Editorial
Tobacco law violation
That the newly introduced tobacco control law has yet to drive the message home among the public is evident from the many media reports of its violation by the smokers. The much-anticipated and acclaimed Smoking and Tobacco Product Usage (Control) Bill that was passed in Parliament on 13 March this year came into effect on 25 March. But the law that prohibits smoking in public places is being flouted openly by the smokers in the absence of proper monitoring by the law enforcing agencies entrusted with the job of punishing the violators. Investigations reveal that while many smokers, especially those belonging to the low-income groups, are not aware of the law, there are others who know but refuse to abide by the law.
So much for the smokers. What about the tobacco manufacturers and marketing companies? According to a report in this daily on Saturday, hoardings with tobacco advertisements continue to allure smokers and would-be smokers alike at strategic public places. Such hoardings in the capital city were still found to be boldly advertising harmful products the consumption of which the government and civil society have been trying to discourage. Surely the cigarette marketing companies are aware of the punishment of three months’ imprisonment or a fine of Tk. 1,000 for advertising their products in public.
The indifferent smokers will only pay heed when there will be a strict enactment of the law and exemplary punishment meted out to some violators. It goes without saying that sustaining a good act becomes a more difficult task in this country than initiating it and in this regard we may recall the bold step taken by the government towards banning production and marketing of polythene shopping bags a couple of years back on the ground of their deteriorating effect on the environment. Though within the first few months all bags disappeared from the markets, some unscrupulous traders continued to sell them through the back door. In some surprise raids the environment minister himself caught some sellers red handed in the city markets. But, by now, these polythene bags have come back in various shapes and sizes and are being sold and used openly within clear sight of the administration. The pertinent question that comes to mind is: Has the euphoria disappeared like water bubbles?
We are aware of the hurdles the government had to face while preparing the tobacco bill. It was a job well done. So, now we shall have to go all out to implement and sustain the Smoking and Tobacco Product Usage (Control) law in society in its entirety.
Parking woes
With the increase in the number of cars in the city, finding a proper parking spot has become quite a problematic issue nowadays. Though a decade ago the complication of parking was unheard of and possibly unimagined, now this has become the number one headache for many car users. Initially, the problem usually involved a prolonged search for parking spots. But now the situation has waded into more troubled territory. Unable to find spots, cars are either parked by the road or in extreme cases on the road itself; needless to state that as a result the roads become narrow and, in certain cases, blocked.
As more and more high-rise buildings are coming up, the issue of parking facilities is often neglected. And a recent report in a local daily tells us that with inadequate attention to proper parking, traffic congestions are becoming perennial features in front of high-rise establishments. However, the blame also falls on certain clinics and private medical hospitals which are operating without any parking facility at all. But according to the construction law of RAJUK, separate parking area is mandatory for multi-storied buildings. In addition, permission is also required from the Dhaka Transport Co-ordination Board (DTCB). The question is how many buildings in the city comply with these specifications? Reportedly 75 per cent high rise buildings do not have acceptable parking facilities.
We notice, not without a sense of hopelessness, that several institutions that aim to provide service to city dwellers were constructed without any prior planning and hence the roads in front of them are occupied by parked vehicles. For the arteries of the city, which are already clogged by too many vehicles, such sequences are literally deadly. Suffice it to say that if we do not have proper parking spots then traffic congestion can never be eradicated. Perhaps the time has come to introduce fines for vehicles illegally parked on a road. Maybe many car owners will not support this but the end result of such an act would reduce haphazard parking altogether. In addition, establishments which do not have proper parking should also face the strict side of law because unless there are a few examples of punishment, no one will bother to take the existing RAJUK laws into account.
At the same time, efforts by the authorities to construct more parking areas are expected and in these cases parking can be provided against a fee. If each ward in the city has a government owned parking facility with a public toilet, then we will be able to solve two civic problems in one go. Will the authorities look into it?
WOODLANDWANDERINGS
Media freedom: The other
side of midnight
The number of journalists who have been murdered or have come under grievous physical assault is enough indication for all of us that our unions, and that means our veteran or elderly journalists, have been unable to defend our cause. Naturally, therefore, when these days they protest anything unfair done to newsmen, the protest lacks weight and substance, for the country knows that these men in the journalistic community are too divided along politically partisan lines to speak for their
colleagues, writes Syed Badrul Ahsan
The observance of World Press Freedom Day last week came with the usual platitudes. Those platitudes were vociferously articulated, sometimes softly mouthed. That was quite natural. Platitudes are always dealt with in such manner. Whether or not they lead to anything satisfying for the soul remains a huge question. It is all dependent on who is voicing the platitudes, on the people who are informing us of the terrible burden they are having to bear on behalf of those in whose defence they happen to be speaking. What needs watching here is whether these soldiers in the defence of rights, in this case newsmen’s rights, have strong enough shoulders to bear the burden, to carry the torch forward for all of us. It is a matter the ultimate story of which will come later. For now, we are all happy flailing away at the establishment for all the impediments the media have systematically come up against over the decades. It is right that we berate government — and by that we mean government as it has worked, or not worked, in this country over the decades — for its failure to ensure the functioning of a healthy press in the country. It remains a peculiar characteristic of the Third World that the freedom of the press remains hostage to the whims of politicians and to all those vested interests which have at some point or the other ended up being a gigantic kleptocracy in the societies they have operated in. And that is why we in the media struggle on — here and everywhere.
But then comes a special, traumatic moment in the life of a newsman, especially in Bangladesh, when he must look into his soul and wonder if the very media veterans who have been speaking of his welfare have actually not done more damage to his career than the entire governmental establishment put together. Yes, it is the other side of the story we must now report on, assuming of course that we are proper media people unafraid to go into a bit of necessary self-criticism. At the World Press Freedom Day deliberations (there were quite a few), senior journalists stood bravely before all of us to tell us how much they cared about the independence and integrity of the media world. Some of the men giving us all that wisdom were, well, people who have not quite lived up to our expectations. And here is how: over the decades our senior journalists (and notice that seniority is open to question here, for it generally denotes media personalities who have aged without any accompaniment of wisdom, which is rather worrying) have effectively destroyed the journalists’ unions in the country. They have done that through identifying themselves blatantly with political parties. Of course a journalist is a political being as well, like everyone else. But the difference between a journalist and other people is that the former does not allow his subjectivity to cloud his professional judgement. That is not quite the way it has happened here. When you have two factions of the Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists and, in similar fashion, two factions of the Dhaka Union of Journalists, you ought not to expect that your interests as a struggling, dedicated media person will be upheld. Go back into the history of the journalists’ community of the past twenty years or so. The number of journalists who have been murdered or have come under grievous physical assault is enough indication for all of us that our unions, and that means our veteran or elderly journalists, have been unable to defend our cause. Naturally, therefore, when these days they protest anything unfair done to newsmen, the protest lacks weight and substance, for the country knows that these men in the journalistic community are too divided along politically partisan lines to speak for their colleagues.
It is not merely over the question of how the unions have handled repression on the media that our worries grow. If you have been a careful observer of media conditions over the years, you cannot but have been amazed at the way good, hard-working journalists have lost their jobs for reasons of the whimsical on the part of management or editors. How many of these newsmen have had their jobs restored per courtesy of union action in their defence? So what should have been a sturdy defence of media professionals by the unions has slowly but surely mutated into a scandal, for no union, no faction of journalists has had the time or the inclination or the moral courage to speak up in defence of media people in distress. They have only had time to dwell on more serious things. How to impress the politicians they have loved, for instance. A few years ago, journalists demanding their salaries in arrears at the newspaper establishment they worked for left it to their unit leaders to ensure their rights. The result was horrendous to the extreme. One fine morning, the struggling newsmen chanced on the discovery that all the unit leaders had left the service of the organisation, of course after making sure that they had been given hefty cheques to speed them along. No one said a word. And no senior leader in any of the journalists’ factions ever looked at the whole thing in the light of morality. Is it not natural, therefore, for us to chuckle when these same union leaders speak to the country on the need to ensure security of life and career for our newsmen?
Hypocrisy, as you and I know only too well, has been getting the better of us in nearly every sector of life. We will not go into all that. But we will speak of ourselves, of the failings of our own community. There are newspapers that do not do well, part of the reason being that the management has decided that an associate editor and a magazine editor belong in the same category and so ought to be given the same level of salary. Note that the magazine editor treats his job as a part time one and ends up producing a weekly magazine through a simple matter of downloading write-ups from journals and newspapers abroad. And the assistant editor, a man holding what should be a senior position? He gets a salary lower than that of the upstart magazine editor. Are you surprised? Yes, you might call it a washing of dirty linen in public. The bigger point, though, is that if you keep pushing your dirty linen under the bed or into the drawers, you cannot in the end survive as morally upright human beings, at least in the media community. And what else has been happening in our media world? Well, a senior journalist, an assistant editor to be exact, finds one morning that the doors to her office have been shut on her because she had earlier raised the terribly disturbing question of how her editor also happened to be the leader of one of the journalists’ unions. She is now without a job. And that is precisely where we have some very fundamental problems with journalism in this country. You have editors who should not have been editors in the first place. Their control over language, be it Bangla or English, is atrocious. They remain happily in charge of their organisations, unaware that good editors are sometimes expected to come up with their reasoned analyses of politics and world affairs. But what enlightenment can you expect from people who have risen to the top in questionable manner? There are senior journalists in the country who have moved earth and heaven for ambassadorial postings abroad. A few have asked for the position of press advisors with ministerial rank! There have been the lucky few who have always come by the biggest, sweetest slices of the cake because of their ability to please the powers that be. Such journalists have managed plum jobs and some other such journalists have made sure that they can come by property through their close ties to government. These are truths we remain aware of, even if we do not always talk about them.
There are newsmen, ageing and therefore veteran, who have made it a point to undertake, regularly, media missions abroad. That is fine with us. The problem, though, is that at the many seminars they have attended they have made a poor show of themselves. Almost everyone on the team keeps quiet, says not a word and then these fine media people come back to the country after what in reality has been a holiday for them. There are other journalists who know they cannot be part of media meetings inside the country or outside, even if they have been invited to those meetings, unless their editors let them go. There are newspapers where the good and the bold are often asked to leave, because they are good and bold, even as the bad and the pusillanimous go on working. There are newspaper organisations where men and women are without reason thrown out of their jobs and then warned, in sinister ways, that they ought not to come back to the office for any reason whatsoever. And their dues? Those are as good as lost. And then there are media organisations that are plainly NGO-friendly, to a point that writing on some of the misdemeanours of some NGOs is considered downright heresy.
That, Sir, is the other side of midnight. The pain in the heart is when we must listen to the dark voices promising us all light at the end of the tunnel when in truth they have been making the tunnel deeper and longer for all of us in the media world.
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk
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