Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

I am not going to talk about ‘democracy’ neither ‘voting rights’. All I am concerned now is ‘I am stuck in Kolkata far from my home because of some people think we have to sacrifice to restore our rights.’
   Now let me ask them ‘Isn’t it my right to breathe free, to return home, to live my life, not to be afraid of going outside?’
   Jalil from the AL said the other day, ‘make some sacrifice for the greater interest of the country and for restoring our own rights’. Why should we sacrifice? This is not our demand. It’s their demand to change the CEC because all they care about is how to get to power. May be the CEC is a big threat for their way to Jatiya Shangsad.
   Where were these politicians when people suffered from shortage of electricity, price hike and so on? Those were our rights and we didn’t have Jalils by our side in the time of our need. Where were they when people of Shanir Akhra were suffering from electricity and water and had no choice but to take to street to protest such injustice? No one was by their side then. Then how do they expect us to suffer now just to retain the AL’s rights?
   It’s been four days that I am stuck in Kolkata and I don’t know how and when I will get back home. My visa will be expired soon, money is also a big problem. Will any politician come to my rescue? No. They don’t care about us. Then why should we care about them?
   Ahmed Saif Reza
   On e-mail

When I was a kid I was a bit like Dennis the menace type. I had a neighbour whose youngest sibling was of my age but was more menacing than I was. We used to play together with a couple of more youngsters from the neighbourhood and often ended up in fist fights.
   This neighbour of mine used to often pick troubles with us and, being a little older in age with the group, used to act as a bully too. When the rest of us used to gang up together against him, he used to helplessly resort to crying and call his father for help. The father used to send his sons, equally bully, to rescue him from the trouble. I am sort of reminded of my childhood’s brawl with this bully neighbour of mine when I see President Bush resorting for help from the henchmen of his father; the Bush senior.
   The latest is that after the defeat in the mid-term elections President George W Bush fired his one-time favourite Donald Rumsfeld and has now inducted Robert Gates, the former CIA Director and a close associate of Bush senior, as his new Defence Secretary.
   It is said that he has been inducted to provide the president with what is being termed as a ‘fresh eye’ and to work to bail him out of the Iraq quagmire. Earlier on he had also inducted James Baker, another close confidant of his father, to work on the exit strategy from Iraq.
   Dick Cheney (Bush senior’s Defence Secretary during Gulf War), Condi Rice (National Security Adviser for Bush senior) to name a few are already on board with President Bush. Colin Powel (Bush senior’s Chief of Army Staff) has already served the president as his Secretary of State and left at the fag end of his first term. I am now hearing Brent Scowcroft, another close associate of Bush senior, is soon to join the Bush junior.
   Looks like soon all the president’s men (Bush senior’s men) will be out there to help President Bush to save him from the battering that he would receive in Afghanistan, Iraq and now from the Democrats who have gained full control of both the houses of the Congress.
   Faiz Al-Najdi
   Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The CEC has to quit. This claim is made on a number of grounds. He has put the quality of the justice community under a serious question by making many controversial, irresponsible, imprudent and irrelevant comments while the nation suffers over the debate revolving him, his resignation. Ram-Shita (!) is one example he highlighted that has made the whole nation surprised. He has to quit on the ground that he (an individual) does not have any right to throw the nation into an uncertainty by clinging the position under the pretext that it is a constitutional one.
   He has to quit because of his extreme impersonal show-up as he did to justify his evasion from the office by showing the belt support on his waist lifting clothes to the journalists. He has to quit for not caring anyone, anyone’s demand, and for not looking at the street that people took to. He seems to be feeling proud of being cordoned by the security officials (watching from TV news). Question comes: what does he think of himself?
   He has to quit because he is well-blind to see the example created by Justice Hasan. Every citizen is political. None is neutral; however, everyone’s work could be neutral. Question about this man is neither with neutrality nor partiality (to me) but more of quality. I don’t want to believe that there is no one with that intellectual prudence in the country who could be placed as the CEC.
   He has to quit because he fails to comprehend that conducting an election with efficiency is different from making it acceptable. I just wonder how come a justice could be that blind and that thick-skinned? Or is whatever he is doing is mere act?
   AKM Ahsan Ullah
   University of Ottawa, Canada
   

This refers to two very interesting letters one by Shahjahan Ahmed and another by Rashed Ahmed. While agreeing fully with the views expressed by them, I would like to add a few more of my own to a vital issue of national importance. The issue is that of gross abuse and misuse of powers by the top bureaucrats while in office, then after leaving office they usually remain silent about their deeds and misdeeds.
   Dr Kamal Siddiqui appears to be an exception to the rule by trying to defend his vicious role played as the principal secretary to the last BNP government. Either he is too clever or too stupid trying to desert a sinking ship or to find an escape route for his future survival in this country. The knowledgeable circles know how powerful or how vindictive he was to his adversaries while he was holding that all powerful office in the last PMO. By trying vainly to shift the blame for his self-confessed ‘failure’ on a petty official like APS Shamsul Alam, he has in fact exposed and incriminated himself.
   However hard he tries to rationalise his criminal activities, apart from numerous other misdeeds, at least one fact is sufficient to prove what far reaching damage he has almost single-handedly caused to the whole nation by repeatedly sending back tender documents for the big power generation projects like Meghna Ghat, Bagahabari etc. to the power ministry run by the sacked state minister Iqbal Hasan Mahmud.
   The power generation and power supply, which is virtually the life blood of a civilised nation, has been sabotaged by this evil duo despite allocation of over Tk 17,000/ crore in five years for this vital sector. He can by no means absolve himself of this guilt by deliberately throwing our whole economy into such an incurable crisis from which it will take another half a decade to recover only if constructive initiative is taken right away.
   Despite his intellectual credentials by serving a thoroughly corrupt regime for full five years, gleefully accepting unprecedented five extensions and thoroughly enjoying his absolute powers which as we know corrupts absolutely, the fact remains he is guilty of gross misconduct. Thus he has proved himself to be a bureaucratic black sheep who is thoroughly untrustworthy.
   Therefore, Dr Kamal Siddiqui’s hypocrisy and betrayal must not be allowed to die down. He has invited trouble himself. Let him face the music now. You can fool some people for sometime, all people for sometime, but not all people for all time.
   AH
   Dhaka

I am a regular viewer of a popular TV talk show Tritio Matra. It is a very interesting talk show where I enjoy all types of political discussions discussed freely and frankly. I specially enjoy the nice and cool way the anchor Zillur conducts the programme.
   However, I have a comment to make here. When the participants express their views in the name of jonogon (people), I just wonder who gave them the right. Have they surveyed what the people think? They just express their own opinion and tell us that these are the opinion of the people.
   I am not a member of any political party but a devoted and peace loving citizen of this country. I cannot tolerate any lawlessness or political restlessness that our politicians indulge in the name of jonogon. Our so-called leaders think the people are with them. NEVER so. Only their paid workers are with them.
   These leaders will have to answer one day for their power hungry activities. It is hundred per cent true that they are not worried about Bangladesh but worried about how to get to power only.
   People have seen how they act when these two parties were in power. They also know what their future will be when one of them will go to power again. We have no hope at all as we are stuck with these two parties and only Allah can save us by sending someone to rule like Mahathir or Mandela.
   As regarding the talk show Tritio Matra, my thanks to Channel i and the anchor Zillur for this interesting programme.
   Nasrin Islam
   Gulshan, Dhaka

We are all familiar with the many contradictions between the BNP and the AL. But with little or no effort one may make a list of the points on which these two major political parties have no difference at all. Some of these points are:
   a. They do not believe in the practice of democracy within the party. Their party heads never retire. They leave politics only on death. Once a party head/leader is dead the mantle of party leadership is passed on not to a politically competent successor, but to a close family member irrespective of the fact that such a family member has the required education, training, grooming and competence, or not.
   b. Such an incompetent successor from the dead leader’s family, on assuming party leadership, finds out who all in the party, or around him/her, are more capable than himself/herself and soon cuts them to size, or gets rid of them by any foul means.
   c. In the absence of capable leaders sycophants and corrupt elements from within the party assemble around the new leader to indulge in unabated corruption and misrule.
   d. On assumption of power they soon make the state organs like the higher judiciary, anti corruption bureau/commission, parliament, comptroller and auditor general’s office etc, which are meant to ensure public accountability, ineffective and corrupt.
   e. Being in power they appoint wo/men with questionable integrity to high offices in the civil and the military for their blind personal/political loyalty to the leader. Instead of selecting kajer lok (useful workers) from among their nijer lok (own men) they have been selecting only okajer lok (useless workers) from among nijer lok, thus creating mess everywhere in the administration.
   f. They grant extension of service (even 5 times) to bureaucrats, purely on political considerations, by depriving the younger ones from their due promotions.
   g. They stubbornly refuse to implement any reform in the electoral laws which will ensure registration of the political parties, submission of statements of assets of the politicians before assuming public offices and after relinquishing such offices.
   h. In a parliamentary election they sell nominations to terrorists, godfathers, smugglers, black marketers, duffers etc at a very high price to fill the parliament with anti social elements.
   i. They also dish out nominations to their family members and relations, as many as possible, who are mostly not only incompetent but corrupt too.
   j. They want to control the parliament members like a herd of loyal and humble lambs by retaining Article 70 of our Constitution. As long as either of these two parties will be in power Article 70 will remain as a leash around the neck of the parliament members.
   k. They find out a nincompoop to appoint as the president so that they can use him as a puppet during rule of the caretaker government. Anyone who on becoming the president tries to show his worth is given the marching order unceremoniously.
   l. They do not want to see the local governments at upazila and district levels function so as to make room for the parliament members to make personal gains from development activities carried out at these levels.
   m. They only publish so-called white papers to expose the corrupt activities of the politicians who were in the preceding government. But they never arrange their trial and punishment in courts of law. In this respect politicians from all parties behave as if they are members of the same strong trade union.
   n. They leave no stone unturned to politicise the teachers and the students of all educational institutions (except primary schools). Thus they have been successfully destroying the education system, whatever we have, of our country.
   o. Before the parliamentary election each party makes many tall promises in its manifesto, but only to forget after the election is won.
   I have listed only 15 major points. One may add many more.
   Ashraf
   Dhaka

The frank answer to this question is NO. The why to the ‘NO’ is the power of veto. This is reserved primarily by the powers that won the World War sixty years ago! Is this democratic? The answer is again NO! The misuse of this power to veto is nothing but the worst autocratic authority that is exercised with selfish interests only!
   The Security Council of the UN is the seat of this naked autocracy. The power of veto is the absolute ruling that can be exercised by any one of the countries that won World War II and have set up the UN. It is not to attain world peace but to demonstrate their absolute authority regardless of what is right or wrong.
   It is time that apart from being a debating club, the UN’s charter should abolish this totally unreasonable and undemocratic concept of veto. Today we see Israel, the world’s only terrorist state that is nurtured, protected and unashamedly encouraged by the umbrella of veto.
   It allows them to do whatever they desire, to destroy, plunder and kill! In mathematical expression, Israel today is nothing but equal or superior to Nazi Germany, in terms of plunder, cruelty and killings. Israel and its veto wielding partner (USA) represent the autocratic combination of the worst type of tyranny, terrorism and uncontrolled violence. They represent the greatest threat to peace on earth, with disregard to human rights or any civilised rule of law.
   Perhaps some day, China may contain these two as the rest of the countries are either toothless or subservient to the USA that demonstrates an uncontrolled show of autocracy and nothing else. In this ‘vetocratic’ format, UN is doomed. It can do nothing to contain the autocratic duo of USA and Israel. In the garb of righteousness and democracy, they represent only ruthlessness and destruction.
   When will this end? That possibly is an unanswered question for all peace loving people the world over.
   SA Mansoor
   Gulshan, Dhaka