“Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world.” — Archimedes, 220 BC.
On November 10, 1987 a young Bangladeshi man named Nur Hossain was shot and killed by the forces of Bangladesh’s part-time poet and full time dictator General Hossain Mohammad Ershad. On that day Nur Hossain had joined thousands of other Bangladeshis in protesting the dictator’s rule. The protesters demanded a return to democracy. Nur Hossain stood out amongst the protesters. He had the Bengali words “Sairachar nipat jak” painted in bright white letters on his bare chest, and the words “Ganatantra mukti pak” painted on his back. “Down with autocracy” on his chest; “Let there be democracy” on his back. He died for those demands and became a martyr for the democracy movement in Bangladesh.
This morning I received an email from Dr. David King. Dr. King is a lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. As ShadaKalo reported in his excellent post last night, General Moeen U Ahmed attended Dr. King’s class on Election Reform on Monday. The class consisted of 9 of Dr. King’s students.
General Moeen U Ahmed denies taking approximately Taka 1 crore loan.
Puts the loan amount at Taka 35 lakh.
Claims he is a victim of “internet propaganda.”
Prospectus issued by Trust Bank itself contradicts Moeen.
[Mashuqur Rahman,USA.]
Since my post two days ago regarding General Moeen U Ahmed’s tenure as chairman of Trust Bank, General Moeen has responded to the concerns raised by me and others in the Bangladeshi blogosphere by giving a series of interviews to various television, radio and print journalists.
Today General Moeen’s response has been covered by every major Bangladeshi newspaper. General Moeen’s denial and the many interviews he has given surprised me. The blanket coverage in Bangladeshi papers was also surprising. I am sure Bangladeshi readers are confused since this may be the first time they are hearing about the Trust Bank issue since no papers have ever covered it. They must be wondering what General Moeen is responding to.
General Moeen U Ahmed refused by the Kennedy School of Government.
Bangladesh Bank regulations breach: Brother appointed MD of Trust Bank.
Taka 99,69,215 loan raises serious questions.
Photo: General Moeen Uddin Ahmed.
[Mashuqur Rahman,USA.]
The head of Bangladesh’s military government, General Moeen U Ahmed, is coming to America. He is accompanied by the Air force chief Air Marshal S M Ziaur Rahman and by the other man instrumental in the January coup, Lieutenant General Masududdin Chowdhury. Last week Bangladesh’s Navy chief was also visiting the United States. It seems like the entire ruling junta is coming to America.
General Moeen, for his part, will be visiting Harvard University on October 21. I am told that the General wanted to speak at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) but wanted to restrict questions. Harvard refused. So, instead, the General will be speaking to a class rather than in a KSG sponsored public event.
Video: War of Bangladesh, Video Montage. Via YouTube.
[Mashuqur Rahman,USA.]
In September Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad delivered a speech at Columbia University amidst much protest. The protests stemmed from his views on the Holocaust. Under questioning Ahmedinejad conceded that the Holocaust had indeed happened, but he was calling for further “research” to “approach the topic from different perspectives.” In doing so, Ahmedinejad was engaging in the modern form of Holocaust Denial. Ahmedinejad’s “different perspectives” were on display last year when he called for a conference on the Holocaust. At the time, his spokesman declared, “I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated.”
Modern Holocaust Denial has three key elements. The Deniers argue that the Nazis did not kill five to six million Jews; that the Nazis did not have a systematic policy of killing Jews; and, that the genocide was not carried out in extermination camps. Ahmedinejad and others call for further “research” to investigate one or more of these key elements. Their goal is to diminish the genocide by, first, questioning its extent and then by arguing that whatever killings took place were part of the normal savagery of war and not as a result of any systematic campaign by the Nazis. Holocaust Denial is anti-Semitism in the cloak of “scholarship.” Over a half century after perhaps the most well-documented act of genocide in the history of mankind, Holocaust Deniers still persist in trying to diminish its horrors.
Holocaust Denial is an example of the phenomenon of genocide denial that crops up to challenge almost every accepted case of genocide. The genocide committed by the Pakistan army during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 is no exception. Because of the scale of the atrocities in 1971 against a civilian population of 70 million people it has proved impossible for genocide deniers to claim that the atrocities did not occur. Instead, they have focused on two tactics used to try to deny the Holocaust: that the scale of the genocide was not that great, and that the Pakistan army had no systematic policy of genocide.
Video: France 24 video coverage of the August riot in Bangladesh and how the opposition organized online. Click the image for a pop-up and play.
[Mashuqur Rahman,USA.]
When the Bangladesh military took power in a bloody coup in 1975 the takeover was trumpeted as a positive event for the country. The leading English language newspaper in Bangladesh editorialized in sycophantic glory:
Corruption and nepotism inevitably led to continuously increasing prices and the economic misery of the masses that left no alternative for them but to languish and perish. In this suffocating situation the Armed Forces could not be true to their conscience and the nation except by coming forward to bring about a change in the corrupt and oppressive government.
Bangladesh has its own illegal immigration problem. The country plays host to approximately 200,000 refugees from the bordering country of Burma. Unofficial estimates, however, put the number at 800,000. The refugees belong to the Rohingya minority, a persecuted Muslim population who are being methodically ethnically cleansed by Burma’s ruling military junta. They live in Bangladesh under desperate conditions, battling for scarce jobs and resources in the already desperately poor south eastern region of Bangladesh. It is just one of the silent tragedies of the forgotten people of Burma.
Burma, or Myanmar as the ruling military junta would like to be called, is one of the most brutally repressed countries in the world. It has been under military rule since 1962. An impoverished country of 50 million people, Burma boasts an army of over 400,000 active personnel. It’s yearly military budget stands at an estimated 7 billion dollars and is greater than Pakistan, Iran and North Korea. Burma has the 12th largest standing military in the world and spends an astounding 19% of its annual gross domestic product on the military. While the junta leaders live in luxury the rest of the population lives on less than $1 a day. Burma is the most corrupt nation on Earth.
The Burmese military is at war with its own people. It is so fearful of its own people that it has moved the capital of the country. In 2005 the military junta built a new capital, Naypyidaw, about 320 kilometers north of the former capital, and Burma’s largest city, of Rangoon. Naypyidaw is secretive and under tight seal. Cell phone networks do not work there and the civil servants are housed in military built apartments while the junta live in luxury villas. Pictures of Naypyidaw are hard to come by.
On Wednesday, Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) released its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2007. The Daily Star newspaper in Bangladesh announced the news with the headline “Bangladesh improves on its graft image: Climbs up to 7th position from bottom of TI’s corruption index.”
Indeed Bangladesh this year tied for the 7th lowest spot on the index and in 2006 Bangladesh tied for the third lowest spot. However, both in 2006 and in 2007 Bangladesh received a CPI (Corruption Perceptions Index) score of 2.0. In other words, Bangladesh showed no improvement in corruption between 2006 and 2007.
Bangladesh’s ranking improved only because seven countries of the world became more corrupt this year (Cambodia, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea and Laos all reported worse scores this year than in 2006) and four new countries with worse corruption than Bangladesh were added to the list of countries surveyed (Afghanistan, Tonga, Uzbekistan and Somalia all were new entrants at the bottom of the list).
Photo/PID: Another Hamid Karzai in the making? Military installed Chief Advisor of Bangladesh, Fakhruddin Ahmed, meets the US installed President of Afghanistan, both visiting the US to attend the UN General Assembly.
[Mashuqur Rahman,USA.]
Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed, the civilian face of Bangladesh’s military government, has arrived in America. For the first time in sixteen years Bangladesh will be represented at the UN General Assembly by an unelected technocrat. While Dr. Ahmed lacks a constituency back in Bangladesh he should feel quite at home in New York.
In January Bangladesh experienced its first UN-instigated (if not backed) coup when the most senior UN official in Bangladesh, Renata Lok Dessalien, warned that there would be “implications” for the Bangladesh army’s participation in UN peacekeeping missions if it took part in the scheduled elections. Later in the day Bangladeshi generals dutifully obliged by walking into the Bangladeshi President’s office and demanding that power be handed over to technocrats chosen by the military. Apparently participating in a rigged election is far worse than participating in a coup, according to the United Nations. Thus was installed Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed as the Chief Advisor of Bangladesh’s “caretaker government”.
The first word in the Holy Koran is “Read”. When I was a child growing up in Bangladesh, my parents hired the imam of the neighborhood mosque to teach me how to read the Koran. Twice a week after school the imam, an old man with a kindly face, would come to our house for an hour to give me lessons. He would ask me to read out loud certain passages from the Koran, and as I would be reading, he would slowly drift off into a sound sleep. At the end of the hour I would wake him and thank him for the day’s lessons. Although the imam taught me how to read the Koran in Arabic, he did not teach me what the words meant. One day I asked him what the words of the Koran meant. He smiled and replied that I would have to learn the meaning myself. He said Islam was about knowledge and the first word in the Koran was an instruction to Muslims to acquire knowledge.
*****
Growing up in Bangladesh you learn tolerance. I am a child of genocide. My identity, and that of the country of my birth, Bangladesh, was forged by resistance to racial and religious hatred. Three million Bengalis were killed by the Pakistani military and their Islamist collaborators in the name of “God and a united Pakistan”. We were killed for not being “pure” enough - for being Hindus, or converted Muslims, or Muslims who sympathized with Hindus or converted Muslims; in short, we were killed for being Bengali. Yet we resisted, and at a cost of three million lives, we created a free Bangladesh with the dream of a secular state where Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews and others could live without fear of intimidation or persecution.
