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IN THE recent past, inflationary environment of Bangladesh used to be characterised by price stability. Prices used to rise slowly and predictably. However, very recently international inflation has had a severe impact on inflation in Bangladesh, which has already reached the double digits and is now inching towards a galloping inflation of 20 per cent or over, which is stagflation – high level of unemployment and low level of economic growth. Analysis shows that inflation has adverse impact on the real economy including redistribution of income and wealth among different groups.
   Stagflation is fairly a high rate of inflation even when we have a slow rate of economic growth, lower level of output and income, lower production of goods and services with a high unemployment and idle capacity. Usually, stagflation occurs when we have cost-push inflation or a higher inflation due to increase in the cost of production or import prices of goods and services including those of intermediate goods that are used in production.
   Higher inflation and higher unemployment are going together, the main cause of which is the higher cost of production. Higher cost of production is attributed to higher prices of energies and oil since the US invasion to Iraq four years ago. Oil price used to be $6 per barrel during 1973, which is about $100 per barrel now.
   The economic stage of stagflation has been complicated this year by flood, river erosion, rainfall and drought and crop damage. The political instability has been added as one among the few significant reasons for lower economic growth. The engine of production and supply of goods and services and manufacturing business have lost its confidence in investment in the present regime for a severe move for anti-corruption. Stakeholders or investors are simply scared of being caught probably for their black money to invest. What is really happening is that the anti-corruption activism is too quick and too hard to cure the economy and the cure is getting worse than the disease. We have to have a device to provide a better treatment not by killing the patient. Otherwise, the economy may be in more trouble. We may not be able to avoid the possibility of an economic collapse.
   The rate of GDP growth remaining substantially too low to accept – may be from 2 per cent to 4 per cent for the next decade from now. Due to higher price and decreased competitiveness, exports from the apparel sector have decreased 24 per cent. Foreign investment in Bangladesh has already decreased significantly because of political instability. Consumers are losing their purchasing power.
   Fighting inflation has become a priority. In order to fight the inflation the following strategies are suggested:
   The usual remedy for cost-push inflation is to control the increase of prices and income through a policy, which will control the social pressure to raise wages and the ability of the producers and suppliers to increase prices. A market intervention to lower the pressure for wage increase and control of prices will temporarily suppress the inflation, which is also beyond our control. Because this is a worldwide increase in prices due to higher prices of energies. Import prices of intermediate goods have also increased in the exporting country. Import prices of many essential goods from foreign countries and India in particular including food and related items, fabrics and female dresses of three-pieces and saris have increased. Therefore, lowering prices are beyond our control. Suppressing the claim of wage increase would be very inhuman as the wage level is already too low for the workers to afford essential goods. As mentioned before, consumers have already lost their purchasing power significantly, which has greatly increased the social and political concern.
   Concentration on supply side to increase productivity may be the last hope to fight the recent inflation. Technological improvement and innovative discovery for production and supply can decrease the cost of production for a given output, or can increase the output with the same or similar amount of input. All these will tend to decrease the price. Additionally, the government would have to give subsidies for the production of essential goods including food item. We do not increase the tax rate since it is not demand-pull inflation but we can increase the coverage of tax payment by each and every citizen of taxable income to maximise the tax revenue of the government. We also need to decrease tariff and increase import quota, if any, for essential consumer goods and intermediate items to keep their prices reasonably low.
   The other significant reason in this major importing country is that our exchange rate is too low to afford the imported goods and services. The government should think of a fixed exchange rate at a relatively high level, which might help the consumer to afford imported goods to some extent.
   As mentioned above, consumers’ purchasing power has substantially decreased. Purchasing power of the consumer will have to be increased so as to enable them to buy their essential goods and services to meet their basic needs in life. Since this is more of cost-push than demand-pull inflation, we do not reduce the government expenditure to purchase goods and services by reducing the budget deficit, money supply and hire purchase. Rather, we need to take an expansionary economic policy by increasing budget deficit or money supply or both, and not increasing the tax rate, so that this policy will directly and indirectly increase the consumer’s purchasing power, domestic consumption and domestic private investment. Increased burden of government loan will be taken care of in a gradual fashion.
   Dr M Azizur Rahman is vice-chancellor of Uttara University, Dhaka

ONE of the bleakest features of the present crisis in Sri Lanka is the virtual impunity with which some can abuse the human rights of others, and even kill them, and get away with it. The law enforcement mechanism in the country is at a low ebb and operate with a high degree of political interference. The ethnic polarisation that exists in society and in the decision-making apparatus of the state makes the problem even more resistant to a solution by internal means alone. The sense of national paralysis that has accompanied the rise in human rights violations has prompted the growing calls for a greater international role in restraining the abuses of human rights in the country.
   Violent actions that cause suffering to innocent people are occurring in different parts of the country. The common feature in them is the culprits are rarely if ever apprehended or charged for the crime. Most often there is doubt as to who the perpetrators are, with the government saying one thing, and assorted non-governmental groups another. Recently, for instance, there have been several killings of hapless Sinhalese villagers in the southernmost Hambantota district from which President Mahinda Rajapaksa comes. On the other hand, in the northern Vavuniya district, five Tamil youth were recently found killed. The initial suspicion has fallen on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, but there are also strong indications that the culprits may be different.
   Reports from the north and east where major military confrontations between the government forces and the LTTE have been taking place over the past two years highlight the sufferings and terror of the people. Virtually every day there are reports of people being either killed or disappearing. In addition there have been long standing and consistent reports of human rights violations, including sexual abuse, emanating from the north and east, especially where there has been civilian displacement and resettlement due to war and the weakening of civilian administration. By and large the response of successive governments has been to play down these incidents.
   Government members have also made strong arguments that in a time of war with a foe as formidable and vicious as the LTTE it is difficult to safeguard human rights in the manner that international law requires. They have pointed out that human rights are violated in other conflicts as well, most particularly Iraq, and that these are the inevitable accompaniments of a war that has been forced upon the government by the LTTE. The implied message that comes from the government is that victory in war demands sacrifice, and that no price is too high to pay to defeat the LTTE once and forever. The present government in particular appears determined not to permit considerations of human rights block its march to victory.
   Past lessons
   Indeed, it may be argued that never before has Sri Lanka had such a strong-willed government leadership that is prepared to defy international opinion to the degree that the present government has. President Rajapaksa’s readiness to visit Iran to boost trade in goods and weapons on concessionary terms is only one manifestation of the government’s readiness to displease the western countries, and even the sole superpower, to achieve the government’s own objectives. So far the government has walked this tightrope but the danger exists of overreaching.
   The government is balancing global politics that pits the west on one side and the newly emerging world powers such as China and Iran on the other. The manner in which it is achieving its own strategic objectives has won the praise from nationalists who uphold the sovereignty of the state as the highest good, and denounce any appeal to the international community as an act of treachery. However, it is doubtful whether a relatively small and aid-dependent country like Sri Lanka can continue for long in a balancing act between the world’s most powerful blocs of nations.
   At this juncture it might be appropriate to go back to the past, to another era when President Ranasinghe Premadasa was at the helm of Sri Lankan affairs and strode like a colossus over the political arena. He too attempted to defy the international community and strived hard to uphold the sovereignty of the Sri Lankan state in the period 1989-93. However, he lacked two advantages that the present government enjoys. The first is that there was no global war against terrorism that his government could align itself to. Second, the dynamic new economic powers of Asia, China, India and Iran had not yet made their presence felt as economic actors on the global arena.
   President Premadasa had to give in to western pressure to sustain the economic aid his government required. He accepted a set of over thirty human rights conditions that were placed on his government by one of the world’s leading human rights organisations, Amnesty International. Partly as a result, the human rights situation in the country turned around, and the era of suffering and terror in the south of the country that accompanied the JVP insurrection of the preceding two years came to an end. The question is what can bring the era of suffering and terror in the north and east of the country to an end today.
   
   Present developments
   The value of international pressure in countering human rights abuses has been highlighted recently in the case concerning Sri Lankan peacekeepers in Haiti. It appears that a handful of them have engaged in sexual abuse of under age Haitian girls on a commercial basis. The Sri Lankan government’s positive response to this charge stands in marked contrast to its position with regard to human rights violations that take place within Sri Lanka itself. As the United Nations is itself involved in this case, the government did not simply deny the allegation and try to get away with it, as it tends to do in the case of locally reported violations. The fact that the government decided to cooperate fully with the investigation suggests the value of international linkages in the investigation and prevention of human rights violations.
   The arrest of Karuna by the UK government on immigration charges in London earlier this month is another example of how the international community can play a positive role in investigating and preventing human rights violations. Some groups have been looking into the legal possibilities of petitioning the UK government to try him for war crimes and other international offences in what could be a test case of western commitment to the practice of human rights in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, Karuna’s immigration offences are not very serious and he might merely be deported back to Sri Lanka.
   On the other hand, the United Kingdom is a signatory to many international conventions, including those that outlaw torture, that permit the UK government to try such people from any country who come within its jurisdiction. If he is tried by British courts, it is possible that Karuna’s deeds when he was with the LTTE and also his actions after he broke away from them will be brought to light. Those who are concerned about the present state of impunity in Sri Lanka may see both the Haiti incident and Karuna’s arrest as opportunities to set an example to perpetrators of human rights violations in Sri Lanka and to demonstrate that they cannot commit such abuses and remain untouched by international human rights law.
   The government, LTTE and other paramilitary groups must realise that a time of reckoning is bound to come to them all, and accordingly they must carry out their wars in accordance with international norms. A no-holds barred war, must become costly not only to the victims, but to the perpetrators as well. As a former champion of human rights when he was in the opposition who lobbied the international community in Geneva, President Mahinda Rajapaksa cannot fail to be aware of the implications of these latest developments. It is difficult to imagine that a person who acted with such commitment to the protection of human rights in the bad times of the past should not be equally concerned today.
   Jehan Perera is media director of the National Peace Council in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at: jehanpc@sltnet.lk

PAKISTAN’S General Pervez Musharraf deserves our sympathy. Not because he has been forced to carry out a coup against his own regime, not because his troops are being kidnapped en masse by Pakistani Taliban and then awarded Rs 500 for good behaviour, not because he himself has become a prisoner in his Army House and can’t even nip out for coffee and paan (betel leaf) as he used to, but because he has utterly lost his grip over grammar.
   In my 15 years in journalism, I have covered three coups. And as I walked towards my office last Saturday (November 3), I had the cynicism of someone who has seen it all before. As I entered the BBC offices on a chilly Saturday afternoon in London, a senior Pakistan hand, who like me had interrupted his cosy weekend to cover the story, wondered aloud why the general was taking so long before appearing on national television and explaining his actions.
   ‘His speechwriter is too old for all this excitement. He is probably taking his time,’ I said. Barrister Sharifuddin Peerzada has midwifed every single coup in Pakistan and when General Musharraf took over in 1999, we had to wait until 3:00am for him to address the nation. The nation listened to his 10 minutes of neatly turned out verbosity and, relieved, went to sleep. Peerzada may lack in democratic credentials, but he cares about his syntax. Last Saturday as I arrived at my desk, Musharraf had already started his address. And it was immediately clear to me that he had fallen into that ageing dictator’s familiar trap: He had written his own speech.
   I exaggerate because he only occasionally glanced at his notes and for 40 minutes talked, well, gibberish; the kind of stuff that only journalists and think-tank-wallahs would take seriously. I was so unsettled – ‘not by what he was saying, but by the way he was saying it’ – that I listened to the entire speech again last night.
   I have been accused of punctuation abuse often enough to take these things in my stride, but for the 40 minutes that General Musharraf spoke in Urdu, he didn’t use one proper sentence.
   He replaced his verbs with hand gestures, nouns slipped off his shrugged shoulders, adjectives quivered under his desk.
   And when he said, ‘Extremists have gone very extreme,’ it suddenly occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound – if you would only pour him one last one.
   Consider this; in the middle of his speech when everyone was silently urging him to get to the point, losing the thread of his diatribe about how judicial activism was responsible for the rise of jihadis in Pakistan, he abruptly said, ‘I have imposed emergency,’ then looked into the camera, waved his hand in a dismissive gesture and said, ‘You must have seen it on TV.’
   He forgot to mention that he had pulled the plug on all television channels except the state-run television. It might sound like old-school dictator talk, but just imagine if somebody took away your television and then told you, ‘Oh, did you see that thing on TV?’
   For those who haven’t suffered General Musharraf’s regime directly, he can come across as a rakish figure, a daredevil who easily switches between his camouflage commando uniform and designer suits and then half sleeved shirts for attending fashion shows – his favourite cultural activity before he was forced to abandon it because of security concerns.
   His CV is impressive: Here is a man who can manage the frontline on America’s war and terror, get rid of three prime ministers and scores of generals and still find time to write an autobiography and then get George W Bush to endorse it in front of the world media.
   I visited Delhi soon after Musharraf’s failed Agra summit and he seemed to have earned the grudging respect of the Delhi elite. My Indian colleagues looked at stone-faced Vajpayee and wondered, why can’t the new shining India have a handsome leader like Musharraf. One south Delhi resident claimed that his wife had started watching Pakistani channels obsessively just to get a glimpse of our commando president.
   I reminded my Indian friend of Musharraf’s Kargil adventure. ‘How come you have forgotten your Kargil widows so soon?’ I said. ‘Well come off it, he is a bit of a matinee idol from the fifties,’ I was told. I am not a big fan of period Bollywood, so I kept quiet.
   As I watched the speech this Saturday, I wondered if my Indian friend’s wife saw the same Musharraf that I saw on my screen. He was like that uncle that I mentioned earlier, who after a couple of drinks not only wants to explain the meaning of life, but also why he is the most misunderstood man in the world, how your aunt never valued him, why the world is run by a cabal of Jewish gays and why Japanese technology is a disgrace.
   You want to take the bottle away and tell him to get some sleep. He wants to tell you he loves you more than his own son and now can you pour him another drink.
   I am not even remotely suggesting that Musharraf was drunk when he addressed the nation. No, it was something far more sinister. He seemed to be having an out of body experience, there he sat in his ‘sherwani’ reading an order written by his uniformed alter ego, wagging a finger at himself, accusing his own government of spreading terrorism.
   And let’s not forget that when I say Pakistani government, I mean General Pervez Musharraf.
   Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were said quite randomly:
   Yes, he did say, ‘Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai (extremism has become too extreme).’
   ‘Hum se koi darta hi nahin (nobody is scared of us anymore).’
   ‘Islamabad mein extremist bharay houay hain (Islamabad is full of extremists).’
   ‘Hakumat ke andar hakumat bana rakhi hai (there is a government within government).’
   ‘Har waqt bas court ke chakkar lagatey rehtay hain (officials are being asked to go to the courts every other day).’
   ‘Officials ki beizzati kartay hain (officials are being insulted by the judiciary).’
   At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first three years in power – ‘mera total control thha (I had total control).’ You were almost tempted to ask: What happened then, uncle?
   But obviously, uncle didn’t need any prompting. He launched into his routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was about to launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he managed to make it sound like the final solution). And just when you thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged into a deep pool of self pity.
   This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s wedding rather than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional president.
   As I said, I have heard some dictator speeches in my life, but nobody has gone so far as to mention someone’s daughter’s wedding for imposing martial law in the country.
   When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that my president not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but because we can’t even handle concepts like proper syntax and grammar.
   Abraham Lincoln was quoted. The slow and painful evolution of Western democracy was evoked. Idealists were told to manage their expectations and then there was the obligatory poetic flourish: ‘I would not let this country commit suicide.’
   Sure, a colleague chipped in, I would rather strangle it with my own hands.
   As he closed his speech with a rather poetic ‘forever Pakistan, forever,’ and the national anthem started to play, it occurred to me that our whole nation is probably feeling like a Kargil widow by now. With no cable television to console her sorrows.
   Counterpunch, November 9, 2007. Mohammed Hanif is the head of BBC’s Urdu Service.

The Pakistan crisis

The Pakistanis don’t have much option but to choose between a dictator and a failed leader; in fact let me rephrase that — the US don’t have much option but to choose between a dictator and a failed leader. It will depend on the US to decide who will be the next leader of Pakistan. It is a shame that after 60 years, Pakistan still could not produce a leader. They squandered a lot of opportunity in the last six decades to establish institutions of good governance.
   Syed
   Old DOHS, Dhaka
   

Bangladesh is an agricultural country. The farmers have to resort to lay blockades on highways demanding fertilisers. What is the government doing about it?
   Mehide Hasan
   Dhaka

I think every English-medium school should start using School Software.
   Shohel
   Lakehead Grammar School, Dhaka

Next on Quick Comments

a. About 10,000 lawmen punished in less than 10 months (New Age, November 12) b. DU commission recommends ban on party politics on campus (New Age, November 12) c. Expat workers’ rights go unprotected: Govt yet to strike bilateral deal with any recruiting country (New Age, November 12) d. Repatriation of stolen money hits snag (New Age, November 12) e. Raise voice against domestic violence against women: Fakhruddin (New Age, November 12) f. Musharraf says polls by Jan 9 (New Age, November 12) g. Pakistan army courts may try civilians (New Age, November 12)