The New Nation - Internet Edition

Problems in onion cultivation

AS reported in the media, onion cultivation in many places in the country is facing setback this year due to scarcity of onion seeds and fertiliser on the one hand and pest attack and thick fog on the other. Farmers fear fall in the production of onion, as many of them are yet to start cultivation of the cash crop due to seed and fertiliser scarcity. Farmers in Manikganj are facing problems as some two lakh of them in the district are now faced with uncertainty and many of them are yet to start cultivation. Of the seven upazilas in Manikganj district - Shibalaya, Harisampur, Gheor and Daulatpur are known for onion cultivation as huge supply of the crop comes from there every season. According to the Department of Agricultural Extension of the district, a total of 9,492 hectares of land have been earmarked for onion cultivation this season in the district.

According to newspaper reports, scarcity of seeds remains a stumbling block in the way of onion cultivation this year. The farmers are trying frantically to collect seeds as much as possible but without much success as many of them made even collective bid to procure the same. Price of onion seeds has gone up - more than double the price of last year - due to scarcity. Moreover, the available seeds are mostly of inferior quality and, as such, they do not germinate properly much to the anxiety of the cultivators. On average, one kilogram of onion seeds is selling at Tk 2,000 to 3,000, this season as against Tk 1,000 to Tk 1,200 last year. Many of the poor farmers of the district bought onion seeds at exorbitant prices this season by borrowing money either from the moneylenders or from some non-governmental organisations.

The farmers had suffered huge loss in the onion cultivation last year for lingering thick fog in the area. Then they suffered loss also in Aman cultivation due to recurrent floods in the second half of last year. To recoup last year's losses of onion and paddy, they prepared seed beds this year for cultivation of onion on a large scale, but faced the uncertainty. This time, too, the cultivators apprehend losses if they do not get adequate supply of fertiliser. They are anxious about the prevailing crisis. 'We cannot start cultivation of onion on our land due to fertiliser crisis when the peak time for onion farming is nearing its end'; one newspaper quoted a farmer as saying. In view of this situation, the government may take urgent steps in time to help farmers overcome the problems they are facing in the cultivation of onion.

Worsening noise pollution

NOISE of different forms is playing havoc to not only people's comfort but also their health. But action to prevent the same does hardly exist. The irony is that many people who feel annoyed by the sounds, are unaware of what bad effects they have on their health. Traffic police recently declared a ban on using of horns in some busy roads of Dhaka as a step against noise pollution. They say that they have plans to extend it to other parts of the city. But the step is more a symbolic one and is devoid of practical value. It is impossible for automobiles to make their way through roads that are used by all modes of traffic from pedestrians to push carts. Thus, honking on the roads is a necessity and stopping it will create greater traffic mess while contributing only marginally towards the control of noise pollution.

What is required is not only asking motorists not to use their horns, but a comprehensive set of restrictions against the creation of noise that would establish it squarely as an offence. Such restrictions must include prohibition of the use of loudspeakers and other noisy activities in residential areas. The Society for Assistance of Hearing Impaired Children (SAHIC) conducted a year long survey at 21 spots to find out the impact of noise pollution on the residents of Dhaka city. The survey result showed that hearing ability of 76.9 per cent of the surveyed people was damaged from continuous noise pollution. A private university and a non-governmental organisation jointly surveyed 20 spots in Dhaka city recently that included residential areas and ones with academic institutions and hospitals where the least noises are desirable. In these areas, sound levels should be within 45 decibels but the survey found average sound level 75 decibels near Dhanmondi, 86 decibels near Birdem hospital and 76 decibels near Kakrail. In what should be a purely residential area at Kallyanpur, the survey found the average sound level at 80 decibels. The average sound level in other residential areas comes near to this level or even surpasses it in some cases.

Noise pollution not only leads to gradual hearing loss. It also creates medical conditions such as high blood pressure, palpitation, loss of concentration, headache, irritation, insomnia and other forms of physical and mental sicknesses. A piece of legislation to prevent noise is considered vital from the standpoint of public health. The government decided about a couple of years ago that it would enact laws to control noise pollution. The draft of a law was prepared that recommended Taka 10,000 as fine and maximum six months of imprisonment for creating noise higher than the permissible limits. But the proposed law has not seen the light of the day.

Let us take the country forward

Jalal Uddin Khan, Ph.D

Didn't we forfeit our right to seek trial of war criminals of 1971, morally untenable as it is now? Still, if they are to be tried, why not the Baksalite and Rakhkhi-Bahini elements of 1974-5 too? Let's think again before we start chasing only one group and not the other. Or let's drop the decades-old thing altogether and move forward on the path of economic development and national unity. Old wounds, whether of Jamati or Baksalite/Rakhkhi-Bahini origin, are sometimes best left behind to recover on their own through a natural course of time as the best healer. "Better late than never," as some people would argue, is not a uniformly and universally applicable panacea or always the best proposition and should not be used in such a politically incorrect and in fact potentially explosive issue. It is neither necessary nor appropriate to open old wounds now when it is too late. This nation is already fraught with too many miseries and problems that need our immediate, continued and constant attention; it is already sinking under the weight of chronic and ubiquitous corruption, top-heavy and backward bureaucracy, poverty, illiteracy, overpopulation, acrimonious and intolerant partisanship, wide disparity between the rich and the poor, high and low, and so on. The nation should be working to see the light at the end of the long and dark and deep tunnel with the larger and nobler ideals and visions to look forward to-those of unity and progress, reconciliation and development, peace and prosperity. It must not allow itself to be overpowered, overwhelmed and bogged down by the cheap shots of the liberal and libertine elements of the media and their self-conceited, jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none semi-intellectual coolies.

It is true that German Nazis of WWII are still being pursued and hunted down and brought to justice but their case is completely different from the argument of those who are calling for the trial of the war criminals of 1971 and cannot be applied to the latter, simply because the Nazis, unlike Jamat, were always shunned by all quarters without exception and were never recognised, rehabilitated, legitimized, befriended, and reconciled to in the political process of their own country (Germany) or any corner of the world. So those who are excitedly drawing an analogy between the Nazis and the Jamatees, gloating over the possibility of finally bringing some Jamat elements to what they view as "justice" are utterly wrong and fundamentally mistaken. Their argument is misplaced and it is unacceptable because it is politically incorrect.

About four decades after the liberation, Awami League and some other political parties are still bickering over an empty anachronism-over what should not have been an issue at this stage in the history of the country-the issue of the political participation of Jamat. They are still deadlocked in their demand for trial of some Jamat elements thought to have committed crimes during the liberation war. Such a demand, subject to ample dispute at this moment in time, may plunge the country - already polarized and divided and partisan - into a potentially dangerous situation. By no means the country can afford a slip into yet another rocky and bumpy terrain for a long time to come. The political parties with a demand for trial of war criminals are doing so not in the best and highest interest of the nation. They are doing so not to unite the country but to divide it; not to lead the country forward but to make it lag behind and drag it into the conflict and violence of the past, to score a myopic political mileage of immediate convenience and not to win a democratic ideal of vision, reconciliation, and statesmanship.

It is a fact that Jamat's current standing is that it is a recognised and lawful political party with considerable public support and parliamentary representation and that it was legitimised and rehabilitated by the successive ruling parties including Awami League from the beginning. When Awami League formed the first government of the country following independence, its great leader Sheikh Mujib, big-heartedly and broad-mindedly, offered amnesty to anti-liberation elements in a gesture of reconciliation. It was a wise decision by a bold and courageous leader to bring the country together. Later when the party was in the opposition, it even formed an alliance (albeit of cynical exploitation) with Jamat and became apparently reconciled with Jamat, however short-lived that reconcilation was, to the pleasant surprise of many, and sealed a marriage of political convenience, directly or indirectly, during the 1990s.

When Zia, another great son of the soil and a liberation hero, came to power in mid-70s, he also took steps to rise above the bitter partisanship by taking some pro-Jamat/anti-liberation elements with him at the helm of the government. Later, BNP also, which was his creation, did the same thing-forming political alliance with Jamat when necessary and even including them in the 2nd Khaleda-led BNP government, treating Jamat with a great importance and taking into consideration the significant political role Jamat was playing in the politics of the country. It was a political party with substantial following needed to win the election and broker a balance of power.

All this had greatly contributed to the legitimacy and establishment of Jamat as a significant political force, far from neutralizing or marginalising its presence in the political landscape of Bangladesh. It is, therefore, simply not right to oppose the participation of Jamat in the political process of the country and, for that matter, in any national issue or dialogue with the end of fostering unity, democracy, democratic equality and democratic majority, and thereby bringing and building the country together. Walling Jamat out would be a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. Walling them out would be detrimental to the cause and interest of a unified and reconciled nation and in all likelihood may lead to unnecessary debacle and disintegration.

If Jamat made a mistake in 1971 by supporting the then united Pakistani it was purely a political mistake which any party under similar circumstances is likely to do out of its ideological principle or strategy. Didn't Awami League make a mistake in 1975 by creating BAKSAL and torturing people to death using the vicious Rakhkhi-Bahini elements for which they are yet to apologize to the nation? It was a "leap in the dark"-to borrow a phrase from a sensible journalist who used it to describe Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Like Hitler's Nazi party, Baksalites and Rakhkhi-Bahini members used violence to silence their opponents and resorted to coercion to push them into enforced political conformity. It was a time of shocking and shivering moral trauma as it was at the time of the Nazis. Like the Nazi past, it still haunts us and seizes us with fear and anxiety. If Jamat and its sister organisations were responsible for many senseless deaths in 1971 -- sad, cruel and painful as they must have been-, aren't Awami League and its affiliated wings equally responsible for many horrendous activities and much destruction in the post-independence Bangladesh as well?

While I do not support or condone what Jamat did then, I would like to say that if Jamat was wrong (yes, certainly it was), at least we understand why it was wrong. In the history of the world every country's struggle for cessation and independence was bloody and violent. No country's road to liberation was ever rosy. No government, however democratic, let alone dictatorial, did or would ever let go easily part of the country it was/is governing.

Post-independence failures and betrayals of the leading pro-independence political parties such as Awami League were and still are more harmful and more destructive than those of the anti-independence elements before independence. Whereas Awami League as the major political party under whose banner the country was able to successfully fight the liberation war and which therefore formed the first government of Bangladesh should have lived up to the expectations of the tired, war-torn, starving people, it miserably failed to do so-to provide leadership, security, rule of law, and economic stability. Instead, they were responsible for rampant chaos, corruption, and misrule, for which the country is still suffering and paying a heavy price indeed. Had Awami League been able to "lead" in the true sense of the term and not turned the country into a bottomless basket and not created an atmosphere of anarchy in which all the relief blankets including the one that on head count might go to Sheikh Mujib were stolen, Bangladesh today would have been an Asian tiger too-like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea-economically developed and politically stable. If Jamat elements are to be tried in the court and declared ineligible to stand in the election for their reprehensible evil deeds, Awami elements should be identified and tried too for their equally dire and devastating misdeeds.

AL-led hue and cry over the issue of religion-based parties and war criminals after decades into the history of the nation will only create further instability and violence. It is prone to mischief with an undemocratic hidden agenda of "divide-and-rule". When they thought they could use and exploit Jamat as a political weapon, to their advantage, against BNP, they did not hesitate to do so, thereby legitimising the political existence of Jamat and improving Jamat's standing as a political force; now that AL sees that BNP and Jamat have some kind of political alliance and that they might not get Jamat votes any more, they are crying foul against Jamat and trying to break the alliance and weaken the strength of the BNP-Jamat alliance. When it comes to AL's political advantage, they do not have any scruple to be allied with any religion-based parties, be it Jamat or Islami Oikkyo Jote or Islami Shashontantro Andolan of Shaikhul Hadith Azizul Haq. But when the same parties are with BNP, they get bitter and biased and start railing and rushing and writhing and recoiling and calling for a ban on Islamic parties. We would like to see an end to this gross hypocrisy and glaring double standard in the least!

Finally, the nation will surely be better off and would have much to gain if it extends an olive branch of blanket forgiveness and sees the whole thing with an eye to reconciliation and unity and moves forward on the way to economic development and stability. Yes, to complete the process of moral fence-mending and national healing, the nation can, however, ask for an unconditional public apology from those who may have been involved in the killing and torturing of innocent people, in 1971 and 1974-75, while it should be left to the conscience of the perpetrators to repent and ask for forgiveness from God.

Palestine: USA fences Israel?

Dr.Abdul Ruff

The decades' long struggle of Palestinians for obtaining a home for themselves from the occupying Israelis is likely to yield positive results in near future and there appeared to be a green signal at the end of the tunnel as President George W. Bush called for an end to Israel's 41 years occupation of Palestinian lands and states a commitment to forge a peace agreement before the end of his term in office, which expires in January, 2009. The announcement came when President Bush, the first American president to visit Ramallah, went to the headquarters of the Palestinian authority on January 9. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ').bdullah had also placed a comprehensive peace plan in March 2007, which speaks for return or compensation in line with UN General Assembly resolution 194. President Bush is of the opinion that Palestinian refugees should be compensated for the loss of homes when they fled during establislunent of Israel. The continued presence of some 220,000 Jewish settlers in much-coveted West Bank remains a big question. The segregation wall, 425 miles long (longer than Berlin Wall), covering some Palestinian lands, particularly best cultivable lands, is another tactics of the Israeli government to grab Palestinian lands in the name of Israeli security.

President Bush pushed forward the peace process, possibly, to identify US concerns with those of IsraelPalestine nations and their conflict, to showcase the US resolve to fmd solutions for troubled conflicts as in Middle East, on the one hand, and on the other, to would improve the image of the United States in the Middle East and in the world at large. The US president might have realized that fmding a solution of the Israel and Palestine problem as a part of his legacy as he leaves office in 2009 and more importantly, help the Republicans with the improved image of his presidency to win the poll 2008.

Also, keen to bolster Middle East allies against an ascendant Iran, the Bush administration last year proposed supplying Gulf Arab states with some $20 billion in new weapons, including Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb kits for the Saudis. The plan has angered Israel's backers in Washington, who say the JDAMs, which give satellite guidance for bombs, may one day be used against the Jewish state or at least blunt its power to deter potential foes. Israel has had JDAMs since 1990. Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel but signaled a softening of this stance by attending a U.S.-hosted conference on Palestinian statehood in November.

Israel controls the economy of Palestine, its resources, electricity, gas, outposts and literally every thing in Palestine. Palestinians require permission of Jews to go for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and the Israeli forces close the borders when the Palestinians return from Mecca. Whenever Israel closes the exit points of Gaza, as it has happened now, the Palestinians would be in ruins in days. After announcing that Palestinians must have a home in 2001, Bush kept a very low profile for too long until recently come out with a peace proposal to secure a Palestine state. Now when on a good-will tour, President Bush significantly changed his rhetoric by saying that Palestine state must be viable and contiguous, whereas, the eight mile long corridor between Gaza strip and the West Bank belongs to Israel. Without connecting Gaza strip with the West Bank a Palestinian state would be unstable and vulnerable. If the corridor is handed over to the Palestinian, Palestine will be contiguous in that case. There is no agreement between Israel and Palestinian authority for sharing water and electricity. Both Gaza strip and West Bank have scarce resources.

But USA continues to fuel the conflict by upgrading the Israeli military equipment. To make the lives of Palestinians still worse and more threatened, the USA has come forward with further supply of advanced weaponry. USA has agreed in principle to provide Israel with better "smart bombs" than those it plans to sell Saudi Arabia under a regional defense package, senior Israeli security sources said. It is awful that the most intelligent country, USA has refused to understand the simple fact that security for Israel does not require any further and that it is Palestine that needs to be secured against Israel. Before the Palestine state is established for them to defend themselves effectively against any rogue misadventures to showcase their military prowess.

Israel expects USA , probably under some understaning, not to sell weaponry to Middle East that could strengthen the position of Palestine. Tel-Aviv objected to US sale proposal of arms to Saudi, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government dropped its objections to the proposed Saudi deal in July after securing U.S. military aid grants worth $30 billion over the next decade. Israeli security sources said the United States further mollified the Olmert government with an "understanding in principle" that future JDAM sales to Israel would include advanced technologies not on offer to Saudi Arabia. "We are checking which of the top-of-the-line JDAMs will become available to us. The agreement is that Israel's qualitative edge will be preserved," one source said. Israel's Defense Ministry declined to give details on any specific defense deals, saying only: "The Americans are certainly taking steps to help us preserve our technological superiority, as is Israel."

President George W. Bush visited Riyadh recently as part of a Middle East tour he hopes will shore up Washington's efforts to isolate Iran over its nuclear projects. In Israel and the Palestinian territories last week, Bush worked to foster bilateral peacemaking but also discussed Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons but whose president has stirred war fears by urging that Israel be "wiped off the map."

Israel has used JDAMs extensively in its 2006 offensive against Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, requiring urgent U.S. re-supplies. Surprise setbacks in the 34-day war prompted Israel's top brass to order an overhaul of the armed forces. Believed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, Israel has vowed to deny Iran nuclear weapons and hinted at the possibility of a pre-emptive strike like its air force's 1981 bombing ofIraq's nuclear reactor. Recent enhancements to the kits include laser navigators and glide wings that allow jets to drop the munitions from a distance of more than 40 miles from the target.

Israel has entered space ties with anti-Muslim countries like India and sells arms and ammunitions to them regularly, thereby threatening the weak peaceful atmosphere prevailing in that region too. USA sells more sophisticated weapons to Israel, obviously for to sell third parties too. Since Bush has taken the entire world into believing that he is sincerely trying to create the Palestine state for those struggling and getting killed in a sustained manner by Israel, he must stop further arming Israel and, instead, provide security for the Palestinians and blow whistle to the Israelis not to air-attack, blockade or create inhuman conditions like closing their outlets to external world that are detrimental to the hapless Palestinians. Democracy also depends on decency. He must stop calling the Hamas, the elected representative of the Palestinians, as terrorists of any category because e that weakens them and further encourages the Israel to pursue antiPalestine policies cruelly.

In the absence of any sincere diplomatic efforts on the part of the UN, UNSC, EU and the Western powers to restrain Israel from its jolly air-strikes on the defenseless Palestinians killing many and destroying property worth billions of US dollars, Israel has taken it as its prerogative to do what ever it feels with the Palestinians. In the absence of any concrete defense facility from the Arab nations on united basis, not only the creation of US promised Palestine stat seems to be in jeopardize, even their own existence has been badly threatened by the Israeli closing all outlets from Gaza where the elected Palestinian government operates denied of its rule by the US-Israeli inspired Fatah president Abbas.

US strategists cannot pretend any more that in further equipping a roguish Israel in Middle East, extensively threatening the Palestinians, a stable peace environment would be established there and that does not complicate the murky peace process in the region. Already by closing the borders of Palestine Israel has forced the Palestinians to run out to Egypt by breaking the boundary wall. No lasting peace could be ensured in Middle East by killing Lebanese and Palestinians and by re-arming Israel endlessly. US must, therefore, consider arming the Palestinians also so that they could also defend themselves against the Israeli air-strikes.