Editorial
Rule of law turned on its head
What Dr Kamal Hossain said on Saturday, i.e. those who are calling for movement to free the detained offenders ought to be identified as their associates (read accomplices), may contradict the very concept of the rule of law but is very much in sync with his not-so-tacit support for the military-controlled interim government and its actions. Hence, while one may be shocked that a man of law like him could even make such an extra-legal suggestion, one should not be surprised at all. Ever since the January 11, 2007 changeover, Dr Kamal and some other so-called civil society stalwarts have persisted with their unqualified support for a regime whose constitutional legitimacy is highly questionable and which has made hardly any attempt to veil its apparently inherent contempt for the political class in particular and the political process in general. These people have seldom wasted any opportunity to denigrate and demonise the elected governments of the past, although the regime of their predilection has over the past 15 months or so steered the country from one debacle to the other. It has defied the constitution vis-à-vis its tenure and mandate, and seemingly embarked upon an open-ended pursuit of redrawing the political landscape by trying, not so covertly and thus far unsuccessfully, to relegate Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina into political insignificance. The incumbents also appear to have used the ‘drive against crime and corruption’ as a means in their perceived attempts at introducing a new political order.
On the whole, the interim government, which came to power with the self-proclaimed objective of upholding and consolidating the democratic system, holding free and fair general elections, protecting and promoting people’s rights and putting the economy back on track, has only undermined the democratic process, drifted further away from the path of elections, curtailed people’s fundamental rights and brought the economy to its knees. As consequences of its injudicious actions, trade and commerce has come to a grinding halt, investment nosedived, employment opportunities shrunk, prices of essential commodities soared, inflation overshot all previous records, and the list goes on and on.
There is no scope for any debate that individuals and groups who have used their political connections and financial might to further their interests at the expense of the nation’s wellbeing should be prosecuted and punished for their misdeeds. It is also beyond any doubt that such prosecution and punishment thereby should be within the ambit of law and entail a process whose legitimacy and transparency is unquestionable. However, most of the detained offenders that Dr Kamal spoke of have been incarcerated in a questionable manner and indicted on dubious charges. The clamour over their release stems from the growing displeasure with the government’s seemingly arbitrary application of law that these people have been subjected to thus far.
The rule of law requires that even the vilest of criminals be afforded the opportunity to defend himself or herself in the court and treated as innocent until proven guilty. The incumbents have apparently done just the opposite thus far. Now, Dr Kamal, a celebrated jurist, seems to be encouraging the incumbents to take their perceived disdain for the rule of law one step further.
Protect haors to feed the country
The National Haor Congress has submitted a charter of recommendations to the government regarding the priorities in ensuring the basic rights of people who live in haor areas and protecting the haors themselves as special zones, New Age reported on Monday. The congress has rightly pointed out the abject poverty and misery that the inhabitants of haor regions are often subjected to with few options to seek education or even medical care. However, the necessity to protect these wetlands is not a parochial one, it has immense national significance.
This paper has consistently aligned itself with the scientific premise that haors – their conservation and wellbeing – are critical for the wellbeing and health of almost all of deltaic Bangladesh. The haors are a unique ecosystem which have since time immemorial been the natural spawning grounds for almost all the indigenous varieties of fish that are found in the country. Fish born in the haors and wetlands scattered throughout Bangladesh are eventually dispersed throughout our river systems and are not only a major source of livelihood for millions of Bangladeshis but also the principal source of protein in the rural palate. The abundance of fish-stocks in the country’s rivers is directly linked to the wellbeing of the haors and wetlands of Bangladesh.
It is disturbing that over the past decade, successive governments have leased out these vast wetlands to private fish merchants who have harvested the fish stocks by drying out the major haors and damming the points where they drain into the river. The consequences of this short-sighted revenue earning policy are evident. Fish stocks in the country are registering a sharp decline, even as population pressure rises. Fish that would go on to constitute a present and future source of food and income for millions become a single harvest without a chance to grow into maturity. While the temptation to pick quantifiable gains over abstract ones is strong, any gains that are made in terms of revenue or even fish sales are clearly outstripped by the devastating losses that this haor-leasing project is having.
We urge the government to note the damage that its myopic policies on the haor ecosystems is having on millions of ordinary Bangladeshis, and we demand that the relevant authorities immediately adopt conservation measures that allow the natural process of fish spawning and dispersion to happen without hindrances. We once again emphasise that this is not a parochial priority, it is a national one.
Guilty by association?
If there is anything worse than the politics of black money and muscle power that Kamal Hossain spoke out against on Saturday, it must be the politics of opportunism, writes Shameran Abed
The current regime’s surrogates have been out in full force of late, trying their best to legitimise the regime itself and to promote different aspects of its political agenda. On Saturday, Kamal Hossain, the celebrated lawyer-cum-politician, suggested that those who are calling for detained politicians to be set free should be ‘identified as their associates’. First of all, he may need reminding that those who are calling for release of the political prisoners of this military-controlled government, i.e. leaders and activists of their respective political parties, are indeed associates of the detainees and have never purported or pretended to be anything but. And second, he would do well to remember that till the January 11 intervention by our western development ‘partners’ and the military, he was himself embedded in the degenerated political process and a close associate of the very people he now so despises.
If there is anything worse than the politics of black money and muscle power that the Gana Forum president also spoke out against on Saturday, it must be the politics of opportunism. Just days prior to the January 11 intervention of last year, was Kamal Hossain not sharing the same stage as Sheikh Hasina, Abdul Jalil, Sheikh Selim and many others who are currently detained for one reason or another? Did he not go to Chittagong in 2005 to campaign for ABM Mohiuddin during the port city’s mayoral elections? If he is not their associate, who is? And if anyone is to be found guilty by association, and he sure seems to suggest that they should, then why is Kamal Hossain not surrendering himself to the army-led joint forces?
Just because someone has had a convenient change of heart following the January 11 changeover and now wishes to collaborate with an illegal regime does not absolve him of his past sins; it may only add to them.
But Kamal Hossain knows as well as anyone else that one cannot be found guilty by association. If that were the case, we would probably all be guilty as charged. Therefore, his attempt at painting those who are seeking the release of Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina as criminal accomplices of the two leaders – mind you the leaders themselves have not been found guilty of any crime by any court of law as yet – amounts to nothing more than pandering to the powers that be by apparently discrediting the political class. He has even gone as far as to claim that the regime should ask the state-run Bangladesh Television to air programmes on the past crimes of political governments. Does he really think that the people are interested in the past when the future looks so bleak? And is Kamal Hossain now against granting autonomy to BTV and Bangladesh Betar as well?
Kamal Hossain is not the only person who was once friends with the politicians who are currently in jail but now won’t miss an opportunity to lay all the blame for our collective failure on them. As a matter of fact, in his defence he can cite his troubled relationship with his old political party, the Awami League, and his disillusionment with mainstream politics in our country that prompted him to break away and float the unsuccessful Gana Forum. He had at least spoken out, at different times, against his past associates. The others, including the so-called reformists who have splintered the Bangladesh Nationalist Party as well as those who have somehow managed to launch entirely new political parties of their own during the state of emergency, are opportunists of much greater distinction.
Take little-known Ferdous Ahmed Quarishi for example. In another lifetime he was a member of the BNP. In his present reincarnation, he has floated a political party of his own and hopes to be real a contender for power. A man who obviously has delusions of grandeur to go with his opportunist streak, he has stated on several occasions recently, most notably during his preparatory dialogue with government advisers, that the next parliamentary elections should be held under the ongoing state of emergency. The recommendation itself is, of course, absolutely bizarre. After all, how can meaningful elections be held while restrictions are in place against assembly and peaceful political activity? And if those restrictions were to be lifted, what is the need for a state of emergency anyway? But it is not the absurdity of his recommendation that is surprising. It is the fact that his position is even more extreme than the one advocated by almost all other collaborators of this regime and that of the regime itself, prominent members of which have promised time and again that the state of emergency would be lifted in advance of the elections. If for nothing else, one must give a man credit for trying.
Fortunately, the present regime’s perceived political agenda of restructuring the polity in line with its wishes has found little currency, and for all the talk by its collaborators to discredit the political class altogether in order to make the case for an extended stay in power of an unelected, undemocratic and unpopular regime, the electorate is largely unconvinced and the political parties remain highly relevant. And yet, the regime and the Election Commission that it constituted seem hell bent on complicating matters further and making their own lives much more difficult. The Election Commission, for example, has just about put the last nail in its own coffin by way of its recent decision to invite a splinter group of the BNP for talks on electoral reforms, despite the fact that a majority of the party’s standing committee had given written notice to the commission regarding which faction constitutes the real BNP.
How the commission thought that it could get away with this is anyone’s guess, but surely they can have no complaints about the reaction of the mainstream faction of the BNP. The secretary general, Khandaker Delwar Hossain, has clearly stated that the BNP will not contest parliamentary or any other election held under the stewardship of the present commission. And on Sunday, Awami League president Sheikh Hasina put a further spanner in the works for the Election Commission and the regime by stating that her party would not go to polls without her and that she has no intentions of retiring from politics. With both the BNP and Awami League now making it clear that they will not contest polls unless the elections are held on their terms, the grand plan of the ruling coterie to liquidate the political careers of Khaleda and Hasina and make their parties irrelevant appears on the verge of implosion. So much for ‘minus-two’ and whatever other subtraction formula the powers that be had in mind.
With no chance of any election being considered credible or acceptable without the full participation of the BNP and the Awami League, the election commission as well as the military-controlled government have got themselves into a bit of a bind and the country is once again hurtling towards an impasse. The regime’s attempts at floating new political platforms as well as their promotion of certain pro-regime factions within the existing parties have little chance of success, at least as far as replacing the BNP of Khaleda Zia and the Awami League of Sheikh Hasina as the two major political forces are concerned. Hence, whatever little hope there remained of proper, participatory elections held under this regime and by the current Election Commission has all but dissipated into thin air. All that we are left with are the chitter-chatter of this regime’s collaborators, high prices of essentials and a worsening power crisis.
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