The New Nation - Internet Edition

THE incumbent caretaker government has been stressing from the start of its tenure that it attaches high priority to a lively and functional press as they can learn from the media many things needed for good governance. Whether the government is harnessing the services of the press or media for its purpose, however, is another matter. But the same is not happening because the people at the helm of power are not probably paying much attention to what the press or the media as a whole have to say about the activities or performances of their departments or ministries. Usually, the government functionaries have built-in arrangement for access to regular clippings from newspaper articles and reports about the functioning of their departments and ministries. The government-run corporations employ public relations officers (PROs) for a similar informative role. The PROs are supposed to keep the chairmen and departmental heads well informed about people's grievances and all disclosures about the underperformance of the corporations so that corrective steps can be taken based on those.

The government in many cases can gain from acting on information supplied by newspapers and the electronic media. Therefore, the key functionaries who really have public service in mind should do well to advise their personal staffs also to prepare paper clippings reports and comments about the departments and ministries on a regular basis and to submit the same to them for scrutiny. They should without fail read newspapers every day and also watch television programmes regularly. Such habits can yield for them a great deal of information about the field level experiences of people in their interactions with their departments and ministries. The same can be of immense value in redressing grievances through taking corrective measures. Not only they ought to practice the daily scanning of newspapers and listening to the electronic media to learn what the people think of their activities, their lapses, their shortcomings and inadequacies, the greatest need is for this culture to bloom where it would have the most positive impact-at the Chief Adviser's Secretariat.

Surely, some people there go through newspapers and take selected clippings to the notice of the Chief Adviser. But there is probably room for this system to be further improved. Every day, the media in Bangladesh produce a large number of investigative reports that relate mainly to corruption, underperformance in government organisations and an assortment of other ills. The tendency among most government officials is, however, to ignore those on the plea of there being so many media outlets and only a few of those being credible. Therefore, a system should be devised for top officials to be obliged to scan media reports and comments in relation to their departments and, more importantly, for them to be similarly obliged to take swift actions as and when needed. Government must have feedback from the media and respond to them to improve governance.

THE value of local and foreign investment proposals submitted to the Board of Investment fell to an alarming low in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, continuing the declining trend prevalent in the previous six months, according to a media report quoting official figures. Foreign direct investment proposals dipped to a meagre $16.82 million in the July-September period of 2007-2008 from $ 1.17 billion in the corresponding period of the previous fiscal year marking a decline by 98.56 per cent. The first quarter of the 2007-2008 fiscal witnessed domestic investment proposals decreasing to Tk 2,539.79 crore, a 68.7 per cent fall against Tk 8,113.32 crore worth of investment proposals registered during the same period of 2006-2007. Import of capital machinery - which is considered a strong criterion of real investment - also declined by 25 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal year.

As reported in the nine months of the 2007 calendar year, foreign investment proposals in terms of value dropped to $ 214.025 million from $ 1.43 billion during the same period in 2006. The local investment proposals declined to Tk 9,222.1 crore between January -September 2007 from Tk 15,646.74 crore during the same period last year. The BOI, which has recently been running without an executive chairman at its helm, expects the investment proposals to increase when the figures of the later months of the gone-by-year becomes available. Government officials are optimistic as they say that the latest measures of the present interim administration start creating confidence in the business sector, investment will regain momentum as they try to attribute the recent decline in registration of investment proposals to stringent measures in the regulatory regime.

The BOI, according to the media report, received foreign investment proposals worth $7.61 million in January 2007, $ 41.71 million in February, $ 27.95 million in March, $92.2 million in April, $13.73 million in May, $14 million in June, $2.60 million in July, $12.16 million in August and $ 2.04 million in September 2007. Data based on actual inflow of foreign investment showed that Bangladesh attracted $ 790 million in FDI in 2006, lower than $845 million worth of FDI in 2005, which was again up from 460 million in 2004. The investment proposals were worth Tk 1,092 crore in January 2007. The decline in value of local investment in the last six months reversed the increasing trend of the past ten years.

Local entrepreneurs registered with the BOI proposals worth Tk 4,745.7 crore in the 1996-97 fiscal year, Tk 6,621.0 crore in 1990-2000, Tk 8,806.6 crore in 2001-2002, Tk. 13,546.1 crore in 2003-2004 and Tk 18,370.3 crore in 2005-2006.

The foreign investment curve with the falling trend is rather alarming. It's really difficult to attract foreign investors to a least developed country like Bangladesh easily in this highly competitive world of today. Efforts must be there to regain confidence of foreign investors to attract FDI and develop the country.

Syed Siful Alam Shovan

Within just one generation, the lives of children throughout the world have changed radically, with just one indication among many being that so many children are now driven to school rather than walking. The same change that occurred in the US has happened also where I now live, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Even though car owners are very much the minority, children's freedom has been greatly curtailed by those cars cars. Those whose parents do have cars are driven everywhere; those whose parents do not, unless they are very poor, are escorted by adults, and strictly prohibited from playing outdoors. It sometimes seems the only children in the city who have the opportunity for wholehearted pleasure, and who have confidence and skill in negotiating the streets, are the slum children.

One could, of course, sit back quietly and watch these changes, reflecting that surely it isn't as bad as it appears, or that something else will come along to make things better, or that children perhaps don't need to play outdoors, or meet and interact with strangers, or get to know those of other social classes, or learn how to get around on their own. It is easy to be defeatist and say, who am I to fight such changes? And there are those who feel the changes are inevitable, because the only response is to curtail cars--and that is a "freedom" or enjoyment we could never part with. It isn't that bad, people may argue; in some parts of the world children have access to parks and playgrounds, and while structured sports for children may not deliver all the benefits of street play, it is the best we can do in the modern world--and surely nobody wishes to give up the benefits of modernity.

We too, here in Dhaka, watched the changes and despaired. Later, I found inspiration in reading David Engwicht's Street Reclaiming; we bought sports equipment to give to the children on the street where our office is--a "residential" neighborhood with homes, NGO offices, a private university, a pharmaceutical company, a car repair center, and a fair amount of traffic--and made signs to put in the streets with such messages as "Love us, let us play". The kids took the sporting equipment and played on the roof of their apartment building; the signs seemed likely to turn rusty in our office.

Then one day, a few months later, a couple of my colleagues came into my office and announced that on that very afternoon, they were starting a cycle training program. A what? We have been working to promote cycling, and fighting with transport officials on the issue of cycle rickshaw bans in Dhaka; in the process we have collected a good number of small, folding bikes. Out came the bikes. We bought a few more for little kids, and taped paper with the message "Cycle training" over our old signs, and put up a banner, and later made a large sign showing Einstein on a bicycle--an amusing choice, I had to think, in a Muslim country--all to make the car drivers pay attention, slow down, and yield a lane or two to the kids.

The first day we arranged for some friends to come cycle; almost nobody from our street showed up. Curious children and skeptical adults watched from their balconies. Later, a neighbor told us that people believed we couldn't be offering free cycle training without an underlying motive--which they took to be that we were planning to kidnap their children. How effective the media has proved in frightening parents out of allowing their children freedom of movement or opportunity to play! If only we could compare the likelihood of children being harmed by being kept under lock and key to the likelihood of being kidnappedt. But the woman who told us this was brave, or had a better feeling towards humanity, and brought her children, and reported to her neighbors, and the numbers began to increase. We advertised the program (for free) in newspapers and through handbills, and children and adolescents (and even adults) from different parts of town began to come, and a regular group of children showed up for the inestimable pleasure of riding a bike with other children.

Other organizations have started similar initiatives, though on small fields rather than on streets. Less than a year has passed, and we hope eventually people will realize the good sense of converting quiet streets into temporary children's playgrounds. In the meantime, other stunning and unanticipated results have occurred. Prior to the program, no children on the street knew each other, having always being escorted by parents, usually by car; now many friendships have developed.

One of our volunteers, Topon Shikder (pictured) says: "We have created a platform which allows children from different apartment buildings to get to know each other, breaking the isolation which existed, in which everyone lived their separate lives. So now if someone is in trouble--is sick, or there is no male around--they can turn to each other for help. And of course the kids love it, they keep asking me, 'give me a bike, give me a bike, when is it my turn?' It's wonderful to see their excitement."

We have slum children helping to run the program and fix the bicycles; like it or not, if you want to ride, you have to interact with these kids, and interact they do. A couple of child servants, who have no other opportunity for recreation, sneak away to join, and revel in being treated the same by our staff as the rich neighborhood kids. The children who repair the bikes have gained confidence as well as new skills, marching about with great authority; twice a week a few of them eat lunch with our office staff. During school holidays, children from the street come to our office to borrow bikes, usually in groups; it is now perfectly normal to have children moving around as freely as if it were their office.

Another of our volunteers, Muminul Islam says, "Street children--those who pick rags or papers, or sell peanuts at the nearby lake, to make a little money--often wander to our street to watch, and stand with their mouths almost hanging open. So I send one of our kids with a bike to ask the child if he wants to ride for a few minutes. I can't express how happy they are! Sometimes afterwards they get so excited, they come up to me and grab my hand, calling me uncle or brother, and thank me profusely."

I wish I could say that the adults on our street have also thanked us warmly for the initiative, and that drivers slow down, or avoid entering our dead-end street altogether so as not to disrupt the children. Most adults, including the parents whose kids participate, are delighted; when they see drivers racing on the street, or honking loudly at the kids, they complain about how uncivilized they are. But other adults tell us we should take the program elsewhere, and one woman--a child physician--complained that it's hard on drivers because "we have to slow down"; others ask why we take so much space (blocking one or two lanes of a three-lane street). Our volunteers shake their heads in wonder--it really seems that people love their cars more than their children, they say.

What we are giving to the children at one level seems so minor-?the chance to ride a bike up and down a stretch of road, while passing drivers blare their horns. On the other hand, we are giving them the freedom to leave their homes unescorted, to gain a new skill, to form friendships, to interact with different kinds of peopletand to have fun. Perhaps, if things go well, if we are able to continue and expand, we will even succeed in communicating our key message: that cars should not be allowed to destroy the joy in children's lives. Perhaps people will see that children don't have to grow up trapped in cars and behind TV, helpless and dependent, growing up in fear of strangers and of the world around them. Perhaps they will come to see the harm in the mentality that has developed, in which any sacrifice of children's natural state seems preferable to restrictions on cars. For it must be a sick society indeed that can, and does, and continues to, love its cars more than its children. Efroymson Dhaka

Mohammad Khairul Alam

Trafficking in young girls, children and women is a matter of great concern all over the world. In South Asia, cross-border trafficking, sourcing, transit to destination is a big problem. Even more prevalent is the movement of persons within the countries for exploitation in various forms. There are no definite figures about the number of victims. Trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation is the most virulent form in South Asia. Internal displacement due to conflict in some of these countries, poverty and lack of employment opportunities, increase the vulnerabilities to being trafficked.

Bangladesh is a source and transit country for young girls, children and women trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and involuntary servitude. It is also a source country for children - both girls and boys - trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and other forms of involuntary servitude. Women and children from Bangladesh are trafficked to India and Pakistan for sexual exploitation. Internally, Bangladeshis are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and bonded labor. Some Burmese women who are trafficked to India transit through Bangladesh.

The movement of young girls from Nepal and Bangladesh into Indian brothels is common. However, most of the trafficking takes place within India itself. There is further movement of these women and girls to the Middle East as well as other destinations. Similar movement from Pakistan and Sri Lanka has been observed. At times of hardship, this starts out as illegal migration and ends up as trafficking.

AIDS researcher Mr. Anirudha Alam said, "Trafficking & HIV/AIDS is interrelated, especially women and girls are trafficking for use of sexual industry. Most of trafficking girls would face several physical & sexual abuses. When a girl or women newly enrolls a sex industry, she tries to safe herself heard & soul, but most of the time they couldn't free her."

The response to combating the crime of human trafficking by the countries of South Asia has been inadequate. There is limited awareness and although knowledge of and the willingness to speak out against trafficking has increased significantly in the past half decade, it is still only at minimal levels. In addition to the lack of awareness, existing anti-trafficking legislation in most countries is inadequate. The law enforcement response - which is meant to provide an effective deterrent to traffickers - is also weak, irresponsive and not victim-friendly.

Lack of job opportunities makes people vulnerable and more inclined to migrate in the hope of creating a better life for themselves and their families. Even so, poverty that makes people sell their children to traffickers and that makes women become victims of trafficking. There is a trend for more and more women to be left alone to fend for themselves and their children; this is referred to as the feminization of poverty. Their powerlessness is taken advantage of by traffickers who assure them jobs or necessary facilities, although instead they may end up in prostitution.

Though this data is not enough to certify the fact, still South Asia is home to one of the largest concentrations of people living with HIV. Female sex workers (FSWs) - as a group - are an important driver of the epidemic. As has been shown in a very recent research involving repatriated FSWs in Nepal, many of the FSWs who have been trafficked are at a significantly higher risk than "average" women of contracting HIV. The Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation and 'Society for Humanitarian Assistance & Rights Protection' (SHARP) jointly conducted a survey that focuses on the attitude, behavior and practice of FSWs in Goalondo Brothel, this study points out that almost 53% of sex workers enter the profession before the age of 20 years, and 30% enter between 20 to 25 years of age, and some of them have been entangled through instigation of the traffickers.

Frank Rich

WE CAN only imagine what is going on inside John McCain's head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can't be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it. "I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy," Huckabee joked to Don Imus, "but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night." So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half-year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

But if McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month, the former president criticised the Press for not sufficiently covering the candidates' "record in public life" and thereby making "people think experience is irrelevant". His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose's show on December 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether "no experience matters". He insinuated that Obama was tantamount to "a gifted television commentator" and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.

Attention Bill Clinton: If that's what this election is about, it's already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it's not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.

For many, McCain's long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President George W Bush on Iraq. What his resume mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the "undesirable" percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having "strained relationships" with one's children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It's not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore.

For Hillary Clinton, the failure of "experience" as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. A recent ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Obama on the question of who has the most experience - 49 per cent to eight per cent. But to little end. That same survey had Obama ahead by four points overall because, as this year's pervasive polling match-up has it, the electorate values change over experience. The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a CEO presidency, overstocked with "tested" Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn't push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.

But for Hillary Clinton, the problem isn't just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the JFK speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Hillary Clinton had mocked Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.

"Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people's experience," Sorensen said. "It's not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity."

Whatever Clinton's experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It's what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That's why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.

This was the moment when Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on "so many Clinton advisers." Hillary Clinton jokingly called out, "I want to hear that," prompting Obama to one-up her by responding, "Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me, as well."

Well, touche. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Obama, like Hillary Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which '08 candidate is instructive. The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Obama's campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a pre-war sceptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an "imminent threat." Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was "trying to change the subject to Iraq" from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, "one, if not both, will suffer." Her text now reads as a bookend to Obama's senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall.

Hillary Clinton's current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, General Wesley Clark, he is balanced by General Jack Keane, an author of the Bush "surge". The Clinton campaign's foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that "we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort" - an argument anticipating the one Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorisation. In late April 2003, a week before "Mission Accomplished", Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was "fairly confident" that WMD would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, "I don't think that that's a situation we'll confront." Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its web site) arguing that "the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough." In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticising Hillary Clinton's Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defence of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Bill Clinton wrote: "If Sen. Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorisation to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it." That's a fair point - and a fair criticism of Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step towards war as Obama claims, there's no excuse for his absence.

Bill Clinton's narrow defence of his wife's Iraq vote in 2002 - it was not "a blanket authorisation to go to war," he wrote - doesn't persuade me.

What Hillary Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics' methods as well. Attacks on Obama's record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks - the invocations of "cocaine" and "Hussein" and "madrassa" by surrogates - smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been "authorised" sound like Karl Rove's denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.

If Hillary Clinton is to win, she won't do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn't have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a "change agent", however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn't tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice.

International Herald Tribune