Category Archives: Bangladesh

Muhummad Yunus is exactly the person Clinton should have been meeting

Hillary Clinton met with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammed Yunus in Dhaka as US secretary of state. (AFP)
Hillary Clinton met with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammed Yunus in Dhaka as US secretary of state. (AFP)

It’s only Tuesday, but it has not been the best week for former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. USflagbangladesh flag icon

Just a day after reports that the FBI discovered nearly 14,900 emails that Clinton should have turned over as work-related emails to the State Department (she turned over 30,000 and marked the rest as private), the Associated Press reported on Tuesday afternoon that, in an analysis of 154 private individuals that Clinton met while secretary of state, 85 of them were at least one-time donors to the Clinton Foundation, an international health charity organization — if true, that means that around 55% of her meetings with non-government and non-foreign officials were with Clinton Foundation donors.

First, it’s unlikely that Clinton, in four years at State, met just 38 people on average annually from the private sector, so there’s so doubt about whether the AP’s denominator is accurate. Secondly, without any other proof, a meeting is not anything more than just a meeting, especially after a thoroughgoing investigation from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation almost certainly reviewed the question of quid pro quo corruption. Third, it’s credible that many private-sector actors (especially wealthy individuals with storied careers in academia, finance, technology or otherwise) might have given money to a high-profile charity like the Clinton Foundation. Finally, and most importantly, while Clinton is not exactly a paragon of government ethics, it beggars belief that she would sabotage her own obvious 2016 presidential hopes by engaging in crude pay-to-play corruption.

It’s true that both Hillary Clinton and her husband have both shown ridiculously poor ethical judgment when entrusted with power, and it was only in July that FBI director James Comey (narrowly) declined to recommend criminal charges for Clinton’s handling of classified information on a home server that she used for email while at State. Both Clintons, already wealthy from book royalties, have also shown reckless greed in taking millions of dollars in speech fees from corporate and foreign interests since leaving office.

But short of one truly horrific example, and a particularly immature staffer in Doug Band, there’s not a lot of scandal involving the Clinton Foundation. (The example, reported last year to surprisingly little fanfare, involves a murky Canadian financier named Frank Giustra, a leading figure in a sale of a uranium company, Uranium One, that won approvals from State and numerous other US agencies. The deal, ultimately, handed over rights of one-fifth of US uranium reserves first to Kazakh and then to Russian control).

By and large, the Clinton Foundation a charity that leverages the Clinton family’s name and experience toward better global health outcomes. In that sense, it’s no different, really, than the Carter Center or any other private-public effort that a former US president undertakes.

In politics, though, especially in the crucible of US election-year politics less than 80 days from a presidential election, reality is less important than perception. And Clinton most certainly has a perception problem with the Clinton Foundation and the idea that it’s become a pay-for-play racket. Moreover, the Clinton Foundation gets generally great marks from charity scorecard watchdogs like Charity Watch. Despite the phony statistics of right-wing news media, the Clinton Foundation spends an admirably 88% of donations on programming.

But the most especially ridiculous aspect of the latest uproar over the Clinton Foundation is that one of those 85 individuals that Clinton met is Muhammad Yunus, the former head of Grameen Bank. Frankly, it would have been diplomatic malpractice not for Clinton to have met Yunus during her time at State, when Yunus was increasingly under attack from his own government.

By 2011, Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic and corrupt leader, Sheikh Hasina, had expelled Yunus and fully expropriated Grameen Bank. Though the Bangladeshi government once tried to accuse Yunus himself of embezzlement, it eventually ousted him from Grameen on the basis that, then at age 72, he exceeded the retirement age. Continue reading Muhummad Yunus is exactly the person Clinton should have been meeting

Bangladesh’s government shares blame for spate of blogger murders

Dhaka-based LGBT activist Xulhaz Mannan and the former US ambassador to Bangladesh, Dan Mozena, in 2014. (Facebook)
Dhaka-based LGBT activist Xulhaz Mannan and the former US ambassador to Bangladesh, Dan Mozena, in 2014. (Facebook)

No one in Bangladesh’s government wielded the machetes that hacked to death Xulhaz Mannan, a prominent LGBT activist and local USAID officer, at his home on Monday in Dhaka.bangladesh flag icon

Just like no one in the Bangladeshi government actually perpetrated the murders of so many active bloggers before him in the last two years. Asif Mohiuddin or Ahmed Rajib Haider in 2013.

Or Shafiul Islam in 2014.

Or Avijit Roy or Washiqur Rahman or Ananta Bijoy Das or Niloy Neel or Faisal Arefin Dipan in 2015.

None of these names are necessarily household names in the United States or even in Bangladesh. In aggregate, however, they represent an audacious attempt by ultraconservative Islamists to silence the secular voices in the world’s eighth-most populous country.

And, with Mannan’s gruesome death, it may be working.

In 2013, hardline Islamists published a ‘hit list’ of at least 84 prominent online writers in Bangladesh, many of whom are secularists, like Mannan, a 35-year-old who published Rupban, a Bangladesh-based magazine for LGBT people in his country. Roy, perhaps the most high-profile victim, was a Bangladeshi-American activist who hosted a website that brought together many brands of secular humanist thought in Bangladesh.

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RELATED: Two years later, Bangladesh needs a real opposition

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With a discrete list of bloggers publicly identified for reprisal by jihadists and radical Islamists who have pledged loyalty, in some cases, to the Islamic State group that controls parts of Syria and Iraq, it should not be difficult for a functional government to protect seven dozen individuals in a country of 169 million people.

Quite to the contrary, government officials have done little to apprehend the perpetrators of crimes that have chilled freedom of speech and expression in Bangladesh, often suggesting that murdered writers may have crossed an invisible line by criticizing Islam too harshly in a country where religion and politics have been dangerously intertwined since its bloody war for independence from Pakistan in 1971:

Rather than condemn the killers, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan scolded the victims, telling CNN: “The bloggers, they should control their writing. Our country is a secular state. … I want to say that people should be careful not to hurt anyone by writing anything — hurt any religion, any people’s beliefs, any religious leaders.”

Continue reading Bangladesh’s government shares blame for spate of blogger murders

Two years later, Bangladesh needs a real opposition

Bangladesh's prime minister Sheikh Hasina won an election boycotted by the opposition two years ago today.
Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina won an election boycotted by the opposition two years ago today.

On this week in 2014, Bangladesh’s prime minister Shiekh Hasina was enjoying a hollow reelection, with a supermajority in the Jatiyo Sangsad (জাতীয় সংসদ), Bangladesh’s unicameral parliament. Hasina had pushed forward with elections, despite breaching political trading by refusing to appoint a caretaker government and despite the opposition’s determination to boycott the vote as flawed.bangladesh flag icon

Nearly two decades prior, when Hasina and her Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) were in the opposition and boycotted the 1996 elections, the two major parties worked out a compromise for a new vote four months later — a vote that the Awami League went on to win.

After her uncontested victory in January 2014, however, Hasina used the opportunity not to enter into negotiations with her rival,  Khaleda Zia, and other leaders of the more Islamist and more conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল). Instead, Hasina has spent the past two years working to undermine not only the BNP, but the entire framework of Bangladeshi democracy, however fragile it had been since independence in 1971.

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RELATED: Zia indictment won’t help
solve Bangladesh’s political standoff

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Today, Hasina’s government has so marginalized the BNP that the seesaw of power between the two parties is far more lopsided than at any time in the past 30 years. Zia has been detained and placed under house arrest for much of the past two years, other top BNP leaders were imprisoned or exiled, the BNP’s hardline Islamist allies Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী) have been virtually criminalized and some of its leaders, on trial for war crimes from the 1971 war for independence, executed. 

Fresh elections are due only in 2018, three years from now, by which time there might not be a robust opposition to wage much of a challenge at all. Continue reading Two years later, Bangladesh needs a real opposition

Zia indictment won’t help solve Bangladesh’s political standoff

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Former prime minister Khaleda Zia, her son Tarique Rahman, and other top officials in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) were indicted on charges of corruption yesterday, making it even more likely that Bangladesh will not soon end the political crisis that began with January’s elections — a vote boycotted by the BNP and other political parties not supporting Zia’s rival of three decades, Sheikh Hasina.bangladesh flag icon

While there’s plenty of evidence that just about every top figure in Bangladeshi politics is likely guilty of some form of corruption, the timing of the charges is suspicious.  There’s nothing inconsistent with the notion that Zia (pictured above) and her allies are culpable for graft and that Hasina’s governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) is using the countries judicial system to pressure Zia and the BNP.  Zia’s supporters are already calling the charges a government conspiracy against her.  True or not, the decision will only further divide Zia and Hasina, making it less likely that the two leaders can negotiate a truce, however warily, to end Bangladesh’s political and governance crisis.

Continue reading Zia indictment won’t help solve Bangladesh’s political standoff

How Bangladesh could influence next month’s Thai election

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They’re both located in south/southeastern Asia, they share female prime ministers, and they share the dubious distinction of being the two troubled elections that kick off 2014’s global election season. thailandbangladesh flag icon

Though there’s little reason otherwise to link Bangladesh’s January 5 general election with Thailand’s February 2 vote, there are uncanny similarities.  In both countries, the main opposition parties are boycotting (or have boycotted) the election, the governing party is set to win the election, leaving each country in a political crisis with no easy apparent solution.  In both cases, the electoral crisis has its roots in a struggle that dates back over a decade, and in both cases, the military hasn’t been shy about intervening in the past.

In Bangladesh over the weekend, prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) won 232 of the 300 seats in the country’s Jatiyo Sangshad (national parliament).  The opposition, more Islamist Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) refused to participate in the vote, and it lost all of its seats.  Ostensibly, the BNP and its leader, former prime minister Khaleda Zia refused to take part in the vote due to Hasina’s refusal to appoint a caretaker government to oversee the elections.  But the reality is much more difficult — the BNP has carried out a campaign of attrition through general economic strikes, protests and sometimes violence to protest Hasina’s government.  Hasina (pictured above, top) has responded with an increasingly authoritarian tone, and Zia and other third party leaders have been detained or put under house arrest.  The political violence comes against the backdrop of the controversial execution of Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah for war crimes relating to the country’s 1971 war for independence, and unresolved matters from the 1971 war tribunal (including the previous life imprisonment sentence for Quader Mollah) led to massive protests in Dhaka’s Shabagh Square in early 2013.  Violence related to the election has already cost hundreds of lives and unknown damage to the Bangladeshi economy and the garment industry that dominates the country’s exports.

In Thailand, prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has called snap elections in response to protests against her government that initially sprang from opposition to a proposed amnesty bill that would have pardoned top political leaders from both major parties for political violence over the past decade.  Yingluck’s populist Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย), however, holds a nearly unbreakable lock on Thai politics, due to the popularity of Yingluck and her exiled brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in northern and northeastern Thailand.  The opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) refused to take part in the elections and is instead calling for an unelected council to govern.

In both cases, the opposition parties are actively banking on military intervention — an outcome that would undermine the fragile democratic institutions and rule of law in both countries, which have each made gains in reducing poverty over the past decade.  The Thai Democrats and its leaders, former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban, knew they had no chance to win the February election and believe that under a military government, they will have more influence.   Zia, who has been Hasina’s chief political rival since the 1980s, has never much trusted Hasina.  Game theory might teach you that three decades of ‘repeated games’ between the BNP and the Awami League would make a negotiated settlement easier.  But the BNP no longer has any faith in Hasina’s government to carry out fair elections, so the longtime animosity between Zia and Hasina may actually raise the costs of a deal.  So the BNP may actually prefer the military to the Awami League at this point.

What’s next?

The international community is already pressing Hasina hard to call new elections, and there’s even a precedent for how Bangladesh can walk out of the current impasse.  When Zia was prime minister in February 1996, she called snap elections that the Awami League boycotted — voter turnout barely exceeded 20% and the BNP on all 300 seats.  After a period of negotiation between the two parties, however, fresh elections were held in June 1996, the BNP lost power and the Awami League won a minority government.  The Bangladeshi tradition of appointing a caretaker government prior to elections, in fact, comes from the 1996 political settlement between the BNP and the Awami League.  Continue reading How Bangladesh could influence next month’s Thai election

14 in 2014: Bangladesh parliamentary elections

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1. Bangladesh parliamentary elections, January 5 (and perhaps again, later in 2014).bangladesh flag icon

Bangladesh is home to 155 million people, making it the eighth-most populous country in the world.  When voters go to the polls just after the New Year, however, it’s certain that the governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) and prime minister Sheikh Hasina (pictured above) will win reelection.  That’s because the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) is boycotting the vote, largely over Hasina’s refusal to appoint a caretaker government to oversee the election’s administration.

The most relevant precedent is 1996, when the BNP’s leader, Khaleda Zia, was prime minister and Hasina and the Awami League were in the opposition.  The Awami League boycotted the February 1996 elections and the BNP won all 300 seats in the Bangladeshi parliament, but the parties eventually came to a deal on fresh elections, and both parties participated in the subsequent June 1996 elections.

Though the players are chiefly the same — the Zia/Hasina rivalry has influenced the country’s politics since the 1980s — the stakes have grown much higher.  Hasina established the International Crimes Tribunal in 2009 to prosecute the war crimes related to the brutal 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.  When the ICT sentenced Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah to life imprisonment, protesters came out in droves to Shabagh Square in Dhaka in early 2013 to contest the sentence as too lenient.  The government relented, executed Quader Mollah in December and banned the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), even though it’s never galvanized widespread support in Bangladesh.  That, too, caused protests and Quader Mollah’s execution brought international condemnation on Hasina’s government.  The protests on both sides have demonstrated that the wounds of 1971 are far from healed.  The opposition has conducted a general strike that’s threatening the economy, and Hasina has found herself increasingly isolated.

Photo credit to The Hindu.

NEXT: Egypt

Opposition continues boycott of Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections

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Bangladesh, the world’s eight-most populous country, was supposed to kick off the 2014 election season, where unpopular prime minister Sheikh Hasina seemed set to be kicked out of office by voters angry about the economy, the lack of jobs, and above all, her handling of the war crimes tribunal that began in 2009 and that resulted last week in the execution of Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah. bangladesh flag icon

Instead, Hasina and the Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) look set to win virtually all of the 300 seats in the Jatiyo Sangshad (the National Parliament, জাতীয় সংসদ) when voters head to the polls on January 5.

That’s because the most prominent opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল), as well as the smaller Jatiya Party (National Party, জাতীয় পার্টি) and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী) are all boycotting the election over what they claim are the unfair conditions of the race.  Specifically, the BNP and the Jatiya party oppose Hasina’s refusal to adhere to the tradition of appointing a caretaker government to conduct national elections.

The boycott leaves at least 154 seats uncontested, which have essentially already been awarded to the Awami League.  That could further escalate the political tensions that reached a crescendo in October, when the BNP launched two general strikes against Hasina’s government and protests that have left hundreds of Bangladeshis dead — all in response to Hasina’s refusal to step down as prime minister.  Opposition forces are also currently enforcing a transport blockade that’s crippling the Bangladeshi economy — since November, the blockade is estimated to have cost the economy up to $4 billion.  Hasina’s government has increasingly responded with a heavy hand, and police forces are carefully tracking the BNP and its leader Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister, and they have detained the leader of the Jatiya Party, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, also a former Bangladeshi leader.

It’s a depressingly familiar story in Bangladeshi politics, which has been dominated by the same parties and the same leaders since the early 1980s.

In particular, the 1996 elections crisis feels like a virtual echo of the current political crisis.  But 17 years ago, the roles were reversed, with Zia leading a BNP government and Hasina leading the Awami League in opposition.  The Awami League began agitating for Zia’s resignation after it alleged that the BNP fraudulently stole a 1994 by-election.  The Awami League organized general strikes throughout the country that disrupted the government for the purpose of brining about a caretaker government and fresh elections, just like Zia and the BNP are doing today.  When Zia called a vote for February 1996, the Awami League and the Jatiya Party boycotted the elections and the BNP won all 300 seats in the national parliament.  The parties ultimately agreed to install a caretaker government in late March 1996 headed by Muhammad Habibur Rahman, the chief justice of Bangladesh’s supreme court, paving the way for a second set of elections in June 1996.  The Awami League won those elections with a minority government, and Hasina became Bangladesh’s prime minister for the next five years.

A similar outcome could be likely in 2014 — and Hasina has indicated that she is willing to dissolve the next parliament and call new elections if the BNP denounces political violence and severs its ties to the Jamaat-e-Islami.  Though the BNP is hardly as Islamist as the Jamaat-e-Islami, Islamism is an issue that has traditionally divided Bangladesh’s two main parties, with the BNP favoring a moderately Islamist nationalism and the Awami League favoring a secular Bengali nationalism.  But the BNP already controls large parts of the country already, and trust between the two longtime enemies is so low that a deal could be hard to broker.  Continue reading Opposition continues boycott of Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections

In one year, south Asia and the ‘Af-Pak’ theater as we know it will be transformed

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No one thinks about ‘southwest Asia’ as among the world’s regions.  But should we?

Consider for a moment that within the next 12 months, the world will witness the following:Iran Flag IconIndia Flag IconPakistan Flag Iconbangladesh flag iconafghanistan flag

  • the rollout of a new, more stable government headed by Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan dominated with the twin problems of regional security and economic growth, itself a transfer of power following the first civilian government to serve out a full term in office since Pakistan’s founding in 1947; 
  • the selection of a new president for Pakistan in August 2013 to succeed Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto;
  • the selection of a new army chief of staff in Pakistan in November 2014 to succeed Ashfaq Kayani, who’s led Pakistan’s military since 2007 (when former general Pervez Musharraf was still in charge of Pakistan’s government) and who remains arguably the most powerful figure in Pakistan;
  • the drawdown of U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan for the first time since 2001 later this year;
  • the election of a new president in Afghanistan in April 2014 to succeed Hamid Karzai, who cannot (and doesn’t want to) run for reelection;
  • the election of a new government in Bangladesh before the end of January 2014 under the explosive backdrop of the ongoing 1971 war crimes tribunals and the Shahbagh protests of earlier this year; and
  • the election of a new government in India before the end of May 2014 — likely to be headed by the latest member of the incumbent party’s family dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, or the sprightly chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi — that will end of a decade of rule by prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Taken together, it’s a moment of extreme political change in South Asia, with turnover in each of the five pivotal countries (with a cumulative population of over 1.65 billion people) that touches and concerns the ‘Af-Pak’ region, and the greater South Asian region generally, which could well be the world’s most sensitive security theater and remains a critical region for global economic development — India is one of the four BRIC countries, and Bangladesh, Iran and Pakistan are each ‘Next Eleven’ countries.

That’s without mentioning the fact that we’ve just entered the first year of what’s expected to be a decade of leadership by Xi Jinping and the ‘Fifth Generation’ of Chinese Communist Party leadership in the People’s Republic of China, and the ongoing interest of Russia as a geopolitical player in the region, with so many former Central Asian Soviet republics bordering the region. It’s also without mentioning the thaw in political repression and diplomatic isolation currently underway in Burma/Myanmar.

For some time, discussion about the European Union has involved the caveat that major policy initiatives on EU policy, especially with respect to monetary union and fiscal union, are on hold until the German federal election, which will take place at the end of September 2013.  It’s reasonable to assume that Angela Merkel will want to secure reelection as Germany’s chancellor before pushing forward with new changes.

But that pales in comparison to the political transformation that will take place in west Asia in the next 12 months, even though I see very few commentators discussing that when they talk about Iran, south Asia, Af-Pak, etc.  In many ways, I think that’s because foreign policy analysis don’t typically think about this particular set of countries as a discrete region in its own right.

Iran comes up in the context of the Middle East and much more rarely in the context of Afghan or Pakistani security, even though Iran’s population is comprised of Persians and Azeris, not the Arabs who otherwise dominate the Middle East.

It’s more common to think about Pakistan today in the context of Afghanistan (for obvious U.S. security interest reasons) than in the context of Bangladesh, even though Bangladesh continues to battle over political ghosts that originated in its 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.  But how much of that has to do with, say, early turf wars in the Obama administration between the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke and other envoys, or the Bush administration’s initial approach to the global war on terror?

It’s common to think about Pakistan, India and Bangladesh together (but not Iran) because they were so centrally administered together as part of the British empire from the 18th through the 20th century.

Looking forward through the end of the 2010s and the 2020s, do any of those linkages make as much sense?

Without channeling the spirit of Edward Said too much, what do we even call the region spanning from Tehran to Dhaka and from Mumbai to Kabul? West Asia? Southwest Asia?

Though I cringe to call it a Spring, make no mistake — the leadership realignment has the potential to remake world politics in ways that transcend even the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011.

 

Matthew Yglesias’s callous 360-word post is wrong about Bangladesh

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On a New York spring day on March 25, a long, long time ago (last decade), constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman was teaching administrative law to a gang of truculent law students when he stopped class in order to take us on a brief walk downstairs from the classroom to the Brown Building, which like everything else in downtown Manhattan, is now part of John Sexton’s growing New York University empire.bangladesh flag icon

The reason was the anniversary of what happened there in 1911 — a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history, which resulted in the deaths of at least 146 workers, many of them young, female and immigrant.  The death rate was tragically higher because the factory managers locked access to the stairwells and other exits, so as to prohibit theft.  The disaster, which came just five years after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, detailing the unsanitary conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses, became a major catalyst for a more progressive labor laws, greater employee rights and better workplace conditions.  Frances Perkins, who would become perhaps the most well-known U.S. secretary of labor in the 1930s, spearheaded the subsequent investigation into the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster.

I was heartened to learn that, on the day of the fire, NYU law students had helped to pull some of the workers there to safety.

I mention this because of the uncanny similarities to yesterday’s disaster at a garment factory in the nine-story Rana Plaza building in Dhaka that collapsed — like Triangle Shirtwaist Factory 102 years ago in New York City, the building was crowded, the fire doors and other exits were locked, and it’s fast becoming the worst garment industry disaster in Bangladeshi history.

Employees had the unenviable choice of jumping to their deaths or being crushed to death, much like the Triangle Shirtwaist workers who were forced to jump or to burn.

But I can’t help but note that Matthew Yglesias — a commentator that I usually find incredibly thoughtful, especially on all matters economic — wrote one of the lazier pieces of journalism I’ve read yesterday with a 360-word post in Slate on why it’s totes cool that Bangladesh can have collapsing buildings.  As it turns out, his piece featured barely one word for each dead Bangladeshi worker — now sadly, the death toll is already 243:

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States….

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans.  That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus.  Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh.  Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States.  Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody.  The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine.  American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.

Yglesias is really channeling 18th century economist David Ricardo here, whose concept of comparative advantage still shapes much of international economics today.  The idea, for anyone who’s not taken an introductory economics course, is that countries should produce what they are most efficient as producing, produce a lot of it, and trade with other countries for the items that the country could produce less efficiently.  So Bangladesh should specialize in the things that it’s best at producing for the lowest cost — and it certainly seems like exporting clothing is one of those things, given that no country, excepting China, exports more clothing to the world.

Yglesias’s point is that it’s perfectly fine for Bangladeshis to specialize in cheap clothing because they’ll be able to produce it at less cost than, say, U.S. or German or Singaporean workers.  In that regard, he’s really arguing that Bangladesh’s comparative advantage is in cheap labor, and that’s of course a well-worn path for relatively poorer countries to become relatively richer countries — that was true in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, the United States in the 19th century, South Korea in the late 20th century.  Government regulation — whether that’s environmental regulation in China or workplace regulation in Bangladesh — adds additional costs to industry, it’s true, and that reduces the comparative advantage Bangladesh has in cheap labor.  That’s why Yglesias is arguing that it makes sense for Bangladesh to have lower workplace safety standards.

But Yglesias really doesn’t get the fundamental facts right — it appears that if the factory workers had listened to local regulators, who spotted the cracks in the building Tuesday, they would have never allowed their workers back into the factory in the first place, which has more to do with a culture of impunity and shady legal practices, not comparative advantage:

Continue reading Matthew Yglesias’s callous 360-word post is wrong about Bangladesh

How the ‘West’ should understand — and why it should pay attention to — Shahbagh

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For the past 17 days, while most of the United States and Europe has ignored it, Bangladesh has undergone perhaps the most important political mobilization since its independence in 1971 — a series of protests that have become known as the Shahbagh protest, named after a central intersection and neighborhood in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital where protestors have gathered.  Even though Pakistan is preparing for elections later this spring and India is already moving toward campaign season for the 2014 elections, it’s becoming clear that Shahbagh is the most important political event in South Asia so far in 2013.bangladesh flag icon

A good friend, Rashad Ullah, wrote a thoughtful guest piece on the protests nearly two weeks ago when they were in their infancy — a piece that attracted some of Suffragio‘s highest readership over the past year, in fact, and which explained the background of the protest.  The protest followed immediately upon the life imprisonment sentence for Abdul Quader Mollah by a special war crimes panel, the International Crimes Tribunal, established by the current government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina (pictured below).

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Quader Mollah is the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), the country’s largest Islamist party, and the protestors are now generally calling for a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami in the furtherance of a fully secular political space in Bangladesh, and there’s some evidence that the Bangladeshi government may accede to the demands.

As it turns out, the life sentence was lighter than most Bangladeshis expected.

If you’re a relative moderate in the ‘West’ — meaning, the United States and Europe — you likely oppose the death penalty, so when you see the Shahbagh protest, you’ll see two different aspects, the first being a movement devoted to the execution of Quader Mollah and other war criminals, angry youths wielding placards bearing nooses and slogans of vengeance.

But that’s not the entire picture — and as the protests continue and grow (now in their 17th day), they seem to be taking on a more transcendental quality.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve re-learned anew the horror of the crimes that Pakistan’s army and its supporters perpetrated within East Pakistan/Bangladesh in the short but brutal war of independence in 1971 — murder, rape, torture, the targeting of women and the Hindu minority, and the systematic assassination of what would have been the Bangladeshi intellectual and political elite upon Bangladeshi independence, atrocities that some suggest may rise to the level of genocide.

On top of those crimes — the original sin of the creation of the Bangladeshi state — both the Pakistani and Bangladeshi governments swept the most horrific elements of 1971 under the rug.  That was perhaps understandable coming from Islamabad, but less so from Dhaka, where you would have expected the victors to prosecute what were clearly crimes against humanity by any international standard.

In the context of the time, however, newly independent Bangladesh and its leaders were interested more in geopolitical recognition than in settling scores, especially given the Cold War alliance between the United States and Pakistan.  Bangladesh in the 1970s needed diplomatic allies more than it needed war tribunals or even truth and reconciliation.

That creates an even more vital moral obligation for the United States and other allies to take note now.  If that weren’t reason enough, it’s important to remember that Bangladesh, with nearly 153 million citizens, is the eighth most-populous country in the world, and one of the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracies.

So it’s increasingly important to keep in mind the second aspect of the Shahbagh protest, what I believe will become the more enduring aspect of what’s happening at Shahbagh — the political coming-of-age of a new generation of Bangladeshis, the sons and daughters (many of whom weren’t yet born in 1971) of those who fought for independence, who are now pushing to finish the business of 1971 by coming to terms with the horrors of the 1971 atrocities, to settle the lack of accountability in either Pakistan or Bangladesh over the past 42 years for the crimes of 1971, and to create a space for Bangladesh to finally move forward as a nation. Continue reading How the ‘West’ should understand — and why it should pay attention to — Shahbagh

Are the Dhaka war tribunal protests morphing into a wider ‘Bengali Spring’?

Shahbagh

Guest post by Rashad Ullah

News reports on the mass demonstrations in the heart of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, now in their fourth full day, dutifully report that Bangladeshis are protesting the verdict of a war crimes tribunal, but they may be missing the larger story — the genesis of a wider social protest movement in the world’s eighth-most populous country.bangladesh flag icon

At face value, the demonstrators are protesting the lighter-than-expected life sentence delivered earlier this week to Abdul Quader Mollah, an alleged war criminal — protestors who favor the death penalty held up signs of “ফাঁসি চাই (“Hanging Wanted”).

The verdict came as a result of a war crimes tribunal prosecuted by the Bangladesh government to bring to justice atrocities committed during the country’s independence war in 1971.  Quader Mollah, a leader of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), the country’s largest Islamist party, which opposed the liberation of what was then East Pakistan in 1971 from Islamabad’s control, and Quader Mollah has been accused of masterminding killings against pro-independence intellectuals and perpetrating institutional violence against women.

In recent years, Jamaat-e-Islami has joined a government coalition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল), one of Bangladesh’s two major parties, from 2001 to 2006, and serves in opposition to the current government headed by the more progressive, secular, and historically pro-Indian Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ), which promised a war crimes tribunal during its victorious 2008 election campaign.

Although the demonstrations were initially organized on Tuesday by a group called the Bloggers and Online Activist Network, thousands of people have joined the protests at the Shahbagh intersection (the area separates “Old Dhaka” and “New Dhaka” and historically a site of major demonstrations). By now, it has become clear that the demonstrations are no longer simply about this particular verdict in this particular tribunal.

Moreover, the quickly congealing Shahbagh movement is as much a national soul-searching as anything else.

The vast majority of participants in the social media-fueled protests are young people who weren’t even alive in 1971, and the energy of the protests over the past four days has made for some odd contrasts — the demands for Quader Mollah’s execution (including mock nooses) are suffused into a carnival-like atmosphere complete with face paint,continuous singing,  and even a monument of paper flowers.  Although outside observers may find the death imagery a somewhat abhorrent reaction of a bloodthirsty mob, it’s important to keep in mind that the protests go directly to the heart of the events that brought the Bangladeshi state into being.

Continue reading Are the Dhaka war tribunal protests morphing into a wider ‘Bengali Spring’?