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The arrest of the brother of Sha’ikh Abdur Rahman and the unearthing of a bomb making workshop in the old part of the capital bring to light once more the sense of complacency in which the authorities have been taking refuge for so long. A few days ago, when the existence of terrorist outfits in areas like Goran was revealed, we hardly needed any telling as to what our predicament exactly was. The clear truth was that the religious terrorism people have generally been talking about and which the government has been denying, at least until 17 August, is now right around us. The received wisdom was that even if terrorism was somehow in existence, it was based in the rural regions, far from Dhaka. That assumption has now turned out to be wishful thinking. As each day goes by, we come to learn through the operations of the law enforcers that the capital could in fact be the centre for all the extremist activities that have been going on. It goes without saying that the risk for all of us is therefore immense. If it is the capital which is today vulnerable, one can understand the kind of difficulty the entire country is in.
   Now that the authorities are frantically looking for Bangla Bhai and Abdur Rahman, one feels compelled to raise the question of why they have taken so long to convince themselves that terror as propounded by fanatical bands of Muslims in this country is a reality. In the last couple of years, the nation has been treated to the bizarre spectacle of Bangla Bhai and the police playing hide and seek even as clear indications arose of the dangers the country was being pushed into. The refusal of the government to admit the presence of a terror network and its willingness to describe all talk of Islamic radicalism as an effort by the political opposition to tarnish the image of the country have now clearly come back to haunt it. Worse, they have increased the fear among people that in all this time when Bangla Bhai and other terrorists were allowed to go free, the terror network has only diversified and widened in scope. We are surely not willing to tell ourselves that the decision to move against the terrorists has come too late and so may mean little in terms of results. Of course it has come too late, but what is of essence now is for the authorities to demonstrate to the country that the time they have lost can be made up. We are encouraged at the state of alert the country is in. But we will be infinitely happy if the masterminds behind the terror activities are speedily caught and brought to justice. Even as we express such a point of view, we must warn the government about the caution with which it needs to proceed against the terrorists. There must not be any move that can even remotely be construed as harassment of innocent people. When a passenger boarding a Biman flight to Kuwait was rudely offloaded from the aircraft a few days ago because to some intelligence people he resembled Bangla Bhai, unadulterated harassment was clearly at work. It threw up the spectacle of an administration coming forth with a knee-jerk reaction to the crisis in hand.
   The drive against fundamentalist terror requires focus. Careful steps rather than wild leaps in the air are called for.

Rescue towers in Cox’s Bazar

Though we have the longest unbroken beach in the world and a proper hotel infrastructure in Cox’s Bazar, it is unfortunate that when it comes to beach safety measures, we are lagging ignominiously behind than many other seaside holiday resorts.
   In fact, the situation is so dire that, after dark, the whole beach area apart from a few spots is engulfed in total darkness, thus making the deceptive sea even deadlier. In the last one decade the accommodation sector has virtually boomed in this town but beach safety measures still remain at their rudimentary level.
   And we are compelled to raise this issue once more as we learn of the death of a student in Cox’s Bazar a few days ago. The body of the student has not been found as yet and if we look at the 50 or so deaths since 1985, we feel an urgent need to have safety towers, a trained lifeguard unit and a sea net reaching out to at least two kilometers into the sea.
   Interestingly, a Bangla newspaper informs us that efforts were taken for such a netting system way back in 1981 at a cost of Tk 6 crore. Regrettably, like many other such schemes this measure never got out of the files and even today finding bodies is a matter of luck. Maybe 50 deaths may not seem a lot to some people but against this we have hundreds of rescued people from the sea by fishermen and private lifeguards.
   Taking such a situation into perspective and keeping the latest death in mind, we must ensure that the local administration takes up the responsibility of forming an adequately staffed and properly equipped lifeguard force. Ironically, when thousands of tourists visit the beach every year, the only water cycle available is for rent. But major beaches around the world have motor-powered boats and water cycles to rescue people who have waded deep into the waters. Alarmingly, in Bangladesh, if someone is accidentally taken deeper into the sea his or her chances of survival are limited and rescue often depends on the presence of a helpful fishing boat.
   But, this inactivity of the authorities in providing reliable safety measures is infuriating and we ask them to act promptly to form a lifeguard force and erect observation towers.
   In addition, hotels by the beach can also play a role here by providing their own life saving facilities. Finally, can we expect the government to reopen the old file relating to the construction of rescue towers?

When a ruining fire broke out in the Circus Maximus in Rome in 64AD, Emperor Nero was holidaying in Antium, where, as historian Suetonius describes, he ‘was singing from the tower of Maecenas, watching as the fire consumed the capital city’. The fire eventually spread and raged furiously over the city of Rome for nine days, but the emperor preferred enjoying piping of the flute in Antium to returning to the blazing ancient city.
   Similarly, when a ruining cyclone, Hurricane Katrina, was battering the United States’ gulf coast of New Orleans on August 29, killing hundreds of people, maiming in thousands and leaving almost all the survivors homeless in three American states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, US President George W Bush was holidaying in his Texas ranch. President Bush also refused to rush to the capital to make his administration actively stand beside the hurricane victims. Instead he was seen, according to an AFP report from Washington on September 1, receiving a guitar as gift from a country singer at his holiday resort on August 30 — the same day that the US officials concerned expressed apprehension of running the death toll in the hundreds.
   The extent of the devastation by the hurricane could be understood, at least to some extent, from a statement made at a news conference by the deputy police chief of New Orleans, Warren Riley, on September 5. Asking everybody to leave New Orleans, the police official reportedly said: ‘There is absolutely no reason to stay here…this city has been destroyed and it’s completely been destroyed…no food or any reason for them to stay. There are no jobs. There are no homes to go to, no hotels to go to and there is absolutely nothing here. There is no power, trees are down, power lines are down.’ The officials also cited the ‘prospect of diseases caused by rotting bodies and polluted waters’ to justify the need for ‘complete evacuation’ of the Katrina-battered city.
   But Bush remained unmoved and, as Newsweek reports, a ‘strange paralysis’ set in among his administration as regards the rescue and relief operation. Why?
   Emperor Nero, allegation has it, deliberately allowed Rome to be burnt in order to have adequate space to build his pleasure garden called Golden Palace. Did president Bush also deliberately allow the people of the hurricane-battered states, mostly black, poor and usually not excited about supporting the Bush republicans, to be washed away? Would he have been more active in the relief and rescue operation in the states, had the region been dominated by a white population? Yes, such allegations are there.
   ‘The catastrophe in New Orleans…was carried live and in colour on television screens across the world…Viewers…could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we’re more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world… their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping. Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days…the president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn’t seem to notice,’ wrote Bob Herbert, a reputed New York Times columnist, on September 5. ‘He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren’t. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W Bush administration, still invisible.’
   The Fahrenheit 9/11 famed filmmaker Michael Moore has also raised similar allegations of racism and class hatred to explain the Bush administration’s delay in rescuing the hurricane-hit stranded residents of New Orleans. ‘C’mon, they’re black! I mean, it’s not like this happened to Kennebunkport,’ Moor wrote in an open letter to Bush, in reference to the wealthy seaside resort in Maine where the Bush family has a holiday home. ‘Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days?’
   Then appeared the United States’ hip-hop artist Kanye West, making similar accusations against the Bush administration. ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people,’ West reportedly said on September 2, breaking from the script at an NBC network’s fundraising show for the victims of the deadly cyclone.
   People like Bob Herbert, Michael Moore and Kanye West are democratically sensitive minds, but none of them are a direct victim of the ruining Katrina. How do, then, the survivors of the disaster feel about Bush’s inaction?
   ‘You want to know why all those black people are stuck down there dying?’ AFP quoted Yvette Brown, a black refugee from the New Orleans city, to have asked on September 3. ‘If they were white, they’d be gone. They’d be sending in an army of helicopters, jets and boats.’
   It is the element of hypocrisy inherent in the Bush administration that prompted him to reject allegations of racial discriminations against the poor black. What is, however, more important to note is that US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the most prominent black person in the Bush administration, has also rejected the allegations. ‘That Americans would somehow in a colour-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I, I just don’t believe it,’ Rice claimed on September 2.
   The claims of Condoleezza Rice, or those of her boss president Bush for that matter, have no basis, because it is already established to be a home truth that the US administration displayed, to quote Jesse Jackson, ‘amazing tolerance for black pain’ during and after the cyclone.
   Before Katrina brutally hit New Orleans, 67.3 per cent of the city’s 500,000 people were black, with 30 per cent living below the poverty line, while, according to the latest US Census Bureau report released on August 31, only 13 percent of United States’ population is black and the national average of American people living bellow the poverty line 12.7 per cent. Besides, Louisiana and Mississippi, the two hardest-hit states, have over 50 per cent childhood poverty rates, which is the highest in America.
   Notably, the political establishment of the United States was well aware that a devastating hurricane might hit the poor black dominated New Orleans city any time. Reuters reported from Washington on September 2 that ‘almost everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models’ much earlier.
   In July 2004, more than 40 federal, state, local and volunteer organizations practiced this very scenario in a five-day simulation code-named ‘Hurricane Pam’, where they had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed over half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents.
   ‘The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around,’ Clare Rubin, who teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, was quoted to have told Reuters.
   What else, if not insensitivity towards the black and the poor, was it that prevented the US government from taking prior preparations to face an already projected natural disaster in the area?
   Then, the Chicago Tribune reported on September 4: While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, the USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, food and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the relief and rescue effort.
   The government rather ordered the Bataan to move to the waters off Biloxi, Mississippi. Replying to the Chicago Tribune reporter concerned over whether the Bataan could do more for the Katrina victims, Captain Nora Tyson, commander of the Bataan, reportedly said, ‘Sure. I’ve got sailors who could be on the beach plucking through garbage or distributing water and food and stuff. But I can’t force myself on people.’
   Why was the ship not utilised to help the poor and black Katrina victims? What was it, if not to deliberately allow the poor, black people to get washed away?
   ‘We have been abandoned by our own country,’ the AFP quoted Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, to have told a television channel on September 1. ‘It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans…Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area.’
   Report has it that by September 7, some 25,000 body bags were brought into New Orleans to cope with the possibility of a huge death toll.
   However, Condoleezza Rice does not, and cannot, in the first place, accept the allegations of racial discrimination against the black and economic exploitation of the poor in the United States, because she herself is a victim, intellectually, of social and political discourses that have dominated the American mainstream politics and economy for more than two hundred years now. Besides, she has a personal obligation to defend her president. After all, a black person, and that too a black woman, is not to be allowed in the United States to exercise the amount of political power that Rice does, unless she can internalise the country’s white-dominated, pro-rich mainstream political philosophies and practice them in real terms.
   (Continued tomorrow)
   E-mail: nurulkabir@newagebd.com