The New Nation - Internet Edition

DU admission qualification bar

The Dhaka University prospectus for the current year reportedly provides that madrashah students cannot seek admission to some departments. Mehedi Hasan and Md Muhsin Uddin, two madrashah students, secured the 48th and the 185th positions respectively in the 'Kha' Unit admission test of the university. But they have been barred from admission to Mass Communications and Journalism. Earlier English and Bangla Departments used to put bar on students not studying the respective subjects with 200 marks each at the Higher Secondary level.

It gives rise to a number of questions. It is learnt that neither the Syndicate, not the Academic Council or the Deans' Committee took the decision. Then who put it in the prospectus? The Dean of the Arts Faculty pleaded ignorance about the matter. Those who initiated the move deserve to be condemned. Now even withdrawal of the illegal restriction would prove not enough, the university authority may have to answer legal and ethical questions. Madrashah education is not illegal in the country. To upgrade madrashah education to the present era of information communication technology and globalisation, the authorities have incorporated lessons on science and technology in the madrashah curricula. Then why should their deserving students be deprived of the right to study in the institutions of higher learning.

Through this action the persons responsible have lowered the prestige of the highest seat of learning and brought shame to it. If there is any weakness in madrashah education, it should be removed through upgradation of curricula and syllabi. Any wrong decision like the present one can only have serious social implications. The creation of a sense of neglect and deprivation in the minds of the madrashah students would never serve the cause of social integration. Let the university forge ahead instead of creating new problems for itself and the society.

Conserving fruits, vegetables

Bangladesh produces large quantities of fruits and vegetables. The production of some items generates surplus for export after meeting the domestic demand. There is the potential to produce and export a great deal more. But thousands of tons of fruits and vegetables actually rot for dearth of processing and preservation facilities. The rotten fruits and vegetables mean wasted resources for their producers and loss of possible foreign exchange earnings from their export.

According to reports, fruits and vegetables produced in vast quantities perish every year. It was assessed that fruits and vegetables that get spoiled include 35 per cent of tomatoes, 10 per cent of bananas, 15 per cent of water melon, 30 per cent of guava and 15 per cent of jackfruits. Establishment of cold storages and processing plants in the fruit and vegetable growing areas can help stop such loss.

The government should encourage the setting up of such preservation and processing facilities. The Krishi Bank and other banks may be directed to disburse credit on soft terms among entrepreneurs to this end. A number of export-oriented agro-industries have been doing path-breaking work in this direction. They have contract farmers to produce round the year with guaranteed stable price for their yields. More significantly, the farmers have been trained to grow quality produces.

Private operators who intend to set up successful agro-industries with an export dimension, need to essentially study the methods applied by the few firms which are there and which have been successful in exporting agro-products. New firms should try to do better than the old ones by using more sophisticated technologies, innovating with food products and in their packaging. In that case, their attraction will not be limited to only expatriate Bangladeshis, but also help gain a wider market access abroad.

Deaths caused by wreckless driving are murders

Maswood Alam Khan

A Munshiganj-bound motorised launch, hit on its behind by a loaded cargo vessel, sank in the river Buriganga last Thursday and dozens of passengers died.

On hearing the incident photo journalists started cleansing their costly zoom lens, rushed to the spot and ran helter-skelter in their quest for dead bodies; one perhaps implored a salvager to hold the body of a baby on his arms for a little longer so that he could catch a lively photograph of the dead for his newspaper to publish on the front page the next day.

As usual personnel from police, fire brigade, armed forces and water transport authority had to come to the spot and do their job of pulling bodies trapped inside the launch and later the launch itself while thousands of spectators circling the spot of mishap witnessed a drama the way people sitting on galleries enjoy the sight of an elephant doing its tricks in a circus party.

A probe committee headed by an important government functionary to find out the cause and identify the culprits was also formed. Investigation Officer would be doing his routine job, so routine-like a job that he may ask a pen-pusher of his office to retrieve from the dust-gathering heaps of files an investigation report on a similar accident that took place a few months back and copy the same in toto--- replacing only the name of the ill-fated launch, the number of victims and the location of the mishap.

But the incident was a simple one not to shout about, was not it? We are nonchalant when scores of people die in an accident. Howls of relations of the victims don't reach our ears as loudly as they should. Some of us of course feel sorry for the accident victims the way we felt at the plight of Sidr victims. But we who are not direct relations of the victims don't shed our tears the way we wail when our pet dog dies from a road crash. Perhaps that is the reason we have failed to take measures to stop repetition of such tragedies that are very much avoidable.

Was it at all necessary to form a probe body to find out the cause of the Buriganga mishap or engage an otherwise busy police officer to investigate the monotony of how the incident---which is always deemed an accident---did occur? Knowing full well that the investigation report may be a carbon copy of hundreds of such earlier reports and the probe committee's dossier containing the root cause of the accident and recommendations on preventive measures will gather only layers of dust?

As reported by all the newspapers it was an "accident" and the launch was described as an "ill-fated" one. So, the episode to us is a fait accompli as we all are basically defeatists. We believe that all the victims of the Buriganga mishap were born with such fate of their death registered on their foreheads. We assume that the 'ill-fated" launch could perhaps avoid this accident if only its owner or its driver could exorcise the vessel from evil influence of Satan.

Accident, as we find in a dictionary, is an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstances beyond human control such as the cyclone Sidr that had befallen people of Bagerhat, Barisal and Khulna last November. But when at broad daylight a bus or a river vessel is rammed from behind by a truck or a cargo vessel due to lack of maintenance or wrongful issuance of fitness certificate by the regulatory body or illness/disability of the driver (which must be screened during issuance and renewal of his driving license) of the hitting vehicle or defective signalling system or a conspiracy the mishap must not be described as an 'accident' nor the rammed vehicle an 'ill-fated' one.

When there is an accident police in our country takes the mishap mostly as negligence of a driver or mere a fatalistic phenomenon and the investigating officer or his higher authority does not take the occurrence as seriously as they would in case of a murder committed. A murder wakes up our police department to the seriousness of the crime and different wings of law enforcement bodies are alerted to investigate deep into the crime to unearth the criminals and their motives behind the homicide.

A criminal as a coldly calculating planner with malice aforethought draws an elaborate plan before committing a felony and mulls for days over his plan to find out lacunas in his blueprint, say, for a murder. He is well versed in all the penal codes, procedural strategies of police investigation and possible strong and weak points of contention his attorney---in case he is caught---would have to deal with while defending him in a court of law.

A murderer conventionally uses a knife or a gun or any other lethal instrument like grenade or poison to kill a victim and the motive behind such a slaughter is to gain wealth from the victim or take revenge for his defeat or for any other felony committed by the victim or for any reason that haunts human brains. The murderer tries his best to camouflage his actions in such a way that a faint suspicion does not cross the probing minds of his opponents or the police. Hundreds of such murderers have thus managed to keep themselves far above the law.

A criminal who managed to fish himself out of legal dragnet took utmost precautions to hide or erase his fingerprints from the weapon he used to kill the victim, but he didn't know that a day was not far away when forensic science would enable the investigators to unearth telltale evidence of his crime from a single hair that fell from his head on the porch of the victim's house, thanks to DNA testing. Many murderers who were set free and roamed at large for years after committing their felonies are of late being rounded up in both developing and developed countries (though not yet in Bangladesh) on new clues revealed by forensic instruments and fresh trials are condemning them to death or life imprisonments.

Committing a murder is no more a job as easy as falling off a log. Killing someone with a knife or a gun is a fool's trade when forensic science can detect human identity from follicle of a hair or a dead cell sloughed off from skin---or when a suspect has no way out but to confess his crime under duress or when bodily tortured.

A shrewd criminal plans to remain miles away from the location and time of the murder. He would rather hire a hit man to commit a proxy murder at his behest. Sensing that his enemy is travelling by a launch on his way home he would instruct over his cell phone his hit man to direct the driver of a sand-laden trawler to ram his vessel into the back of the launch carrying his enemy.

Killing hundreds with a view to kill one single enemy may sound preposterous, no doubt; but, when greedy criminals in our society steal guarders from unguarded rail tracks to sell for a few takas they don't imagine that thousands of rail passengers may die from his act of petty theft. Moreover, there is no dearth of sadists or psychologically imbalanced people all over the world who enjoy seeing people dying at their raising of a finger!

I would be the last man to imagine that the driver of the sand-laden trawler MV Ibrahim Lodi was appointed by someone as a hit man to ram his vessel into the back of ML Sourav-1 on the River Buriganga last Thursday. What we as citizens would love to imagine is that our law enforcement agencies while investigating such a traffic accident should first envisage that there could be something grievous behind an accident---some horrid machination to murder some people.

According to a statistic 5000 people died in accidents that took place in 8000 kilometre long river routes of our country during the last ten years out of which 330 people died from accidents occurred in the River Buriganga alone since the year 2000.

We don't know whether government authority could unearth the real culprits responsible for such cruel deaths of so many innocent people and perhaps we will never know whether among the culprits were any surrogate murderers.

There are many incidents we read in newspapers and many dramas we view in cinemas where innocent and honest people die ostensibly in accidents but in fact they are killed by a far-sighted conspiracy. Trucks and jeeps instead of knives and guns have been used to kill rivals, because the killers know accidents are accidents and punishment prescribed in penal codes for such killing in an accident is no punishment.

Revising terminology sometimes greatly helps reshaping our attitude. Whenever we read about a road crash described as an accident we, including the investigating officer from the police department, develop a conditioned attitude and treat the episode as something preordained. If a train is derailed the incident has always been described as a train accident which in fact should not be viewed as an accident because the derailment is predictable and could well be avoided if proper measures were taken in proper time.

We should stop using the word 'accident' the way British Highway Code uses 'collision', 'crash', 'mishap' or 'incident' to describe events that once were known as accidents. The prestigious British Medical journal has also decided to ban the word 'accident' from its pages.

If the nomenclature "accident" is banned from using the word to describe a traffic mishap and if such mishaps are viewed by our law enforcement agencies as grim as a case of a proxy murder and if the persons responsible are interrogated the way a suspect of a murder is grilled not only criminals would find committing a felony by a surrogate murderer unrewarding, frequency of crashes on roads and rivers would also diminish greatly as river and road vehicle owners and operators, who are in no way criminals, would then be extra cautious about traffic safety measures while plying their cars, buses and trucks on a highway or their vessels on a river---to avoid hassles a murder suspect faces.

Can no one stop these child killers?

Aijaz Zaka Syed

WE FACE this battle in the newsroom almost on a daily basis. Every time there's a slaughter of the Palestinians - which is almost every day - we in the news business face this predicament: To publish or not to publish?

I agree with many of my colleagues that these gory pictures of the carnage, this mindless bloodletting with bodies of children, youths in their prime and desperate men and women carrying their loved ones in their arms are not most pleasant to look at. In fact, given a choice that's the last thing most of us would want to see when we pick up the newspaper in the morning. We want to begin our day on a positive note, don't we? While we breakfast with our families and see our lovely children prepare for the school, we are not really looking forward to such disturbing pictures of other people's dead children.

Many of my journalist colleagues and most media networks around the world are sick and tired of going on and on about the 'Palestine problem'. They are suffering from what you would call 'coverage fatigue.'

How long can you go on publishing the same kind of annoying pictures and irritatingly familiar stories? As a colleague said the other day: "What's new about the Palestinians getting killed? They've been dying for the past sixty years, my friend!"

One of my bosses chided me for running the report about 14 Palestinians - four of them children - getting killed in an Israeli raid last week on front page. "Instead we should have positive local stories on Page 1," he emphasized. I couldn't argue with him because, as they say, the boss is always right - even when he isn't. I couldn't tell him that there is not a more LOCAL story than this one. This is our own story, whoever we are and wherever we live. This is the story of the good versus evil and the truth versus falsehood. This is our own struggle for justice, freedom and dignity. After all, what is it that the Palestinians are fighting for? They are fighting for basics like liberty and right to live a life of dignity in their own country, in the land that they inherited from their ancestors.

These are basic things that we all have and take them for granted. We take them for granted because we haven't had to struggle for basics. We inherited these rights thanks to our good fortune of being born in a free country.

And why are the Palestinians dying? They are dying because they want to live in dignity. They refuse to submit themselves to tyranny and the disgrace of occupation. Like you and me, the Palestinians too want to live in peace and security - in the comfort of their homes, with their loved ones. Like us, they too want their children to get the best of education and grow up to enjoy a life better than theirs.

But do the Palestinians have a choice? They have no choice but suffer under the most ruthless and vile occupation regimes the world has ever known while the world looks the other way. The so-called international community that the editorial pundits and diplomats keep telling us about is too bored to act.

What can the international community do anyway when the United Nations has dispensed with the pretence of passing regulation resolutions urging Israel as well as the Palestinians to "exercise restraint?" Excuse me? You are telling both the oppressor and the oppressed to exercise restraint? How are the oppressed supposed to exercise restraint? By not being a victim? But does it really matter? In any case, what have the UN and the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY done so far to stop the world's longest-running ethnic cleansing campaign? Ban Ki-Moon, the current UN head, acts as if he's in the pay of the United States, not the UN. And what's the point of crying over the Western and US indifference. Has it made any difference? None, as far as I know.

And do we in the media have a choice? If this conflict has gone on for nearly 70 years now and the Palestinians continue to die like flies, should we stop reporting about it? Should the media stop doing its job of telling the truth as it is for the fear of offending the sensibilities of our sensitive readers? If we do not speak out against this ceaseless genocidal campaign against a helpless and defenceless people, who will? Especially if the Middle East media doesn't take a stand on the issue, who will? Just look at the series of attacks on Gaza this week. Sixty Palestinians were killed on March 1, scores of them children and many of them less than a year old. The day before that, on February 29, 18 people were killed, four of them children; one of them was a six-month old baby. And the day before that…it goes on. In fact, this week, news agencies dispassionately inform us, has been the deadliest for the Palestinians since 2002. That's it. Just another statistic. That's what the Palestinians have become, a mere statistic.

The world has grown inexorably weary of this endless bloodletting and killing of innocents and women and children. Children too young to know why they are dying.

But the killing machine called Israel never stops. It continues to kill - kill and killtuntil the Palestinians give up their land or become a minority in their own land. The six-month old Mohammed Bourai is yet another young Palestinian who would never know what his crime was. He sleeps in peace as his young, silently-mourning father cradles him in his arms. What father can bear such a sight? And what kind of people are they who do this to children as young as this?

Is there no one who can stop these child killers? Where is the international community when we need it so badly? Whatever has happened to the world's conscience? Why is it silent? And how long will it maintain its silence? Silence is crime. Silence is complicity. As the Prophet warned, those who see evil and do nothing about it also share the responsibility.

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

Obama's foreign policy will win world's respect

Jonathan Power

RICHARD Haas, the former high state department official in Republican governments observes in his recent book, "The Opportunity", that the time has never been better for an organisation of great powers to bring peace and stability to the world.

For the first time in several hundred years the major nations are not engaged in a struggle for dominance. "It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this development", he writes.

This could also have been written at the end of the tenure of President GW Bush and the onset of the presidency of Bill Clinton. But Clinton lacked initiative and let the ball drop. George W Bush, who had even less experience, picked the ball up but kicked it all over the field. Now fortune perhaps smiles for second time. A Barack Obama presidency could do what should have been done seventeen years ago at the end of Cold War and secure a grand peace on major issues between the major-and not so major-powers.

America has its problems of self-identity. Richard Hofstater summed it up: "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one." As Rabbit Angstrom, the main character in many John Updike novels, said, "Without the Cold War, what's the point of being American?" America, committed to its principles of liberty, democracy, individualism and private property, has the weakness of seeming to need an "evil empire" out there to feel fulfilled. George Bush felt this viscerally and 9/11 gave him his cause-Islamic militancy, which, by sleight of hand, he also turned into a war on Iraq.

Fortunately there has always been a good 40 per cent of Americans who don't think like Rabbit and never have. Now, I would guess, another 20 per cent, having experienced the depredations of Clinton and Bush, are ready for a different read of what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American Creed". Instead of being motivated to be involved in the outside world by security threats it is time to be involved because of moral challenge. This is certainly not the time to be isolationist and everything indicates that if Obama becomes president he will not want to be, although clearly a first item of business will be to withdraw from Iraq and reconfigure the Western involvement in Afghanistan (although he has yet to be as thorough in his thinking on Afghanistan as he has been on Iraq). But this will be, as the French say, the time "to withdraw so as to better advance". The contours of an Obama foreign presidency already are becoming clear, partly through his own statements and partly through those of his foreign policy advisors, some of whom I've talked to. There will be an end to the rhetoric of "the global war on terrorism". There will be a shift from dealing with Al Qaeda by military might to one that depends more on intelligence and police work (as with the latest Spanish arrests of a terrorist cell). There will be an almighty push to secure a two state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute even though it will mean profoundly upsetting the Israel lobby in Washington (though probably not most rank and file American Jews). There will be an end to unnecessary confrontation with Iran and, although there will be no let up in the effort to make Iran come clean on its bomb making activities, there will be a preparedness, as is finally being done with North Korea, to reach out and offer American cooperation on ending Iran's diplomatic and economic isolation. There will be more of an effort to persuade the European Union to stop Turkey feeling like an outcast and having no choice but to become more Islamic. As for Europe itself, Washington will no longer play at divide and rule, but will work to unite Europe even more tightly. On one side this will mean no longer encouraging London to distance itself from Brussels and the Euro currency and on the other joining with Brussels to speed up Ukraine's economic and political development to enable Ukraine to become an important member. It will also not look askance at those who quietly are working to improve relations between the West and Russia so that within a generation Russia could join the EU too.

Nuclear disarmament between the US and Russia which has gathered dust during the Clinton/Bush years will be renewed, partly as a way of decreasing growing tension between the West and Russia, partly to eradicate the chance of an accidental launch, partly to demonstrate to the world that if a country is no longer an enemy then there is no reason to point rockets at it and, not least, to honour past promises made in the signing on the Non-Proliferation Treaty to show consistency with the pursuit of persuading other countries not to develop nuclear arms.

With China, links will grow and paranoia about its growing military strength will subside.

The push for human rights observance will be more consistent. No one will be allowed off the hook because they are a "useful" ally. The turn around in African economic fortunes will continue be supported, as it has usefully been by Bush. In Kenya, his father's land, Obama will personally bang the leaders' heads together.

(Jonathan Power is a veteran foreign affairs commentator based in London)