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‘One woman’s success can only help another woman’s success.’ This is an inspirational slogan of Gloria Vanderbilt, a New York-based American company. But the Al Safa Garments factory in Jordan, which supplies apparels to the company, fails hundreds of hard-working women workers each day as they sew clothing for sale in America under the brand name of Gloria Vanderbilt.
   The National Labor Committee, a New York-based advocacy group, has just published a damning report on the appalling and inhuman working conditions, human rights abuses as well as torture at many garment factories in Jordan. The report with an unusually strong title – U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement Descends into Human Trafficking – also mentions an alleged rape and death of a young Bangladeshi woman at the same notorious Al Safa Garments factory.
   The report, covered by numerous newspapers in the world including the New York Times (ahead of its release), sums up the alleged rape and death of the Bangladeshi woman this way: ‘Something terrible happened at the Al Safa Factory. A young woman is dead. Some rumours circulated, but the guest workers at the Al Safa factory – even today – are still too terrified to speak of the woman’s death, afraid that they could be beaten, fired and even imprisoned, before being forcibly deported, if management knew they were publicly speaking about the girl.
   ‘A young woman from Bangladesh, no more than 20 years of age, hung herself in early February 2005 after – allegedly – being raped by a factory manager. She hung herself in a bathroom using her scarf. It seems that her body was not immediately returned to Bangladesh, but remained in a locker at a local morgue for at least several months. To date, we know of no official investigation into her rape and death.’
   The National Labor Committee says the Al Safa Garments factory is a rough place for the 500 or more guest workers from Bang’adesh, India and Sri Lanka.
   But Al Safa is just one of many notorious garment factories in Jordan. The advocacy group found that in the Western factory, which produces for the giant American retail chain Wal-Mart, four young women, including a 16-year-old girl, were raped by plant managers. Despite being forced to work 109 hours a week, including 20-hour shifts, the workers received no wages for six months. Workers, who fell asleep from exhaustion, were struck with a ruler to wake them up. At the Al Shahaed factory, the workers were paid two cents an hour and they were slapped, kicked, punched, and hit with sticks and belts.
   All across Jordan, tens of thousands of foreign guest workers, mostly from Bangladesh, China, India and Sri Lanka, are trapped in ‘involuntary servitude’ with their passports confiscated, restricting their ability to leave and tying them to jobs that often pay far less than promised as well as the minimum wage of the country. They are routinely forced to work 100-plus hours a week and cheated on wages. Any worker asking for their proper wages can be imprisoned. Factory bathrooms lack toilet paper, soap and towels. Dorm conditions are primitive often lacking running water three or four days a week. Any worker speaking about the factory conditions will be attacked and forcibly deported without any back wages.
   The report follows months of research and investigation by the advocacy group members in Jordan and Bangladesh. They spoke to Bangladeshi workers in Jordan, and those deported to their homeland in Dhaka, to investigate the harsh working conditions, inhuman treatment of guest workers as well as wanton abuses of their fundamental human rights. The most stunning finding of the report of the advocacy group is that some apparel makers in Jordan and some manpower recruiting agents supplying foreign workers to them have engaged in human trafficking in the name of overseas employment. As press reports suggest, the workers from Bangladesh paid manpower agents from $1000 to $3000 for job in Jordan while they got only two cents per hour and a life that was no better than slavery.
   The findings of the advocacy group for workers have drawn a worldwide attention as major newspapers as well as wire services around the world carried them almost immediately. The New York Times published a lengthy story headlined An Ugly Side of Free Trade: Sweatshops in Jordan even a day before the report came out on the website of the National Labor Committee. The newspaper interviewed several Bangladeshi workers and documented their plight as well as their terrible working experience in Jordan. Spokespersons from most American companies receiving clothing from the garment factories in Jordan are aware of what they called ‘serious violations’ and ‘serious problems’ at some Jordanian factories. They said they are monitoring the situation. Wal-Mart recently cited Al Safa factory for labour violations and dispatched inspectors to Jordan after the New York Times asked it about the accusations on May 1.
   Meanwhile, Jordan has vowed to crack down on abuse of foreign workers in Jordan-based textile factories following what it called a ‘disturbing’ US rights group report detailing alleged violations. Jordan’s Labour Minister, Bassem Salem, has admitted that his ministry has ‘violation files on several companies’ but said that many of them have been shut down as part of a crackdown on violators by the authorities. An AFP report carried by Middle East Times quoted Salem as saying: ‘We have won the battle but not the war as other companies like this will spring up continuously with new names.’ He said the Labour Ministry and the Foreign Textile Manufacturing Association were preparing ‘a binding code of conduct document to ensure that employers maintain decent working standards and conditions.’ In addition, the ministry is developing its own procedures to monitor the extent to which companies abide by what he called this ‘golden list.’
   The most stunning disclosure in the US rights group’s report was that ‘not a single factory worker in our ten-month investigation across Jordan said that they received any help whatsoever from Jordanian Ministry of Labour officials, from the local unions, or even from their own Bangladesh embassy.’ The shocking report on the deplorable working conditions of hundreds of Bangladeshi workers in Jordan has come out for several days now, but the Bangladesh government is still conspicuously silent on the issue.
   The writer is a Bangladeshi journalist based in North America

Atlanta: Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.
   Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 per cent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 per cent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president.
   It is almost a miracle that the Palestinians have been able to orchestrate three elections during the past 10 years, all of which have been honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by us at the Carter Center, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people.
   One clear reason for the surprising Hamas victory for legislative seats was that the voters were in despair about prospects for peace. With American acquiescence, the Israelis had avoided any substantive peace talks for more than five years, regardless of who had been chosen to represent the Palestinian side as interlocutor.
   The day after his party lost the election, Abbas told me that his own struggling government could not sustain itself financially with their daily lives and economy so severely disrupted, and access from Palestine to Israel and the outside world almost totally restricted. They were already $900 million in debt and had no way to meet the payroll for the following month. The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure.
   With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honour a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this ‘can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate.’ Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed.
   Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine.
   There is no way to predict what will happen in Palestine, but it would be a tragedy for the international community to abandon the hope that a peaceful coexistence of two states in the Holy Land is possible. Like Egypt and all other Arab nations before the Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Palestine Liberation Organization before the Oslo peace agreement of 1993, Hamas has so far refused to recognize the sovereign state of Israel as legitimate, with a right to live in peace. This is a matter of great concern to all of us, and the international community needs to probe for an acceptable way out of this quagmire. There is no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians both want a durable two-state solution, but depriving the people of Palestine of their basic human rights just to punish their elected leaders is not a path to peace.
   The International Herald Tribune, May 7, 2006. Former US President Jimmy Carter is founder of the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization working for peace and health worldwide

The level of violence and the growth of incidents in Sri Lanka have not subsided despite the prospects for a return to the negotiating table in Geneva.
   The violence is more intense than what prevailed before the first round of Geneva talks in February. This raises the spectre of worse violence that is to come if the forthcoming round of Geneva talks goes down the path of the first. If the next rounds of talks are to yield a better result, they would need to be better prepared for, and be better conducted.
   In retrospect it can be seen that Geneva 1 was a failure, although it was hoped that they were not. In fact the talks almost failed while they were going on, with the government and LTTE negotiating teams at a deadlock. It has been reported that last-minute intervention by a special emissary of President Mahinda Rajapakse saw this crisis overcome. However, hardly had the talks concluded when the two sides started to issue contradictory statements as to what was achieved.
   The government is presently showing a positive face with regard to the resumption of peace talks with the LTTE. While the general population remains apprehensive about the prospects of a return to a quick date for the resumption of the Geneva talks. This is the positive side of the government. It has shown the ability to take corrective action when forced to the wall, but the problem is that this only happens when the situation has deteriorated some more.
   Unfortunately, a weakness of the government is that it is not pro-active, or forward looking, when it comes to developing a positive vision to take the peace process forward. On the contrary, the government has been slow and nit-picking at the level of details. An example would be the manner in which it procrastinated over the issue of the venue for the peace talks. It first said that the venue should be in Sri Lanka, then in Asia, and finally agreed to Geneva after more than a hundred lives had been lost.
   Now again on the issue of transporting LTTE cadres from the east to the Wanni for consultations, the government’s refusal of a military helicopter, followed by the offer of private ones, and finally a Sri Lankan airlines sea plane, has provided the occasion for further delay.
   Tragically, while these disputes over details have taken place, two hundred people have died, and several thousand have become internally displaced and living as refugees.
   
   Government hope
   The keenness of the government to get back to the negotiating table with the LTTE is not in doubt. This is why the nit-picking is so counter-productive. There is no way other than talks, for the government to stop the LTTE from killing soldiers on a daily basis through the claymore mines and grenade attacks that are apparently unceasing. The LTTE’s actions over the last several months indicate that neither international sanctions nor military responses, will stop it in its tracks. If the LTTE is to stop, it has to be persuaded to stop.
   Meeting again in Geneva for talks might seem to be the easiest way to convince the LTTE that there is a better way to sort out problems than to use destructive violence. But it must be remembered that the government and LTTE met once before in Geneva in February of this year. Although they met and talked, and there was even a statement of agreement, the violence soon returned. There was clearly no real meeting of minds.
   This raises the question, whether a second meeting will lead to any different outcome.
   At the first round of Geneva talks, the LTTE insisted on a one-point agenda. This was to discuss the issues relating to the disarming of paramilitaries as specified in the Ceasefire Agreement. Therefore if the government wants the next rounds of Geneva talks to have a different outcome, one option would be to comply with this LTTE demand. This could lead to further such demands. If the government is not prepared to accept this one-point LTTE agenda for the second round of Geneva talks, it needs to develop an alternative agenda that could interest the LTTE as well as the Tamil people.
   
   Alternative agenda
   Going by what the LTTE has been saying for some time it has two prerequisites for the peace process to recommence without violence. One is that the government should not try to undermine them militarily by seeking to use Tamil armed groups or paramilitaries against them. At the same time it would be necessary for the LTTE to provide guarantees, and to permit the institution of an effective monitoring mechanism, that does not permit the type of killings that they have practised against their political opponents in the past. The second is to obtain some form of governmental, and thereby international, recognition of LTTE governance in LTTE-controlled areas. This would also necessitate that the LTTE subscribe to human rights norms in their governance, and accede to an internationally monitored human rights regime.
   If the government is not prepared to discuss these issues, and resolve them along with the LTTE, it might be better not to go for Geneva 2. This is because another failure at Geneva II could mean the death knell for the peace process and the consolidation of the war process.