The New Nation - Internet Edition

May Day today

THE historic May Day is being observed in Bangladesh as elsewhere over the world today in memory of the workers who gave their lives 122 years ago at Hay Market in Chicago in the United States. Workers' rights in different areas have been established, secured and promoted worldwide ever since. But working people in the world trace their inspiration to that unique struggle by the Chicago workers, which heralded the new age where employers were made to recognise for the first time that their workers are human beings and have basic rights which must be respected and enforced.

In Bangladesh labour laws and regulations do not too poorly serve the country. Trade union practices providing collective bargaining of workers with their employers are 'generally allowed in the industries and services here. Labour courts promote and protect workers' rights and enforce laws. Bangladesh is associated with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and remains committed on the whole to ILO policies. However, trade union practices are in existence in the old industries and services and not in the new ones. But the government is committed to give this facility to this group of industries.

It should be advantageous for workers to put less emphasis on orthodox trade union practices and accept less bindings on employers so that they feel encouraged to expand business activities. This should help maximise employment generation as unemployment is a huge problem. More employment with tolerable income should be a better choice for the country's workforce than little employment and no income from too much of trade unionism. Thus, there is a need for responsible trade unionism in the country. Of course, it does not mean that pressure for better looking after the welfare needs of workers ought not be there when new enterprises graduate into stronger entities and thus, become able to smoothly accommodate reasonable demands from their workers.

For an energy policy

AT a recent discussion meeting organised by the Bangladesh Economic Association, academics and economists demanded the adoption of 'a comprehensive energy policy' without any option for gas export with a view to ensuring people's right to natural resources for long-term use. They also demanded that the interim government should not sign any production-sharing contract with international oil companies if the country is to secure its energy future. They questioned the efficiency level of foreign oil companies for which the devastating Magurchhara and Tengratila blowouts took place in the recent past causing colossal damages to resources.

For obvious reasons, the speakers reminded that the trans-national companies create crisis in the country to dictate terms of production-sharing contracts. As reported about 85 per cent of gas is now used to generate electricity which is a must for attaining food security and development of the country. Signing of any contract to engage foreign companies in the country's most important natural resource would not be wise at all. Some of the experts mentioned that framing of terms besides provisions made in the actual production-sharing contract for deals with foreign companies is deeply related to energy and food security as well as real national development.

The pending case of Anti-Corruption Commission involving the Canadian Niko oil-gas company and the top government leaders and officials speaks of underhand dealings of severe nature against the country's interest. Earlier, the special assistant to the chief adviser on energy advocated gas export though the country is facing problems as the government fails to supply the required gas to local industries as the gas reserve is depleting fast. There should be no hurry on the part of the interim government for contracts that have far-reaching impact on country's resources and the national economy.

8-hour work still a far cry

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

The International Congress of Paris [ICP] adopted May 1 as the International Socialist holiday in 1889, and each following year, in all civilized country, workingmen and women steer to demonstrate on that day to demand from a capitalist world greater political and industrial freedom and better standard of living.

It was conjured principally as an international demand for an 8-hour day, for social legislation, for equal labor right for men and women, and as a protest against militarism and war of intolerable exploitation. In most countries May Day is celebrated as a workers' holiday.

On this day the class conscious working men and women assert, if only for a day, their freedom and solidarity from capitalist domination. And by this hallmark it signifies to them the great international brotherhood of the working-class, fighting for liberation from capitalist oppression. Then comes the war, and May 1 became a day of sadness.

The observance of the day in Bangladesh is essentially important and mostly goes mocking of that fortitude, with the deep-seated rights of the citizens poised under a state of emergency. There is no rebuffing the fact that the reality for workers in Bangladesh remains largely similar to that of the Chicago laborers, who took to the streets for an eight-hour working day exactly 122 years ago. Tens of millions of workers in the formal and informal sectors of the country work longer hours for meager amount.

Conversely, the Chicago laborers at least had the freedom and right to come together and protest against the exploitation they had been subjected to. As of now, the workers in Bangladesh do not even have that freedom. Therefore, the very goal of whatever programs that we will have to showcase the day should be to make the case for quick withdrawal of the state of emergency and restitution of the fundamental rights of the general people.

It is in Bangladesh more than in any other place that May Day prolongs to have huge connotation. To be sure, as the country has gone through the various ways, some of them rather asymmetrical, in its rally towards industrialization, the memo of May Day has progressively come to attain a fresh and more effective meaning for all of us

The painful efforts of workers and farmers of Bangladesh have been going on, in spite of all the deafening proclamations that have been made and go on to be made a propos how developed a society we have been forwarding. There are the facts and figures which continue to report to us what needs to be worked out. The number of the poor has not grown less. If anything, it has only been going up. The mass departure of young people, men as well as women, from the villages to the towns and cities of the country is testimony, if testimonies were needed, of the deficiency the broad masses are yet subject to in this land. And in the urban areas, the laborious struggle which the poor -we can consider the garments workers, rickshaw pullers and some other helpers here - have incessantly put up is an ideal pointer of how far we yet holdup behind other nations in the issue of guaranteeing a welfare society for the nation.

In the general brains, thus, May Day is about the establishment of a civilized, caring, educated society where the self-esteem of the individual matters. The self-esteem of course comes through giving the individual the opportunities promised him or her by the state. In Bangladesh, it is the serious responsibility of the state to care for all its citizens well. A breakdown to do that can only create, often, those circumstances of poverty and corruption that have recurrently limited our capacity to do better to our fellow countrymen.

The truth for Bangladeshi workers today, conversely, largely remains similar to that of the Chicago laborers 122 years ago, although the government as well as political parties observe the day in pomp; but with missing the spirit. An authentic report shows that more than tens of millions of workers in the country's formal and informal industrial sectors are paid at a rate which is one of the lowest in the world.

More to the point, the private sector workers, particularly the garment workers, mostly women, are reportedly made to work, at times, 12 hours a day and seven days a week. And as for working condition, it is one of the worst in the world - frequent garment's wages riots making the labor right warped being the burning example. Our governments are never seen serious about addressing the issues, which is a clear manifestation of their indifference to the welfare of the toiling laborers. Under these political and economic circumstances, we can hardly expect the healthy growth of a resourceful labor force, which is well thought-out a key to the healthy growth of national economy principally in the competitive open market economy of the globe.

The 8-hour day has become the standard of capitalist production; in every capitalist country universal labour right is either realized or on the eve of its realization. On the other hand, the violation of international labor law under capitalism has become a chimera, permanent peace an empty phrase, a dream that will not and cannot be fulfilled so long as capitalism with its greed for territories, markets and spheres of influence continues to exist.

It is because of these facts that the class-conscious workers, leaving to the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class the stage-management of 8-hour day celebrations, demonstrate on May Day for revolution, and that on May 1 there rings round the world the timeless slogan: "All power to the workers!"

It is high time that the government ensured the labor rights for the ultimate benefit of both the workers and the employers, which would sooner or later result in a considerable economic advancement of the whole country.

China bashing season has begun

Farish A Noor

WHILE the simplistic thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington in his work 'The Clash of Civilisations' reads like a paltry script from a bad movie, it has to be said that bad scripts are often the most believable and effective.

It was Huntington who predicted that in the wake of the Cold War a new sort of conflict would arise, namely one configured along cultural-civilisational differences between the developed Western world and the mysterious, exotic and threatening East. The two cultural blocs that were said to be the future adversaries to the West were the Muslim world and China, respectively. In the case of the former, it was opined by Huntington that with the demise of Communism the potential threat of Islam would be realised sooner or later for the simple reason that Islam and the West shared 'bloody frontiers' that were marked by centuries of conflict. This thesis, however, is patently false to anyone who has even the slightest idea of the history of Islam and the non-Muslim world, for the fact is that the frontiers of the Muslim world are not marked by violence nor stained by blood, but rather remain porous horizons marked by the eclectic culture of Islamic mysticism or Sufism: From Southeast Asia to China, from Africa to Europe, the furthest frontiers of the Muslim world are precisely where mysticism and the Muslim practice of inter-cultural dialogue and cultural cross-fertilisation flourished the most.

Related to Huntington's fear of Islam was his fear of China, dubbed the 'sleeping giant' by Napoleon more than a century ago and which til today has yet to truly realise and demonstrate its full economic potential. Huntington's crude thesis argued that in time the West would have to realise that non-negotiable cultural differences exist between the Western world and the Orient, and that these cultural differences would ultimately serve as the catalyst for an all-out confrontation between the West and China. As the world stands on the brink of a global recession and as we witness what may soon become a global food and resource crisis, the lens of Western policy-makers and media analysts are already looking eastwards to locate the new 'threat' to the global order, namely China. It is with this thought in mind that we reflect on the rather curious assortment of media tit-bits that have been served to us lately. In a space of a month, the international media has focused on the internal and external developments in China of late. Needless to say, the human rights record of China - not only in its dealings with Tibet but also internally in terms of its treatment of local dissidents - leaves much to be desired.

China was and remains an authoritarian state with a brutal policing apparatus that works to ensure that the regime remains in power at all costs, regardless of the loss of basic freedoms and civil liberties to its people. But having said that, it should also be remembered that the Chinese government is not the only despotic regime on the planet at the moment. Nor should we forget that the Western governments have been willing and able to work with many equally brutal regimes the world over, from the despots of the Arab states to the dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. So why single out China for now? And if China's record is something to be looked at closely, we might as well take some time out to look at America's own human rights record in dealing with the detainees in Guantanamo Bay as well.

The latest craze seems to be the focus on China's economic dealings with Africa and how Chinese companies have been investing in the development of natural resources and infrastructure in the African continent. Several reports in the international media - including the BBC and CNN - have painted the picture of an aggressive China moving into the African continent to suck its resources dry and to secure monopolies in areas such as oil and gas. Yet it has to be remembered that in the wake of the Second Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, it was America that took the lead in the race to re-establish its presence in the African continent. Fearful of the prospect that the oil and gas reserves in the Arab-Muslim world were being depleted too fast, and that Arab oil and gas will run out for good in less than two decades, American and other Western oil and gas companies have begun to turn to Africa as another source of vital resources for their industrialised economies. Soon after the invasion of Afghanistan the Washington-based African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG) was set up to promote American oil and gas company interests in Africa.

Already many of these companies have secured for themselves lasting monopolies in African countries like Nigeria. So is all this talk of an 'aggressive China' moving into Africa simply a smokescreen to hide the fact that American oil and gas companies are already there, exploiting the natural resources of Africa to serve their own domestic industrial needs? And if China is to expand and develop its economy, then surely it also needs to secure a steady supply of vital resources such as oil, gas and steel?

This, then, appears to be the real reason and agenda behind the spate of China-bashing that we are seeing in the international media today. For if the governments of the West are really concerned about the standard of human rights in China at present, they would do just as well to apply the same standards to themselves and to their strategic allies in the Arab world, Africa and Asia. For now however, this hypocrisy of the highest level will continue as long as the international community remains blissfully ignorant of the real geo-political manoeuvrings that are taking place in this latest media skirmish between the West and China.

A global economic crisis is in the making, as well as a global race for rapidly depleting resources. The media campaign to demonise China today is just the opening round to what will surely be a long-term conflict whose human costs will be borne by the rest of humanity as well.

(Dr Farish A. Noor is Senior Fellow, Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Research Director for the Research Cluster 'Transnational Religion in Contemporary Southeast Asia', Nanyang Tech Uni, Singapore)

Zimbabwe towards unity government?

Dr.Abdul Ruff

The national elections in Zimbabwe were held on 29 March - a month ago. The final results of parliamentary and presidential polls have still not been published - more than four weeks after the elections. Latest indications reveal that Zimbabwe is heading for a unity government. After a long wait in obtaining the final victors in the polls, it seems, some mediators in Zimbabwe are negotiating for a unity government by the national parties, both ruling and opposition. The continued bitter war for power by major parties in this African state has forced a few statesmen to push for a Unity Government and help usher in a sort of peaceful atmosphere in the country.

According to a formula being so worked out, "whoever wins" Zimbabwe's presidential election in the recount will have to form a government of national unity, the country's UN ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku has said. "There is no way anybody can do without the other", he said arguing that neither side could really control parliament. He is the second government source to make this suggestion in a week. The final parliamentary results are due to be released shortly, after which presidential results will be verified.

Last week, the Herald, seen as a government mouthpiece, ran an opinion piece calling for a government of national unity. It would be possible, it viewed, for the rival political leaders to work together and pointed to the example of Kenya, where a power-sharing government was set up after violence in which 1,500 people were killed.

The contest pitted Mugabe, the 84-year-old who has been in power for 28 years, and Tsvangirai, 56. Over the weekend, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission released the results of recounts in 18 seats, which confirmed that Mugabe's Zanu-PF party has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since independence in 1980. The original results showed that the combined opposition had 109 seats, against 97 for Zanu-PF. Mugabe's Zanu-PF party has already conceded it lost control of the country's parliament for the first time since taking power after independence from Britain in 1980. A recount of the March 29 vote in 18 out of 23 constituencies showed no change in previous results, giving a historic victory to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The recount unfavorable to Mugabe notwithstanding, even after a month the results are not announced in Zimbabwe. "It's definitely a world record and it's not something to be proud of," said Zimbabwean independent MP and former Mugabe ally Jonathan Moyo. "And, when it comes, its credibility will be irretrievably compromised," he said. But the ruling party dismissed as "totally false" the argument that the delay was to give Zanu-PF time to rig the outcome. He pointed out that similar claims were made when the electoral commission said it was recounting 23 parliamentary results. In the re-count, the MDC had predicted that the recount of 23 parliamentary results would be fixed in order to let Zanu-PF retain its majority.

The MDC says 15 of its supporters have been killed since the elections. More than 200 of its activists were arrested during a police raid on its Harare headquarters last Friday. A judge has ordered that they should either be charged or set free, following an MDC petition. The police said they were looking for suspects involved in attacks on ruling party supporters but the MDC said those arrested had fled their homes after being victims of attacks.

Zanu-PF spokesman Bright Matonga said the results showed that Zimbabwe's electoral system was "transparent". Mugabe's allies say the scale of the violence has been exaggerated. Meanwhile, the state-owned Herald newspaper reports that opposition supporters attacked an army training camp, leaving one person dead. Elections officials say that the process of verifying presidential results will start after final parliamentary results are announced. But they warn it could take as long as a week, as they will only be released after both sides agree.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's rival opposition factions say they have reunited, declaring they have a majority in parliament. The announcement was jointly made by Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, whose faction split in 2005. At a joint news conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tsvangirai and Mutambara announced that they were now working together.

The two MDC factions on 28 April said they had reunited and would therefore have a majority in parliament. This was confirmed over the weekend, when the unchanged results of 18 of 23 seats being recounted were released. But a two-thirds majority was needed to change the constitution and said there was a "hung parliament". However, President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF governed without such a majority between 2000 and 2005. Tsvangirai claims he beat President Robert Mugabe outright in the polls. But independent monitors and Mugabe's allies say that neither candidate passed the threshold of more than 50% of the vote required to be declared the president. Representatives of the presidential candidates are set to meet the electoral commission to review the results of the disputed presidential election - officials say these will be released when the rival candidates agree on them.

This meant that President Mugabe's Zanu-PF party was now in the minority, they said. "Mugabe should concede that he cannot be president without controlling the parliament," Tsvangirai said. "The old man must go and have an honorable exit." The opposition announcement is considered a significant move.

The MDC's reunification would make it harder for Mugabe to win any run-off, although Tsvangirai says he would not take part. He says the delay is intended to give Mugabe's supporters time to intimidate opposition supporters in rural areas. This is strongly denied by Zanu-PF officials, who accuse the opposition of exaggerating the scale of the violence. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) now plans to invite Mugabe and Tsvangirai to a final "verification and collation exercise", where they will compare their own vote tallies with the ZEC's own, according to the Sunday Mail, a state-run national newspaper and government mouthpiece. Analysts agreed that the presidential election results would be published later this week, but said that the recount was a delaying tactic aimed at securing victory for Mugabe through a campaign of violence.

Meanwhile, The USA has pressed South Africa, having considerable influence over Mugabe, to use its influence to defuse the post-election crisis in Zimbabwe, without openly criticizing South African President Thabo Mbeki.

More than four weeks after general elections in Zimbabwe, the official results for the presidential vote have yet to be announced. Obviously, Mugabe is keen not only to retain power at any cost, but, more importantly, also not to let the "foreign stooges" to govern Zimbabwe. But the verdict of the people has to be respected, though. One does not know if he would prefer a re-poll to sort out the issue with the opposition. Tsvangirai says he has already won the election outright and has called on Mugabe to step down. "The old man must go and have an honorable exit." But independent monitors and Mugabe's allies say that neither candidate passed the threshold of more than 50% of the vote required to be declared the president and so a run-off will needed. The MDC says 15 of its supporters have been killed since the elections and hundreds forced to flee their homes.

Since the opposition is united with a thumping majority to claim for forming government, they want Mugabe to quit the scene. A report on the situation in Zimbabwe is to be presented to the UN Security Council soon. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has called on the UN to send a special envoy and to warn President Robert Mugabe that increasing violence against opposition activists amounts to "crimes against humanity".

Of course, the serious concern of the opposition MDC about the faltering or hanging poll verdict should be taken in to account by the UNSC and a solution should be found to put an end to the poll/democratic turmoil in Zimbabwe.