1. In the Graveyard of Hope- Faruq Wasif
2. Messiah Syndrome- Shameran Abed

In the Graveyard of Hope- Faruq Wasif
[Prothom Alo, June 28, 2008]
[Translated for Drishtipat by Shabnam Nadiya]

Bangladesh is the name of hope’s graveyard. Bangladesh is another name for waiting. Here, everything almost arrives, but nothing actually, finally comes. But even within the darkness, the possibility of the arrival shines like the morning star. Even though in exchange for our nose, a blade we received, we still hope that some day our noses will heal. We are waiting, hope, sister to waiting, will one day return. The train of history will stop at our platform. We wait. This is our life’s force in this unspeakable reality. We water the grave of hope and bring forth the grass of sorrow. Waiting, brother of hope, keeps us awake. We traverse decades. We come through death, war, pestilence and famine.

A new decade arrives, and we spy hope in the dregs of frustration and are moved. Hope arose in 1990, after the fall of the despot. Hope arose in 2000, at the arrival of the new millennium. We were almost becoming self-sufficient in food production, xx was rising, our confidence was growing as the young men and women labouring here and abroad were earning dollars. But the lines of that poem turn true somehow: I built this house for happiness/It burnt up in fire/I bathe in an ocean of ambrosia/It turned poison.

The poem is more than a hundred years old. Today some non-poet would perhaps write, new bottle same wine. So it’s with that in hand that we have to sit down today to take measure of our humiliation on a national scale.

Transparency International has conducted a survey and provided a record of the corruption during the rule of this government. It states that corruption hasn’t decreased in comparison to the past two governments, it has increased. TIB themselves has prepared a comparative picture based on data from the survey of 5,000 households across 62 districts. An examination of the six months prior to and six months after 1/11 shows that ministry-wise corruption levels, meaning education, health, land administration, local government, the NGO sector, corruption and bribery are rampant everywhere. And that too is at higher levels than before. In the education sector, it used to be 12.5 percent, now it’s 44.5 percent. In the health sector, 32 percent has grown to 36.9 percent; in land administration 39.4 percent has increased to 45.1 percent and in the NGO sector, 33.3 percent is now 35.7 percent.

In addition, 96.6 individuals out of every 100 have been victims of the corruption in the law enforcement agencies. So who’s been left out? We hear that the politicians are no longer in power, many of them are immobile, in jail. So who are the phantoms who have been doing all this? It was to curb corruption that so much effort was expended, so many upper floor chumps were sent downstairs, and chumps from lower floors promoted to the upper.

In the past the political leaders would call the TIB report a conspiracy, propaganda to tarnish their image. Will the same thing be said this time as well? I don’t know. If corruption has decreased even slightly, then is the new TIB survey lying? Those who have nothing else, have experience. Its from that experience that we know, whatever the intent of the survey, the data that has emerged from it are close to the truth. If that is the case, then what was this game of hopscotch that we had been witnessing all this while?

We don’t know whether in the future, after another 1/11, we will have to read another epic of corruption in an anti-corruption drive. Still, sorrow sulks within our hearts, Why did we build this house!

Our train never arrives; our night never dawns. The ringing of sword on shield never ends. If our train does come, it never runs on the right track. Still we wait. Like a condemned man waits with the noose around his neck, so we wait too, for some more breath, light, cherished faces, tastes of the mortal. We who inhabit the footpaths wait, one day we will have a house. Slum-dwelling rickshawpullers in Dhaka and Chittagong nurtures the yearning to one day return to the village and farming. The poor wait, something will happen some day. They will no longer want for rice, their children will laugh. The prostitute waits, even if she can’t, her daughter will escape this life of the fallen. When her life is over, she thinks her granddaughter or her great granddaughter will surely find a different life. Then she goes to her grave and waits, when will the gates of heaven open. And she will ask the Creator of this world, did my children find happiness? Those fathers and mothers will wait even beneath the grass and earth of the grave, those that they had left behind, have they found happiness? Perhaps they won’t know, but we do, over a million women have been smuggled to brothels in various countries. That’s about the number of people who live in a smallish district of this land! Over 400,000 among them are India, and 40 thousand boys are living the lives of sex slaves in Pakistan. Still we wait, they will return, they will be brought back. People cannot do without waiting and hoping. If we didn’t have the hope of the times changing, we would move around like the living dead. If there was no wait for the establishment of our golden Bengal and the trial of the war criminals, the Liberation War would become a meaningless. If there was no hope that one day this lawlessness will end, we would turn to stone from sorrow.

It is through these eyes of stone that we witness the kings, queens and princes of corruption have either been released or are about to be. Of course we want to see freedom in politics, we want the re-establishment of the political rights of the people. But since when have these corrupt politicians become so similar that we have to witness the freeing of the crrupt in the guise of freeing politics?

We see that although corrupt individuals are being placed under pressure, institution corruption is not being addressed. Citizen’s participation in administration and rule has not been increased. The people are like puppets in the reform and anti-corruption drives. Are we only supposed to go and vote when we’re called upon? We’ve lost our rights in the regimes of both political and non-political governments. All we’ve retained is our right to vote. What can be done with that, if the same people stand for election? If the pond of politics is overrun with weeds, you cannot clean it with bamboo sticks, the entire pond has to be uprooted. Only the people can do that. It’s the people of East Bengal that wiped out the last trace and name of Muslim League. It’s the people of Bangladesh that forced out the Pakistani occupation forces. In Kansat, Shonir Akhra, Fulbari, the people rose up again and again. That was the muscle power of democracy. And this government, this is the muscle power of the ruling elite. The two not bring the same results.

A scream for a mass movement burnt deep inside the heart of society. But no response to that came from politics, and so a vacuum was created. The people could find no one any more to reflect their hopes on to. “People Power” hung in space with no heir, no one to claim the mantle. But power is such a thing, it does not, cannot just travel hand to hand without a final address. Since the people could not, the people’s representatives would not, take it on, power landed in the laps of today’s navigators, and said take me, use me, drive me. The next history every one knows. We needed a flush to get rid of all the waste, they pressed the flush button. But now all the blood, all the spoils, all the pollution is coming back. is that dirt now going to overflow the toilet and drown us all?

No one can deny that corruption is like a sea flowing over Bangladesh. Everyone knows that a sea cannot be cleaned like this. The only way is to allow rivers and streams to keep flowing into the sea until it cleans itself. And those rivers, those streams, are the people. So the only path is to remove the barriers in the way of the people. There is no other solution. There can be no ordering the river to flow from the heights of the Qutub Minar of power. Stuck between the scylla and charybdis, we also see a glimmer of hope. Will a bridge be built between the masses and government power, can state power finally pass out of the hands of the elite into the people? On that rests the future of hope and fear.

So we wait and wait. We wait as the hyphen between past and future. But no nation, no people, can spend decades suspended, waiting as hypens. We want to wipe away our poisoned inheritance and start a new day, but we cannot also erase our proud history.

The last 37 years have rained so many blows on our feelings, deep calluses have formed. It has become like a hard tortoise shell. Does a hopeful heart still beat under that shell? We fear that if hope is dead, opportunism will be born and will stretch its neck out of its shell like a tortoise. And Bangladesh will be transformed into a grave for hope. In that graveyard will walk a group of tortoise people, who have a strong shell as shields and whose necks are always stretched out in greed.

We do not want the dead weight of those tortoise-like opportunists to turn everything to poison forever.

The messiah syndrome
- Shameran Abed
Our current army chief is not the first general to have unsuccessfully tried to bring about a qualitative change in a nation’s politics by giving it, in characteristic military style, short-term shock therapy. But strengthening democracy requires more than a messiah, it requires collective, long-term efforts to establish the rule of law, to ensure individual freedom and to allow democratic institutions to grow and flourish.

IT IS surprising that a major story on Bangladesh in the latest issue of Time magazine (June 30-July 7), which is based on an exclusive interview with the army chief, General Moeen U Ahmed, has gone almost unnoticed. Could it be that those who have seen and read the story prefer not to discuss or highlight it, given its unflattering portrayal of the general and his attempts at being the nation’s redeemer? Or are we ashamed at our collective folly at having initially been hopeful about the general and his band of deluded followers who still believe that they can put this country on a democratic path by stifling democracy itself?

General Moeen, like his purported boss, Fakhruddin Ahmed, appears to have a preference for the foreign media. One will not come across too many exclusive interviews of the army chief in local publications (he did, however, give an exclusive to one of the private television channels that has seemingly gone out of its way to pander to this military-controlled regime). But when foreign media organisations come calling, the army chief, like the chief adviser, seems to oblige them far more willingly. Do both men suffer from the same complex? Do they both feel that their accountability is to the west rather than to the people of Bangladesh? After all, it is the resident representatives of our western development ‘partners’ who are believed to have instigated the January 11, 2007 intervention by the military in the first place, and it is they who have supported and propped up this regime ever since.

If the tendency of the principal players of the current regime to explain themselves to foreign audiences more willingly than to the people of this country is worrying, what is more worrying is their patent lack of appreciation of history. Our current army chief is not the first general to have unsuccessfully tried to bring about a qualitative change in a nation’s politics by giving it, in characteristic military style, short-term shock therapy. This has never worked in the past, in this subcontinent or elsewhere, and it will not work this time around. Addressing our democratic deficit will require more than a discredited anti-corruption drive and the desperate neutralisation of two iconic political leaders. General Musharraf tried this very tack in Pakistan and failed miserably. In our country, the fallout, political and economic, of this government’s ill-conceived agenda, which many believe is also designed to legitimise a greater long-term role for the military in national politics, will only be dire and frightening.

A sustainable democracy will not result in our country until our leaders work to establish the rule of law, uphold the fundamental rights of the citizens and allow democratic institutions to grow and flourish. Yet our current leadership, just like the elected and military leaders of the past, have continually undermined the rule of law, violated at will the rights of the people and continue to sidestep or destroy at every opportunity the institutions that are supposed to act as the pillars of a genuine democracy – a functioning legislature, an independent judiciary, an effective bureaucracy, civil society organisations that operate as non-partisan pressure groups and media that works to put additional checks and balances on government, not work as the mouth pieces of one or the other party or of an unelected, military-controlled regime.

Moreover, there is an inherent arrogance about our current rulers, who were never given a popular mandate but seem to believe in their own right not only to govern but also to determine who should govern in future. This may seem to most to be contrary to the basic democratic ideal of representative government, but it appears not to bother the chief protagonist of our present undemocratic dispensation in the least. To Time magazine, General Moeen stated that ‘you can judge the people of a nation by the type of leaders they select’. Given that the general admittedly has an extremely low opinion of the leaders that we ‘selected’ in the past; does this mean that he has an equally low opinion of us, the people, as well?

That would explain why he apparently feels little need to explain himself, his actions, or that of the current regime to the people of this country. But what are its implications for our democratic aspirations? If our present rulers, whose primary duty is to allow the people to freely and fairly choose their governors, do not feel that the people are up to it, what reason could we have to feel optimistic about a return to democratic rule? General Moeen also told Time magazine that the people need to be educated ‘so that they don’t keep on cutting off their own feet’. Who will judge when the people have been sufficiently educated? And what will happen to elections till that desired level of education has been attained? If the general feels that the people, at their present level of awareness, are not capable of making the right decisions, surely he is better off not affording the people that opportunity at all.

Given his apparent take on the matter, the bigger question is: does the general believe in a representative democracy at all where every person has an equal vote? Or does he feel that the choice of governors should be left up to a select group of educated and enlightened men such as himself? Right now, it seems that he feels compelled to show support for the former while he secretly believe in the latter.

For those of us who feel that the only way to strengthen democracy is by allowing people more freedoms and greater choices, the implications of General Moeen’s statements to Time magazine are disheartening to say the least. When rulers lose faith in the ability of the people to decide for themselves what is best and, more worryingly, when they feel that they can openly and unashamedly insult those they govern, the result is usually the confiscation of the people’s democratic rights. That began with the declaration of the state of emergency that automatically suspended the fundamental rights of the people and the promulgation of the emergency power rules, which took away additional rights including the right to bail. When and under what circumstances those rights will be returned to the people remains anyone’s guess.

Interestingly, General Moeen reportedly feels that ‘no systems of government are bad in their own right, it’s the human beings who make it so’. That is probably why he feels that he can bring about a qualitative change in politics by getting rid of our current crop of political leaders and installing ‘effective leaders’ in their place, if need be by circumventing the democratic process. But is it not an effective system of checks and balances that is meant to keep the leaders honest? And do we not require functioning democratic institutions to ensure that those checks and balances exist and work? Our democracy’s many failings will not be addressed simply by imposing different leaders on the people. The sooner the army chief realises that and puts faith in the people’s ability to learn from their mistakes, the sooner will he allow us to re-embark on our democratic quest.