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THE heavyweights on either side of the political divide, it seems, are unanimous in their view that the official and unofficial leaders of the military-controlled interim government, especially the then president Iajuddin Ahmed, chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed and chief of army staff Moeen U Ahmed, need to be investigated and subsequently held legally accountable for extra-constitutionally taking over state power and sustaining an illegal regime for nearly two years under a state of emergency that suspended the people’s fundamental rights and the political process. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Tuesday, a number of prominent political leaders, including senior members of the ruling Awami League, believe – and rightly so, one must agree – that such investigations and trials are imperative to deter extra-constitutional intervention in governance and politics in the future. Regrettably, the prime minister does not appear to be in agreement with the emerging consensus across the board on this issue. Worse still, according to another report front-paged in New Age on Sunday, she does not even approve of the AL leaders speaking ‘openly on a sensitive issue like the demand for Moeen’s trial’. The directive is likely to not only raise questions about the government’s self-proclaimed commitment to consolidation of the democratic political process but also reinforce the common perception that the ruling Awami League may have entered into a negotiated settlement with the military-controlled interim government before the December 29 general elections.
   As we have written in these columns many times before, extra-constitutional takeovers, regardless of their frequency and duration, disrupts the political process and consequently impedes democratisation of the state and society. As has been seen in the past, one of the first few things that the usurpers of state power do is to deny the people their fundamental rights as enshrined in the constitution and attempt at redrawing the political landscape. In the process, they seek to denigrate and demonise the political leaders, especially those who choose to raise a voice of dissent, and resort to human rights violation in the name of justice. Such periodic extra-constitutional takeovers and the concomitant onslaught on the political process translate into substantial weakening of the political institutions in particular and the political process in general. Hence, it is imperative that the politically conscious and democratically oriented sections of society should strive to devise effective deterrence to extra-constitutional takeovers. Investigation and trial of the on-stage players and the backstage mentors of the immediate-past interim government, we believe, could constitute a giant stride in this direction. As an elected government, the Hasina administration owes it to the democratic aspirations of the people at large to take the first step, whether it likes it or not.
   Thus far, however, the government has displayed a curious reluctance to bring to justice the architects of the January 11, 2007 takeover and the subsequent extra-constitutional and extra-legal regime. The government needs to realise that its reluctance runs counter to the people’s aspirations for consolidation of democratic governance nurtured. Failure in this regard could only be construed as opportunism and the government should know better that the people in general do not approve of opportunism. Therefore, we demand that the government should immediately set in motion the process whereby the exponents of the interim regime are probed, prosecuted and punished demonstrably for extra-constitutional intervention and politics so that it may act as a deterrent for similar machinations by one power-hungry quarter or the other.

A pointer to systemic flaws
in traffic management

THAT the wife of a Dhaka University teacher was killed on campus, crushed under the wheels of a vehicle driven by a learner driver, points once again to our flawed traffic system and ever-so-slack monitoring of it. For the family that lost a dear member in Monday’s accident, it is an irreparable loss but what will be inexcusable is if the authorities concerned fail to take necessary steps and let it go as a passing incident. According to a report published in New Age on June 23, there is no mechanism for the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority to monitor the mushrooming driving schools throughout the city operating on busy roads posing serious threats especially to the pedestrians. The report says there are at least 200 driving schools across the country and of those only about ten have been registered with the BRTA; the remaining 190 are operating illegally.
   The roads of the metropolis have turned into death traps with a sudden increase in the number of accidents. In most cases, minibuses having defective breaks and untrained drivers behind the steering wheels have been identified as the main cause of such accidents. As road accidents are hardly investigated, responsibility cannot be fixed and no one is made to account for it. In the context of the growing number of accidents on the roads it is necessary to review the whole phenomenon and adopt a coordinated approach towards improving road safety. It is being widely felt that unless the relevant laws are enforced strictly, incidents of road accidents, be it in the city or on the highways, will not be reduced.
   The authorities need to wake up and take steps to monitor the driving schools and their activities to find whether they are registered and have qualified instructors, right training vehicles, etc while considering other important issues like pedestrians’ safety, school time rush, etc. The authorities concerned may also consider fixing a separate time schedule for these training programmes. Once initiated, the government needs to launch a drive against the errant driving schools that violate these rules and take strict measures against those to bring order back on the street making it safer for the citizens.
   Although road accidents, or any accidents for that matter, cannot be eliminated, they can certainly be minimised through better traffic management and adequate safety measures. But this will be possible only if a sincere and accountable administration is at work. If enforcement of rules, surveillance and accountability are lax, accidents and tragedies will remain an inevitable outcome.

AFTER President Barack Obama’s seminal speech in Cairo, it was all too natural that Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu would try his utmost to deflect world opinion to portray himself as a man of peace. He has learned the art of doublespeak quite well from his predecessors – from Ben-Gurion to Olmert. On June 14 he decided to deliver his own speech. If we were expecting a change of heart from this narcissistic individual whose extremist views and actions have not only killed many unarmed Palestinians but also led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, we were mistaken. The speech was not meant for Palestinians but for the western audience, especially Obama, to deceive them. It was a deceitful speech, true to his nature.
   While the civilised world has rightly recognised that the root of the conflict lies in the uprooting of the Palestinian people from their ancestral homes and continuous refusal of the Zionist state to withdraw from the Occupied Territories allowing the Palestinian people to live as free citizens, Netanyahu said that ‘root of the conflict has been and remains the refusal to recognise the right of the Jewish People to its own state in its historical homeland.’ What did you expect from this smooth-talking winker? Six years ago he said, ‘A Palestinian state – NO!’ because ‘Yes to a Palestinian state means No to the Jewish state.’
   In his speech, Netanyahu invoked the myth of historic rights by saying, ‘The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel has lasted for more than 3500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon, and Isaiah and Jeremiah lived, are not alien to us.  This is the land of our forefathers.’ He continues, ‘Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People.’ There is no denying that like the indigenous Palestinian people, the Hebrews – the Jewish people – once lived in Palestine. They were not the first settlers to the land though. Before the modern-day birth of Israel, in her 3500-year old history, Jews had even ruled the territory for approximately 400 years, while Muslims had ruled the territory for nearly 1200 years (638-1918 CE). More importantly, there was continuous presence of the Palestinian people for nearly five millennia, while Jews cannot claim such continuity.
   Netanyahu said, ‘In 1947 when the United Nations proposed the Partition Plan for a Jewish state and an Arab state, the entire Arab world rejected the proposal...’ It is not difficult to understand why the Arab world rejected the UN proposal. What the UN did was not only illegal going against its own charter, but also criminal to the core. It gave 56 per cent of the territory to the Jewish state when the Jews only possessed 6.5 per cent of the territory before the partition was declared. When the Balfour Declaration was made, promising a Jewish homeland, they possessed only 2.5 per cent of the land. The Balfour Declaration in itself was another travesty when, as Arthur Koestler rightly concluded, ‘One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third nation.’ And thanks to Zionist terrorists of Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang, the territory originally allotted to the Zionists by the UN was enlarged to include four-fifths of Palestine.
   Instead of land, if we are to look at population, by the time the area was partitioned by the UN, there were about 600,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arabs. Thus, the Jews comprised less than a third of the entire population, and yet, they were allotted 56 per cent of Palestine. Is it difficult to understand why Arabs did not welcome the partition plan, which was illegal and unfair?
   Netanyahu said he was ready to conduct negotiations with the Palestinian community ‘without preconditions’. And then, he put several preconditions! Netanyahu said, ‘Palestinians must clearly and unambiguously recognise Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The second principle is: demilitarisation. The territory under Palestinian control must be demilitarised with ironclad security provisions for Israel… And obviously, the Palestinians will not be able to forge military pacts.’ This precondition is disingenuous given the fact that by his use of the phrases ‘nation-state’ of the ‘Jewish people’, Netanyahu is proposing to de-legitimise and uproot some 1.5 million Israeli Arabs who live within the pre-1967 Israeli proper.
   We should recall that in September 1993, Arafat sent a letter to the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in which he stated unequivocally that the PLO recognised the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338, committed itself to a peaceful negotiated resolution of the conflict, renounced the use of terrorism and other acts of violence, affirmed that those articles of the PLO covenant that deny Israel’s right to exist were not longer valid. Even Hamas, the much maligned Palestinian organisation in Netanyahu’s speech, is ready to accept the two-state solution with a Palestinian state living side by side Israel in the territories occupied in 1967. On June 16, Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas, made that announcement at a joint news conference in Gaza City with visiting former US president Jimmy Carter. Carter told reporters that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict according to the two-state solution, with Jerusalem as the joint capital of the two states, was the best method of achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace.
   Like all Zionists, obviously, Netanyahu is against sharing Jerusalem. His position on Jerusalem is unacceptable to all Muslims, and not just Palestinians. Netanyahu’s call for demilitarisation of the future state of Palestine is also criminal. If past and present records of war crimes are a sure way to decide who should be demilitarised, it is Israel that deserves demilitarisation more than the Palestinian side to protect unarmed civilians. He wants to turn the proposed Palestinian state into another Gaza by having full control over air and sea. He also talks about ‘defensible borders’ which, as rightly noted by Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, is a code-word for ‘no return to the pre-1967 borders’. This is an untenable position and violates several UN resolutions.
   Netanyahu said, ‘The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel’s borders. For it is clear that any demand for resettling Palestinian refugees within Israel undermines Israel’s continued existence as the state of the Jewish people.’ What he means is that he is against return of millions of Palestinian refugees. This is at odds with the UN Resolutions. One may recall during and after the 1948 war, some 700,000 Palestinian residents were driven out. By 1964 when the PLO was formally organised, there were, according to the UN estimate, 1.3 million Palestinian refugees. Nor should we forget that when Israel launched pre-emptive strikes on June 5, 1967 another 320,000 Arabs were forced to leave the additional areas in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine that were occupied by Israel. A number of UN resolutions were adopted with US support and Israeli approval, reemphasising the inadmissibility of acquisition of land by force, calling for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, and urging that the more needy and deserving refugees be repatriated to their former homes.
   As to the settlements, Netanyahu said Israel has no intention of building new settlements. However, building construction inside the settlements will continue to ‘enable the residents to live normal lives.’ It is obvious that like his predecessors, Netanyahu will continue to ignore pleas from the international community including those of President Obama in Cairo to halt settlement expansion.
   The US has a strong role in any peace effort involving the Middle East. Carter has said in his book Palestine Peace and Not Apartheid, ‘The US’s constant policy had been predicated on a few key UN Security Council resolutions, notably 242 of 1967 and 338 of 1973. Approved unanimously and still applicable, their basic premise is that Israel’s acquisition of territory by force is illegal and Israel must withdraw from occupied territories. More specifically, US policy was that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were “illegal and obstacles to peace”.’
   It is high time that the Obama administration and the US Congress take immediate steps to support the president’s statement that ‘the United States does not recognize the legitimacy of further settlements’ and support a solution to the conflict based on UN Security Council Resolution 242 and General Assembly Resolution 194, the foundation of the Arab Peace Initiative. Let not a sly voice coming out of Israel choke the euphoria generated in the civilized world with a prospect of a real peace in the Middle East.
   Dr Habib Siddiqui is a peace and human rights activist, and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bangladesh Expatriate Council, USA. He writes from Pennsylvania. saeva@aol.com