The New Nation - Internet Edition

THE government, according to a recent newspaper report, has drafted a policy apparently to prevent entry of derelict ships made of or carrying highly toxic substances, prevent environment pollution and reduce human casualties in ship-breaking yards. A committee earlier submitted the draft of what is called 'The National Policy on Ship-Breaking 2007' to the authorities concerned and the Shipping Ministry will take the next required steps to make it effective. When it comes into effect, the policy will help improve working conditions in the ship-breaking outfits located mainly in the south-eastern district of Chittagong and marked as 'dangerous' by the international environment watchdog Greenpeace. The policy suggested ban on import of warships or nuclear power-driven vessels for scrapping. It also pursued mandatory introduction of modern equipment for scrapping waste reception, and recycling facilities and setting up of healthcare centres to prevent environmental pollution and reduce human casualties.

Due to the lack of a policy in line with the international conventions on ship-breaking, Bangladesh has been facing an acute environmental pollution because of unsafe dumping of toxic wastes in the Bay of Bengal, numerous deaths of workers and health-related problems of many others engaged in ship-breaking over the last decades. There were media reports on such tragic incidents often and on when they occurred and organisations concerned with human rights at home and abroad asked the government to adopt a tough policy to reduce health and environment hazards in this sub-sector, employing more than 20,000 people. According to available statistics, ship-scrapping units meet 90 per cent of the domestic demand for steel, but workers in this sub-sector have no legal shields for their safety.

According to the media report, the Shipping Ministry at an inter-ministerial meeting recently finalised the draft policy for placing before the council of advisers for approval. Officials concerned have claimed that they tried their best to prepare the rules in line with the international conventions. But experts alleged that the draft policy still has 'many loopholes' and it was not updated in line with

the Basel Convention of 1992 which later adopted technical guidelines for

environmentally sound management of the full and partial dismantling of ships. The draft policy says worn out ship cannot be used for any purpose other than scrapping. The exporters of the ships have to prepare a list of toxic and harmful materials and their quantity with their locations in the ship prior to export and must submit the report to the authorities concerned. The draft policy provides that the owners must dispose of all wastes, in a way that is environmentally sound and not harmful for human health before handing over the vessels to local importers and all the tanks and cargo holds of the vessels must be cleansed of inflammable and poisonous substances. The proposed policy empowers the law enforcers to restrict movement of any vessel trying to enter Bangladesh's territorial waters without prior permission from the government.

EVER since hard rock was found at Maddhyapara in Dinajpur, a big scope of import substitution and support for the country's construction and related activities emerged. Thus, when initiative was taken in 1994 to mine the hard rock, expectation grew that production of this rock would be very significant for the national economy. Rocks have been imported mainly from India spending thousands of crores of Taka. The Maddhyapara rocks can be very profitably used by the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) for road building, by the Water and Power Development Board (WAPDA) for embankment construction and the Bangladesh Railway for laying on its tracks. Besides, there are all kinds of extensive uses of hard rocks for construction and related works. It was estimated that with the Maddhyapara mine commercially producing hard rock for supply to various users, the country would be annually saving some 2 crore and 39 lakh US dollars for import substitution annually.

The Maddhyapara project became fully functional from May last year and has been producing about one thousand tonnes of hard rock a day and has accumulated rock at the project site since the start of mining. But nearly all of it remains stockpiled there as there are no buyers notwithstanding that official directives that were issued to different government ministries --likely to use this rock -- to do so with immediate effect. Different government bodies who would be the major users of the rock are sticking to their old habit of importing their requirements of rock. When the ministries were asked to account for their behaviour, they passed the buck to the contractors. After receiving this explanation, the ministries were ordered to include a mandatory provision in the tender schedules that only locally produced rocks are to be used. But months have passed and this specific order, too, is being ignored most irresponsibly and unconscionably. It is still business as usual for the ministries which are allowing contractors to freely import rocks.

But the economy will suffer from such unplanned activities. If this mode of producing rocks at Maddhyapara is allowed to continue with no buyers, then very soon the mining company will have to be shut down. Already, paying salaries to its workers and employees is proving to be difficult as the company presently has no earnings. If it is compelled to shut down then the resources spent so far on this project will be a total waste. The expected saving of national resources from the project will not materialise. The country will have to go on bearing the double liability of draining precious resources on importing poor quality rocks and then building weak and less dependable structures with the same. But superior quality construction is possible by using Maddhyapara's rock. The locally produced rock is also priced considerably lower than its imported equivalent. Therefore, it is high time to take a hard look at this issue from the very highest level in the government.

Aijaz Zaka Syed

THE other day I was watching this movie, The Sum of All Fears. The movie is based on a Tom Clancy novel by the same name. Clancy has long been a darling of Hollywood dream merchants. And if you've read any of his breathlessly racy thrillers, you would know why.

Here's a master storyteller who brings to life our worst fears and insecurities. And they appear frighteningly close to reality. After all, that is what all good fiction is supposed to do: reflect life as it is or could be. This is what The Sum of All Fears seems to do too. In the Ben Afleck and Morgan Freeman-starrer, the world comes as close as within 30 seconds to a nuclear holocaust.

The action is set in post-Soviet Union world when there's a weak leader in Kremlin. Some Israeli rogue scientists and closet Nazis from East Germany (what a combination!) use a nuclear weapon that Israel couldn't use against the Arabs in 1973 war to wreak nuclear havoc on an unsuspecting world. As a footnote, we are told it was Israel's friends in high places in the US who 'stole' the nuke to gift it to the Jewish state after 1967 War with Arabs. The nuke imported into the US and planted in Baltimore goes off when the US president is watching a Super Bowl match with tens of thousands of other Americans.

The president survives the attack. However, it brings the US and Russia to the brink and the world to a nuclear extinction as Washington accuses Moscow of masterminding the plot. You'll have to watch the movie to see how our hero, Dr Jack Ryan, saves the day and the world. But there's another reason why you should watch The Sum of All Fears: To see how the Israeli lobby and Zionists play big powers - in this case America and Russia - against each other, to achieve their own objectives.

This is a classic game the Zionists with their numerous lobby groups like AIPAC have been playing for decades, playing the Christian West and Islamic world against each other, seeking to destroy them both. Using this tactic, they managed to carve the Jewish state in the heart of Muslim world driving its original inhabitants, Palestinians, out. They are playing this game all over again and once again the action is set in the Middle East. They have already manipulated and used George W Bush's America to destroy Iraq. And they are in the process of doing the same to Iran, using the reigning superpower with all its might and resources.

They forced the US to hit Saddam Hussein's Iraq even though it had been reduced to a failed state. Its infrastructure had been devastated and its once powerful army was little more than a ceremonial guard with no firepower after the long war with Iran and the first Gulf war with the US. The rest was done by the years of the UN sanctions that drove the country to the brink besides killing hundreds of thousands of innocent children.

Yet this helpless country with its desperate people and utterly weakened regime was painted by the Zionist and neocon fanatics as a clear and present danger to the West and the rest of the world.

Our friend Tony Blair - by the way, where is Bush's poodle? One hasn't seen much of him since he was appointed the Middle East peacemaker with a handsome pay packet and perks to go with it! - assured us the toothless tiger that Saddam could launch an attack against Britain within 40 minutes. How Israel and its friends did not rest until the Western coalition led by a too willing America bombed Iraq back into the Stone Age is part of history now.

And now the US is stuck in the Mesopotamian quagmire like no other imperial power has ever been in recorded history. The US has already lost more than 4,000 of its soldiers in Iraq with 851 troops dying this year alone.

These casualties are nothing compared to what has happened to the Iraqis themselves. According to independent estimates, Iraq might have lost at least one million of its people to this war. But then America's invaluable gifts like democracy and freedom don't come cheap. And as Bush would argue, this price is nothing for what the Iraqis have been blessed with in return.

It may be years before the Iraqis and the world are able to determine the true extent of Iraq's decimation. The country that was once the most developed and advanced in the Arab world is today worse than one of those anarchist banana republics in Africa.

And it has lost trillions of dollars in oil revenue and other financial resources over the past four years. But the losses that the US itself has sustained in Iraq are not negligible. America has already poured $466,384,379,030 into the bottomless pit that Iraq has been.

More importantly, this war has had catastrophic effects on the US economy. The once mighty dollar is lying at the feet of upstarts like Indian Rupee and Philippines' Peso. And with Emirati dirham and other Gulf currencies pegged to the greenback, we are all feeling the pinch big time. And the oil is poised to cross the $100 mark any time now. The global economy, hopelessly dependent as it is on the US economy, is looking at an unfolding crisis that could make the Asian markets crash of 1997 and the Great Depression of 1930s in the US look like a picnic.

Who is responsible for this mess? Don't look any further than America's old and trusted friends in the holy land for answers. It was the Israelis, backed by their liaisons in the US establishment and media, who landed America in this mess.

Unfortunately, Bush's America has drawn no lessons from its utterly humbling and humiliating experience in Iraq. Implausible as it seems and incredibly stuck as they already are in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Americans appear yet again ready and willing for yet another disaster, this time in Iran.

And the same forces that egged the US into the blunderland of Mesopotamia are driving the Americans into the minefield that Islamist Iran promises to be. The Israeli involvement in this relentless campaign and grand conspiracy against the Muslim world, cleverly making use of America and its men and women, is not a fantasy of humble hacks like me.

Prof James Petras, an expert on Israeli influence in the US and author of two excellent books on the issue - The Power of Israel in the United States (2006) and Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militarists (2007) - says in a piece in Palestine Chronicle (www.palestinechronicle.com): "Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Zion-Cons (Zionists and Neocons) in the Bush Administration (Ari Fleischer, Paul Wolfowitz, David Frum, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser and others) and key Zionist Congress members like Senator Joseph Lieberman, called for the US to attack Iraq, as part of a series of sequential wars, to include Syria and Iran."

Petras goes on to argue how Israel and its friends executed the Iraq mission and how they are working on the Iran campaign: "Israel promoted the US attack on Iraq, did all in its power through its US pro-Israel followers to design, propagandise and plan the war. Israeli officials worked on a daily basis with its US agents inside the government, particularly the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to provide disinformation to justify the military attack."

Petras is not your typical conspiracy theorist. If you read the history of Iraq war backwards, you'll know what he's talking about. In the run up to the Iraq war, the global media was fed lies about Iraq on a daily and hourly basis by the Israeli lobby as well as its fifth columnists in the US. And the self-same trusted friends of America are now gunning for Iran. And once again innocent Americans - and Muslims - will die for a war that is not only totally unjust and unnecessary, it is not even their war.

As Petras argues: "They (Zionists) work hard to send thousands of American soldiers to their death in the Middle East in the interests of Greater Israel. They do not come with black shirts and stiff-arm salutes. The public face (of Zionist lobby) is a clean-shaved, neck-tied, pink-jowled attorney, real estate philanthropist or Ivy League professor.

And they tell us to keep quiet or face slander, ostracism in our communities, loss of jobs or worstt (But) there is rising anger and hostility in America against the Zionists, against their arrogant authoritarian communal attacks on our democratic values. Sooner or later there will be a major backlash. The American people will not remember their cries of 'anti-Semitism'; they will recall their role in sending thousands of American soldiers to their death in the Middle East in the interests of Israel."

So the Americans and we Muslims have something in common. We are both victims of the Zionist conspiracies. We have known this for quite some time. When will this reality dawn on the Americans?

(Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior editor and columnist of Khaleej Times.)

Jinat Rahman

The human kind have never been endangered to such a scale by any epidemic that now we are struggling with the mortal disease AIDS. It as for sure that the total human kind has neither paid so much attention nor became so much appalled for any other disease as it became for the rampant expansion of AIDS.

AIDS is such a severe syndrome that still the medical scientists have not invented any treatment of it. AIDS/HIV is the most rigorous among all the deadliest diseases that exist in the world. Painful death is the final outcome of this syndrome. In the zenith of technological advancement, the inhabitants of this planet are experiencing its nightmare every now and then. Everyone is apprehensive about its fatal existence. We are now encumbered by this incurable disease after its devastating excursion in Europe, America and Africa. It is spreading out everywhere like the pace of light and sound. Our nearest neighbor India has already been declared as the second biggest AIDS/HIV attacked country. Moreover, it has been started attacking our beloved Bangladesh at a slower pace. In 1988 The United Nation at first expressed anxiety of the existence and expansion of AIDS in its general convention. It declared the world AIDS day as well. About five million people are infected by HIV virus. There is no cure of this syndrome. To create mass awareness to face this curse, the first December of every year has been declared as the world AIDS day.

The existence of AIDS was first detected in 1989. Though thirteen years have been elapsed after that, HIV infected people are increasing in an alarming rate. According to the government census published in December 2006, the number of HIV patient is 864. Among them 240 people are fully suffering from AIDS and 190 people have already died from a painful death. The rest of them are just waiting for their demise. The people of Sylhet are attacked mostly and to a greater extent by this fatal disease. The number of attacked people here is 40. After that there is Dhaka and Chittagong. These two districts have 22 and 21 AIDS affected people. 34 AIDS infected people have not been detected till now.

But comparing the scenario of our neighboring countries, this survey of AIDS affected people is quite disputed. Moreover, serious discrepancy and dissimilarity have been observed in the government source comparing to other sources. Last year when a person who was back from Malaysia died in Pabna by AIDS, he was not counted in the govt. census published in November. No activity has been undertaken by our govt. to test the blood and health of our 130 million people to detect the AIDS affected people. Our govt. treats the report published by BSMMU (PG) hospital and other two hospitals as the scenario of the whole country. On the contrary, the health ministry expressed its anxiety by numbering the AIDS attacked people as 1000 and foreboded that this number will increase in a rampant manner within a short time period. Whatsoever data has been disclosed by our govt. it is very easy to surmise how the number of AIDS affected people is augmenting in an alarming rate by watching the increasing ratio of AIDS affected people. In 1988 five laboratories have been established in Bangladesh to detect AIDS by the assist of GLOBAL Program on AIDS of World Health Organization. A survey shows that sufficient evidence of AIDS expansion exists in Bangladesh. Mainly it is a highly risky place for AIDS. Another way of AIDS expansion is to transmit blood without testing. Especially seventy five percent of the blood donors here are professional blood donors. Though the severity of AIDS is still low here, it can expand as the Diffusion method like our neighboring country. If proper prevention and precaution is not taken, a huge number of potential and working people can be attacked by this curse. Our socio-economic system may falter as a result of it.

The number of sexual worker in our country is about 0.6 million. Six percent of them are infected by the germ of AIDS. 30%-40% of these sexual workers are suffering from complicated sexual disease like Syphilis or Gonorrhea which is paves the way for expanding AIDS. 52 percent of the sexual workers are in severe risk of being effected by AIDS. Motor workers, rickshaw pullers, drug addicted youth, some students and some people of the so called high society are the regular customers of these sexual workers. Ninety nine percent of these motor workers and rickshaw pullers are completely ignorant of the risk and consequence of HIV/AIDS. A single sexual worker of Bangladesh engages in sexual intercourse twenty times each week which is the leading number in the world. The 1.5lac sexual workers every day perform sexual activity with three male every day on an average which leads to thirteen million a month. If these sexual workers and the in the mean time affected six percent sexual workers are not informed of this mortal disease, they can spread this fatal germ to nine hundred male everyday. If this number will increase and multiply a geometric number, this incident statistics may prove the UNAIDS statistics correct. It is because most of the customers don't use condom during sexual activity. They also express severe disapproval of using it although the sexual workers insist them to use condom. This disapproval also accelerates the expansion of HIV virus. This data has been collected from the research papers of Centre for Policy.

Human right means to live independently. Every person will eat, sleep, move, and express his /her opinion, make relatives, elect leader, perform cultural activity as well as participate in the religious programs and rituals-----all these are basic human rights. Almost every constitution has permitted this authority to every one to independently have these rights beside the International Human Rights Agreement. According to Bangladeshi constitution, every person has the equal legal or moral prerogative whatever his/her religion, color, nationality, tribe, language, opinion, socio-economic condition, wealth is. Not only this privilege is only for those who are mentally and physically fit but also it treats the sick and mentally instable people in the same manner.

Being infected by AIDS or HIV means the voyage towards death. But don't they have the rights to get the authority over basic human claims? Of course they have. Because it has been assured in the cosmopolitan human rights claim that they have all equal authority over social and national rights and to live independently like others. They will live independently in the society; participate in socio-cultural and religious activities. But do they get it or fulfill their rights in reality? No, they are not. Not at all if the scenario of Bangladesh is concerned. Although numerous people in Bangladesh are infected by HIV virus, they don't disclose it and don't take treatment for the fear of shame, embarrassment, social security, loosing job and so on. Because, till now those people's whose names have been divulged have experienced utter negligence, embarrassment and social torture. The suffering people were made social outcast or were forced to leave the village or home. These are the regular incidents. So many times it happened like that the AIDS affected person was sent in jail. For this reasons they were deprived of social security and other rights and became a spectacular creature. Even the family members of the affected person couldn't evade humiliation and torture.

As a member of the society, as a citizen of this country and mostly as a human being, it is our duty to ensure the human rights of the AIDS affected people. Regarding this matter, the responsibilities and duties of the state, government as well as general people are discussed in the following.

The physicians must inform the patient about the nature of their disease and tell them what types of safety measures have to be taken. To prevent the expansion of this disease, the doctors should describe the code of conduct to the patient with the people he/she is closely attached with like- husband or wife, children or relatives. Those who are leading a conjugal life, the partner of the patient must be informed. According to the AIDS specialists, the commonplace rules and regulations are not sufficient enough to protect the rights of AIDS attacked people. The amount of care that is taken for the Diabetes attacked or mentally impaired people, is not taken for the AIDS attacked people in our traditional law and order.

To get rid of this situation, the expert physicians together with the social workers should work to detect the AIDS infected people in every sphere of the society and to take care of them properly. This type of caring is included in benevolence and altruism that has been made as a compulsion in Islam. And it is also written in Quran to help the distressed which everyone must oblige.

The doctors also have to show respect to the rules and regulations and should not violate the moral of the medical profession. They must not avoid the AIDS patients how severe their sickness is. They will inform the patients about the nature of their illness and what to do to prevent its expansion.

AIDS and other sexual diseases are somewhat different from other diseases. In these cases the patients have to suffer from torture and humiliation. As these types of diseases are of different pattern, the relationship between the doctor and the patient is quite emotional.

It is true that the level of the knowledge health and sexuality is below standard in this region comparing to the areas of the world. The matters related with sexual affairs are treated as the topic of mortification and are never discussed openly. That's why it is always shadowed by the cover of haziness. So, the right of the patients should be emphasized and uplifted. It is for sure that whatever is the cause of AIDS infection, the patient's status and position shall never be impaired.

(To be continued)