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The malaise of Bangladesh Biman, the national flag carrier, is not a consequence of few days or months of irregularities and corruption. Delayed flight schedules, artificial ticket crisis, mismanagement and corruption have engulfed Biman for a long time. The chaotic situation prevailing in the flight schedules emanates from overall mismanagement, procurement and maintenance of planes, etc. Reportedly, if a flight on international route gets grounded, it causes a loss of one crore taka. Add to this the repairing cost, cost for procurement of spare parts, expenses for passengers due to flight cancelation, then one will realise why Biman is a losing concern.
   A minister has already lost his job due to chaotic management of the hajj flights. But still the situation in Biman hasn’t improved at all. Now the mess is even more intractable. Flight schedules have been severely disrupted causing troubles and sufferings to the passengers. Many people working in the Middle East lost their job due to Biman’s erratic flight schedule. A lot of us living abroad now think twice before travelling by Biman.
   If the authorities concerned don’t do anything soon to improve the situation in Biman, soon it will turn into a carrier which everyone will avoid.
   Mallik Akram Hossain
   The University of Hong Kong

The government has reportedly taken steps to identify and punish the members of the police force, who served as bodyguards and protocol officers of the notorious Bangla Bhai and his accomplices. It is good to see that the government is at least taking some cosmetic measures against anarchy prevailing in the name of religion.
   Initially, the people holding key positions in government denied the very existence of JMB and Bangla Bhai and attributed it to a figment of imagination of the press. It is alleged that these influential people instructed the government employees (members of the police force) to support and patronise the activities carried out by the religious fanatics. Only one MP dared to break the silence and revealed the secret that a number of officials were ordered by some influential of the very government to patronise the fanatics.
   Now to enhance the image of the government and to show their sincerity in curbing religious fanaticism, these government officials will be sacrificed. But who will net the big fishes?
   Saif
   Dhaka

Most Americans say that their founding fathers fought a War of Independence against Britain because they thought ‘taxation without representation is tyranny.’ This is absolutely incorrect. The Stamp Duty of 1765, to defray some cost that Britain incurred to protect America from the French incursion, was quickly revoked and never collected and all 13 colonies had their own elected local legislatures with the British Parliament only playing a supervisory role.
   It may be recalled when on April 12, 1770, the British Parliament repealed the Stamp Duty because of opposition from the colonists, some Americans, who called themselves Sons of Liberty, were not happy. In most leading urban areas of America, obscure political hacks such as Sam Adams of Boston had achieved public renown and personal success for the first time in their lives by denouncing the threat of British tyranny from the moment of the Stamp Act. No new dish of outrage from Britain meant lean days or bad home-cooking. As time passed, the stature of politicians whose popularity depended upon British tyranny diminished progressively. They despaired for their future. Their influence faded inexorably.
   Then in 1773, Parliament passed a law with American implications. In the course of regulating the affairs of the East India Company, the House of Commons legislated some provisions that would make British tea, legitimately imported, cheaper and therefore competitive with that smuggled into the colonies from Holland. It lowered the duties on British tea. The so-called patriots like Sam Adams interpreted cheap tea as the means of seducing the Sons of Liberty into subjugation. According to them, the House of Commons had paused for three years ‘not to repent their evil deeds, but rather to collect themselves, and devise some measures more effectual. For so far from giving over the execrable design, the plan of oppression is renewed.’ Adams and his followers decided to ‘venture upon a desperate remedy’ to prevent the tea from being landed. On December 16, 1773, one hundred and fifty Sons of Liberty disguised as native Indians boarded three ships in Boston harbour and ‘in a very little time,’ according to Sam Adams, ‘every one of the teas was immersed in the bay, without the least injury to private property.’
   Of course, the East India Company regarded their tea as private property of some value. In fact, by their accounting, 10,000 pound worth of private property had been wantonly and publicly destroyed, leading to a chain of events which ultimately triggered a full scale war. However, if Britain had ignored Sam Adams and his antics and did not declare martial law in Boston, Sam Adams and his followers would have again lost their standing and like Canada, America would have evolved peacefully as an independent nation within the Commonwealth.
   Like 18th century political opportunists like Sadm Adams and his group of Sons of Liberty, the US President George W. Bush and his neoconservative underlings seem to be using spreading democracy in Iraq as a thinly disguised quest to promote their own careers. Having elected in a dubious 2000 presidential race by disenfranchising thousands of African-American voters and by the intervention of partisan Supreme Court judges, Bush needed some spectacular show of force to project his image as a saviour of democracy. To achieve this, he is using the military intervention in Iraq first to dismantle Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and when the weapons could not be found, he has expanded his justification for military intervention as a gesture to bring democracy in Iraq.
   This way, he seems to be following in the footsteps of Sam Adams. At first, Adams denounced imposition of Stamp Duty as ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’ and when Stamp Duty was repealed and Britian lowered duties on its own tea, he denounced it as a British design to seduce the Sons of Liberty. Similarly, having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, Bush is using spreading democracy as the reason for his occupation of Iraq. But unlike Sam Adams, who succeeded in galvanising the American people, George Bush has only alienated his own people. Bush’s popularity is now at a rock bottom of 34 per cent while 62 per cent of the American public think that he misled them in the war against Iraq. Even those who once supported his military intervention in Iraq are turning away from him.
   According to Bush’s ambassador to Iraq Zalmi Khalilzad, the Americans might have opened a ‘Pandora’s Box in Iraq.’ The Sunni insurgents are attacking the Shiite majority who have won the election. The once-dominant Sunnis resent their loss of power and now-dominant Shiite majority fear that any concession may lead to renewed Sunni domination and the Kurds are looking for an opportunity to secede from Iraq. Instead of bringing democracy, Bush might have brought anarchy in Iraq. The American forces have become bystanders incapable of stemming the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. At least, Sam Adams could depend on competent military leaders like General George Washington who defeated the British with the help of his French ally. But no one seems to be willing to help Bush in his Iraqi misadventure.
   Mahmood Elahi
   Ottawa, Canada