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THE newly-constituted Biman board of directors has already set a record in having sat for a marathon meeting – the first formal one since its formation on February 24 – from early evening till midnight on March 3, but still failed to deliver any result and called for another meeting to be held on March 8. The convening of another meeting in quick succession is only indicative of the importance of the issues that the board must resolve in a prudent and responsible way so as to ensure Biman not only retains its recent recovery from a free fall but also climbs out steadily and confidently to its optimum cruising altitude.
   The issue of enormous importance that is confronting the board is the one of procurement of aircraft to meet Biman’s need of the day and of the hour and not of the year 2013 or 2017 when, according to the Fleet Planning Committee, the brand-new Boeing777s and Boeing787 Dreamliners are to be delivered by the manufacturer. Surely, the board must first cater to Biman’s immediate needs before indulging in the luxury of investing in the distant future.
   Reportedly, Biman alone cannot bear, even in the most optimistic projection, the full cost of the four B777s and four B787 Dreamliners, and the government of Bangladesh, as the 100 per cent shareholder of the Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited, will have to inject Tk 1,700 crore as equity in order to make the project viable.
   If it were Biman’s resources alone, and none from the government exchequer, then perhaps the board would have the independence and authority to reach a decision at its very first meeting and would not remain in animated suspension as it does now. Because of the envisaged investment expenditure of the government in the project being many times more than Tk 25 crore, the issue will necessarily be referred to the executive committee of the National Economic Council.
   It would be refreshing to remind ourselves of how time-consuming and exasperating it had been for Biman to go through all the ECNEC and PPR exercises in the first half of the 1990s in the run-up to the induction of the two Airbus A310s in 1996. Then again it was because the procedures were rigorously followed that the allegations of corruption involving the purchase of the Airbuses would subsequently not stand in the court of law when cases were filed against the protagonists of the Airbus deal.
   Whenever Biman opted to buy – as it did at various stages of its history – brand-new aircraft, for example the DC1O in 1989, the ATPs in 1990, or the A310s in 1996, Biman invariably ran into financial difficulties primarily because of a highly adverse debt-equity ratio that once reached the staggering value of 83:17 bringing Biman precipitously close to bankruptcy. This time again, unless the government provides enough financial support in terms of equity, the history will only repeat itself. The political governments never lived up to their commitment to Biman in terms of providing equity injection resulting each time in disputes between Biman and the government following the purchase of every new aircraft.
   Biman really does not need to go through all the rigour of straitjacket exercises, for it really does not need to commit today to a colossal amount of expenses in its current financial condition. Rather, Biman would do well to cut its proverbial coat according to its cloth.
   With the arrival of the Superjumbo Airbus A380, many airlines will face over-capacity which they will trim by selling off their other long-haul aircraft. The Singapore Airlines is already flying its two Superjumbo Airbus A380s on SIN-SYD sector, the Emirates is scheduled to operate its new A380s non-stop from Dubai to New York on October 1, 2008, London Heathrow on December 1, 2008, and Sydney-Auckland on February 1, 2009. From the media reports we know Airbus expects to deliver 13 A380s in 2008 and 25 in 2009 and 44 per year from 2010 onward. One can reasonably expect, by 2013, when Boeing offers to deliver its first B777 to Biman, there will be a glut of aircraft of various types including B777s in the aviation world. Can Biman then not buy at a bargain price from the secondary market the B777s that it is desperate today to place orders for?
   The Fleet Planning Committee of Biman never ceases to amaze the observers with its overtures. Already mired in a controversy as to its composition, the committee now fronts an erstwhile Biman board member to make the presentation of its fleet planning before the current Biman board. The capacity in which the erstwhile Board member has access to the Board meeting and the capacity in which he makes a presentation before the Board are not just academic questions, but also are vital legal ones that beg explanations from those who are at the helm of affairs of Biman.
   If Biman could properly keep all its aircraft airworthy and flyable all the time, there would be no reason why it cannot maintain the flight frequency and schedule in its present route structure without any disruption. Irrespective of old or new, the three used DC1Os that Biman bought in 1983-84 for a total of $63m and the one brand-new DC1O that it bought in 1989 for $69m – the workhorses of the national flag carrier – continue till today to render absolutely the same services. Pertinently, what matters is how you maintain your aircraft, not how new or how old your aircraft is.
   We have never had any dearth of people looking after the interest of the Boeing or the Airbus or the international financial institutions. This time around we expect the new board members of Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited will be passionate about the very survival of Biman and not let themselves beguiled by the mirage of the rosy picture of Biman’s future as depicted by the seller’s feasibility study.
   Khurshid Alam Khan is president, Flight Engineers and Navigators Association

ABSENT in the discussion of the conflict brewing in the Andes over a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to kill a guerrilla leader is the role of US military in the conflict. It goes well beyond providing satellite intelligence on the location of guerrilla camps: the two countries have opposing responses to Washington’s attempt to militarise the hemisphere. Ecuador’s constituent assembly proposes prohibiting all foreign military presence, while Colombia seeks ever greater US military hardware, intelligence and troops. The US response has been quite un-diplomatic.
   While visiting Italy last October, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa made a modest proposal: if the United States allows his country to set up a military base in Miami, his government would renew the lease for a US base in the coast city of Manta. Otherwise, US troops and operations will have to leave when the base lease ends next year.
   Less than a month later, Correa passed through Miami on his way to China, and US Customs police treated the president as an ordinary foreigner. It wasn’t the first time Correa and his vice-president had been denied diplomatic treatment. Ecuador’s foreign minister called the incident a ‘humiliation of a head of state, from arrogance by a country that believes itself above all others.’
   
   Declining US influence
   Latin Americans are increasingly saying ‘No’ to the US military bases that are spread through the region. The Pentagon uses vassal states in Central America – Honduras and El Salvador – as bases for drug-war surveillance, police training, helicopter sorties, and military-run charity programmes. And Colombia, a key ally in the region, receives more military equipment and training than the rest of the hemisphere combined.
   But US influence in the region is declining, and the US military presence is perceived as protecting a failed economic model. Instead of militarising relations and building fortresses, the United States should address the reasons why majorities throughout the region are turning against US-led models.
   The widespread US military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean has a long history. Bases resulted from and facilitated the hundreds of US interventions to protect corporate property, coups, occupations, threats by gunboats, and other uses of force since the mid-1800s. Panama was carved out of Colombia in order to build the canal, with a series of bases and forts. In addition to protecting the canal, US bases there served for training Latin American armies, preparing US troops for jungle warfare in World War II and the Vietnam War, testing military equipment, including chemical weapons and preventing leftist forces from either winning or consolidating power in Central America.
   
   Panama and Puerto Rico
   Advantages thus obtained by Panama, including access to US markets through the Canal Zone, always conflicted with a desire for independence and with resentment of US arrogance, racism, and interference. A similar dynamic occurred in Puerto Rico, where the Navy moved in after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and remained in the colony for more than a century.
   The 1978 ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties, which required the United States to close its bases in Panama by the end of 1999, represented a watershed in US policy, but Washington never renounced military hegemony in the hemisphere.
   The enclave system of military basing in Panama and Puerto Rico – with thousands of troops, multiple military capacities, and internal societies alienated from the ‘host country’ – has largely dissolved, with the possible and ironic exception of Guantánamo, as a result of popular resistance. But the United States has adapted by establishing more and smaller bases and ‘security locations,’ by relying on proxy troops trained and supplied by the United States, and by using air and naval forces for intelligence.
   
   Colombia, Honduras and Guantánamo
   The largest bastion of US military presence is in Colombia, where 800 soldiers and 600 military contractors are supporting a counterinsurgency that targets civilians and destroying health and environment through aerial fumigation as part of the failed so-called ‘Drug War.’
   Then the United States operates a base in Soto Cano, Honduras, set up in 1984. It’s a legacy of Reagan administration’s efforts to prevent a leftist revolution in El Salvador while fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by subsidising, in violation of a congressionally imposed ban, the armed contra insurgents. The Soto Cano base provides support for training and helicopter sorties. And there’s an air base and police training academy in El Salvador. And drug traffic surveillance facilities in Curazao and Aruba.
   The infamous detention camp in Guantánamo, Cuba is in fact part of a longstanding US naval base there, which enjoys a lease with no termination date. With an uninterrupted US presence since 1903, Guantánamo has served as a rest and relaxation site for sailors and Marines, refuelling site for Coast Guard ships and temporary camp for Haitian refugees. The military detention camp established for detainees of suspected al-Qaeda members, in violation of Geneva Convention norms, where documented torture and abuse are rife, currently overshadows the naval base, which is controversial in its own right. The base is a hangover from the earlier heyday US imperialism a century ago, and Cuba has refused to deposit US Treasury checks for the base’s below-market rent.
   
   Widespread withdrawal
   Revulsion toward US unilateralism and the torture methods used and taught by US officials is leading to withdrawal from some US-run military programmes, such as the US School of the Americas (relocated from Panama in 1984) now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
   Bases set up in Puerto Rico and Ecuador, partly as a result of the closure of bases in Panama, are already closed or soon will be. The grassroots movement of civil disobedience, culture, and political action to stop the naval bombing in Vieques, Puerto Rico unified a colonised society otherwise fractured by attitudes towards relations with United States. Ecuador bowed out of hosting a multinational naval exercise last year, and several Latin American nations have refused to sign agreements that would exempt US soldiers from prosecution in the International Criminal Court.
   Argentina even led a multinational military exercise in October 2006 ‘to recover an airport that has fallen under the control of an extra-continental power, being used to fly in and deploy troops into the area.’ The United States is the only such power with the capacity and political wherewithal to fly in troops in such an operation. Paraguayan soldiers participated in the exercise, dubbed ‘Operación Hermandad’ (Operation Brotherhood).
   
   Washington’s response
   Washington’s response to this rising tide of resistance increasingly has been to rely on Colombia, where President Alvaro Uribe is George W Bush’s Latin political twin. Colombia harbours 1,400 US soldiers and military contractors, as well as five radar sites, all operated by the ITT Corporation, and a ‘Forward Operating Site’ in Apiay. Apiay is one of a handful of sites in Colombia where the US Army 7th Special Forces Group trains thousands of Colombian soldiers every year. Washington has appropriated $5.5 billion in mostly military funds since 2000 as part of ‘Plan Colombia,’ a bi-partisan initiative purportedly aimed at ‘going to the source’ of cocaine production by fumigating coca fields. In reality it has been a project that helps Colombia’s military fight insurgents. Drug trafficking has continued apace since the plan’s inception.
   Pundits repeatedly frame the prospect of reducing the US military’s presence in Colombia or rejecting the corporate-sponsored free trade agreement with the country as ‘abandoning a friend.’ ‘The danger for the United States is that if it abandons these Latin advocates of open markets, the beneficiaries will be radical supporters of Venezuela’s Chávez,’ wrote David Ignatius in his Washington Post column. ‘Failing to ratify the [trade] agreement would be tantamount to abandoning a neighbour in its time of greatest need… We desire nothing more than to give Colombia a pledge of economic trust and friendship,’ opined the Los Angeles Times in an editorial.
   
   With friends like these…
   But just what friends are these? Colombia’s armed forces have allied with paramilitary death squads that have forced millions of Colombians to flee in terror from lands that are then occupied by others, and the army itself is the most abusive in the hemisphere. More than 75 of Uribe’s circle of political colleagues and appointed officials are under investigation for working with paramilitary forces, while the Uribe government has worked out an amnesty for demobilised paramilitaries that has reinforced impunity.
   Colombia remains the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, with more of them killed in 2006 than the rest of the world combined. Uribe consistently responds to criticism by political opponents and human rights workers by claiming it comes from the guerrillas. This is the model that the White House has been touting on Congressional junkets to Medellín in its drive to win approval of the Colombia trade agreement.
   Colombia’s militarisation makes its neighbours nervous. The US military base in Manta, Ecuador, set up with up to 500 US soldiers to run counter-drug flights when Panama threw out military bases in 1999, has become a controversial presence that a majority of Ecuadoreans want closed. The US commander in Manta has also stated that the base is ‘very important’ for Plan Colombia. US officials defend the Manta base, asserting that drug traffic in Ecuador and the eastern Pacific has grown in recent years. But if drug traffic has grown since the base began operations in Manta in 2000, it suggests – at the very least – that it’s ineffective.
   
   Cutting off Manta
   President Rafael Correa, who was inaugurated last year, pledged that his government would not maintain the lease for the Manta base, which expires in 2009, unless the United States allows Ecuador to have a military base in Florida. In a public letter to Correa, more than 40 peace, religious and solidarity organisations publicly declared their support in October for Ecuador’s decision to close the US military base in Manta. ‘Every dollar spent on military approaches to drugs represents a theft from programmes for at-risk youth and treatment of addiction in the United States, for investment in reducing US carbon emissions, and for payment of other debts our country owes to the world,’ the groups said.
   Keeping the air base in Manta is still on the table, say spokesmen at the Southern Command and US Embassy in Quito. One arrangement that SouthCom is exploring would allow US military or surveillance aircraft to land in Ecuador, but not at a fixed US base.
   The conflict that erupted between Colombia and Ecuador after Colombian forces bombed a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuadorean territory on March 1 was born of rising bilateral tensions. Previous Colombian military operations along the border spurred diplomatic protest notes last year. When Ecuador last May withdrew from annual naval exercises led by the United States that were scheduled to be held off its coastline, the US Southern Command said that the exercises would be held instead in Malaga Bay on Colombia’s Pacific coast. The Manta base houses AWACS aircraft with a capability for detecting satellite phone calls. The location of the FARC guerrilla camp was reportedly determined by a satellite call regarding humanitarian exchange of prisoners made by guerrilla leader Raul Reyes to Senator Piedad Cordoba, leading Ecuadorean groups to call for an investigation into the role that US and Colombian soldiers based in Manta played in the operation.
   
   War on drugs
   The announced departure from Manta requires the Southern Command to go looking elsewhere in the region for a spot to base its air operations. The two candidates leaked to the media are Peru and Colombia. The United States already conducts extensive military activities in both countries. Peru hosts a key radar station used in the ‘War on Drugs,’ and the United States has expanded the tempo of military manoeuvres in the country. Moving the operations to Colombia would consolidate the country’s position as the Latin American country most militarised by the United States.
   The failed militarised approach to traffic in illegal drugs hasn’t affected the availability or price of these drugs in US communities, nor addressed the poverty and lack of infrastructure that leads some Latin American farmers to enter the illegal economy. A study by the Rand Corporation showed that spending on treatment of drug users is more than ten times as effective for reducing illegal drug use as interdiction of the sort conducted from the Manta base.
   
   Good for DynCorp
   The premise of the policy, that revving up the Colombian military to fight the guerrillas who protect coca plantations will affect the street price of cocaine, has been thoroughly discredited. So we might ask: Who, besides the corrupt Colombian military, has benefited from the $5.5 billion appropriated for Plan Colombia since 2000? The No. 1 beneficiaries in dollars are the US companies that produce Blackhawk gunships and run the programme of chemical warfare in Colombia’s coca fields. These include the companies providing the US government with ‘services’ to aid the Drug War.
   DynCorp International has signed contracts with the State Department for about $150 million annually since 2000 for its operations in Colombia. It also handles most of the operations at the Manta base. The company’s corporate offices, like those of many of the growing band of mercenary outfits, are located in suburban Virginia, outside Washington. (The company’s headquarters are in Falls Church, which is adjacent to the Congressional district of Representative Frank Wolf, the ranking Republican on the House of Representatives Foreign Operations subcommittee that marks up the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds that Congress approves for DynCorp.) The company in turn has consistently given thousands of dollars to Wolf’s campaign. Such a blatant conflict of interest is another demonstration of Plan Colombia’s corrupt underlying dynamics, which should be cause for a fundamental re-casting of the policy.
   If the 2008 elections yield a Democratic victory, renewing the party’s majority in Congress and winning the presidency, the next administration will get a chance to not only re-examine the premises of failed economic, military and narcotics policies in Latin America, but to re-shape those policies to engage the new majorities emerging throughout the region. Democrats, to be true to democratic values, should undertake such a fundamental shift in policy. But don’t hold your breath. Democrats and Republicans are likely to only react reflexively, unless people in the United States actively press them to do so.
   Foreign Policy in Focus, March 7, 2008. John Lindsay-Poland, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is co-director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean in Oakland, California, and author of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US in Panama.

Equal share of inheritance

I am sure that all parents want their children to share their property equally. The imposition of some ancient regulation forbids them to do so, therefore they abide.
   After all these are only regulations and may be altered by the state. In the past, a few regulations of the Muslim Family ordinance were changed. It is also a fact that several sects in Islam require equal division of inherited property. So why can’t we?
   Imtiyaz Husain,
   Gulshan, Dhaka
   

* * *
   Let Bangladeshi people get it done.
   It would enhance their status as civi-
   lised people and by honouring their women they would show respect to themselves.
   Prophet of Islam raised women’s status in the age of darkness by giving women many rights that were unknown in that primitive world. Now let Bangladeshi people, who claim to be good Muslims, follow the prophet’s great example and treat their woman folks as equals.
   And also equal wages for similar job for men and women should be the norm of any civilised society and I often feel very sad when I find that my adopted country, Sweden, one of the finest countries on earth, does not follow this rule strictly even though women in Sweden have many rights that could be a matter of pride for any nation.
   I strongly suggest that Bangladesh, however poor the country is, must follow the simple rule – equal wages for similar jobs irrespective of colour, creed or sex. By doing so Bangladesh would raise its status as a civilised nation.
   Tayeb Husain
   Sweden
   * * *
   The Holy Quran prescribed the minimum portion of the property or the share that a woman can inherit. If we decide to give them more than the minimum, i.e., the equal share, this should be treated as a good gesture and a good idea.
   Everybody in the society, irrespective of their political affiliations, should support and back this idea. The government should go ahead with the proposed reform on this issue.
   MH
   On e-mail

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This is incredible! It is the fifth time that they have changed their agreement and policy regarding rice export in Bangladesh in the last three months. Also, it is not understandable why our government still thinks India is the only place to import rice from!
   Maruf
   Huntington Beach, California, USA

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