Dedicated to the restoration of pluralist, representative, democracy in Bangladesh. I write because they can't speak anymore.
In the first 20 years of her existence, neatly coinciding with the last 20 years of the Cold War, Bangladesh was decidedly a backwater in the global scheme of things; as such the “Bangladesh beat”–at foreign offices, major Western media, university research centers–was the place where ambitious late 20 somethings went to dabble in things …
Continue reading “The second stringers who ‘cover’ Bangladesh”
About time…but more needs to be done The sanctions imposed on 5 of the regime’s security leaders and human rights violators by the United States this month https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0526 is a case of better too little and late, than never. Years of engagement by thoughtful individuals in the diaspora has helped move this effort to this …
Continue reading “Finally….sanctions by the US on the Bangladeshi dictatorship’s chief henchmen”
It’s a decided surprise when occasionally the once respected Prothom Alo newspaper in Dhaka (a sister concern of the Daily Star of regime pet ‘critic’ Mahfuz Anam) spills out the beans on the nature of the ‘democracy’ that that the graduate interns at the Bangladesh beat at the New York Times or Washington Post or …
The surprise is not that Bangladesh’s heavily politicized one party state and its military apparatus are so shockingly full of brutality and corruption as shown by the shocking expose of Al-Jazeera’s investigative journalism team. The bigger surprise, perhaps, is the subservient, cowardly, and craven attitude of Bangladesh’s ‘free’ press and ‘intelligentsia’ which is shooting the …
August 15, another annual day of Bangladeshi intellectual sycophancy
Given how ‘elections’ happen in Bangladesh, the mayoral one in the northern half of the capital Dhaka is no surprise with the usual make-believe candidates running against the anointed ruling junta selectee and the press showing all the silly coverage of phony canvassing and long queues at polling booths. It is doubly phony since the …
Continue reading “Another day, another ‘election’ in Bangladesh”
“To give due credit for originality, a slow cooking approach to transforming a budding democracy into an authoritarian regime without officially becoming a dictatorship is perhaps an invention of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The robust two-party parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary that Zimbabwe started with in 1979 was slowly, steadily, and methodically transformed into a …
The scale and scope of the night-before stuffing of ballot boxes was so stunning even by the ruling junta’s normal benchmarks, that it’s own ‘front’ ally (all these totalitarian parties of the Eastern European style..be they post WWII Poland or North Korea or Syria have ‘fronts’ which bring the main political machine of the junta …
It is said ‘better late than never’. What many of us had known from the time of the January 2014 ‘elections’, when the majority of the parliament was elected without a single ballot being cast, the mandarins of the global elite at London’s Economist have finally concluded as well: Bangladesh has ceased to be even …
In a January 29, 2019 piece in the Daily Manabzamin—which was retweeted by democracy activist and noted physician Dr Pinaki Bhattachariya—a tale of sadism emerged that rivals in specificity, if not in scope, the depredations of the Iranian junta. Mary, a young woman activist in the pro-democracy Opposition movement, was blinded when the junta’s police …