Concerns over development
projects
by Salahuddin Ahmed and
AFM Mainul Ahsan
IN A developing country like Bangladesh development projects play a huge role in its overall development. Bangladesh is pilling up huge credit from the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and other lending agencies to get done many development projects. Since we are a developing nation, we need to manoeuvre our policy to make the adequate use of this fund from these lending agencies. We know there are merely two types of projects in our country: grant and loan projects. We obviously need to focus on various loan projects, since we need to pay off the debt to these agencies. But the ultimate question that crops up is how we can get these projects done more efficiently and timely.
Various ministries act as the implementing agencies for various development projects. As far as development projects in our country are concerned, the education, commerce, planning and finance ministries usually play the major role in formulating and implementing them. The executive committee of the National Economic Council identifies the priority areas and finalise the projects. After a project is formulated, problems do arise in implementing them. We know various consulting firms submit their proposal in getting contracts for these projects. But we strongly doubt whether these firms provide premium expertise to carry out such high-profile projects. As far as public procurement is concerned, sometimes the implementing agencies ask for fixed-rate budget and sometimes the lowest budget. It would be better if the executing and implementing agencies fix an exact budget and ask firms to submit financial and technical proposals. If we select a firm on the basis of the lowest budget, the overall value of the project could be vulnerable.
We need to focus very specifically in selecting firms or consortia of firms to get these projects done. There should be no room for corrupt practices when selecting a firm. We all know that these development projects have been done by public procurement rules and these rules should be followed throughout the initiating and implementing a project. It is conceivable that in many high-profile projects international management consulting firm need to be included as the lead firm. These firms then select local management firms as their local subcontractors. It is obvious that these local firms play a huge influence in winning the project. The implementing and executing agency should make sure that there is no influence from any firms whatsoever and the winning firm should win project on the basis of the qualifications detailed in the procurement rules. It is conceivable that the firms supposed to be selected on the basis of their experience and the qualifications of the consultants provided by these firms. We can get the name of short-listed firms on the website of, say, the Asian Development Bank; but for more transparency these firms’ name should be revealed in the national media. It should also be noted that we get the name of only the lead firms, but there is no indications which local firms will be giving support to these international firms. Everything should come in front as far as transparency and efficiency of such high-profile projects are concerned. Local firms would be tempted to form consortia with many different international firms that could seriously cast doubt on the efficiency of the project. For all these reasons the names of the short-listed firms with their local subcontractors should be revealed to all.
Another serious issue regarding these development projects is the timeframe. Sometimes it is seen that firms are asked to submit proposal for several times for undergoing a project. Bidding several times surely question the efficiency of the project and it makes room for corrupt practices. The project executing agency should make sure that there will be just one bidding (there is always exception) and this bidding will be according to the procurement rules.
Moreover, the parliamentary committees can also play a significant role in ensuring transparency to implement these projects in various level, including project selection, procurement, and implementation. Oppositions always make a parliamentary committee lively.
Members of parliament, local government representatives, e.g. union council chairman, members, are automatically assigned to a position to oversee and ensure transparency in the implementation of different projects at the local level. However, unfortunately, these local government representatives or policymakers themselves or their relatives’ business firms more often than not get the job order to be done at the local level which creates conflict of interest. Because of this conflict of interest, it is not possible for a policymaker to oversee and ensure transparency in a project when he has business interest in that project.
We cannot afford either spending inordinate amount of money and time or corruption while implementing these development projects. We should make sure that the grant and loan we get should be made full use of. Our government will be resilient enough to make sure that there will be no clumsiness and crookedness in executing and implementing these development projects.
Salahuddin Ahmed and AFM Mainul Ahsan are pursuing higher studies in the United States
Livni’s smile: the boss has gone mad
The Arab defeat in the 1948 war brought in its wake the fall of almost all the existing Arab regimes and the ascent of a new generation of nationalist leaders, exemplified by Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. The 2009 war may bring about the fall of the current crop of Arab regimes and the ascent of a new generation of leaders – Islamic fundamentalists who hate Israel and all the west, writes Uri Avnery
ONE hundred and sixty-nine years before the Gaza War, Heinrich Heine wrote a premonitory poem of 12 lines, under the title ‘To Edom’. The German-Jewish poet was talking about Germany, or perhaps all the nations of Christian Europe. This is what he wrote (in my rough translation):
For a thousand years and more
We have had an understanding
You allow me to breathe
I accept your crazy raging
Sometimes, when the days get darker
Strange moods come upon you
Till you decorate your claws
With the lifeblood from my veins
Now our friendship is firmer
Getting stronger by the day
Since the raging started in me
Daily more and more like you.
Zionism, which arose some 50 years after this was written, is fully realising this prophecy. We Israelis have become a nation like all nations, and the memory of the Holocaust causes us, from time to time, to behave like the worst of them. Only a few of us know this poem, but Israel as a whole lives it out.
In this war, politicians and generals have repeatedly quoted the words: ‘The boss has gone mad!’ originally shouted by vegetable vendors in the market, in the sense of ‘The boss has gone crazy and is selling the tomatoes at a loss!’ But in the course of time the jest has turned into a deadly doctrine that often appears in Israeli public discourse: in order to deter our enemies, we must behave like madmen, go on the rampage, kill and destroy mercilessly.
In this war, this has become political and military dogma: only if we kill ‘them’ disproportionately, killing a thousand of ‘them’ for ten of ‘ours’, will they understand that it’s not worth it to mess with us. It will be ‘seared into their consciousness’ (a favourite Israeli phrase these days). After this, they will think twice before launching another Qassam rocket against us, even in response to what we do, whatever that may be.
It is impossible to understand the viciousness of this war without taking into account the historical background: the feeling of victimhood after all that has been done to the Jews throughout the ages, and the conviction that after the Holocaust, we have the right to do anything, absolutely anything, to defend ourselves, without any inhibitions due to law or morality.
***
WHEN the killing and destruction in Gaza were at their height, something happened in faraway America that was not connected with the war, but was very much connected with it. The Israeli film ‘Waltz with Bashir’ was awarded a prestigious prize. The media reported it with much joy and pride, but somehow carefully managed not to mention the subject of the film. That by itself was an interesting phenomenon: saluting the success of a film while ignoring its contents.
The subject of this outstanding film is one of the darkest chapters in our history: the Sabra and Shatila massacre. In the course of Lebanon War I, a Christian Lebanese militia carried out, under the auspices of the Israeli army, a heinous massacre of hundreds of helpless Palestinian refugees who were trapped in their camp, men, women, children and old people. The film describes this atrocity with meticulous accuracy, including our part in it.
All this was not even mentioned in the news about the award. At the festive ceremony, the director of the film did not avail himself of the opportunity to protest against the events in Gaza. It is hard to say how many women and children were killed while this ceremony was going on – but it is clear that the massacre in Gaza is much worse than that 1982 event, which moved 400 thousand Israelis to leave their homes and hold a spontaneous mass protest in Tel-Aviv. This time, only 10 thousand stood up to be counted.
The official Israeli Board of Inquiry that investigated the Sabra massacre found that the Israeli government bore ‘indirect responsibility’ for the atrocity. Several senior officials and officers were suspended. One of them was the division commander, Amos Yaron. Not one of the other accused, from the Minister of Defence, Ariel Sharon, to the Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, spoke a word of regret, but Yaron did express remorse in a speech to his officers, and admitted: ‘Our sensitivities have been blunted.’
***
BLUNTED sensitivities are very evident in the Gaza War.
Lebanon War I lasted for 18 years and more than 500 of our soldiers died. The planners of Lebanon War II decided to avoid such a long war and such heavy Israeli casualties. They invented the ‘mad boss’ principle: demolishing whole neighbourhoods, devastating areas, destroying infrastructures. In 33 days of war, some 1,000 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, were killed – a record already broken in this war by the 17th day. Yet in that war our army suffered casualties on the ground, and public opinion, which in the beginning supported the war with the same enthusiasm as this time, changed rapidly.
The smoke from Lebanon War II is hanging over the Gaza War. Everybody in Israel swore to learn its lessons. And the main lesson was: not to risk the life of even one single soldier. A war without casualties (on our side). The method: to use the overwhelming firepower of our army to pulverise everything standing in its way and to kill everybody moving in the area. To kill not only the fighters on the other side, but every human being who might possibly turn out to harbour hostile intentions, even if they are obviously an ambulance attendant, a driver in a food convoy or a doctor saving lives. To destroy every building from which our troops could conceivably be shot at – even a school full of refugees, the sick and the wounded. To bomb and shell whole neighbourhoods, buildings, mosques, schools, UN food convoys, even ruins under which the injured are buried.
The media devoted several hours to the fall of a Qassam missile on a home in Ashkelon, in which three residents suffered from shock, and did not waste many words on the forty women and children killed in a UN school, from which ‘we were shot at’ – an assertion that was quickly exposed as a blatant lie.
The firepower was also used to sow terror – shelling everything from a hospital to a vast UN food depot, from a press vantage point to the mosques. The standard pretext: ‘we were shot at from there.’
This would have been impossible, had not the whole country been infected with blunted sensitivities. People are no longer shocked by the sight of a mutilated baby, nor by children left for days with the corpse of their mother, because the army did not let them leave their ruined home. It seems that almost nobody cares anymore: not the soldiers, not the pilots, not the media people, not the politicians, not the generals. A moral insanity, whose primary exponent is Ehud Barak. Though even he may be upstaged by Tzipi Livni, who smiled while talking about the ghastly events.
Even Heinrich Heine could not have imagined that.
***
THE last days were dominated by the ‘Obama effect’.
We are on board an airplane, and suddenly a huge black mountain appears out of the clouds. In the cockpit, panic breaks out: How to avoid a collision?
The planners of the war chose the timing with care: during the holidays, when everybody was on vacation, and while President Bush was still around. But they somehow forgot to take into consideration a fateful date: next Tuesday Barack Obama will enter the White House.
This date is now casting a huge shadow on events. The Israeli Barak understands that if the American Barack gets angry, that would mean disaster. Conclusion: the horrors of Gaza must stop before the inauguration. This week that determined all political and military decisions. Not ‘the number of rockets’, not ‘victory’, not ‘breaking Hamas’.
***
WHEN there is a ceasefire, the first question will be: Who won?
In Israel, all the talk is about the ‘picture of victory’ – not victory itself, but the ‘picture’. That is essential, in order to convince the Israeli public that the whole business has been worthwhile. At this moment, all the thousands of media people, to the very last one, have been mobilised to paint such a ‘picture’. The other side, of course, will paint a different one.
The Israeli leaders will boast of two ‘achievements’: the end of the rockets and the sealing of the Gaza-Egypt border (the co-called ‘Philadelphi route’. Dubious achievements: the launching of the Qassams could have been prevented without a murderous war, if our government had been ready to negotiate with Hamas after they won the Palestinian elections. The tunnels under the Egyptian border would not have been dug in the first place, if our government had not imposed the deadly blockade on the Strip.
But the main achievement of the war planners lies in the very barbarity of their plan: the atrocities will have, in their view, a deterrent effect that will hold for a long time.
Hamas, on the other side, will assert that their survival in the face of the mighty Israeli war machine, a tiny David against a giant Goliath, is by itself a huge victory. According to the classic military definition, the winner in a battle is the army that remains on the battlefield when it’s over. Hamas remains. The Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip still stands, in spite of all the efforts to eliminate it. That is a significant achievement.
Hamas will also point out that the Israeli army was not eager to enter the Palestinian towns, in which their fighters were entrenched. And indeed: the army told the government that the conquest of Gaza city could cost the lives of about 200 soldiers, and no politician was ready for that on the eve of elections.
The very fact that a guerrilla force of a few thousand lightly armed fighters held out for long weeks against one of the world’s mightiest armies with enormous firepower, will look to millions of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims, and not only to them, like an unqualified victory.
In the end, an agreement will be concluded that will include the obvious terms. No country can tolerate its inhabitants being exposed to rocket fire from beyond the border, and no population can tolerate a choking blockade. Therefore (1) Hamas will have to give up the launching of missiles, (2) Israel will have to open wide the crossings between the Gaza Strip and the outside world, and (3) the entry of arms into the Strip will be stopped (as far as possible), as demanded by Israel. All this could have happened without war, if our government had not boycotted Hamas.
***
HOWEVER, the worst results of this war are still invisible and will make themselves felt only in years to come: Israel has imprinted on world consciousness a terrible image of itself. Billions of people have seen us as a blood-dripping monster. They will never again see Israel as a state that seeks justice, progress and peace. The American Declaration of Independence speaks with approval of ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’ That is a wise principle.
Even worse is the impact on hundreds of millions of Arabs around us: not only will they see the Hamas fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous.
The Arab defeat in the 1948 war brought in its wake the fall of almost all the existing Arab regimes and the ascent of a new generation of nationalist leaders, exemplified by Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. The 2009 war may bring about the fall of the current crop of Arab regimes and the ascent of a new generation of leaders – Islamic fundamentalists who hate Israel and all the west.
In coming years it will become apparent that this war was sheer madness. The boss has indeed gone mad – in the original sense of the word.
Counterpunch, January 19. Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.
The ACC’s future
One major yardstick by which the ‘change’ of Awami League’s mantra will be measured is the manner in which the new government handles the independence of the Anti-Corruption Commission.
If it goes back to the old days of untouchability of the ruling people and makes the ACC a handmaiden of the PMO, nothing would have changed and indeed we would have regressed in time. Politics should not be a license to steal, burn, extort. And that dictum applies equally to politicians on both the treasury and the opposition benches.
BT
USA
TCB
The industry minister says there will be no interference in the activities of the business people. However, the finance minister said a few days back that the government would take part in the import of essential items to curb the price increase. Who we should believe?
F Islam
Dhaka
Israel and democracy
Israel is not a democratic country at all. What it has is theocracy. The country was founded on a religion and it is still based on a religion. Holding regular polls and having a setup of a multi-party mechanism with a parliament do not necessarily make a country democratic. When the West talks about democracy in the Middle East they intentionally exclude Israel from the list. Democracy cannot be sustained in a non-secular society. Religion-based societies institutionalise discrimination and exploitation of the minorities. That is what exactly is happening in Israel. If Israel can turn itself into a democratic country all the regional conflicts will be solved and the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs and non-Arabs will live in peace and harmony, even in one single state structure.
MH Khan
Dhaka
Ratifying ordinances
The expert body was right to recommend no blanket ratification of ordinances.
MT Hussain
Daffodil Online Ltd
Israel-Gaza ceasefire
The ceasefire may lead to relative quiet, but it won’t lead to peace.
A citizen
Dhaka
* * *
The ceasefire will not last, Israel will not stop, it will look for any excuse to drive out all the Palestinians from their homes and grab their land. Millions are already displaced, what’s a couple more?
Zubair
Banani, Dhaka
* * *
Israel launched aggressive military operation, heavy-handed, brutal and
disproportionate, causing civilian
deaths that also destroyed Palestinian infrastructure, bred more hatred, and then gets away with it! Why is it always like this?
Why is the international community incapable of condemning Israeli actions in the strongest and most explicit words? If an Arab country had done what Israel did, a war would have been declared on it! Double standard again!
Sayeedur Rahman
Via e-mail
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