The Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Naim Ahmed, claimed on May 23 that the overall law and order in the capital is normal despite an increase in the number of some crimes. The next morning, a band of armed muggers shot dead an army official’s son and took away Tk 4.45 lakh from his father-in-law at Dhanmondi, as if to prove the metropolitan police chief’s claim hollow. Later in the day, the metropolitan police issued a note for the citizens, which ironically was signed by its chief, asking them to seek ‘police escorts during drawing from or deposit of money with any bank or transfer of money to other places’. The note was an indirect admission that all was not well on the law and order front.
   Indeed, all is not well on the law and order front, regardless of what the metropolitan police chief or the military-driven interim government wants to have us believe. One needs not do too tenuous a research to agree. A band of robbers stormed the house of a brick trader and walked away with Tk 22 lakh in cash and gold ornaments in the evening of July 8. On the same day, very early in the morning, robbers took away more than Tk 20 lakh in cash and valuables from the house of a jeweller at Hazaribagh. The owner claimed that the robbers had entered the house impersonating as members of the Rapid Action Battalion. On July 7, a mobile telephone shop at a shopping complex at Uttara was robbed of Tk 5 lakh in cash and cellular phone sets in an early-morning robbery. The same day, in the span of a few hours, muggers robbed a woman of cash and a cell phone set at Khilgaon while a hotel employee was shot at Malibagh. A few hours previously, a man was shot dead on the Dakshin Kajla Nayanagar Road at Jatrabari. Put together, we have six serious crime incidents in the span of 36 hours or so. The rate of one crime every six hours does not quite substantiate the metropolitan chief’s claim of normal law and order in the capital, does it?
   The official figures on countrywide crime are anything but flattering. According to the home ministry, between January and June, in the first six months of the military-driven interim government, there have been 1,197 robberies, 1,932 murders and 580 muggings. In other words, over the past six months, more than 600 incidents of serious crime have taken place every month, which comes to 20-odd per day. What is especially alarming about these figures is that the incidence of crime has remained more or less steady despite heightened law-enforcement activities under a state of emergency. Ever since the declaration of a state of emergency in the country and the subsequent installation of the interim government of Fakhruddin Ahmed, the law-enforcement and security forces of the state have been on what could be termed an anti-crime overdrive. The army-led joint forces have detained some two lakh people for their suspected involvement in crime and corruption. They have also seized huge caches of arms, ammunition and explosives. Yet, street crimes continue to take place, perhaps more in cities than in villages. Over the past week or so, the incidence of crime has seemingly been exceedingly high. It could very well be that the enthusiasm with which the law-enforcement and security agencies started the anti-crime drive after the assumption of office of the military-driven interim government has started to wane. The other possibility is that more people are taking to crime. The latter seems more plausible. And the reason is not too difficult to trace.
   One of the first few things that the Fakhruddin government did, upon assumption of office, was to initiate a drive against illegal structures and makeshift shops on roadsides and pavements. The law-enforcement forces — sometimes also the security forces — supervised demolition of slums and removal of makeshift shops with gleeful enthusiasm in the first few days and weeks of the interim government. Overnight, the slums were gone and so were makeshift shops on the roadsides and pavements, especially in Dhaka. The pavements looked cleaner and the roads wider alright; however, the drive actually set in motion a much bigger problem for the city. Neither the government nor the majority of the citizenry realised that.
   According to media reports, the demolition and eviction drive made tens of thousands of people in the city homeless and jobless. The cosmetic change for the city actually came at a substantial price, and no one especially in the government seemed to realise that. It does not seem that the authorities have fully realised its implication as yet. They cannot be faulted for that. Whoever is in power treats crime solely as a law and order issue. The elected governments in the past did it and the interim government has not been any different in this regard either. The fact of the matter, however, is that crime is not entirely a law and order issue, and cannot be treated as such. One has to look at the greater picture.
   The people who have lost their homes and employments because the government’s demolition and eviction drive now have no alternative to fall back on. Let alone low-cost housing for the displaced people, the government has not yet come up with a comprehensive plan to rehabilitate the small-time hawkers who had their only source of income taken away from them. It has come up with a stop-gap arrangement in the form of holiday markets; the step can be comparable with prescribing pain-killer for a life-threatening disease. Meanwhile, life, especially in the city, has become increasingly costly. The prices of essential commodities have increased manifold over the past six months. Mere survival has become an untenable proposition for the displaced lot.
   With their previous source of income gone and the possibility of fresh employment increasingly remote, it is only likely that some of these would resort to desperate measures such as street crimes. Their number may be few at this moment but no one can guarantee that it will not increase in the coming days.
   Regrettably, the government seems oblivious to the direct correlations between unemployment and crime. Instead of creating, or at least attempting to create, jobs, it appears intent on cutting more jobs. The government sacked the entire staff of a state-owned jute mill in Khulna on Wednesday. More than 3,000 people and their families found themselves looking at an uncertain future overnight. Similar job cuts in other public-sector enterprises are reportedly on the cards. Meanwhile, the government’s anti-corruption drive has left businesspeople across the country jittery and it is increasingly unlikely that they would expand their existing ventures or undertake new ones in the foreseeable future. According to a report in New Age on July 11, potential investment by local entrepreneurs as registered with the Board of Investment between January and June has become almost half of the investments registered between July and December 2006. The latest official statistics also show that foreign investment proposals to the investment board has nosedived to Tk 11,925 crore in 2006-07 from Tk 24,986 crore in 2005-06. The poor investment scenario will translate into more shrinkage of the job market.
   Clearly, the number of desperate people in the city and elsewhere is increasing exponentially. Desperation leads people to engaging in desperate acts. When it does, no matter how many law enforcers the government deploys out on the streets and how many petty criminals are put behind bars, the incidence of crime will climb and climb steadily.

THE European Union has been a fantastically successful experiment in modern times. But the question that is being asked in the world capitals is: has it reached the end of the road? As the Union struggles to adopt a mini-treaty, with various opt out clauses, to cope with an organisation of 27 countries by the end of the year in Portugal, has the minimalist vision won out?
   To put these questions differently, is the vision of the founders to build a United States of Europe in substance, if not in name, lost out to the United States’ publicly declared desire to make the EU a sheriff to police its European and world policies? The answer would seem to be in the affirmative, and what seems to have tipped the scale is the entry of the former communist members whose agenda is Russia-bashing and aligning with the US as their ultimate protector against Russia, although they remain rooted in Europe.
   This was dramatically demonstrated at the last EU summit in Germany when Poland shocked other member states by declaring that it was Nazi Germany that had reduced its population by millions and therefore the country deserved more weight in decision-making. Many of these new members, including of course the Baltic states, are fighting World War II battles and wish to get even with their old Russian masters by humiliating Moscow.
   This has meant in practice that the old concept of the EU becoming a world political player along with the US has receded, as the new members’ support of the US-led invasion of Iraq under Britain’s inspiration so dramatically illustrated. There were always differences among the member states on whether the goal should be a federal union or a loose federation of states, but in the past a majority did aspire to something more than a group of flourishing states in an economic, financial and trade compact. The planned constitution, rejected by Dutch and French voters, was a testimony to the dreamers’ vision.
   Even before the new members spoiled the EU party, efforts to set up a rapid deployment force were stymied by open American opposition and although the concept symbolically survives, the US has reinvented NATO, the Cold War organisation, into a world policeman and co-opted the European Union into it. Even those European nations opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq have troops in Afghanistan under the NATO banner although, characteristically, America has a separate conglomeration of troops fighting there under its own flag.
   Thanks to some astute footwork by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the mini-treaty was agreed upon after lengthening the timeframe for the new voting procedure to kick in to propitiate the Polish delegation. But Poles are still questioning the fine print and one of their junior ministers has publicly launched a tirade against Germany and questioned the concept of a secular EU. Even if the mini-treaty does go through in Portugal, the current president, with a high-profile president replacing the rotating presidency and one person to be in charge of foreign policy, the prospect of a strong European political presence in the world is remote.
   The truth is that the accretion of ten new members at one go, most of them former communist states, has been a burden too heavy for the EU to carry. Apart from giving the United States ammunition to slap down any suggestion of the EU becoming another centre of power, the new members have brought their own different concerns and agenda. It has not merely slowed down the process of integration but called into question the very rationale of a collective European world presence in the political and strategic space.
   Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the European Union’s relations with Russia, surely the most important question of the post-Cold War age. The immediate bone of contention is the American plan to locate components of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic without consultation with either the EU or NATO. Moscow has understandably taken a dim view of this further containment of the Russian Federation and has proposed alternatives the US has spurned as an adequate substitute. And Poland continues to block discussions on a new relationship between the EU and Moscow to protest against a Russian ban on Polish meat imports.
   Poland, for its part, took exception to Germany’s bilateral arrangement with Russia for an under-water direct gas pipeline that would not have to traverse Poland, among other countries. Russia supplies a quarter of EU gas supplies and there is widespread concern in Europe over this dependence. But it is hypocritical of the West to accuse Russia of using its energy treasure as a political weapon. Each country uses the most potent weapon it has to pursue its diplomatic objectives — witness America’s worldwide military bases and presence to make its point.
   Nothing can diminish the European Union’s achievements after the devastation of World War II. Not only was a trading and economic community formed to bring great collective benefit to the peoples of the member countries but also many of them formed a union of a common currency — surely an astonishing modern feat — and made borderless travel a reality under the Schengen rubric. The EU deserves the world’s sympathy for faltering in the political steps the visionaries sought to take to build a brave new world.
   Everyone in Europe decries a two-speed continent, what has in effect come to pass in some fields. The danger today is that there will be a three-speed Europe, with the former communist states forming their own sub-group in order to take revenge on their own historical misfortunes. In any event, the US is greatly relieved at the virtual end of European political ambitions in the near term. It is, therefore, giving greater attention to the growing reach and power of China on the one hand and to further containing Russia on the other.
   Europe started two world wars in the last century and suffered for them. Its new birth in the shape of the European Union has now met a roadblock. The EU must therefore soldier on as an American satellite, quarrelling over trade and other disputes on peripheral issues, but otherwise at the beck and call of the hyper-power.