs — including from China — and build an $18 billion manufacturing industry. But there’s a difference between accepting that workers are being paid sweatshop wages to make our incredibly inexpensive clothes — the minimum wage is $36.50 a month — and accepting that they must labor in deathtraps. And they do: according to the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group in Washington, more than 1,000 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in fires and other disasters.

Even Yglesias backtracked later, emphasizing that there are on-the-ground improvements that can be made to labor standards in Bangladesh that could mean the difference between life and death. (See this interview with Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Center for Global Development for a few ideas.) And those improvements shouldn’t drastically increase the cost of clothes made in Bangladesh — which is a good thing, given our addiction to cheap and fast-changing fashion:

“It bothers me, but a lot of retailers are getting their clothes from these places and I can’t see how I can change anything,” 21-year-old university student Elizabeth McNail said, clutching a brown paper bag from clothier Primark the day after a building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, killed at least 362 people. “They definitely need to improve, but I’ll still shop here. It’s so cheap.”

International retailers can do more to advocate safer standards at textile factories that manufacture their wares, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Customers can do their part by putting a little pressure on their favorite brands, though that would require placing as much value on the cost of a life as you might on the cost of a T-shirt.

First appeared in the TIME magazine, April 29, 2013

Sadly, Bangladesh Simply Cannot Afford Rich World Safety And Working Standards

2013-04-29T23:33:00.000+06:00

People rescue garment workers trapped at a building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday, April 25.

TIM WORSTALL

The horrible disaster in Bangladesh, where hundreds lost their lives as a shoddy building collapsed onto the various workforces, forces us to face an unpleasant truth. Bangladesh simply isn’t rich enough to be able to have the same safety and working standards as those we enjoy in the rich countries.

There are many who disagree with this of course. Reuters has a report on some of them:

Kalpona Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, is traveling with Abedin on a 12-state tour in the United States. They are demanding fair compensation from Wal-Mart and a legally binding agreement from manufacturers to ensure fire and building safety and worker rights. “This is a pattern of gross negligence on the part of multinational corporations,” Akter said. “They know what is happening, but they are not stopping it.”

The proposed answer seems to be that the buyers of the goods from these factories must make sure that said factories are safe, that everyone is properly paid, that they’re enforcing high standards and so on.

To which there are two responses I’d make. The first is that this is all a bit colonial really, isn’t it? Bangladesh does have a government, they do have laws about who can work where, for how long, how much they should be paid and so on. They also have building codes, building inspectors and all the rest. It really is a colonial attitude to insist that the locals cannot work these things out for themselves and that they must have some set of foreign rules imposed upon them. In a certain light we can even say that it appears racist to some extent. Poor brown people just aren’t good enough at this governance stuff so we enlightened ones will have to do it for them.

However, whatever your opinion of that idea, there’s another much stronger argument. Bangladesh just isn’t rich enough to support the sort of worker safety laws that we have ourselves. As Kindred Winecoff points out here:

But neither is this the best time to completely denounce neoliberalism or engage in the sort of extreme wishful thinking through which it is suggested that Bangladesh could (or even should) have levels of labor protection equivalent to the U.S. That is quite literally impossible: Bangladesh’s GDP per capita is about $2,000 per year. Taken together, U.S.-level unemployment protections, retirement accounts, safety regulations, and other programs which benefit labor are more costly than that. So it’s impossible.

Even if the entire economy were devoted to nothing but providing equal labour provisions, the

standards to Bangladeshi workers, there still wouldn’t be enough money to actually bring Bangladeshi standards up to US ones. And that’s even if the entire economy were devoted to it: no one gets any income or food or anything else while we do so. So clearly it’s impossible for there to be equal standards currently.

The sad truth of it all is that such standards will improve in Bangladesh for exactly the same reasons they did in the UK and US a century and more ago. For exactly the same reason they are improving in China right now. As people become richer they take some of that new wealth not in pure cash. But in all those other things like shorter working hours (and thus more leisure), safer workplaces, unemployment protections and the rest. These are the products of wealth.

Which means that all of us who would like to see those conditions improve, and yes of course I include myself in that number, should be cheering on the export led growth of that Bangladeshi economy. For it is indeed that which will lead to those better working conditions that all desire.

Which leads us to the question of how to aid that economy in growing: the most obvious would be to deliberately go and buy those textile products made in that economy. The more that sector sells the richer the country and the workers will be. The richer the country and the workers the better working conditions will become. For as my boss at the Adam Smith Institute, Madsen Pirie, repeatedly points out, the best way of alleviating poverty is to buy things made by poor people in poor countries.

First appeared on Forbes.com, 28 April 2013

Tim Worstall, a Forbes contributor and writes on business and technology. Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.

Bangladesh factory disaster: How culpable are Western companies?

2013-04-29T13:15:00.000+06:00

Photo: Paul Hackett/Reuters: A Primark clothing shop in central London on April 25, 2013. U.K. clothing retailer Primark, which has 257 stores across Europe and is a unit of Associated British Foods, confirmed that one of its suppliers occupied the second floor of a building that collapsed in Bangladesh killing at least 370 workers

BRIAN MONTOPOLI / CBS NEWS

The horrible collapse of a garment factory building in Bangladesh has renewed questions over whether Western companies should be held accountable for lax safety standards in the factories where their products are made. Below, we get you up to speed on the debate.

First off, what's the latest?

The news keeps getting worse. Two days after the collapse, the death toll is now above 300; some workers remain trapped beneath the wreckage, with rescuers working frantically to save them - sometimes cutting off limbs to get people free. While officials say that 2,200 people have been rescued, the Associated Press has reports the "smell of decaying bodies" amid the wails of workers' relatives at the scene, and the death toll is expected to rise. More than 3,000 people worked at the site.

Could the tragedy have been avoided?

Absolutely. Police ordered the building evacuated the day before the collapse, after workers reported cracks in the structure. But authorities said the building owner assured factory owner required the workers to come to work despite the order.

Al Jazeera reports that thousands of protesting workers have clashed with police since the collapse. Police firing tear gas and rubber bullets to keep protesters at bay. One deputy police chief said workers are demanding the arrest and execution of the owner of the building - who has reportedly gone into hiding - and those who owned the factories it contained. Some protesters have set fire to factories and smashed vehicles.

Has anything like this happened before in Bangladesh?

Based on calculations by the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group, more than 900 people have died in factory fires in Bangladesh since 2005. In November, more than 100 people were killed in a fire at a factory that was producing clothes for Wal-Mart, Disney and other Western companies. Workers said the exit doors to the factory, which had lost its fire safety certification months earlier, were locked and bolted, prompting some to leap to their deaths from the burning building. In January, seven workers died at another factory fire in the country, amid reports that the emergency exit was locked from the outside. It was just one of dozens of fires since the 2005 tragedy.

Why Bangladesh?

Because it's a cheap place to make clothes. The country's minimum wage is roughly $38 per month - as the BBC reported last year, China has turned to Bangladesh for manufacturing as its labor costs have risen.

Garment manufacturing is a crucial component to the country's economy: More than 4,000 garment factories generate 80 percent of Bangladesh's exports, worth about $20 billion per year. The nation is among the biggest exporter of garments in the world, with most going to the United States and Europe.

Government officials have pledged to improve worker safety, but they are also skittish about taking steps that would increase production costs and potentially result in the industry moving somewhere even cheaper. According to Human Rights Watch, there are just 18 inspectors monitoring thousands of factories in the Shaka district, the center of the industry. The group also said that factory owners - a powerful force in Bagladesh, with ties to government officials - are usually given advanced notice before an inspection.

Those factory owners, meanwhile, face pressure not to slow or cease operations when there are safety issues because they face pressure to fill orders from Western retailers by strict deadlines. That pressure has been exacerbated since the start of February by ongoing strikes, protests and violence which, the Financial Times reports, has effectively shut down transportation routes.

"Working conditions in Bangladesh are poor, as many plants operate on an illegal basis without having a license and clearance from the fire department," the European Union said in calling for improved working conditions in February. "Western retailers already criticized the conditions of the Bangladeshi garment plants for not complying with safety rules, but the major Western brands still place orders."

Was there any progress after earlier tragedies?

Not much, at least as far as workers' advocates are concerned. After the January fire, the country ordered that all its factories be inspected and insisted that the owners stop locking exit doors. But the tragedies have not prompted major reforms by the Bangladeshi government.

Frustrated by a lack of action by the government, worker advocates have pressured the companies importing the garments to take steps to make workers safer. One proposal, called The Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement, would create a legally binding and rigorous independent inspection and oversight system. It would also allow workers to refuse to work in dangerous conditions. (Efforts to unionize workers in Bangladesh have largely been met with hostility or worse; last year labor rights activist Aminul Islam was tortured and murdered.) Inspections would be funded by as much as $500,000 per year from each company.

But only two companies have signed onto the agreement, short of the four necessary for it to take effect. Wal-Mart, Gap, H&M, JCP, Abercrombie and Kohl's are among the companies that have refused to sign on, instead taking their own steps to address worker safety. (The companies that have signed on are Tchibo, a German retailer, and PVH Corp., which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger.)

Gap announced in March that it would spend up to $22 million to improve safety at its factories in Bangladesh, and it has hired its own indipendent fire inspectors in the country. Bill Chandler, Head of Public Affairs for Gap Inc., told CBSNews.com it "did not have a business relationship with any of [the] factories in the building that collapsed this week."

"Nonetheless, Gap Inc. takes our commitment to improving working conditions in Bangladesh seriously," he said, adding: "To see tragedies like this become a thing of the past, it will take a collective effort of all retailers, all stakeholders, the U.S. government and the Bangladeshi government to significantly improve the working conditions in this country."

Wal-Mart said in January that it would cease working with contractors that use unsafe practices, and recently vowed to spend $1.8 million to train factory managers in Bangladesh about fire safety. "We are saddened by this tragic event," the company said in a statement to CBSNews.com. "...We remain committed to promoting stronger safety measures in factories and that work continues."

Advocates say private audits and other efforts by these companies has done little to improve the situation. "Global companies and consumers profit from cheap labor in Bangladesh, but do little to demand the most basic and humane conditions for those who toil on their behalf," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "It is time for companies to say that they will take no clothes from companies that do not meet minimum standards."

One complicating factor in oversight is the fact that owners often use subcontractors to produce garments. Wal-Mart said that while its "investigation has confirmed Walmart had no authorized production in this facility," it will act if it learns there was production through subcontracting, saying it has a "zero-tolerence policy" for unauthorized subcontracting. The New York Times reported that activists searching the rubble have found tags and documents suggesting that production for Mango and Benetton, among other companies, though those brands are distancing themselves from the disaster. (The maker of Joe Fresh and Irish retailer Primark have admitted to using the facility.)

Advocates hope that the latest tragedy will spur companies to increase their efforts to keep workers safe. There is speculation that the latest tragedy and the ongoing strikes and violence will spur companies to move manufacturing away from Bangladesh. But that could simply shift the fundamental problem elsewhere in what critics call a "race to the bottom" by global brands.

"How many more workers have to die," said Stott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium, "before these corporations are willing to take the steps necessary to put an end to this parade of horror?"

First published in CBSNEWS, USA, April 26, 2013

Cheap clothes have helped fuel social revolution in Bangladesh

2013-04-28T14:18:00.002+06:00

Photo Saleem Samad: Women work at a garment factory in Bangladesh, earning about $37.50 per month.

STEPHANIE NOLEN in New Delhi

The news that Joe Fresh sourced clothes from a factory in a building that collapsed outside Dhaka this week – killing at least 300 workers and injuring as many as 1,000 more – brought the price of cheap fashion into sharp focus for Canadians.

The immediate reaction of many was to vow to boycott the store, an understandable response.

But I’m not sure it’s the best one.

Yes, Bangladesh’s garment industry is ridden with appalling labour practices. The fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory in November that left charred piles of young women’s bodies heaped at the fire exits – which were locked – reminded us of that. I’ve visited factories that were so dimly lit the workers stitched Gap-bound shorts hunched over, squinting at the seams. I’ve seen factories where the windows were sealed and the industrial fumes were strangulating. The workers, mostly women, sewing clothes for H&M and Nautica and all the other stores in the West make a few dollars a day, working 12-hour days. A despairing friend who says she struggles to pay the price of Canadian-made clothes, or shop only at the Maritime second-hand chain Frenchy’s, asked me this week if she had to “go naked” in order not to feel guilty.

But our cheap clothes have helped fuel a social and economic revolution in Bangladesh, and Bangladeshis do not want that to end.

Pressure from buyers works. Clients have pushed factories in Dhaka – and in Kampala and Maseru and other places where I’ve reported on the garment industry – to improve labour and safety standards. Not great – they wouldn’t meet Canadian standards. But they’re safer, and factory owners are constantly forced to reexamine.

Companies such as Nike and the Gap, high-profile bands that have been targets of movements like the Clean Clothes Campaign, have been forced to take an active interest in how their clothes are produced, and the factories that make them are correspondingly better than the ones that sew for brands that do not audit.

Two European brands that sourced from the building that collapsed this week were subject to close monitoring. The auditors had approved the working conditions – but it was not part of their brief to check the building. And the structure, we now know, was built without permits or inspections and on unstable ground. So this needs to be factored into expanded audit parameters.

The Bangladeshi state is weak – so is any state that has to rely such poorly paid jobs to build its economy – and the building owner is wealthy and politically connected. Of course, he didn’t have to have the factories inspected. The state will not enforce safety, but you as a consumer can demand it.

Is that better than boycotting the “Made in Bangladesh” label? In Dhaka not long ago, I spent the day in a slum called Korail, where I met many young women who work in the factories. Mini Akhtan makes $65 a month working 72 hours a week, sewing shorts and pyjamas bound for malls in Canada and the United States. She hates the fact that her mother is raising her five-year-old son, whom she sees only on Friday afternoons.

But Ms. Akhtan and her friends gave off a palpable sense that their life is different than it was five years ago – and a certainty that it will be quite different five years from now than it is today. Will they be rich? No. But maybe their kids will be at the private school. They will have saved enough from working at the garment factory to move back to the village and start a small shop. Or to buy a plane ticket to Bahrain to spend a few hard years doing construction work – and come back with savings to really shake things up. Ms. Akhtan is the first person in her family ever to have a formal job; her son, she said with total confidence, will be an engineer.

I asked her to show me the room she shares with her husband – it was small and wickedly hot. But it had electricity to power their one bulb and their fan. They share a piped water stand with six other families, and a latrine and a shower stand too.

And that’s another thing about the garment factories. They account for 75 per cent of Bangladesh’s exports. And Bangladesh is making massive inroads against poverty. It started from the nadir, so it still has low literacy, poor health indicators, high corruption. But maternal mortality has been cut in half in a decade. Ninety-five per cent of kids get their vaccinations.

On every development indicator, Bangladesh is trouncing India – even though India’s economy is growing twice as fast – and a big part of the reason is that women are driving Bangladesh’s growth. The garment factories have a mostly female work force (out of the sexist conviction that they are more biddable and better with fine handiwork like sewing.) Women with jobs and income get a bigger voice in their family decisions; their children go to school, get vaccinated. In India’s boom, almost no women have joined the work force – and you do not see as much social progress as you do across the border.

Bangladesh

’s garment zone can seem like a hellhole, and no one who shops at Joe Fresh would want Mini Akhtan’s job for five minutes. But you can call Joe Fresh today and demand that they audit their producers for safety and for working conditions. You can demand to know what their producers’ relations are with Bangladesh’s struggling labour unions. You can tell Joe Fresh that if they are going after your business, they need to have a direct relationship with a supplier – not outsource to a third party so they get plausible deniability. Demand to see those safety audits, every quarter, posted on their website, right beside the sale on $6 shorts.

And get involved with Clean Clothes or a similar campaign working to shed light on that consumer chain. You don’t have to go naked. You can do more for Mini Akhtan and her family by buying “Made in Bangladesh,” and finding out how much the worker who made your shorts was paid.

First published in The Globe and Mail, Canada, April 27 2013

Bangladesh Islamist: Bad moon rising

2013-04-26T00:31:00.000+06:00

The Shahbag protests in Dhaka, which were held recently to condemn Bengali Islamists' collaboration with the Pakistani Army in 1971, have found both allies and critics in India's West Bengal region. Ironically, the Indian state is exploiting the anti-Shahbag narrative - led by Islamist forces within India - to earn brownie points with what it sees as a valuable minority. But at what cost?

GARGA CHATTERJEE

1971 is still fresh in the mind of many Bengalis from the West, when a massive relief and solidarity effort was undertaken on our side of the border to help a mass of humanity trying to escape what has been described variously as "civil war" and "genocide". The leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami in East Bengal and its student wing organized murder and rape squads, at times in collaboration with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Their specific crimes included mass-murder, rape as a weapon of war, arson and forced conversions. They escaped prosecution because Bangladeshi generals used them to cast an Islamic veneer of legitimacy over their illegal capture of power. In this way the JI was gradually rehabilitated.

But then the present Awami League-led government came to power, and its manifesto promised the trial of war criminals. Thus started the proceedings against the collaborator mullahs in the War Crimes Tribunal. Last month's Shahbag protests were held to demand maximum punishment for the guilty.

In West Bengal, which is in India, a few meetings and assemblies have happened around the issue of Shahbag. However, to the shock and dismay of many, the largest of these assemblies was a massive rally held in central Kolkata's Shahid Minar on 30th March, explicitly against the Shahbag protests and in support of the war criminals convicted by the tribunal. Various Muslim groups, including the All Bengal Minority Council, All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, Madrassa Students Union, Milli Ittehad Council and Sunnat-ul-Jamaat Committee, convened the meeting. People had also arrived in buses and trucks from distant districts of West Bengal like Murshidabad and Nadia, in additional to those from the adjoining districts of North and South 24 Parganas, Haora and Hooghly. Students of madrassas and the newly minted Aliah Madrassa University were conspicuous at the gathering.

They rallied because "Islam is in danger" in Bangladesh. Never mind that post-1947, that part of the world through all its forms (East Bengal, East Pakistan, People's Republic of Bangladesh) has seen a continuous drop in the population percentage of religious minorities, in every census since 1951.This rallying cry is not new. It was heard in 1952 when the motherland language movement was in full swing; in 1954 when the United Front led by Fazlul Haq and Maulana Bhashani challenged the Muslim League; in 1969 when the Awami League made its 6 demands; and in 1971 when Bengalees fought for independence. Now this demand is being made in the context of Shahbag in 2013. The pattern shows that 'Islam in danger' comes up during every secular movement for rights and justice. One of the main accused in the war-crimes trial, Golam Azam (also the leader of the Jamaat in East Pakistan in 1971), had used this old trick in the hat when he stated in 1971: "The supporters of the so-called Bangladesh Movement are the enemies of Islam, Pakistan, and Muslims." Replace 'Bangladesh' with 'Shahbag' and 'Pakistan' with 'Bangladesh', and you have the latest slogan.

Describing the struggle in Bangladesh as one between "Islam and Shaitan" (Satan), the Indian Muslim protestors announced at the meeting that they would cleanse West Bengal of those who were trying to support the present Prime Minister of Bangladesh and the war-crime trial effort. It was also threatened that those political forces that support Shahbag would be "beaten with broomsticks" if they came to ask for votes from Muslims. For effect they added that, just like Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie, Sheikh Hasina too will be kept out of Kolkata. They also endorsed the anti-Shahbag "movement" in Bangladesh. This last assertion is especially worrisome as the so-called movement has let loose its fury on the religious minorities of Bangladesh. It has resulted in a wave of violent attacks on Hindus, Buddhists and secular individuals, with wanton burning and destruction of Hindu and Buddhist homes, businesses and places of worship. Amnesty International communique mentioned attacks on over 40 Hindu temples as of 6th March. The number is over 100 now and still rising.

Given the recent trends of politics in West Bengal, this large gathering and its pronouncements are not shocking. The writing has been on the wall for a while. A collapse in the Muslim vote of the Left Front is an important factor in its recent demise after more than three decades of uninterrupted rule. Various Muslim divines like Twaha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif have explicitly pointed out that decline as a point of threat to the present government. The Trinamool Congress wants to ensure a continued slice of this vote. The present government has tried to hand out sops to build a class of Muslim "community leaders" who eat out of its hand by giving monthly stipends to imams and muezzins. Very recently it was decided that such a cash scheme might be worked out for Muslim widows too. Given that it is beyond the ability of the debt-ridden, visionless government to solve the problems that are common to the poor, it has cynically chosen to woo a section of the marginalized on the basis of religion using handouts. These are excellent as speech-making points that masquerade as empathy and social justice. But it is dangerous politics to say the least. It sets into motion currents and gives fillip to forces whose trajectories are beyond the control of the present political groups. The Left Front's political fortune has not improved after its humiliating defeat. It has cynically chosen not to oppose this communal turn to West Bengal's politics, for it too believes that silently waiting for the incumbent to falter is a better roadmap to power.

The damage such tactics are doing to the state's political culture is immense and may well be irreparable. The incumbent's connivance and the opposition's silence are largely due to decades of erosion in the culture of democratic political contestation through grassroots organizing. Both the incumbent and the opposition parties deal with West Bengal's sizeable minority population primarily via intermediaries, often doing away with any pretense of political ideology while indulging in that transaction.

For their part, organizations owing allegiance to a particular brand of political Islam have exploited this disconnect fully. An emerging bloc of Islamist divines and ex-student leaders have amassed students at short notice and launched protests to influence government policy. Such blackmailing is hardly aimed at uplifting the living standards of West Bengal's Muslims. Rather, it is a show of brute force that began with the successful driving-out of writer Taslima Nasreen during the Left Front regime. Its most recent example was the governmental pressure that managed to keep Salman Rushdie out of a proposed literary event in Kolkata, after he had successfully done such events in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai. This slow pushing of the envelope fits into a sequence of events that are increasingly stifling the freedom of expression in India. At the same time, its double standards are explicit. On March 21st, a medium-sized group consisting of small magazine publishers, human rights workers, theatre artists, women's organizations and peace activists had announced that they would march in solidarity with the Shahbag protests and express their support to the Bangladesh government's war crimes trial initiative by marching to the Deputy High Commission of Bangladesh. Even after it had obtained prior intimation, the rally was not allowed to move by the police due to "orders" and some of the marchers were detained. The same police provided security cover to pro-Jamaat-e-Islami organizations as they conducted their rally a month earlier, and again later when they submitted a memorandum to the same Deputy High Commission demanding acquittal of convicted war criminals. Last year the state issued a circular to public libraries to stock a sectarian daily even before its first issue had been published!

The role of the state is explicit in these actions - it thinks it can play this game of brinksmanship with finesse. The flight of cultural capital from India is but a natural corollary of such unholy alliances, with the political class playing tactical spectators and enablers.

The recent bye-election to Jangipur, a Muslim majority constituency, carried certain signals. Prompted by the elevation of Mr. Mukherjee to India's Presidency, this election saw the combined vote of the two main parties fall from 95% in 2009 to 78% in 2012. The major beneficiaries were the Welfare Party of India, a thinly veiled front organization of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the Social Democratic Party of India, an even more radical group of a similar ilk. Such groups are armed with a program of "tactical pluralism" (which is, it has to be said, akin to the tactical defence of Taslima Nasreen's freedom of speech by majoritarian communal political forces in the Indian Union). The rallying against Shahbag has blown the cover of faux pluralism.

Communal tension in India has grown in recent years. There has, for instance, been serious disturbance by West Bengal standards in Deganga and Noliakhali. The majoritarian forces smell a subterranean polarization of the polity. Mouthing banalities about Bengal's "intrinsically" plural culture is useless: culture is a living entity, something that is always in flux, created and recreated every moment. At present it is being recreated by the victimization discourse of fringe groups like Hindu Samhati. And it is being recreated in religious congregations in parts of West Bengal where unalloyed poison produced by divines like Tarek Monawar Hossain from Bangladesh is played on loudspeakers. Thanks to technology, such vitriol produced in a milieu of free-style majoritarian muscle-flexing in Bangladesh easily finds its way to a place where the demographic realities are different. Hence the popularity and consequent defence of one of the convicted war criminals, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, who in his post-71 avatar had become something of a superstar in the Bengali waz-mahfil (Islamic religious discourse congregation) circuit. What are the effects of the subterranean cultural exchange of this kind? Well, one of them is a Holocaust-like denialism, evident in the audacious defence of Sayedee as proclaimed loudly at the recent rally in West Bengal.

First published in The Friday Times, April 19-25, 2013 - Vol. XXV, No. 10

Bangladesh is divided over justice for victims of past massacres

2013-04-23T23:43:00.000+06:00

SHASHI THAROOR

The sea of humanity besieging the Shahbag area in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, for the last two months, has had an unusual demand – unusual, at least, when it comes to the Indian subcontinent. The demonstrators have been clamoring for justice for the victims of the genocidal massacres of 1971 that led to the former East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan.

The demonstrations have been spontaneous, disorganized and chaotic, but also impassioned and remarkably peaceful. Many of the several thousand demonstrators at Shahbag are too young to have had any personal experience of the killings that marked the Pakistani army’s brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to suppress the fledgling independence movement. But they are animated by an ideal – the profound conviction that complicity in mass murder should not go unpunished, and that justice is essential for Bangladeshi society’s four-decade-old wounds to heal fully.

What is curious about this development is that the subcontinent has preferred to forget the injustices that have scarred its recent history. A million people lost their lives in the savagery of the subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan, and 13 million more were displaced, most of them forcibly. But not one person was ever charged with a crime, much less tried and punished.

An estimated million more were massacred in Bangladesh in 1971, and only this year have some of the perpetrators’ local allies been tried. Almost every year, somewhere on the subcontinent, riots, often politically instigated, claim dozens – sometimes hundreds and occasionally thousands – of lives in the name of religion, sect, or ethnicity. Again, investigations are conducted and reports are written, but no one is ever brought before the bar of justice.

To paraphrase the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin: The intentional killing of one person is murder, but that of a hundred, a thousand, or a million is merely a grim statistic.

The idealism of Bangladesh’s young demonstrators, however, points to a new development. The outpouring of emotion evident at Shahbag was provoked by a decision of an international criminal tribunal convened by the government. The tribunal, which tries cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, found a prominent member of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, guilty of complicity in the killings of 300 people, but gave him a relatively light sentence of 15 years in prison (prosecutors had sought the death penalty).

By demanding severe punishment for those guilty of war crimes – not the Pakistani Army, long gone, but their local collaborators in groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Badar, Al-Shams and the Razakar irregulars – the protesters are also implicitly describing the society in which they wish to live: secular, pluralist and democratic.

These words are enshrined in Bangladesh’s constitution, which simultaneously declares the republic to be an Islamic state. While some see no contradiction, the fact that many of the collaborators who killed secular and pro-democracy Bengalis in 1971 claimed to be doing so in the name of Islam points to an evident tension.

If any proof of this clash of values were needed, it came in the form of a counter-demonstration against the Shahbag movement led by activists of the fundamentalist Islamic movement Hifazat-e-Islam, which occupied the capital’s Motijheel area. Unlike the Shahbag events, the counter demonstration was well-planned and organized, and conveyed the stark message that there was an alternative point of view in this overwhelmingly Muslim country.

The bearded, skull-cap-wearing protesters shouted in unison their agreement with speakers who denounced the International Crimes Tribunal. Their supporters include activists of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami-Bangladesh, which has fought alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The debate between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy is not a new one on the subcontinent. But the issue of justice for the crimes of 1971 has brought the divide into sharp relief. The Shahbag protesters reject Islamic extremists’ influence in Bangladesh, and even call for organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami to be banned, while Hifazat-e-Islam and its supporters want the country’s liberal forces repressed, secularist bloggers arrested, and strict Islamism imposed on Bangladeshi society.

The young people at Shahbag are mainly urban, educated and middle class; Hifazat derives its support mainly from the rural poor. Traditional versus modern, urban versus rural, intellectuals versus the peasantry: these divisions are the stuff of political cliche. But, all too often, cliches become established because they are true.

The Bangladeshi government’s sympathies are closer to the Shahbag protesters than to the Hifazat counter-demonstrators. But it must navigate a difficult path, because both points of view have significant public support. The authorities have even taken steps to appease the Islamists by arresting four bloggers for their posts. But the government remains resolute in its support for the international tribunal.

The irony is that true religion is never incompatible with justice. But when justice is sought for the crimes of those who claim to be acting in the name of religion, the terms of the debate change. The issue then becomes one that has been avoided in Bangladesh for too long: whether claiming to act according to the requirements of piety provides an exemption for murder.

The outcome of the standoff in Dhaka should provide an answer in

Bangladesh

, and its implications could reverberate far and wide.

First published in the print edition of The Daily Star, Lebanon, April 23, 2013

Shashi Tharoor is India’s minister of state for human resource development. His most recent book is “Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.”