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A BANGLADESHI cattle trader was killed by Indian Border Security Force along Baraachara border early Saturday. Local people said the BSF troops of the nearby Haridaspur camp caught Rubel, a young man aged 25, after a hot chase late at night when he was returning home after paying money to Indian traders for purchasing cattle. They said the BSF men beat up Rubel indiscriminately and killed him by giving electric shock. Later, they left the body along the border (New Age, June 28). It has become a common phenomenon that the Border Security Force, in the name of border patrol, kills innocent Bangladeshis. The Bangladesh government must take this issue seriously and talk to the Indian counterpart on a regular basis to tackle the crisis.
   The Border Security Force is a border patrol agency of the government of India and a component of the Paramilitary Forces of India. Its main role is to guard India’s international borders during peacetime and also prevent trans-national crime. Similarly, Bangladesh has a paramilitary force, the Bangladesh Rifles, mainly assigned to guarding the borders of the country. Apart from its primary task of protecting the borders, the members of the Bangladesh Rifles have taken part in other military operations. This force was ordained with the additional task of checking smuggling in 1958.
   However, rather than protecting the borders like the BDR, the BSF members seem to be more occupied with killing innocent Bangladeshi civilians indiscriminately in the name of curbing smuggling and preventing crime. According to a report published in 2005 by a human rights organisation, the BSF killed one Bangladeshi every five days. These figures are definitely alarming. BSF men are known to kill or often kidnap Bangladeshi farmers by labelling them as smugglers or criminals. Some farmers are known to have been kidnapped while they were working on their farms in the border regions of Bangladesh. According to the human rights coalition Odhikar, the BSF has killed 743 Bangladeshis in total and injured 806 and abducted 886 between January 1, 2000 and January 31, 2009.
   A lot of tension prevails in the border regions due to this matter. There are often reports of exchange of gunfire between the BDR and the BSF. In some incidents, border guards of both nations are reported to have been seriously injured and, in some cases, killed. Flag meetings are held between BDR and BSF high officials to either protest against or resolve these situations.
   In 2001 there was a severe border conflict between the BDR and the BSF. This led to the BSF filing a formal complaint against the BDR accusing them of war crimes. The BDR was accused of killing 16 BSF officials during April 18-20, 2001. The BSF also mentioned in their complaint that only eight bodies could be identified as it was impossible to identify the other bodies due to decomposition and mutilation. In an article titled ‘BSF lodges “war crimes” FIR against BDR. Is right of legitimate self-defence a “war crime”?’, AH Monjurul Kabir, a Chevening scholar and director of Law Watch, a Dhaka-based think-tank on human rights and legal issues, tried to shed light on this rather curious instance. In his article, Kabir defined what war crime means and clearly pointed out how the BDR members could not have been involved in any such activity. He also highlighted several possibilities of what might have caused the bodies to decompose or appear to have been mutilated. The bodies could easily have decomposed as they were recovered 36 hours after the exchange of gunfire started. The bodies were recovered from paddy fields where they had remained in the open for 36 hours. This caused the bodies to decompose. Moreover, the bodies were recovered by villagers once they began to reek. And there was no way that the BDR men could have mutilated the bodies amidst the incessant gunfire. The injuries to the BSF members could also have been caused by the villagers whose houses were attacked and also set ablaze by the BSF members. The villagers could have had struggles with the BSF to protect themselves and their property.
   It was surprising how the BSF could accuse the BDR of war crimes because they have a proven record of intruding on Bangladeshi soil and killing civilians without any provocation. Therefore, such an attempt to charge the BDR of war crimes was totally inappropriate and baseless. Because of that conflict 10,000 to 20,000 villagers living in the area had to flee, with at least 17 suffering wounds. Many villages were also destroyed in the fighting.
   In a report published by a human rights organisation, it was said that the inhabitants of the border areas in Bangladesh seem to live in constant fear. Not only do the BSF kill innocent Bangladeshis without provocation, there are also reports of women being raped and houses looted. Often the BSF take the dead bodies of the people they kill and do not return them.
   There are also rumours regarding some members of both the BSF and the BDR being involved in cattle smuggling in the border areas of India and Bangladesh. An incident related to cattle smuggling left two BDR men dead in July 2008. The media in both India and Bangladesh carried contradictory reports on this incident. Some reports accused the BDR of assisting the cattle smugglers and the BSF men trying to stop them and this led to exchange of gun fire which resulted in the death of two BDR men. Other reports claimed that BSF men had illegally entered into Bangladesh territory. When the BDR became aware of their presence and challenged their intrusion, the BSF men opened fire and killed two BDR men.
   In another recent incident that occurred in November 2008, BSF men killed three Bangladeshi civilians including a minor boy in Panchagarh. BDR officials of Pachagarh 25 Battalion reported that around ten drunken BSF men entered Maynaguri village near the Majhipara border, which is at least 500 metres inside Bangladesh, and ransacked several houses. When the villagers protested, the BSF men fired at random, killing three people and wounding one. However, when formal protests were made by BDR officials and flag meeting was held, the BSF expressed their regret for the incident and informed of taking action against the accused person.
   This incident also led the BSF to get into legal trouble when the brother of one of the men killed by the BSF in that incident filed a case against them with the aid of the Bangladesh Human Rights Commission. The accused BSF member had been caught by the villagers during the shooting and was later handed over to BSF authorities after the BSF had apologised for the unfortunate incident. The secretary of the Human Rights Commission’s upazila unit, A Rahman Mukul, demanded exemplary punishment of the accused BSF members and compensation for the families of the victims.
   There are numerous known incidents of the BSF men crossing the border and entering Bangladeshi territory and killing innocent civilians on their own soil. There has never been any known or reported case of BDR members entering Indian territory or attacking unarmed Indian civilians. In the past five months alone, i.e. January to May, the BSF has killed seven Bangladeshi civilians. Most of these men were Bangladeshi cattle traders.
   The Indian high commissioner to Bangladesh, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, justified such merciless killings of the BSF by labelling the victims as ‘criminals and smugglers’. The extrajudicial killings of the BSF cannot be justified this way as they are a violation of national and international laws. It is high time that the Bangladesh government discussed this issue seriously with the Indian government. Rather than holding flag meetings every time BSF invades Bangladeshi territory or kills innocent civilians in the name of curbing crime, some definite steps must be taken to put a stop to this matter permanently and allow the inhabitants of the border areas to live a peaceful life which is free of terror.
   Dr Nadim Jahangir is professor and director, School of Business, Independent University, Bangladesh

AS AMERICANS celebrate July 4, they can contemplate that the union of ‘free and independent states’, like the former British colonial power, has evolved into its final manifestation – a complete whorehouse. While members of parliament in London charge their expense accounts with every personal expenditure, including the rental of adult xxx-rated films, an American newspaper put the reporting of public policy out to bids until politico.com blew the whistle.
   In Washington, everything is for sale, including journalistic integrity. The Washington Post, which abandoned investigative reporting eons ago, decided to boost its sagging revenues by spreading her legs. The Post’s business division put out a flier offering lobbyists access at the Post’s CEO’s gracious home to ‘those powerful few’ in the Obama administration, Congress, and among the Post’s editors and reporters who decide the nation’s policies, such as health care.
   The Washington Post’s flyer offered a Wal-Mart low cost of a mere $25,000 for one ‘salon’ to interact with decision makers and $250,000 for eleven interactions.
   Alas, people with an old fashioned sense of integrity impugned the Washington Post’s new business model, and the Post’s boss, Katharine Weymouth, had to rescind the offer that would have rescued the newspaper by turning it into a ‘facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters’.
   I say damn the old fashioned moralists. America would be much better served if the Washington Post was selling access to lobbyists instead of selling the US government’s PSYOPS operations in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, Venezuela, Honduras, and everywhere else, for which the paper receives a pittance: the reporter can tell his editor that he has a deep source within the government, hardly an adequate recompense for wars that cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when Americans cannot pay the mortgages on their homes.
   America would be better off if the Washington Post whored for lobbyists than for the US Imperial State, which has failed to adjust its imperial ambitions to its bankruptcy. As an example of its whoring for US Imperialism, on July 2, the Washington Post reported President Obama’s claim that Russian Prime Minister Putin is a person who lives partly in the past, with ‘one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.’
   If Putin has ‘one foot in the new’, he is ahead of Obama who has both feet in the past.
   Obama said that Putin needs to learn that ‘the old Cold War approaches’ to relations with the US are ‘outdated’.
   The Post reported this as if a failure of Putin’s is endangering US/Russian relations. The Post did not point out that it is Obama, not Putin, who has wars of aggression against three independent countries –Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with a fourth war threatened with Iran. We know for a fact these wars originated in the Bush administration’s lies and deceptions, but Obama continues the occupations and expands the wars, thus endorsing the deceptions.
   It is the Washington whorehouse that unilaterally abrogated the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia and began constructing anti-ballistic missile sites designed to negate Russia’s nuclear deterrent. If Russia’s nuclear weapons can be made useless, Russia can be knuckled under to accept America’s hegemonic will, and US hegemony takes another step forward.
   It is Washington that is surrounding Russia with military bases: an anti-ballistic missile base in Poland, an anti-ballistic missile radar site in the Czech Republic, American-made ‘colour revolutions’, which have installed US puppet governments in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, with failures in former constituent parts of Soviet central Asia.
   NATO, once a European/American alliance against Soviet invasion of Western Europe, is now a mercenary US force fighting for America in Afghanistan and attempting to encircle Russia from the Baltics to Central Asia.
   Obama will soon be on his way to Russia to discuss whether or not Russia is willing to give in to US demands to prostrate itself before US hegemony. Obama hopes to drive a wedge between Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev, like the wedges Washington has facilitated between the ambitious ruling ayatollahs in Iran. If Obama can get Putin and Medvedev at odds, Russia will be neutralised.
   That would leave China alone as an obstacle to US world hegemony.
   The US has no media. But it does have a Ministry of Propaganda. Americans were programmed with days of propaganda that Islamic Iran, a member of the US-designated ‘axis of evil’, stole the election from the Iranian people. According to the US Ministry of Propaganda, the Iranian people are allied with the US government against the Iranian government.
   Even people who are regarded as Iran experts said, without any evidence, that the elections were stolen. One of their arguments is that three hours were not enough time to count all the votes, yet it was announced that Ahmadinejad won. The ignorance of ‘experts’ made theft a certainty for American TV audiences.
   The ‘experts’ who make this assertion are obviously ignorant of Iran’s electoral procedures. For the ignorant ‘experts’ and the Americans deluded by them, here is the way it works:
   There are more than 45,000 voting places, which means less than 1,000 votes per voting place, an easy number to count and report in three hours. At each voting place there are a dozen or more observers, including every candidate’s representatives, representatives of the Guardian Council, and the local police. The votes are counted in the presence of all and all sign documents attesting to the count.
   The vote totals are forwarded to a central office in the region that has representatives of the candidates and the Guardian Council, where they are verified by a dozen or a dozen and a half of witnesses. From here the vote count goes to the Minister of the Interior, where the vote is announced.
   Unless these procedures were not followed, and no evidence has been provided that the procedures were not followed, it is impossible to steal an Iranian election. It is much easier to steal an American one, which happens routinely.
   There are thousands, indeed tens of thousands of witnesses, perhaps hundreds of thousands of witnesses, to the Iranian vote. Yet, only Mousavi and his corrupt supporters among the high living Iranian elite, who are fighting for personal power in Iran, contest the vote. The kids in the street were the usual dupes. At this stage in history, how can anyone believe that there is a pure candidate that wants to bring freedom and justice to the people? Anywhere. In any country, the US included.
   Ignorant ‘experts’ made a great noise about the fact that 50 cities or towns had votes in excess of registered voters. Again, this is a demonstration of the total ignorance of ‘Iranian experts’. In Iran, voters can vote wherever they happen to be at the day of election. Vacationers, business people on travel, commuters, and the partial absence of distinct voting districts, can produce a vote count in excess of the local registered population.
   The Guardian Council examined these differences, added them up, and noted that if every additional vote was fraudulent, the number was insufficient to affect the outcome.
   The Guardian Council has agreed to post every vote count.
   Did you learn of these facts from Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, or from the CIA and Mossad bloggers? Of course not. Every time ‘your’ media opens its mouth lies jump out that serve the US government’s hegemonic propaganda.
   America’s salvation lies with Charles Pelton and the Washington Post’s business side managers. Once the American media is obviously a whorehouse, which it is, Americans might pull themselves out of their stupor and learn to recognise facts and to think for themselves.
   But don’t hold your breath. From what I have seen, with few exceptions, Americans are as dumb and insouciant as they come. And they think they are the salt of the earth.
   Counterpunch, July 3-5. Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration.

Tipaimukh and our government

So, our water resource minister Ramesh is back again with another theory in support of Tipaimukh dam. He surely is having a strong backing from some one/quarter! Wonder who?
   Ashfaque Chowdhry
   Via e-mail
   

* * *
   I would just like to make a comment on how awfully the current government, and particularly the foreign minister, are managing the image of our country during a time when it is crucial to show strength and character especially as regards Tipaimukh issue. They have ruined it with their blatant misuse of power and corruption under the guise of democracy. Living in a bubble, where they are more concerned about taking care of their own interest rather than the country they have sworn to protect, they are completely blind to the destruction they are causing our country, showing no signs that they have any intention of improving it.
   Kazi Mehboob-ul-Asad
   Via e-mail

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