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:
Tag Archives: #AwamiLeageBD
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 …
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: Credential production centers for younger party cadres so they can be absorbed into the nominally competitive civil and judicial services Training ground for the ruling party’s in-house terror squad BCL whereby BCL mid-level leaders can sharpen their skills of murder, rape, …
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”, …
Bangladesh’s Basij Militia
Iran’s dictators have their shadowy militia Basij; Bangladesh’s dictators have their “BCL”
Punitive sanctions are good; preventive ones are even better
The US sanctions on a few high level leaders of the Bangladeshi dictatorship’s brutal security establishment are not only welcome news but are already having a measurable impact: since the announcement of the sanctions until last night, not a single victim has died in staged encounters with the regime security forces, and no known cases …
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The middle-school apologia for dictatorship: predictable, uniform, unoriginal
Blame the “western media”, blame “conspiracy against us”, blame “lack of patriotism”, blame “colonialism”, blame “but what about..”…that’s in a nutshell the toolbox of every barbaric dictatorship–and its paid and unpaid interlocutors–which is criticized for the horrid treatment of its own citizens. That apologia is pathetically old and worn out; it may impress the usual …
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Democracy vs Development: the phony ‘debate’
Have you noticed that all those politicians, journalists, ‘experts’, and ‘civil society’ types who engage in ‘profound’ debate on “democracy vs development” have their own spouses, children, and investments safely abroad in capitalist, democratic societies? In fact in many cases they themselves either live in such free societies or have residency/citizenship in those countries? See, …
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The second stringers who ‘cover’ Bangladesh
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 …
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What NYT, Economist, WaPo won’t admit
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 …