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WORKERS’ struggle for dignity and respect is one that has yet to go a long way towards ensuring establishment of their rights. Today, the 123rd anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago symbolises that spirit. While we pay tribute to those killed in 1886 for demanding humane working conditions, even as this day is celebrated across the world, the struggle goes on in different forms in different parts of the world including in Bangladesh, where a vast majority of the labour force continues to toil without even the minimum recognition of their rights.
   Although the garment factory workers are the first ones that come to mind whenever workers’ rights are discussed, their issue has at least managed to come to the fore. There is at least a semblance of movement striving to establish better conditions and pay for the garment factory workers. There are, however, a large of number workers and labourers who are not even recognised as such. The two obvious examples are agricultural labour and household domestic labour. Both the groups have substantial contribution to the economy and national output but are not even recognised as ‘labour’ by the government. As such, there is no framework or guideline that ensures a certain level of wages or benefits for farm labourers or domestic workers. There is no mechanism to guarantee that these millions of people will have decent working conditions and enough pay to fulfil their basic needs or that they live with human dignity and respect. Perhaps, more unfortunately, the required social movement and public mobilisation towards realisation of the rights of these groups are also absent altogether.
   The reasons are many. But one would not be wrong to posit that since their society is perpendicularly divided into mainstream partisan lines, the political establishment has never considered these groups as a force significant enough for consideration. Had the labourer and workers been able to unite and wage their own movement, the political establishment, whether the government or the opposition, would have realised that this is indeed a force to reckon with. But they apparently fall prey to the narrow partisan interests and in the process their voice is entirely lost amid the crude power struggle of the mainstream political parties.
   It should not, however, be in doubt that the prime factor of production, which is labour, plays a crucial role for the economic growth and development of a country. And a system that pointedly and almost deliberately ignores the interests and welfare of those workers and labourers will in the end prove to be fragile and unsustainable. Since the government is not apparently interested, although it should by all means, the more conscious sections of the citizenry should initiate a movement and mobilise public opinion in a constructive manner to ensure and realise labour rights.

Laws alone not adequate to
ostracise communalism

THE prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, claimed, during a meeting with the visiting vice-admiral of the French navy and commander of the joint forces in the Indian Ocean region on Wednesday, that her government ‘believes in… freedom of all religions’ and would repeal all laws and rules discriminatory to minority communities. Her promise for legislative actions for protection and promotion of people of ethnic and religious minority communities is indeed praiseworthy. However, her promise lost much of its credibility when people reportedly affiliated with the ruling party swoop on members of a religious minority community and vandalised their temple in what appears to be an attempt at forcible occupation of land, that too in the capital Dhaka the day before she made the statement. What’s worse, while the police have begun investigations of the incident, which took place Tuesday morning, the ruling party has neither disowned the purported perpetrators nor initiated any disciplinary measures against them.
   The prime minister and her government as well as her party need to realise that repeal of discriminatory laws and rules, and enactment and enforcement of laws and rules to protect and promote the rights of the minority communities cannot by themselves ostracise communalism from society. What is needed is a sustained campaign for social, cultural and political reorientation of the majority – religious and ethnic. The government as well as the ruling party needs to spearhead such campaign by example, and not just rhetoric alone.
   As for social, political and economic disparity, it is there both between and within the religious and ethnic communities, be they the majority or the minority, particularly between men and women. Religious tenets have traditionally been a major impediment towards women’s empowerment – social, political and economic. These have held back women both in the majority and the minority religious and ethnic communities, in varying degrees though, and deprived them of their due entitlements, which makes the introduction and enforcement of democratic family laws, specifically with regard to inheritance, imperative.
   At a national convention on violence against women on Wednesday, the law minister indicated that the government was willing to institute universal family laws but it had limitations as religious tenets still rule the society and the personal laws were based on the individual’s religious values. He also said the government would initiate moves to amend the Hindu laws, to ensure women’s right to paternal property, if the Hindu community did not feel embarrassed. Indeed, there is merit in his argument; however, democratisation of property relations is a demand that has been espoused not only by the rights activists but also by many members of the Hindu community. Besides, the state and the government, as the manager of the state, are ordained by the constitution to make ‘special provision in favour of women and children or for the advancement of any backward section of citizens’ [article 28 (4)].
   Hence, it is imperative that the government should democratise property relations by way of instituting universal family laws. However, it needs to ensure enforcement of these law cuts across all communities – religious and ethnic – so as not to further stoke communal feelings prevailing in society.

THE implications of the study released by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the United States this month are ominous for Bangladesh. The study reveals that global warming is drying up some of the biggest river systems across the world faster than was previously thought, and more so for those rivers in highly populated areas, which are drying up at more alarming rates. ‘In the subtropics this [decrease] is devastating, but the continent affected most is Africa,’ said Kevin Trenberth of the atmospheric research centre. ‘The prospects generally are for rainfalls, when they do occur, to be heavier and with greater risk of flooding and with longer dry spells in between, so water management becomes much more difficult.’
   According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the scientists examined recorded data and computer models of flow in 925 rivers, constituting about 73 per cent of the world’s supply of running water, from 1948 to 2004. ‘It found that climate change had had an impact on about a third of the major rivers. More than twice as many rivers experienced diminished flow as a result of climate change than those that saw a rise in water levels.’
   According to the NCAR scientists, the Ganges system is among those showing some of the most significant downward trends in freshwater flow as a result of dams and increased population pressures upstream, but also because higher temperatures are causing higher rates of evaporation, with changing rainfall patterns failing to feed into the river system.
   For Bangladesh, India, and the region as a whole, there is no doubt that reduced freshwater flows in the Ganges river system will prove devastating in the long run. The effects will be multifarious, effecting agriculture, nutrition, navigability of the rivers, and most of all allowing swathes of land along the coast to become unfit for habitation as rising seawaters advance further inwards.
   Diminishing freshwater flows on the Ganges will likely debilitate predominantly agrarian economies along its banks and may eventually strip the region’s people of the major source of protein in their diets, as a result of a reduction in the quantity of micro-nutrients that debouch into the Bay of Bengal, originating in the Himalayas. Sundarban, on both sides of the border, are after all the richest fish nursery in all of South Asia, largely as a result of the ecology of the Ganges from its headwaters to its watershed.
   What’s worse, diminishing freshwater flows across South Asian river systems including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra will be further reinforced, say scientists, as a result of shrinking glaciers. The Himalayas have the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar caps. During the dry season, when water is in short supply, these glaciers feed eight of Asia’s greatest rivers: to the east, south and west – the Yangtze, Hwang Ho, Salween, Irrawady, Mekong, Tsangpo/Brahmaputra/Jamuna, Indus, and the many tributaries of the Ganges including the Kosi, Gandaki and Karnali that debouch from the Nepali midhills. The glaciers of the Himalayas as a whole are referred to by scientists as the ‘water towers of Asia’, because they serve as storage that release water throughout the year into the rivers of Asia.
    According to a report by the World Wildlife Fund, 67 per cent of the Himalayan glaciers are melting at a startling rate and ‘the major causal factor has been identified as climate change’. The Khumbu Glacier, from where Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary began their historic ascent of Mt Everest, has retreated more than five kilometres since they climbed the mountain in 1953. The 30km Gangotri Glacier in India, near the Badrinath pilgrimage centre, has been receding over the last three decades at more than three times the rate than it had during the previous two centuries. The Rika Samba Glacier in Nepal’s Dhaulagiri region is retreating at 10m per year. Such measurements alarm scientists, who were previously used to gauging glacial retreat in centimetres.
   And this is not just happening in Nepal’s mountains. Across the Himalayas, from Tibet in the north to the Karakoram in the west, the glaciers are melting so fast that the WWF fears that a quarter of the ice floes could disappear by 2050. In the climate equilibrium that has evolved over millennia, the glaciers (because of their white colour) reflect back sunlight, keeping the high-altitude peaks within a certain temperature range. As the glaciers start melting and receding as a result of global warming, however, they reveal the darker rock underneath, which in turn absorbs more sunlight and intensifies the melting process. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere then reflect that heat back onto the earth’s surface, accelerating the process even further.
   ‘The melting glaciers represent a time-bomb that is ticking away even as we speak,’ cautions Pradeep Mool, a specialist on glaciers at Kathmandu’s International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. ‘Glaciers melt to form high-altitude lakes, dammed with debris and moraine that characterises the landscape of the Himalayas. But as the water from glacial melt accumulates over the years, these dams which are structurally weak suddenly give way, resulting in what we call glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs.’
   GLOFS, indeed, are the most obvious results of glacial melt. In 1964, one such GLOF destroyed entire stretches of a highway in China and washed 12 timber trucks more than 70km downstream. A GLOF at Nepal’s Dig Tsho glacier in 1985 destroyed a hydroelectric project near Namche Bazaar, as well as bridges, houses and farmlands worth. The total estimated damage was $4 million. ‘And it isn’t just water that crashes down into the valleys,’ says Mool, holding up a photograph from a 1991 outburst in Nepal that swept away entire villages. ‘You have rocks and other debris that rush downriver at enormous speed.’
   Since 1964, Nepal alone has witnessed 13 catastrophic GLOF events. There are over 5000 glacial lakes between Bhutan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet/China, and scientists regard at least 90 of these lakes to be potentially dangerous. ‘The real problem,’ sighs Mool, ‘is that we don’t even know the extent of the problem, since countries such as India and Pakistan will not share the data and maps of their mountainous regions.’ As the glaciers melt and recede, more glacial lakes are expected and hence more incidence of GLOFS.
   ‘Contrary to popular perception, this isn’t Nepal’s problem or Pakistan’s problem, but a problem for the entire Subcontinent,’ urges Madan Lal Sreshtha. ‘The melt waters from these retreating glaciers mother the river systems of the Brahmaputra and the Ganga, so if these glaciers eventually disappear, the flow in the rivers will be drastically reduced and almost negligible during the non-monsoon months. Says Shrestha, ‘Glaciers accumulate snow during the South Asian monsoon and it is meltwater from these glaciers that feeds river systems that flow through India and Bangladesh during the dry season until April-May,’ he explains. ‘As the glaciers recede, not only will these rivers flood during the rainy season – with the water that is not frozen and held back by the glaciers – but in the lean seasons, there will also be less and less water in these rivers. Eventually, when the glaciers disappear, there will only be a trickle of water in these great rivers in the winter.’
   The decrease in non-monsoon flows would affect the populated plains of South Asia in a thousand different ways. Winter agriculture would suffer, recharge of underground aquifers would be affected thus reducing groundwater reserves, and the use of water for urban and industrial purpose would also be affected, as would water transport, fisheries, wetlands, and water-dependent wildlife. Overall, we are looking at long-lasting impact that that has not even begun to be studied at a time when we are just awakening to the fact of receding glaciers.
   For Bangladesh, a country that would probably fare the worst in the face of climate change because of raised sea levels, such consequences of glacial retreats in the faraway Himalayas could be disastrous. As large swathes of Bangladesh’s coastal belt are already ravaged by cyclones, salinisation and rising sea-levels, scientists say the decrease in volume of year-round freshwater from Himalayan glaciers could bring disease, drought, and deluge of unseen proportions.
   A model developed in part by the Indian Centre for Ecology and Hydrology reveals that glacial melt will result in ‘an increase in river discharge at the beginning causing widespread flooding in the adjacent areas.’ But after a few decades, the model warns, this situation will reverse and water levels in these rivers will start declining to permanently decreased levels. In the upper Indus, the study shows initial increases of between 14 and 90 percent in flows over the first few decades, followed by flows decreasing between 30 and 90 percent over the following century.
   When world leaders meet in December this year to hammer out a long term deal on how to tackle the spectre of climate change, they should be reminded that the fallout of global warming is no longer in the realm of academic projections. People in some of the poorest parts of the world have already started living these realities.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

EVER since Franklin D Roosevelt promised quick action to combat the Great Depression of 1929 within his ‘first 100 days’ in office – effectively 100 hours of legislative time – it has become de rigueur to clock the success or failure of a new leader around the world by this Rooseveltian measure. How then does US President Barack Obama, who broke many taboos and raised hopes at a time of doubt and depression in achieving office, measure up to the standard?
   The Rooseveltian parallel is apposite in Mr Obama’s case because of the problems in his in-tray at home and abroad. He faces a world economic meltdown triggered by the US, two low-intensity wars, sullen relations with Russia, two nuclear-related political crises in Iran and North Korea, the albatross of Israel and an antagonist world crossed by President George W Bush’s method of declaring American supremacy and conducting inter-state relations.
   The contrast between President Bush’s record and his successor’s promises on the campaign trail could hardly be starker. Mr Obama’s greatest achievement has been to change the mood music at home and around the world even as he has tried to fulfil some of his promises. It is inevitable in the intractable and contentious nature of the problems he faces that his first 100 days must be judged.
   First, in the positive column must be placed the commitment to close Guantanamo prison, pushing through a strong economic bill and blueprint for economic recovery, addressing climate change, announcing a central US role in international organisations, symbolically declaring his commitment to global nuclear disarmament and making his first moves towards Cuba, Iran, Iraq withdrawal and shifting the focus of the US defence budget even while increasing it. But some of the president’s actions reveal the pitfalls ahead, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the banks’ bailout.
   Perhaps the greatest challenges Mr Obama faces lie in the increasing bitterness and frustration the Republican opposition is displaying at home. The existential fear the Right in America — still a considerable force — harbours is the philosophical and ideological bent of the Obama administration. The new president, as every American, still sings the virtues of capitalism, but is willing to be pragmatic enough to borrow some European concepts of regulation and social safety net to conjure up the dreaded word ‘socialist’ in US conservative eyes.
   The American political climate was moulded by the so-called ‘Reagan revolution’ and honed in eight years by Mr Bush in his pursuit of neoconservative goals of unalloyed world supremacy buttressed by American might. Both the Republicans of the Jackson school and the Wilsonians agree on the goals of US uniqueness and exceptionalism. Where they disagree is on the methods and on greater recognition by the Obama administration that the world has changed and US power is best employed as a last resort, giving diplomacy more room. Mr Obama’s dilemma is that Republicans will use the evocative symbols of the diminution of American power around the world to beat his administration with.
   On the economic front, alarm bells are already ringing on the banks’ bailout plan and the dying automobile industry, the symbol of American industrial supremacy, and on the escalating Afghan war. In West Asia, the new administration has appointed a special envoy and done little beyond reiterating the two-state formula, given Israel’s overwhelming influence on US policy. On Afghanistan, a special representative is hitting the regional capitals even as alarm over Pakistani developments grows by the day.
   On Cuba, Iran and North Korea, the Obama admiration has set the stage for a new approach, either by taking small steps or by changing the mood music. Tough choices lie ahead as the regional actors interact. A somewhat more substantive promise of ‘resetting the button’ on relations with Russia has led to the first substantive talks on reducing nuclear stockpiles with a view to reaching a new agreement by yearend.
   The contours of some of these challenges have already become apparent. In effect, Washington has not given up its objective of containing and constricting Russia while seeking a better relationship. Moscow’s cooperation in achieving some of the US goals, particularly in relation to Afghanistan and Iran, will be dependent upon receiving satisfaction on its own interests. On Iraq, the US will leave a shaky Iraqi government in office after withdrawing troops although Mr Obama has given himself a fallback position with a hefty complement of ‘trainers’ remaining in place.
   It is, however, on Afghanistan and Pakistan that Mr Obama seems to be floundering. His administration is, in a sense, trying to balance a troop ‘surge’ with muscular diplomacy, particularly in persuading Pakistan to aid American efforts. The domestic situation in Pakistan has rightly alarmed the US and its enthusiasm in talking to ‘good Taliban’ has been blunted by the manner in which the civilian-army combine in Islamabad is surrendering control of non-tribal areas to the Taliban. The trends and gyrations in American policy have alarmed India.
   It is, however, on economic and social issues that the president will face his greatest challenges at home. The banks’ bailout remains deeply unpopular while the failing automobile industry is leaving large numbers of people and communities unemployed and shattered. President Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to reform the country’s health service and Mr Obama’s new attempt to put an end to a national shame of the world’s most prosperous and industrialised country failing to provide healthcare to all its citizens will face stiff opposition. A cabal of pharmaceutical companies and doctors’ network has always frustrated the adoption of a rational comprehensive health plan. In Mr Obama’s case, vested interests are mounting an ideological offensive of equating the provision of healthcare for all with socialism, which, in the American political lexicon, is a deadly sin.
   Mr Obama has suggested that his performance in the first 1,000 days, rather than in the traditional hundred, should be judged. He can be pretty certain that his wish will remain unfulfilled.