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THAT the minimum wage in several sectors has not been reviewed for up to 25 years speaks volume about the indifference that successive governments have shown to workers welfare. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Sunday, the Minimum Wage Board has so far fixed the minimum wage for 42 industrial sectors. However, the board has not done so for some of these sectors in 15-25 years, although labour laws stipulate such reviews every five years. Labour leaders attribute the failure to the absence of worker-centric trade unionism, and the lack of sincerity of the government, stakeholders and people’s representatives. As a result, workers in some sectors have to make do with as low a monthly wage as Tk 495, which, needless to say, is way lower than the Millennium Development Goal of a daily pay of at least $2 for each worker.
   It is not to suggest, however, that workers in the sectors wherein the minimum wage has been reviewed recently fare any better. A glaring example is the much-publicised revision of the minimum wage in the readymade garment sector in 2006, after a break of 12 years, that too prompted by widespread labour unrest in the capital Dhaka and surrounding areas. In line with the tripartite agreement between the government, factory owners and workers, the minimum monthly salary in the RMG sector was fixed at Tk 1,662. Taking inflation into account, such a wage is barely enough to sustain an individual, let alone a full family. Then again, many garment factories defaulted on regular payment such meagre wages, leading to sporadic violence by agitated workers.
   The fact of the matter seems to be that workers’ welfare remains mere political rhetoric, promises that the mainstream political parties conveniently makes and breaks. In fact, over the years, the political parties, who have alternately occupied the seat of power, have only undermined workers’ interest. Trade unionism has been discouraged, particularly in the private sector. In the public sector, the trade union bodies have generally been populated by self-seeking lackeys of the mainstream political parties, who have focused more on lining up their own pockets than protecting and promoting workers’ interests. Either way, the workers have only seen their miseries compound year by year.
   As a labour leader, quoted in the New Age report, said, the government needs to ‘encourage trade union in all sectors’ and it should be a responsibility of the government to enable ‘workers to attain legitimate facilities.’ The government did decide to launch trade unions in the garment sector; however, the decision would have counted had there been explicit signs that the incumbents were on the workers’ side. It has become sort of a routine that the workers face double trouble for raising their voices against exploitation. There have been many instances where the workers had to be at the receiving end of police action for protesting against non-payment of their salaries and allowances, and then implicated in cases.
   Be that as it may, it is unacceptable that the minimum wage in so many industrial sectors has not been reviewed for so many years. The government needs to take immediate measures so that the reviews are done and the wage of the workers is revised upward commensurate with the prevailing cost of living.

Poaching serious drawbacks
for Tiger preservation

POACHERS are killing five tigers in Sundarban every year undermining all attempts at conservation. Besides poaching, shrinkage of habitat causing tigers to stray into the surrounding villages and become target of the local people is another potent cause of decimation of the tiger population. A report published in yesterday’s New Age mentions citing a government publication ‘Bangladesh Tiger Action Plan 2009-17’ that up to two incidents of illegal tiger hunting were recorded each year while three tigers perished because of retribution killing acts by local people.
   The population of the Royal Bengal Tiger, a precious naturalist treasure that the country still possesses, was long known to be dwindling. In recent years the tiger population rose from the critical level to which it had fallen but conservation activities could not be accelerated. Globally tigers are listed as an endangered species. Three of the eight subspecies of tigers are already extinct. Today less than 7,000 tigers survive worldwide. Bangladesh has around 300 to 500 of them. It is true that poaching is an international racket and a vigorous and sustained international effort is required to save the endangered big cats. The trade on tiger organs flourishes though it is illegal in every country. The trade is based on the superstition, skilfully promoted, that tigers’ organs and fat make powerful aphrodisiacs and are a remedy for countless number of ills. Also exotic tastes of the rich for items made of tiger skin fuel the racket. The World Bank president Robert Zoellick said illegal activities of traders and poachers could be estimated to be around $10 billion. Bangladeshis are not the buyers of these myths or consumers of the weird and fanciful stuffs made out of tiger’s body-parts but it could not remain unharmed by the illicit trading network. We may blame the international racket but poaching becomes easier with collusion of a section of forest officials. When all forest resources are stolen due to complicity of forest officials, tigers too become vulnerable to illegal hunting, trapping and poisoning.
   Conservation of tigers is becoming difficult because Sunderban itself is shrinking and deteriorating. Tigers are losing their habitat and food. They kill 20 to 30 people of the surrounding villages every year and get killed by vengeful villagers. Thus tigers are unable to flourish in an emotionally conducive atmosphere. The fundamental problem is the run-away population leading to the squeeze on forest land for farming, fishery and shrimp cultivation. When the balance of nature is disturbed, neither the forest nor tigers nor men are safe.

WAR is, said Major General Smedley Butler, twice-recipient of the Medal of Honour (1914, 1915), ‘a racket’. He had seen it from close(st) quarters and had turned into an outspoken critic of the US military-industrial complex. Describing what his life’s efforts had been devoted to, he wrote:
   ‘I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents’ (War is a Racket, 1935).
   If Smedley Butler was living, he’d probably have agreed with Peter Ustinov the playwright, who said recently, ‘Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.’
   If passions do not rage to transform hostilities into outright war, ‘false flag’ operations may be staged. The Japanese did not ‘sneakily’ attack Pearl Harbour. Their encryption codes had been broken and Washington knew what was going to happen. But the US president decided to withhold the information from his commanders at Pearl Harbour. One hundred and sixty-three American soldiers were killed, 396 wounded, 6 tank landing ships sank. Why? Roosevelt, so the story goes, wanted a piece of the war pie.
   More recently, Iraq’s WMD myth was manufactured, packaged and presented. Aided by the Clinton administration’s deliberate sabotaging of UN weapons inspection in Iraq, it created the predictable western outrage needed to justify George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
   The September 11 Twin Tower attacks have been dubbed the ‘New’ Pearl Harbour by the leader of the 9/11 Truth Movement, David Ray Griffin. The questions raised by the movement which remain unanswered in the government appointed committee report, speak of, at its best, the criminal negligence of the Bush administration; at its worst, complicity.
   
   Obama’s expansion of push button execution
   IN HIS recent West Point speech, US president Barack Obama announced his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, to fight al-Qaeda which had attacked the US on September 11th (in the words of Bush, it was a ‘faceless’ and ‘cowardly’ act), and is now operating in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Even though al-Qaeda’s members are now, according to James Jones, his national security adviser, as few as 100).
   What Obama did not mention was another decision that was taken to ‘parallel’ the troop surge in Afghanistan: an expansion in the CIA-led killer drone campaign in Pakistan. An act which will lead to more drone strikes against militants. More US spies in Pakistan. An increased CIA budget for its operations. And thereby, more of what critics term, ‘push-button’ executions. A state of affairs where the US administration is, Guantanamo-style, judge, jury, executioner – all in one. These executions, or targeted assassinations, or extrajudicial killings are not executions, or targeted assassinations, or extrajudicial killings. The war on terror has changed all that. Terrorists are no longer criminals. They are combatants. Killing them is part of warfare. And the globe is the battlefield.
   In a recent New Yorker magazine article and in several interviews, Jane Mayer who has extensively researched on Predator drones informs us, there are two drone programmes, one is part of the US military-run programme, the other, is run by the CIA. The former, she says, is carried out transparently. There are after-action reports, there is a chain of command. But the CIA’s drone campaign is a ‘secret targeted-killing program’, one that is executed in places where the US is not at war. ‘It’s a whole new frontier in the use of force.’ We don’t know, she says, who is on the target list? How do you get on the list? Can you get off the list? Who makes the list? And, eerily, Where is the battlefield? Where does the battlefield end?
   President Obama had promised ‘change’, and there has been change in the drone attacks. In its first ten months his administration carried out as many drone attacks as did the Bush administration in its last three years. Drone strikes are a new hot favourite in US ruling circles for not ‘risking a single American soldier on the ground’ (Reuters), and less collateral damage than from an F-16. CIA director Leon E Panetta has called them ‘the only game in town.’ But reliable information on casualties is difficult to assess since the Zardari government does not allow anyone, neither journalists, nor aid groups into the area. According to a recently released New America study, ‘Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 750 and 1,000 people. Among them were about 20 leaders of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.’ The rest of those killed? Footsoldiers in the militant organisations, or civilians.
   Piloting a drone requires much less talent or experience than piloting a real plane. It is more like doing well in ‘a video game’, and is work that has been outsourced by the CIA to civilians, to those who are not even US government employees. While sitting at CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia), a drone pilot can view and hone in on a target tens of thousands of miles away. Someone like, for instance, Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan, who was killed in a drone assassination on August 5th this year. Live video feed captured by the infrared camera of an undetected Predator drone hovering two miles away had relayed close-up footage of Mehsud reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house, in Zanghara (South Waziristan), on a hot summer night. The CIA remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. ‘After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards.’
   But Mehsud — targeted and assassinated to elicit the Zardari government’s support for these incursions into Pakistan’s sovereignty — had not been an easy shoot. Mayer tells us, success came only after 16 strikes had been carried out over a period of 14 months, killing a total of 538 persons, of whom 200-300 were bystanders.
   But who cares for native deaths? The less the (American) body bags, the less the (American) blood spilled, the more likely the public acceptance of war. As for the drone pilots, as former congressperson for New York, James Walsh (R) had said ecstatically, it allows them to be ‘literally fighting a war in Iraq and at the end of their shift be playing with their kids in Camillus.’
   And, why not? Who says ‘gangster capitalism’ contradicts with Western family values?
   
   ‘Everything is permitted’
   HONOUR and war are said to be inseparable.
   I think, no longer. Virtual war is cowardly. For, as John Berger reminds us, there has never been a war in which disparity—the inequality of firepower—has been greater. On the one hand, satellite surveillance night and day, B52s, Tomahawk missiles, cluster bombs, shells with depleted uranium, computerised weapons. And increasingly, one sees the American dream materialise, a ‘no-contact war’. On the other, sandbags, elderly men brandishing the pistols of their youth, wearing torn shirts and sneakers, armed with a few Kalashnikovs.
   What courage does the American warrior show through pushing his joystick while sitting in Langley? Should not the Medal of Honour be disbanded? Or better still, re-named Medal of Cowardice? For remote-control killings? Killings best-described in George Bush’s words, as ‘faceless’ acts?
   And what about those who decide? Those who push the bigger joystick? In Shakespeare’s plays, says Stephen Greenblatt, the ruler serves as a model and a test case. ‘If his actions go unpunished, then, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, everything is permitted.’
   Has everything already become permitted? For, as Macbeth had said, ‘I am in blood; stepp’d insofar that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as to go o’er.’