Thee incontrovertible truths that Bangladesh’s media doesn’t want you to know

There are three incontrovertible facts in Bangladesh’s politics that the regime or its pet media like Dhaka Tribune and Daily Observer dare not broach:

  1. Never in Bangladesh’s history has a sitting government lost an election since both the law and the culture make it impossible for the Election Commission, Police, or the civil service to do anything not approved by the sitting Prime Minister and the sitting Home Minister.
  2. None of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s grandchildren live in Bangladesh…rather every last one of them lives in the same Western democracies that this family condemns every hour of the day. In fact one of Mujib’s granddaughters—Tulip Siddique—is a well known pro-Putin Labour Party MP in the British Parliament.
  3. The only time an actual one-party, one-family state with all executive, judicial, and legislative power concentrated in one person by dint of the Constitution was created in Bangladesh was in 1975 through the 4th Amendment (aka the BKSAL amendment) which made Awami League led by Mujib’s family the only ruling entity and forbid all newspapers and other parties.

Human rights abusers do not belong in UN peacekeeping operations

The involvement of Bangladesh’s security personnel in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations is a source of three critical resources for the Bangladeshi dictatorship:

  1. Prestige
  2. Foreign currency
  3. Career advancement for military and internal security officials whose support lends the enforced legitimacy that laughably phony elections cannot

The visit of the head of the UN peacekeeping operations to Bangladesh is thus rightly triggered calls from major human rights organizations to do a better job in screening security personnel from that country before they don the blue helmet. Many such Bangladeshi “peacekeeping” personnel belong to the notorious RAB unit; many others are simply there to get the dollars and head back home to launch an effort to migrate to Canada and the United States where many human rights abusers from Bangladesh have second homes.

People in regions of armed conflict should be able to count on the blue helmet symbolizing safety and security; having known human rights abusers wear those very helmets is a sadistic joke that the United Nations should avoid playing.  The cost of bringing such personnel—who are used to impunity for crimes in their own countries—to maintain the peace is staggering.

Ideally, the United Nations should forego any further recruitment of Bangladeshi personnel for peacekeeping operations until such a time that the dictatorship paves the way for free elections which are, technically, due by the turn of the year.

Better late than never

Some of us advocated, called, pestered, wrote, emailed about this since the Trump administration. At times it felt like a useless endeavor given the forces arrayed against this. Now let’s use this…and add phony journalists and their ‘editors’ as well (I mean absolute haters of free elections like Syed Badrul Ahsan and Syed Ishtiaque Reza shouldn’t be able to enjoy the bounties of American freedom anymore than the crooks in the judiciary like “Justice” Shamsuddin Manik).

https://www.state.gov/announcement-of-visa-policy-to-promote-democratic-elections-in-bangladesh/

Further clarification tells us that immediate family members of these crooks will be affected too.

Now is time for Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand to join the United States in delineating visa restrictions for those enablers in the civil service, judiciary, and security services who violate the God-given right of the people of Bangladesh to choose their own rulers. Pity the typical over-privileged sycophants who make excuses otherwise.

At this site we’ve started a database for those who are engaging in activities proscribed in these sanctions, including time, place, and names of victims. At the appropriate time this database will be shared with Bangladesh’s development partners including foreign ministries and consular officials of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Those who are killing democracy in Bangladesh–and those who are condoning such conduct– should not be welcomed in the free world and nor should their families.

Should institutions in the West accept credentials from Bangladesh’s public universities?

Academic freedom was never really a thing in Bangladesh, despite nonsensical utterances about “Oxford of the East”.  Things have only gotten worse since the one-party, one-family dictatorship came to power in 2008 and got rid of free elections and a free press. Universities themselves are little more than factories to nurture and produce the armed vigilantes of Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL)—the regime’s version of Iran’s Basij militia. Exams, dormitories, curriculum, and ‘research’ are all controlled by BCL cadres at Bangladesh public colleges and universities. Thus it is little surprise that the few independent thinkers left on the faculties of these institutions are being silenced for the slightest deviation of the ‘official’ version of history (kinda like they did in Iran and earlier in the USSR).

This brings up a question which is dear to me as a higher education professional: should Western universities—I am referring to the ones in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada—continue to accept the credentials generated by Bangladesh’s public universities at face value? There is no guarantee that a grade recorded in a transcript reflects quality or substance of the work done by pupils; there is no assurance that any scholarship thus transcribed means what it is supposed to mean at any level. Even at the graduate school level at premier public institutions, regime-affiliated “scholars” rely mostly on plain old plagiarism for their credentials including their PhDs.

I’d think that there needs to be a moratorium by universities and immigration authorities when it comes to accepting the academic work from Bangladeshi students and scholars whose educational records are issued by public colleges and universities in Bangladesh. During the moratorium some process can be created to adequately vet the integrity of the actual work behind these records so that those genuinely interested in furthering their studies can be welcomed to the West while the regime-affiliated poseurs can be turned away.

DDR, China, DPRK, Bangladesh…multi-party democracies!!!

If there was any doubt that the ‘official opposition’ Jatiya Party (JP) is anything more than a front-organization of the ruling one party Awami League junta, it should be dispelled with this meeting where the Bangladeshi dictator is setting up the leadership of the ‘opposition’. This blog has long maintained that JP—founded by the late dictator H M Ershad as a temporary vehicle for his political ambitions—is analogous to the phony and supplicant ‘other’ parties in the former East Germany, China, and North Korea. Only idiotic Western journalists go along with their patrons in the Dhaka Tribune, Daily Sun, and bdnews24 to make the JP something other than the Her Master’s Voice that it really is.

The (pretend) long arms of a dictator

That a brutal dictatorship is trying to silence dissenters abroad is not surprising; small mercies for the cartoonish approach to these things. That Bangladesh’s entire “free media”–the Prothom Alo, the BFUJ, the (regime owned) Dhaka Tribune, the Daily Star–are all entirely silent about this says a lot about their phony commitment to democracy. As I have often maintained, the cheapest ladies of the evening are no match for the so-called ‘journalists’ in Dhaka, when it comes to pricing their wares.

Bangladesh’s private universities: the next hunting ground of ruling party terror squad BCL

Under the one-party dictatorship in Bangladesh, the 30 odd public universities serve three purposes:

  1. Credential production centers for younger party cadres so they can be absorbed into the nominally competitive civil and judicial services
  2. Training ground for the ruling party’s in-house terror squad BCL whereby BCL mid-level leaders can sharpen their skills of murder, rape, intimidation, public goods looting, and mass violence
  3.  Engine for phony scholarship that can be used to beguile Western universities into awarding coveted fellowships and visiting professorships to academics friendly to the one-party dictatorship; few, if any, of these academics ever come back once given the golden ticket to ‘study’ abroad.

The ruling party bigwigs and their financiers in the business world don’t ever send their kids to universities in Bangladesh; every last one of the children of cabinet members, editors of major newspapers (almost all of which are little more than press information units of the ruling junta), and central committee members of the ruling Awami League study in free democracies like the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

That leaves the aspiring middle and upper middle classes in a lurch; this demand sector had so far been well catered to by the hundred or so private universities which range from high quality North South and BRAC to sycophantic cult centers like ULAB. The saving grace of these universities has been the absence of an organized presence of the BCL terror squad in the dorms. Not anymore; the ruling dictatorship is afraid that some actual scholarship and education takes place in many of these universities and is eager to put a stop to that. Plus, the BCL terrorists need more places to ply out their trade in murder, mayhem, and loot.

It’s time for the international credential evaluation community (AICE, IACEI, ECE etc) and Western universities to call a spade and spade: transcripts, diplomas, and learning assessments of Bangladeshi universities—public and, now, private—are simply not trustworthy given that the system of examinations and other assessments is run not by university administrators and faculty but by the ruling party’s BCL terror squad cells in each university. It’s time to stop accepting diplomas granted by universities in Bangladesh until such a time that academic freedom and institutional integrity is restored in the higher education sector in that country.

All the queen’s men

If sycophancy was an Olympic sport, the so-called journalists of Bangladesh would certainly be in the running for the top three slots every four years. In the run up to the opening of the controversial Padma Bridge last month, ostensibly respectable journalists left no stone unturned to show their obeisance to the unelected “prime minister”, Sheikh Hasina Wajed.

The doyen of the editor corps, Mahfuz Anam compared her to Winston Churchill in writing for the ‘respectable’ Daily Star; not to be outdone in the sycophancy heats, competitor Dhaka Tribune corralled the ever-ready resident pro-Hasina American “economist” in Dhaka Forrest Cookson (whose actual job in Dhaka nobody seems to know and whose “PhD” is economics seem to have no grantor) to miraculously claim that even the CIA confirmed that Hasina was without a shade of blemish or corruption in this multibillion dollar project of ‘national pride’! And these are two of the more ‘neutral’ English dailies in the country. I guess, the moral rot that a dictatorship wreaks ultimately reaches the souls of even otherwise admirable people.

The truth behind the enormous corruption that went into the Padma Bridge is probably well known by the editors of both the Daily Star and the Dhaka Tribune, but truth-tellers don’t get invites to Gonobhobon tea parties. Hence, the task to remind us of that truth is left to Netra News, which is run by a couple of journalists who escaped to exile when the Hasina regime’s secret police went looking for them to make them ‘disappear’ like so many dissidents have. The editors of Bangladesh established newspapers may be too afraid to mention unsavory facts; some men aren’t.

The corruption was of a proportion suitably consistent with the gigantic scope of the project, and encompassed multiple continents as Hasina’s henchmen, moneymen, and bureaucrats sought a ‘few percent’ for their pockets. After all, this is a regime that presides over a country where, as the Netra News article notes, Ordinary people know about how this all works, even if they are not involved in seeking government contracts, because so many of them are forced to pay hundreds of thousands of takas (equating to thousands of dollars) simply to get their son, cousin, sister or brother the chance of a government job — whether it be for a basic position as a teacher, a police officer, or a soldier. People are well aware how this ritualized corruption results in key decision makers, including many senior government ministers, lining their own pockets.

Bangladesh’s Basij Militia

One of the more inscrutable aspects of Bangladesh’s dictatorship–at least to the starry-eyed Western stringers from WaPo, NYT, Economist and similar outlets whose local offices are based in Delhi and whose Bangladesh beat is often covered by easily duped newly minted grad student types–is the organization called “Bangladesh Chhatra League” or “BCL”. Literally translated, the words mean simply “Bangladesh Students League”. Simplicity and accuracy are hardly the same in dictatorships.

In reality, the BCL is a shadowy armed cadre whose leadership is well into its 40s and 50s with nary a connection to classrooms. Rather, it’s closely modeled after Iran’s Basij militia or the Red Guards of Maoist China in that it functions as a shadowy parallel to official law enforcement agencies like the police and [US sanctioned] Rapid Action Battalion. Recruited from younger and more criminally-oriented members of the ruling Awami League, this shadowy force regularly unleashes violence on dissenters and keeps a strict control on the examinations, grading, dorms, and activities at public universities. The rather innocuous title of the organization allows the government to claim “oh these are just unruly students” to hoodwink naive foreign reporters. Last week saw what was a great example of how merely ‘unruly’ these ‘students’ were: upset that merchants at a major market were not providing free goodies to these thugs on the occasion of the festival of Eid ul Fitr, the BCL cadres caused hell to break loose on the hapless shopkeepers and, with impunity, murdered several of them while the police, not surprisingly, looked on (as has always been the case).

Even with the pictures, affiliations, and whereabouts of the perpetrators captured on security cameras and distributed widely on social media (before the government clamped down on the distribution using the draconian “Digital Security Act”), most of these murderers roam free under the patronage of the Awami League dictatorship.

The One party, One family dynasty ruling Bangladesh

A great tragedy of the Bangladeshi people is that their own journalists have simply disappeared into sycophantic oblivion like the Pravda journalists of yore; the very idea that any newspaper or broadcast show would even ask where does the so-called Prime Minister’s uber-nationalistic son live, or who he is married to, or how he makes a living, is simply unimaginable for the chattering conglomeration of cowards known as Bangladesh’s “editors” and “broadcasters”, never mind anything more substantial A greater tragedy is that the ‘respectable’ international media–think the New York Times, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, etc–have their Bangladesh beats staffed by junior stringers too dependent on their New Delhi offices or too enamored with the concept of a woman ruling a Muslim-majority country or too thoroughly compromised with family ties to the Bangladeshi dictatorship (like the head of the BBC Bengali Service) to be of much use in pointing out the bloodthirsty and cruel nature of the Bangladeshi dictatorship that is little more than a corrupted family enterprise dedicated to greed. In regards to almost any other country (think present day Sri Lanka), journalists in London and New York would be making a big deal–rightly so–about such a state of affairs. But alas, poor Bangladeshis must be children of a lesser God.