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THE High Court on Wednesday ordered the home secretary and two police officers to appear in court on June 3 to explain why they should not be charged with contempt of court for barring, in violation of the court’s order, a former state minister of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government from going abroad. The court also asked three top police officers, including the inspector general, to explain within a week why they, too, should not be charged with contempt of court in this regard. The former state minister was offloaded from a Singapore-bound aircraft at Zia International Airport on May 24 although the court on May 11 asked the government to not stop him from going abroad for medical check-up and thereafter re-enter Bangladesh within the next six months.
   At midnight on Tuesday, the police turned up at the residence of Abul Kalam Azad, former treasurer and now professor of marketing of Dhaka University, to arrest him in connection with a criminal case filed with the Shahbagh police station in the afternoon. Azad was accused in the case of vandalising the office room of the complainant, Hafizur Rahman, in 2005 when both were working for the National University, the former as the treasurer and the latter a section officer. Hafiz also filed a case with the Dhanmondi police station on May 6 against Azad, accusing him of illegally recruiting 700 Class III and Class IV to the National University. The police eventually returned without arresting Azad after the Dhaka University authorities had promised to present him before the court in due time.
   The sense of urgency that the police have displayed in the abovementioned cases is somewhat perplexing. First of all, the police hardly display such earnestness vis-à-vis cases and complaints filed by regular citizens. Secondly, it is highly unlikely that the police defied a standing court order in the first case and disregarded the convention of informing the university authorities beforehand in the case beyond the knowledge of, and without clearance from, higher authorities, i.e. the government. It is hardly surprising, though; after all, successive governments have hardly ever hesitated to use the law enforcement apparatus of the state to harass their opponents in the political arena in particular and dissenting voices in society in general, even if it required defying court orders. The Awami League-led government, which rode to power on a promise for change, is yet to show any sign that it will not walk down the same alley, so to speak, and the incident involving the former state minister tends to indicate that it is ready to go any length to torment its political opponents. As for what happened at Dhaka University with regards to the attempted arrest of a professor, the disregard that the police showed to the prestige and honour of a teacher is unfortunate.
   Whereas the people’s patience is wearing thin, they may still be willing to give the AL-led government the benefit of the doubt and believe the two cases mentioned above were aberrations rather than deliberate actions. It is, therefore, time that the government started doing what it had promised to do: usher in change in politics and governance.

A glaring example of DCC apathy
to public health, hygiene

A CHRONIC problem that dogs the people of this city of 140 million is the lack of sufficient numbers of public toilets. And the few ones that the authorities have so far been able to provide are so poorly maintained that visiting those places is an experience by itself, which, needless to say, is by no means pleasant. The Dhaka City Corporation maintains only 48 public toilets throughout the city – a number that should have been increased manifold over the years. But the corporation has not only shown sustained reluctance in this regard but also not bothered to ensure proper maintenance of the existing few. A report published in New Age on May 28 gives a glimpse of the horrid conditions that these public toilets are in.
   According to the report, most of these toilets, if not all, are over flown with dirty and smelly water. People using the washbasin or urinal need to actually manoeuvre quite skilfully to avoid the filthy water and come out unscathed. As complained by the users, the lessee just collects the money and hardly pays any attention to keep those toilets clean. Meanwhile, the sweepers who clean those toilets complain that they are hardly provided with regular supply of bleaching powder, etc and hence they are left with nothing but water to clean these toilets.
   The responsibility or the lack of it of the authorities concerned has turned the few public toilets that the city has into unusable mess. Even though there are a number of provisions, laid down by the city corporation for public toilets which include high and low commodes, urinals, basin, breast-feeding space and dressing room for women and even separate entrances for men and women, very few of those have any such facilities. It is also complained that the contractors employed to construct those public toilets used low-quality materials and toilet fittings and hence the toilets had worn down in no time.
   These unhygienic toilets also have serious implications on health and hygiene. According to doctors, those using those toilets can contract diseases like diarrhoea and parasite infections and often can get infected even with venereal diseases like syphilis. Lack of monitoring, poor management and proper planning have made the condition pathetic. The authorities need to take notice of this important yet neglected aspect of city life and take necessary steps to arrange for sufficient number of public toilets and well maintain those including the existing ones.

EVEN as the death toll from this week’s cyclone Aila inches upwards as communications are restored in affected areas, it is obvious that the total number of deaths will not be nearly a tenth of the numbers killed in cyclone Sidr in 2007. And yet, the devastation that Aila has caused, a month after cyclone Bijli tore through coastal villages and a year and a half since the devastation of cyclone Sidr, brings home an important lesson: perceiving the ferocity of cyclones by their death toll can be tremendously misleading when a community’s coping capacity is worn thin, as they are repeatedly buffeted by extreme natural events.
   The reality is, cyclone Aila has not had a fraction of the international media coverage that cyclone Sidr had received even though for hundreds of thousands of families in the coastal zone, this week may well be the tipping point that will see them driven to penury or astronomical debt in trying to recover from what was deemed to be a moderate cyclone. The reasons are simple. Coastal communities are no strangers to cyclones. They have lived with them for centuries and they have an organic ability to bounce back after an extreme weather event, with the help of savings, enterprise, and resilience. The problem is: the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones is gradually on the rise, largely as a result of man-made global warming and rising sea surface temperatures, wearing down the organic coping capacities of these communities, and seeing them slip deeper and deeper into poverty.
   Over the past three years, rising food costs have taken their toll on marginal and small farming families across Bangladesh, their economic misery compounded by two back-to-back floods in 2007 and cyclone Sidr to end the year with another massive destruction of standing crops. These manifold crises have often compelled farming families either to sell of their small landholdings or their farming implements to survive – along with the attendant realities of pulling children out of schools and sending them to work as agricultural labour or in the cities. What all this means is that these hundreds of thousands of families have suffered an economic setback that may take more than two generations to recover from – as it is only their children’s children who might have an opportunity to go back to school. The economic and social consequence of this series of back-to-back events is that many of the development goals that governments, not just in Bangladesh, but across the world have set for themselves, including the Millennium Development Goals, will be confronted with dead ends as changing weather patterns undo much of the good that development policies and practices are achieving.
   Bangladesh, though it shares this plight with many other countries, faces a tremendous development challenge in the decades to come. A study of global climate change risk hotspots by the aid agency CARE reveals that we face some of the highest levels of risk in terms of a rising incidence of floods, droughts as well as cyclones. While scientists refuse to attribute any particular weather event to climate change – it is scientifically sound that the trends in changing weather patterns are not only confirming the reality of man-made climate change but also indicating that patterns are changing at a speed and with greater severity than predicted. According to last year’s annual UN Human Development Report, ‘sea levels could rise rapidly with accelerated ice sheet disintegration. Global temperature increases of 3–4°C could result in 330 million people being permanently or temporarily displaced through flooding.’ Over 70 million these displaced are predicted to be in Bangladesh alone.
   For Bangladesh, one of the biggest casualties of climate change is going to be agriculture and food security. As armies of small farmers find it increasingly difficult to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and failing crops, they will often be compelled to sell their landholdings, destroying the foundations of traditional food security in the rural economy. In aggregate too, countries like Bangladesh will produce less and less of its own food – with the small farmer who constitutes the backbone of food production on the retreat, plunging those millions of families that will not have the means of buying imported staples into deeper malnutrition. According to the UNHDR, the additional ranks of the malnourished could rise by 600 million by the year 2080. Side by side, drought affected areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, could rise between 60-90 million hectares at a cost of over $26 billion, which is more than the total current aid that goes to the region. As if that were not enough, seven of Asia’s great rivers will initially experience rising water levels resulting in floods as a result of glacial in the Himalayan range, before they start drying up – causing unimaginable devastation in the deltas they flow through.
   The reality is that the worst excesses of this fallout from global warming and climate change will be felt in some of the poorest regions of the world, to the very people who are far removed from the industrial and consumption excesses that are responsible for greenhouse gases and unsustainable energy use. According to the UN, some 262 million people were affected by natural disasters annually between 2000 and 2004, over 98 per cent of them in the developing world. In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on in 1,500 people were affected by natural disasters. In the developing world the comparable statistic was 1 in 19. It is for these reasons that the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen later this year to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol must act decisively and with the political will necessary to avert an mitigate and adapt to a disaster of global proportions.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.comEVEN as the death toll from this week’s cyclone Aila inches upwards as communications are restored in affected areas, it is obvious that the total number of deaths will not be nearly a tenth of the numbers killed in cyclone Sidr in 2007. And yet, the devastation that Aila has caused, a month after cyclone Bijli tore through coastal villages and a year and a half since the devastation of cyclone Sidr, brings home an important lesson: perceiving the ferocity of cyclones by their death toll can be tremendously misleading when a community’s coping capacity is worn thin, as they are repeatedly buffeted by extreme natural events.
   The reality is, cyclone Aila has not had a fraction of the international media coverage that cyclone Sidr had received even though for hundreds of thousands of families in the coastal zone, this week may well be the tipping point that will see them driven to penury or astronomical debt in trying to recover from what was deemed to be a moderate cyclone. The reasons are simple. Coastal communities are no strangers to cyclones. They have lived with them for centuries and they have an organic ability to bounce back after an extreme weather event, with the help of savings, enterprise, and resilience. The problem is: the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones is gradually on the rise, largely as a result of man-made global warming and rising sea surface temperatures, wearing down the organic coping capacities of these communities, and seeing them slip deeper and deeper into poverty.
   Over the past three years, rising food costs have taken their toll on marginal and small farming families across Bangladesh, their economic misery compounded by two back-to-back floods in 2007 and cyclone Sidr to end the year with another massive destruction of standing crops. These manifold crises have often compelled farming families either to sell of their small landholdings or their farming implements to survive – along with the attendant realities of pulling children out of schools and sending them to work as agricultural labour or in the cities. What all this means is that these hundreds of thousands of families have suffered an economic setback that may take more than two generations to recover from – as it is only their children’s children who might have an opportunity to go back to school. The economic and social consequence of this series of back-to-back events is that many of the development goals that governments, not just in Bangladesh, but across the world have set for themselves, including the Millennium Development Goals, will be confronted with dead ends as changing weather patterns undo much of the good that development policies and practices are achieving.
   Bangladesh, though it shares this plight with many other countries, faces a tremendous development challenge in the decades to come. A study of global climate change risk hotspots by the aid agency CARE reveals that we face some of the highest levels of risk in terms of a rising incidence of floods, droughts as well as cyclones. While scientists refuse to attribute any particular weather event to climate change – it is scientifically sound that the trends in changing weather patterns are not only confirming the reality of man-made climate change but also indicating that patterns are changing at a speed and with greater severity than predicted. According to last year’s annual UN Human Development Report, ‘sea levels could rise rapidly with accelerated ice sheet disintegration. Global temperature increases of 3–4°C could result in 330 million people being permanently or temporarily displaced through flooding.’ Over 70 million these displaced are predicted to be in Bangladesh alone.
   For Bangladesh, one of the biggest casualties of climate change is going to be agriculture and food security. As armies of small farmers find it increasingly difficult to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and failing crops, they will often be compelled to sell their landholdings, destroying the foundations of traditional food security in the rural economy. In aggregate too, countries like Bangladesh will produce less and less of its own food – with the small farmer who constitutes the backbone of food production on the retreat, plunging those millions of families that will not have the means of buying imported staples into deeper malnutrition. According to the UNHDR, the additional ranks of the malnourished could rise by 600 million by the year 2080. Side by side, drought affected areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, could rise between 60-90 million hectares at a cost of over $26 billion, which is more than the total current aid that goes to the region. As if that were not enough, seven of Asia’s great rivers will initially experience rising water levels resulting in floods as a result of glacial in the Himalayan range, before they start drying up – causing unimaginable devastation in the deltas they flow through.
   The reality is that the worst excesses of this fallout from global warming and climate change will be felt in some of the poorest regions of the world, to the very people who are far removed from the industrial and consumption excesses that are responsible for greenhouse gases and unsustainable energy use. According to the UN, some 262 million people were affected by natural disasters annually between 2000 and 2004, over 98 per cent of them in the developing world. In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on in 1,500 people were affected by natural disasters. In the developing world the comparable statistic was 1 in 19. It is for these reasons that the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen later this year to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol must act decisively and with the political will necessary to avert an mitigate and adapt to a disaster of global proportions.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

RETURNING to the prime minister’s office after a gap, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has won the opening round in his confrontation with US President Barack Obama. Israelis were nervous about the new president’s activism in seeking an opening to Iran and a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the beginning, rather than the end, of his term.
   Mr Netanyahu left Washington without agreeing to a two-state solution, linking it to Palestinians accepting Israel as a Jewish state, and extracting a deadline out of Mr Obama – the end of the year – for substantial progress to be made on tackling Iran’s nuclear programme. The Israeli prime minister showed yet again what astute diplomacy buttressed by unparalleled clout in Washington can do.
   It has been the Holy Grail for years that Israel and Palestine should exist as independent nations in peace on the basis of their 1967 borders and even President George W Bush proclaimed it from the housetops while letting Israel do anything it wanted to consolidate its colonial rule over Palestinians. Now the new right-wing government in Israel has elevated the two-state solution, as it is called, to a dispute, thus ensuring that ultimately accepting it in theory would be marked as a concession given to Palestinians.
   It is no secret that Israel had a role in egging on the neoconservatives in power in the Bush era forcibly to dethrone Saddam Hussein, a thorn in its flesh. But the result of the Iraq war was immeasurably to increase Iran’s influence in the region with the installation of a Shia majority regime in Baghdad. Israel’s theme song changed and propaganda offensive was mounted to clip Tehran’s wings.
   There has been public debate in Israel, and some preparations, for taking out Iran’s nuclear establishments, Tel Aviv awaiting Washington’s nod. That nod has not been given; with the result that Israel has mounted a new propaganda offensive saying that Iran going nuclear represents an existential threat to itself. In the process, Israel has linked the conflict with Palestinians to a reasonable outcome of Iran’s nuclear programme.
   The truth is that Mr Netanyahu and his ultra-right wing foreign minister have no intention of giving Palestinians their state and have set about obfuscating the core regional conflict by adding new conditions. Demolishing more Arab homes and changing its typography are tightening Israel’s grip on occupied East Jerusalem and even as West Bank settlements are expanded, some token demolition of outposts are sops to bleeding hearts.
   These are early days yet and it would be unfair to judge Mr Obama’s promise of new openings by the first battle he has lost. But there are already murmurs of disapproval from reputed American experts on secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s less than enthusiastic endorsement of her president’s policies and the fact that such dyed-in-the-wool pro-Israelis as Dennis Ross have been appointed to key positions for the region. It is also being suggested that Mr Obama lacks the grand vision in reordering America’s relations in the region, in particular towards Tehran. His predecessor’s programme for regime change, for instance, has not been terminated.
   It is well understood that any solution to Iran’s nuclear programme must allow it to continue conducting the full nuclear fuel cycle on Iranian soil under international oversight and rules. But one section of the Obama administration, including Ms Clinton, is pushing the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany to impose tougher sanctions on Iran if it does not limit its nuclear programme by the September session of the UN General Assembly. And Mr Netanyahu got President Obama to endorse the formation of a high-level US-Israeli working group to identify coercive options if necessary.
   Already, what is on offer to Palestinians resembles Swiss cheese and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s concept seems to be Palestinians living in policed cantons with autonomous municipal functions on the West Bank while the Gaza Strip is choked off, permitting little other than minimal essential supplies after the devastation of the last war Israel fought, its methods now the subject of a United Nations investigation.
   Complicating the picture is the forthcoming Iranian presidential election on June 12, but the essential Iranian stance on the nuclear programme will remain the same whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or one of his adversaries occupies the President’s office. The gesture made by Mr Obama on the Iranian New Year has been duly acknowledged, but the bottom line is what the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei pronounced: words must be matched by deeds.
   Politics, of course, is the art of the possible and Mr Obama has formidable problems to contend with: the economic meltdown and two wars, to begin with. Can he take on the might of the Israeli lobby at home to give Palestinians justice in a conflict with emotions and religious fundamentalism running high on both sides of the divide? Israelis are now selling the line that moderate Arab states can be in tacit agreement with Tel Aviv in curbing Iran’s regional clout.
   It is equally clear that no amount of sophistry can alter the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the continued colonial occupation and usurpation of Palestinian land by an occupying power that has bottled up the Gaza Strip and made life hell for Palestinians on the West Bank by erecting hundreds of checkposts they must daily negotiate many times whenever they leave home. There are, of course, separate exclusive roads for Israeli settlers.
   Palestinians, on their part, remain divided between Fatah and Hamas factions, the latter controlling the Gaza Strip. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority is in danger of becoming obsolescent, with little prospect of renewing its mandate, given Israel’s control over borders that would deny Palestinians free access to vote. In the short term, it might suit Israelis to cement Palestinian divisions, but the important question is: Where is it taking Israel and the region in the medium and long term?
   In the end, only Mr Obama can provide the answer. Does he have the vision and daring to leave the legacy of being the peacemaker in West Asia, aside from being the first black to reach the White House?