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FORMER prime minister Khaleda Zia’s release on bail yesterday is indeed a welcome development, particularly because of the military-controlled interim government’s decision to show respect to the court orders granting her bail in all the cases. Given that this regime has shown a tendency to place arbitrary roadblocks on the release of corruption suspects, often re-arresting them from the jail-gate in hastily put-together cases after the courts have granted them bail, we could not be sure whether the court orders would be followed through this time around. At the same time, it is now an open secret that the release of both Sheikh Hasina in June and Khaleda Zia yesterday took place following intense negotiations leading to agreements between them and the present regime, the contents of which are altogether unknown to us. We believe the people have the right to know what negotiations and agreements have taken place.
   We have long argued that while the government must pursue through legal avenues those who have allegedly engaged in corruption, regardless of their power or profile, it should not stand in the way of corruption suspects seeking and being granted bail by the courts. In our view, there was little reason to drag Khaleda Zia to jail in the first place and even fewer reasons for her prolonged incarceration. The same was the case with Awami League president Sheikh Hasina. The emergency government could easily have pursued the cases against the two leaders without jailing them for such long periods. After all, there was little, if any, chance that they would attempt to abscond. At the same time, there is hardly any justification left to keep incarcerated other corruption suspects who are yet to be convicted or acquitted by the courts. We, therefore, urge the government to allow everyone indicted on bailable charges to seek bail from the courts and to honour the decisions of the courts in the bail petitions.
   Now that Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina are both free, at least for the time being, while the cases against them are under trial, a new responsibility falls on the two leaders. While it is true that the present regime has been an incompetent manager of the state and has further complicated the political process rather than levelling the electoral playing field, it is also true that the people of this country do not wish to return to the politics of the past. At the same time, while the people have never supported the imposition of reforms on the parties from the outside by an unelected regime, they understand nevertheless that the parties must internally democratise by bringing about major reforms. All this time, both the BNP and the Awami League have said that internal reforms would be brought about under the leadership of their top leaders once they are released from jail. Now that both the top leaders have been released, they owe it to the people of this country, who have stood by them through thick and thin, to bring about the kind of reforms within their parties that are necessary and to change the essentially corrupt nature of our politics.

Aziz shows where his allegiance lies

IT IS outrageous that the finance adviser to the military-controlled interim government, AB Mirza Azizul Islam, has taken it upon himself to declare publicly that the World Bank should be given charge of the multi-donor trust fund to address climate change. As reported in New Age on Thursday, besides other media outlets, Mirza Aziz made this announcement in London at a conference where the United Kingdom committed to providing Bangladesh with aid amounting to some $132 million, of which over $100 million will go to this trust fund. However, there had been no previous discussion regarding the management of these funds among the key government officials.
   There has been strong opposition from different sections of the citizenry in Bangladesh regarding involvement of international financial institution in the management climate change funds. According to the hurriedly formulated climate change strategy and action plan, Bangladesh would require some $5 billion over ten years, which is quite evidently a sizeable amount. The management of these funds, their disbursement and expenditure should be given to a national board that, as we have stated previously, should accommodates the voices and interests of different quarters including the excluded and marginalised, minorities, political quarters, experts, the government, non-governmental organisation and if need be international agencies and organisation that might include the lending agencies.
   We fully agree with the apprehensions commonly expressed regarding a lending agency being given charge of the climate change funds. It would provide the lending agencies managing the fund to impose more conditions on Bangladesh and further constrain its sovereignty over it own policies in general and climate change in particular. We further draw attention of the relevant authorities that it has also been a unanimous demand of all least developed countries, given their bitter experience of the World Bank managing climate change funds, that lending agencies must not be in charge of funds that are meant for the poor countries. This opposition had in fact led to a final decision to formulate a more inclusive management board for handling adaptation funds under the UN framework.
   If Bangladesh deviates from that position and agrees to allow involvement of the international agencies then on one hand it would lose control over substantial resources management of which should be a matter for the nation to decide and on the other hand alienate its allies in significant groups of least developed countries and the group of 77 developing countries in climate change negotiations at the multilateral level. This would merely project Bangladesh as a trying to be the ‘good boy’ in its bid to secure a few more million dollars. We demand that the government revise such a position not just to ensure national authority over funds meant for Bangladesh also in the interest of solidifying international solidarity.

FOR Bangladeshis, while there may have seemed much to cheer about on Wednesday when the UK government committed roughly $150 million to a multi-donor trust fund to tackle the impacts of climate change, the devil was in the detail. Amidst the fanfare, finance adviser Mirza Azizul Islam, who headed the Bangladesh delegation, made comments that compromise Bangladesh’s national interests and international standing to a degree that perhaps surpasses his own understanding of the issue. In fact, the comments that the finance adviser made at the UK-Bangladesh climate change summit on Wednesday are so seriously contrary to the country’s interests that a strong case emerges for him to be immediately dismissed from the cabinet upon his return to Dhaka.
   For months now, Bangladesh’s top climate change scientists and policymakers have repeatedly called for the government, the finance ministry in particular, to back away from allowing the World Bank from managing what is going to be the substantial multi-donor trust fund for climate change adaptations that was launched in London on Wednesday. Civil society groups have again and again warned that allowing the bank to administer the fund will mean losing key decision-making control over what projects will be funded and how.
   In the days leading up to the summit, two of Bangladesh’s leading climate change scientists, Dr Atiq Rahman and Dr Asaduzzaman, both lead authors of the IPCC reports that established the science of climate change globally, warned in interviews to New Age that the Bangladesh delegation in London must not do or say anything that will jeopardise our stance at the UN negotiations on climate change, adopted by the group of Least Developed Countries, and G77+China. They were specific. Dr Atiq Rahman warned that the bank had a bitter legacy in Bangladesh and there was reasonable mistrust of its policies that should not cast a shadow on this new initiative. Dr Asaduzzaman warned that Bangladesh will become an ‘international pariah’ if it unilaterally endorses the World Bank as a manager of the multi-donor trust fund. Both of them confirmed that these fears had been conveyed to the chief adviser, and while the government had not entirely dismissed the possibility, it was highly unlikely that the bank would be nominated the manager.
   It is common knowledge that the bank and its twin, the International Monetary Fund, impose a wide spectrum of conditionalities, such as what projects to fund, what equipment to buy, what consultants to hire, for funds that they disburse. Allowing the bank to control a multi-billion dollar fund that Bangladesh is raising to tackle the effects of climate change will be counterproductive if the bank’s historical actions are anything to go by.
   In fact, it has been an uphill battle for climate change policy circles in dealing with the finance ministry, and the Economic Relations Division in particular, which were initially fixated on the idea of availing World Bank loans to tackle climate change.
   Internationally, Bangladesh and its LDC partners have repeatedly taken the stance that the funds the industrialised North dispense to help countries like Bangladesh to tackle climate change have to be ‘new and additional’ as per agreement and has to be seen as grants or compensation. The thinking behind this demand is that countries like Bangladesh are faced with a rising frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events as a result of man-made climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions they had no part in. Now, in order to avoid further climate change, the West is telling countries such as Bangladesh that they must use cleaner energy sources to achieve their own development. On both these counts, for suffering the consequences of the Annexe 1 countries’ environmental excesses and for accepting a slower growth trajectory by internalising environmental damage in economic growth, the LDCs are demanding additional funds which must come in the form of compensation.
   The chief adviser has himself repeated on several occasions that what Bangladesh is seeking is not pity or alms from the West but compensation for the consequences of the environmental cataclysm their actions have wrought. Despite a spate of heavy criticism it has faced on this issue, the ERD has remained recalcitrant, even as the World Bank’s own eagerness to dispense loans has waned. ‘It’s as if the ERD is attached to the World Bank through some invisible umbilical cord; the World Bank is ready to let it go but the ERD keeps coming back,’ one senior government official commented to New Age last week. Nonetheless, insiders report that the rationale that loans are not an option has now been brought home to senior officials at the bank and dropped from the agenda despite the ERD’s enthusiasm. But now, an entirely different threat has emerged. ‘The [finance] adviser said he was not in favour of demanding compensation from the developed countries for climate change that caused damages to developing countries,’ the Dhaka-based bdnews24.com reported from London on Wednesday. Mirza Azizul Islam told the news portal, ‘Is there any meaning of demanding compensation when there is no such research on who polluted to what extent?’ With one callous comment the finance adviser has greatly undermined the leadership role that its LDC partners have till now assigned to Bangladesh, given its high profile as the frontline of climate change.
   The issue of whether the bank would be allowed to manage adaptations funds for the LDCs was a major talking point at last year’s high-profile Bali conference, and it was unanimously decided that all LDC members would block the bank’s latest bid to wrest a position where they would once again dictate tenets of a country’s economic policy as master of these funds. As it now stands, Bangladesh may have effectively alienated its LDC and G77 partners at the UN negotiations, and ‘may not be allowed to enter the room at future negotiations’ because of the foolish unilateral comments of a few servile bureaucrats.
   The bank, the architect of such infamous and economically disastrous policies such as the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s, is abhorred and feared in equal parts across the developing world for its sinister neoliberal agenda. And yet, despite all the criticism, all the opposition, all the facts, the finance adviser unilaterally announced in London on Wednesday that the World Bank ‘may’ administer the fund, ‘given [its] experience, fiduciary management capacity, and expertise’. There has been no discussion on this at the cabinet level, say senior government officials, and despite this military-controlled interim government’s mysterious allegiance to the bank and its friends, both chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed and his special assistant on forests and the environment, Raja Debashish Roy, are apparently opposed to awarding the management contract outright to the bank.
   Why not the World Bank? Why are so many people opposed to such a great degree to the idea of awarding the management contract to the bank? For one, because it is one of the most corrupt multilateral lenders in the world, unrepentant and unreformed despite being exposed for faulty policies that have driven numerous countries into debt and economic oblivion in the past three decades.
   Also, because it is known to advance an agenda often described as the Washington Consensus: a basket of ‘shock treatment’ economic policies involving ‘deregulation, privatisation, “openness” (to foreign investment, to imports), unrestricted movement of capital, and lower taxes [and] it is also, in its fullness, a theory of how the world should be run, under American supervision,’ as noted by William Finnegan in a May 2003 article in Harpers magazine.
   ‘Testifying before Congress in 1995, Lawrence Summers, then of the Treasury Department (now president of Harvard), disclosed that American corporations received $1.35 in procurement contracts for each dollar the American government contributed to the World Bank and other multilateral development banks. This was an unusually candid admission by a leading bank supporter that one of its main activities is, in fact, corporate welfare,’ wrote Finnegan.
   The newspaper The US News and World Report, in its April 3, 2006 issue, revealed that more than 20 per cent of the $20 billion a year that the bank disburses in loans and grants worldwide is associated with corrupt practices. ‘Traditionally [World Bank] staffers have been rewarded with promotions and salary increases for pushing money into projects – not for reporting corruption,’ the report observes.
    For an idea of the kind of rampant corruption that goes on inside the bank, one need only refer to the observations of Steve Berkman, a former manager with the bank’s African projects. In the US News and World Report story, Berkman points out how, in the 1990s, while reviewing the expenses of one of the bank’s education projects in Nigeria, he came across an invoice of $2,200 paid by the bank for 18 cups of tea. ‘We paid $2,200 for 18 cups of tea,’ and when brought to the attention of the authorities, ‘the bank did nothing,’ Berkman told reporters. He added that it makes no sense that an institution with so much financial acumen can’t estimate its losses due to corruption. ‘They [the World Bank] can tell you how many steps a woman takes from a hut to the village water well, but they can’t tell you something like that?’ Berkman asked journalists.
    It is perhaps forgivable that in the day-to-day operations of an institution as large as the World Bank, there will be some negligible theft, pilferage and corruption, but the scale at which it evidently takes place at the World Bank even forces the bank’s own senior officials to question its acceptability. According to Glen Ware, a former senior bank investigator, the World Bank’s internal investigation team has explored some 2,000 allegations of internal corruption in the past six years, and found ‘a recurring pattern of bribery, kickbacks, front companies [and] shell companies’. Investigators at the bank told the US News journalists that for the bank’s projects in African states Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, ‘the going rate to win a contract [from the bank] has been a 10 per cent kickback.’ In Indonesia, they discovered the kickback rate to be 15 per cent up front, and 15 per cent later.
   The bank spends $150 million annually on consultants, some of whom have, in the past, earned as much as $4,000 a day, according to published reports. And although contractors and consultants in each country get an inkling of the kind of corruption that goes on in each country office, no one but the bank’s top Washington bosses can even begin to visualise the big picture. But the bank’s bosses don’t take kindly to those who attempt to practise the same transparency that the bank advocates among its client governments. As Robert Holland, the bank’s executive director for the United States recently observed, ‘I am bound by a disclosure policy that I strongly disagree with. It bars me from telling you what happened in board meetings, or even disclosing statements that I made at board meetings about matters of critical interest to developing nations.’
   These are the kind of expenses that Bangladesh might be incurring with its multi-donor trust fund for climate change if the bank is allowed to become the manager. And there will, of course, be the additional burden of a 10-15 per cent commission that the country will have to pay the bank for rendering its services. The best (and most comical) example of things to come if it is a foreign donor that decides on which projects to fund emerges on the website of the very DfID which pledged £75 million to our climate adaptations fund. A section titled ‘Bangladesh faces up to climate change’ on the donor’s website carries the following information:
   Crab curry is a popular dish in Bangladesh. And as more and more land becomes flooded by the rising sea-levels, crab cultivation is on the increase, ensuring that a steady supply of the crustaceans is provided to markets all over the country…
   Need any more be said?
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

THE arguments will continue till the cows come home, but the American success in swinging the Indo-US nuclear deal, with considerable Indian diplomatic help, in the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group will have two major consequences: It marks the beginning of a new phase of relations with the United States, and it is the one substantial legacy of the nearly five years of the Manmohan Singh government.
   It is also significant that the deal approval comes at a particularly fractious time in domestic politics, reflected in the government’s inability to build a greater consensus around a landmark foreign policy initiative. The Communist parties had their ideological reasons for opposing the deal and finally withdrew support to the coalition government. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s opposition was purely opportunistic in hoping to pull down the government and, after failing in the attempt, burnishing its nationalist credentials.
   The Manmohan Singh government decided that only the United States had the key to give India a seat at the world’s high table and US President George W Bush’s calculation of his country’s interests propelled him to open a unique window of opportunity. The July 2005 deal was the consequence, winding its way through American political and bureaucratic processes and then through the difficult political minefields in India leading to the Communist divorce and the Samajwadi Party’s help in rescuing the government.
   Ironically, India’s exclusion from what Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has described as the ‘nuclear mainstream’ was crafted and orchestrated by the US after the Pokhran-I test. This exclusion was hurting more and more as nuclear plants were working at 40 per cent capacity for lack of uranium and India’s successes in developing its indigenous nuclear programme were hindered by being denied new nuclear technology.
   The US’s promise to take India out of its 34-year nuclear isolation, despite New Delhi’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and possessing nuclear weapons after Pokharan-II, came at a price. The price is that India should form a strategic partnership with the US — a term debased by overuse — in a regional and international setting. India has convergences with the US on several issues, including balancing China’s future power trajectory, and a growing Indo-Japanese economic and political relationship.
   There are, however, points of divergence in relation to Russia, for instance, on US’ unilateral and militarist impulses and on the role of the United Nations and on how the US views Iran and what is described as the broader Middle East. If India’s nonalignment had a pro-Soviet tinge in the old days, its nonalignment tomorrow, for what it is worth, will have a pro-US tilt. How successfully India plays this balancing act remains to be seen, but the two anti-Iran votes at the International Atomic Energy Agency are a warning that New Delhi should retain a cool head even while making necessary concessions.
   The policies the next US administration will pursue remains to be seen, but the worldviews of Washington and New Delhi will inevitably come into conflict on occasion. The US has world interests while India is an emerging power. The American impulse is to prevail, even through force if required, while Indian preferences are more consensual. The essence of India’s nonalignment is to seek autonomy in policymaking, an exercise that is becoming increasingly difficult in the post-Cold War, and now post-Georgia, era.
   In domestic political terms, the NSG approval has come as a further setback to the BJP. One can understand the Communist parties’ perspective of opposing India being drawn into an American orbit, but what is one to make of the party that initiated the process of Indo-US rapprochement — remember the marathon Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh talks in various world capitals — mounting a staunch opposition to the nuclear deal?
   The sense of insecurity the BJP and its leader LK Advani are exhibiting is reflective of their frustration from unexpectedly losing the last general elections and then failing to unseat the Manmohan Singh government. Merely declaring that the deal is tantamount to selling the country down the river or walking into a trap will convince few. Nor is the party’s decision to wear the badge of nationalism on its sleeve a productive exercise.
   It must surely disconcert Mr Advani that the man he flamboyantly described as the ‘weakest prime minister’ the country has had has succeeded in carrying out a foreign policy coup that has been compared with Indira Gandhi’s success in the Bangladesh War, in a conjunction of high-wire diplomacy and force that has few parallels in history. To manage a motley collection of parties that form the coalition and coaxing the Left parties to play along until the time of break arrived required a high degree of planning. And there was the Samajwadi Party willing to lend support at a crucial moment.
   The government cannot rest on its laurels because a new, more intensive phase of diplomacy must now begin. India owes a debt to the US in pushing the deal through the NSG in terms of giving it an adequate share of commercial opportunities in the nuclear trade it has opened up. France and Russia are ahead in the queue in seeking orders for nuclear reactors. Partly, it is up to Washington to speed up its own legislative and bureaucratic processes to claim its share of the Indian cake.
   Above all, the Manmohan Singh government has to prove the critics of the deal wrong by managing the contradictions that will surely arise in balancing the interests of the US with India’s core beliefs and multilateral bent of mind. For instance, India cannot be a party to demonising Russia and opposing policies a newly resurgent Russian leadership is following. Nor can India be a party to containment of Russia through NATO and otherwise. Russia played a helpful role in getting India approval for the deal. On the other hand, China has much explaining to do on why it chose to act as it did.