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A LOT has been said and written about climate change and its effects on Bangladesh. The country looks set to be one of the worst victims of climate change, experiencing increased frequency and severity of natural disaster. In the span of less than two years, two major cyclones – Sidr in November 2007 and Aila in May 2009 – have taken place. The changing rainfall pattern may also be symptomatic of climate change. After a prolonged dry spell, the heavy downfall that many parts of the country experienced in late July might be a warning sign.
   Still, there seems to be a general lack of awareness that climate change is for real, and that frequency and ferocity of natural disasters are on the increase. At the official level, there seems to be lack of coordination among different wings of the government, which makes it difficult to address environmental displacement.
   The number of major cyclone occurrences in Bangladesh is on the rise in every 10 years’ interval. It was 3 in 1970s, 5 in 1980s, 9 in 1990s and 9 between 2001 and 2009 (BBS, 2007). Most of the landfall areas of these cyclones are Chittagong and Khulna-Barisal, while the wind speed (223 kilometres per hour) and tidal surge (15 feet) were the highest during cyclone Sidr in 2007, considering last 10 years’ occurrences. On an average 2 and 6.5 per cent of the total population and of the coastal area respectively were displaced, if the number of fully damaged houses and average household size are taken into account in each major event of cyclone of the corresponding year.
   Flood occurrence due to heavy rainfall is also becoming unpredictable and extreme. It has been found that the frequency of major flood occurrence increased since 2000 compared to 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. On an average 21 per cent of the population was displaced in the 1998, 2004 and 2007 flood incidents. In case of drought, the risk of north-western Bangladesh towards environmental degradations can be mainly characterised as drier zone with less vegetation, less soil moisture and lower rainfall than national average. Nineteen droughts occurred over 31 (1960-1991) years which affected about 47 per cent of land areas and 53 per cent of the population. Therefore, the past data reveals that approximately 3 per cent of the population was affected in one drought. Also in every two years, the country is hit by one drought. The findings reveal that on average 26 per cent of the population (41 million) are being displaced in major calamities (e.g. 21% in flood, 3% in drought and 2% in cyclone).
   As coastal population makes up 28 per cent of the total population, if a sea-level rise of about 88 centimetres could cause displacement of approximately 35 million people from the coastal area. This huge population displacement will create extra pressure on the mainland. Also, persistent of higher poverty level in Khulna, Barisal and Rajshahi might be connected with disaster of these areas like drought, cyclone and tidal surge. This rising population displacement, poverty and population growth will create immense pressure on government development programmes.
   However, there is no clear indication about the problems of environmental displacement in national policies like national environment policy (1992), coastal zone policy (2005) and NAPA (2005), Bangladesh climate change strategy and action plan (2008). For instance, it is written in coastal zone policy 2005 that susceptibilities of coastal communities will be addressed as these people are very much dependent on natural resources for their livelihood. But how will their sufferings be addressed? There is no action plan with timeframe in national policy to address the problem.
   As some of the policies are very old with respect to already changed environment, public debates in this regard are widely continuing to draw the attention of decision makers. In this case, there is still contradiction that increasing frequency and intensity of natural calamities is due to the effect of climate change which induces population to displace searching for secured life.
   Population displacement is increasingly becoming a national security issue, while effects of climate change will continue to threaten people’s lives and property significantly. But there is lack of coordination among relevant organisations to effectively address the problem of environmentally displaced people. Also, there is yet to be an effort to determine the total number of displaced people by multiple natural disasters. In this regard, a study conducted by Norman Myers can be mentioned. It was claimed that an estimated 25 million people were environmentally displaced in 1996 and this figure is predicted to double by 2010 and reach 150 million by 2050. But the estimation is on a global scale. There is no national estimation and prediction on environmental displacement. Such estimation is required so that government can take necessary steps like where and how specific number of people needs to be rehabilitated.
   Some argue that developed countries are responsible for environmental degradations in developing countries like Bangladesh. As a response of such deteriorations in human and natural life, it is the responsibility of international community to provide enough assistance to these vulnerable people. The form of international assistance as a response to climate change is being questioned on whether financial assistance should be compensation or aid. Also, the issue of international migration is getting priority among the rights activists as one of the ways out alongside other concerns like adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and financing.
   International negotiation on climate change in Copenhagen (December 2009) is an important opportunity for Bangladesh to address climate change related complexities. In this regard, climate induced population displacement can be considered one of the key negotiating topics among others (e.g. adaptation, mitigation, technology development and transfer, financing). Following issues to substantiate environmental displacement during negotiation can be focused on:
   * Evidence of increased frequency and intensity of disaster
   * Current estimation and future projection of the number of environmentally displaced people
   * Problems associated with huge population movement within the country
   * Increased human insecurity demanding international law to protect their rights
   * Gender vulnerability to climate change while the poor have rights to expect safe lives and livelihoods, sustainable and prosperous future
   * Additional fund to accelerate adaptation measures within the country such as planned migration
   * International migration being an option of adaptation measure to be incorporated into negotiation
   Despite the government initiatives to respond to effects of climate change, there is still lack of coordination among the agencies concerned to operationalise its policy and action plans. Also, there are contradictions in addressing environmentally displaced populations and government role in negotiating with the international community regarding what have already been lost and what are going to be at risk. Thus, effective adaptation measures with international assistance are yet to get done. Some of the possible course of actions is proposed to meet the challenges ahead
   * Build consensus that climate change is real and it influences a massive amount of population displacement because of its environmental effects. And such population movement may turn into an additional disaster which is difficult to control by a developing country like Bangladesh alone.
   * Deeper understanding of local environments and changes associated with it as well as already taken development programmes and its management system. It will help to identify activities that are yet to be adopted.
   * Develop strategies to address the causes of environmental displacement and to minimise the impact of displacement upon local ecosystems
   * Minimise redundancy or duplicity of work among the ministries
   * Strengthen negotiation skills, which facilitate substantive focus
   * Implement climate change adaptation measures such as flood control and land erosion with improved embankment as well as salinity and high temperature tolerant crop production, floating cultivation so that it is possible to contain the problem
   * Role of policy and research and development sector to identify and combat environmental degradations to reduce the emerging impact of environmental displacement. Enough budget allocation to strengthen research and development can be considered
   * National policies should have action plan with timeframe. In this regard, millennium development goals and targets can be mentioned
   * Establishment of a monitoring cell on operationalisation of guiding principles developed by the national policy to protect environmentally displaced people
   Tahera Akter is a researcher. tahera13b@yahoo.com

AN INTENSE political engagement over the question of West Bank settlements is continuing between the Barack Obama administration in the United States and the government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel. A failure to resolve the issue would be fatal to any chances of real progress towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
   A particular rhetorical weapon is being employed by self-proclaimed supporters of Israel in the United States in relation to the settlements: that any dismantling of these communities and removal of their inhabitants would amount to ‘ethnic cleansing’. The use of such a term makes an explicit association between any withdrawal of the settlers from the West Bank and (among many other cases) the systematic expulsions that took place during the wars of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
   The argument is being made for immediate political purposes, as the pace of engagement in the new round of regional diplomacy quickens (see Alex Spillius, ‘Obama close to securing Middle East peace talks’, Daily Telegraph, August 26). But some of its rhetorical potency derives from the fact that it connects to historical experience and political reference-points in the region as well as beyond. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ case thus deserves closer examination: but might it lead in directions that its proponents would not wish to go?
   
   A subtle warning
   A PROMINENT Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, has circulated a report to sympathetic individuals and organisations on behalf of the Israeli Project. This outlines what it calls ‘the best settlement argument’: ‘The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can’t be Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We don’t say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews’ (see Gilad Halpern, ‘Pro-Israel group: Obama settlements policy backs “ethnic cleansing” of Jews’, Ha’aretz, August 23).
   The advice of the Israel Project – whose board of advisors includes twenty members of the US Congress, from both parties – represents an interesting variation in the response to perceived threats. Israeli politicians and their allies have long argued that Arab and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence portends a new holocaust. The most prominent example is the reaction to the anti-Israel rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the holocaust-denying Iranian president, in 2005 (interpreted by no less than the International Association of Genocide Scholars as a ‘public expression of genocidal intent’). The Israel Project’s approach (albeit now somewhat qualified by its founder) represents a subtler and apparently more realistic warning of a new, inherently anti-Semitic, threat. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ argument – given that this concept is so often used as a euphemism for genocide – keeps the genocide threat to the fore without conjuring the fear of a mass slaughter of Jews, which is obviously implausible in the context of any likely peace settlement.
   The political context and motive of the ‘cleansing’ argument may make it appear little more than a shallow propaganda move. Certainly the way the Israel Project presents it – denying any threat to ‘cleanse out Arabs from Israel’ and asserting Israeli Arabs’ citizenship and ‘equal rights’ – is doubly disingenuous. The desirability of ‘transferring’ Israeli Arabs out of the state is a recurring theme on the not-so-far shores of Israeli politics, and on no serious assessment can Arabs be said to have equal rights in what is, after all, the ‘state of the Jewish nation’. The current proposals to demand that Arabs take a loyalty oath to the Jewish state only emphasise the deepening crisis of the Arab community’s position within Israel (see Laurence Louër, ‘Arabs in Israel: on the move’, April 20, 2007).
   
   The historical code
   BUT if the Israeli Project’s focus on ‘ethnic cleansing’ hits a deeper nerve, this is precisely because of the way that all political issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the settlements, are defined in terms of communal interests. Sixty years ago hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were expelled and terrorised into flight by the emergent Israeli state – a certain episode of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and indeed of genocide (to the extent that there was a concerted policy to destroy a large part of Arab society). For the last forty years, Israel has used its occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem to continue the process of dispossessing Palestinian homes and land, in slow-motion and by means which are ostensibly legal in domestic law (if not in international law, since the occupation itself remains illegal).
   In this light, is it not then plausible to consider the proposal to dismantle Israeli settlements a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in reverse? It is clear that there have been many such genocidal ‘cleansings’ in history, including the wholesale ‘revenge’ expulsions of Germans in the closing stages and aftermath of the second world war in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. True, there can be no suggestion that the mere ‘freeze’ on new and extended settlements currently proposed by President Obama could fall into this category, since no one will be dispossessed or expelled from anywhere as a result (although a freeze may save a few Palestinians from this fate). But since any even half-reasonable peace settlement must hand over some Israeli settlements to Palestinian control (without this there is no possibility of a coherent and viable Palestinian state), the situation of the Jewish population in these settlements is a real, complex and potentially difficult issue.
   It is clearly relevant that many settlers, as well as settlement leaders, have been in the vanguard of Israel’s illegal expansion in the occupied territories, and their parties are the most aggressively anti-Palestinian in the current Israeli political scene. No able-minded adult settlers can truly have been wholly ignorant of this context, and in this sense all can be regarded as complicit to some degree. However these facts cannot justify the compulsory removal of an entire population, including children and the mentally incapable – as well as those settlers whose motives have been primarily socioeconomic rather than expansionist. Such an expulsion might indeed be considered, like the Israeli expulsions of Palestinians since 1948, ‘racial’ in character (whatever the specific ideological motives). Even if neither Israel nor Jews have collective rights to occupied Palestinian lands, it can be argued that individuals and families may have acquired personal rights to stay in homes in which they have lived for years or even, in some cases, decades. The key to the question, then, is the reconciliation of these rights with justified Palestinian demands for political control over the occupied lands in which settlements have been built – and the rights of former Palestinian landowners to compensation.
   
   The political twist
   SO IF ‘peace’ does not ‘require that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews’, three things would be necessary to achieve peace without ‘cleansing’.
   First, Israeli advocates must stop talking euphemistically about a ‘Palestinian area’, and face up to the unanswerable case (in the absence of any realistic prospect of a single bi-communal state) for a viable Palestinian state. Second, Israel must acknowledge the terrible consequences of its own ‘ethnic cleansings’ of Palestinians, starting with 1948 and including those that have taken place recently to allow the building of the settlements, and make proposals to address the continuing injustices arising from them. Third, Israel must address the poor and deteriorating situation of the Arab minority within its own borders, dropping all constitutional provisions which make Arabs second-class citizens and ensuring that ‘equal rights’ become a reality.
   For if the continued existence of a Jewish population in the settlements requires a Palestinian state in which minorities can be confident that their individual and communal interests will be respected, the latter needs to be matched by an Israeli state which demonstrates the same standards. A Palestinian state should not be a racially Arab state; but neither should the Israeli state be defined as the state of the Jewish people. Unless both states can be defined both by secular, non-racial constitutions and by clear, well-founded and widely-supported policies of minority inclusion, the prospects for Jewish residents in any settlements handed back to Palestine – and for Israeli Arabs – will continue to be poor.
   The Israel Project offers nothing in this direction. It supports policies that would continue to confine Palestinians to Bantustan-style ‘areas’, deny the abuses they have suffered over sixty years and their unequal status within today’s Israel, and do everything to sustain the present illegal status of territory- and land-grabbing settlements.
   The group’s advocacy touches on a real issue, but by seeking to block any serious compromise with legitimate Palestinian claims its campaign only makes more likely the kind of ‘cleansing’ which it says it wants to avoid – and that when compromise comes, as it must, a number of Israeli settlers will be forcibly removed. Most probably this will be done, as in Gaza in August 2005, by the Israeli state itself.
   This makes it ever more important now to distinguish between the rights of settler families and the ideological interests and purposes of the Israel Project and its allies. For in the context of the just and secure two-state agreement that Israelis and Palestinians alike desperately need, such ostensible support for Israel turns on closer inspection into its opposite.
   openDemocracy, August 28.

Death of Ted Kennedy

It is easier to applaud greatness than to learn from greatness. We applaud Edward Kennedy because he helped us in 1971. But we forgot him after that until his death. He was renowned for his reaching out to opponents, fighting for great causes, compromising for the common good, putting his conscience first, inspiring and developing new talent and challenging injustice within his party and his country. We cannot even dream of such an elected official. Our leaders would honour him best by learning from him instead of pretending to understand true greatness.
   Ezajur Rahman
   Kuwait

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