The New Nation - Internet Edition

Bangladesh in UN peacekeeping

BANGLADESH has celebrated the International Peacekeeping Day of the UN on 29th May. The Armed Forces Division organised the celebration function at the Bangladesh China Conference Centre in association with the UN office in Dhaka. Bangladesh is the second highest contributor of troops to the UN peacekeeping missions. Since 1988 77,850 Bangladesh personnel have performed duties in peacekeeping in 42 missions in 26 countries.

The demand for Bangladesh personnel in UN peacekeeping operations is ever increasing for their professionalism. So far, 79 Bangladesh personnel have embraced martyrdom while discharging their peacekeeping duties at different places. Of them 71 are army personnel and 8 others from the police force. Bangladesh peacekeepers have earned Tk.20,000 crore in foreign exchange.

In discharging their duties Bangladesh peacekeepers have demonstrated high level of professionalism, discipline, hard work and sincerity. They abstain from vices like alcoholic addiction and womanising. Their dedication, hard work, neutrality and sanity earned high reputation for them as well as and for the nation. To earn glory they risked their lives and 79 of them have embraced martyrdom. These are the reasons of their high demand and undisputed reputation in UN peacekeeping system.

Bangladesh ardently supports the endeavour for world peace and generously contributes troops to the UN peacekeeping programme. By their sincere, honest and efficient discharge of duty Bangladesh troops have succeeded to satisfy the UN and the people of the trouble-torn areas. This has heightened their position in the estimation of the world community at large.

Due to good performance and reputation of the Bangladesh Army in UN peacekeeping their demand is increasing steadily. To meet that demand Bangladesh needs to remain prepared with trained officers and troops who would further enhance the good name.

Women entrepreneurs' agenda

THE women entrepreneurs have reportedly taken an initiative to develop a 'national business agenda' for identifying the barriers or impediments that women entrepreneurs face, and provide them with complete guidelines. The Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry has started capacity building in cooperation with the Centre for International Private Enterprise for this. The women chamber will make a coalition with different stakeholders and other organisations working with women entrepreneurs to formulate national agenda.

The women chamber president said, the national business agenda would work as a platform for all women entrepreneurs in the country to build their capacity and contribute to different sectors of business more professionally. The organisers will submit the agenda to the policymakers and other stakeholders concerned possibly early next year. The women chamber will work on implementing the agenda after the successful completion of the process, in cooperation with the government as different organisations are working with women business people.

The women's chamber chief is hopeful that through the national business agenda the stakeholders will come under one umbrella for capacity building of women entrepreneurs. The women's chamber organised a workshop in the city for capacity building and launched the national business agenda with a group of women entrepreneurs who, as a whole, are very dynamic as they want to explore their business outside the country by expanding activities, particularly in the international market. The national business agenda would mainly focus on legislative framework and other issues that the women entrepreneurs face in launching and expanding their business. Women entrepreneurs in developed and less developed countries also face the same kind of problems. Once the exclusive chamber for the fair sex forges coalition, it will be able to help the government effectively in policymaking and related activities.

Towards a low carbon economy

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

World Environment Day (WED), celebrated on 5 June each year, is one of the major modes through which the United Nations instigates worldwide awareness of the environment and widens political attention and action.

The World Environment Day catchphrase for 2008 is Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy followed by Melting Ice - a hot topic?-2007. Identifying that climate change is becoming the defining issue of these days, UNEP is sincerely asking countries, companies and communities to point up on greenhouse gas emissions and how to lessen them. The main international celebration of World Environment Day 2008 is taking place in New Zealand, so celebrated last year in Tromsø, Norway. UNEP is honored that the city of Wellington is hosting this United Nations day.

We are convinced that WED-2008 will contribute to awareness that the condition of the environment depends on every individual as well as on the global community, and that partnerships and mutual aid will allow all nations and peoples to enjoy a more secure and prosperous future. Special attention must be devoted to highlight resources and initiatives that promote low carbon economies and life-styles, such as improved energy efficiency, alternative energy sources, forest conservation and eco-friendly consumption.

The day's agenda is to give a human face to environmental issues; empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development; promote an understanding that communities are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environmental issues; and advocate partnership, which will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future.

Measures include greater energy efficiency in buildings and appliances, including light bulbs, up to a switch towards cleaner and renewable forms of electricity generation and transport systems.

The focus is to put on the role of forests in countering rises in greenhouse gases. An estimated 20 per cent of emissions contributing to climate change globally are a result of deforestation.

"As part of New Zealand's drive for greater environmental sustainability, we've made a commitment to reduce our emissions. But to overcome the challenge of climate change, kicking the carbon habit must be a truly global goal," says Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, says: "New Zealand is among a pioneer group of countries committed to accelerating a transition to a low carbon and carbon-neutral economy. We are therefore delighted to be holding the main WED 2008 celebrations in Wellington and in communities across this South Pacific nation".

He says, developed and developing countries stood to benefit environmentally, economically and socially from more efficient low-carbon technologies and strategies.

"What we need is action to slow, stop and then to reverse the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions. A transition to a low carbon economy is essential to achieving this," says Mr. Steiner.

"Along the way we will see more rapid and widespread access to cleaner and greener energy, new job opportunities and reductions in unhealthy urban and in-door pollution. WED is about positive perspectives on change, and this is what we hope to highlight in New Zealand," he adds.

Bangladesh is also afraid of undergoing the decay of its environment. The environmental problems faced by the world today are getting worse day by day. We are failing to protect resources and ecosystems. We are failing to invest enough in alternative technologies for betterment of environment.

Understanding of the environmental challenges we face is alarmingly low. It is imperative that environmental issues must be fundamentally repositioned in the policy-making arena. The environment must become better-integrated into mainstream economic policy of Bangladesh. The government must not only create environmental agreement, awareness and festival, they must strictly enforce them as well.

Our surrounding continues to face serious environmental degradation making situations unbearable to live in. Man is armed with both weapons of destruction and also those of construction and development. Unknowingly, man's weapons of reconstruction and development have negative consequential results affecting us in different ways. A refinery is producing fuel for all our needs but the same refinery is polluting our atmosphere, as well, making habitation unbearable. Vehicles carry us to any destination but same vehicles fill our atmosphere with carbon monoxide, which can equally kill us.

Testing of chemical, biological and nuclear military weapons has created an irreversible disaster for the world environment and atmosphere. There is a lot of finger pointing when it comes to environmental issues. There seems to be a tug of war between developed and developing countries.

The developed countries blame it on the developing world, by citing areas, such as over population and illiteracy for environmental degradation.

Developing countries, however, argue that developed countries are the ones that dump their wastes in lakes, seas, oceans, deserts and forests. Ironically, they are the ones contaminating the air from their big factories and industries; and by testing weapons in the oceans and deserts.

Climatic change represents a serious threat to every part of the globe, and it would be ridiculous to believe that this is just another issue being pushed by the developed countries down the throats of the developing world.

Until a decade ago, there was very little understanding of the financial, social and health effects of environmental degradation and the subsequent costs they impose on the economy. As environmental concerns and assessment of impacts of environmental degradation gained prominence globally, awareness regarding these issues has increased in Bangladesh as well, prompting government as well as civil society institutions to focus on understanding and dealing with these issues.

World Environment Day needs not to be seen just a day set aside in a year to discuss, undertake and solve environment issues as they affect the world. But the day must continue to be everyday. It should not be just one day in a week, month, a year or decade but every day of our lives.

We should celebrate our accomplishments of World Environment Day and do so with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. The challenge is how can we discuss, experiment and improve the environment through this single day set aside in a year. To most of us, if the day is over, environmental issues are suspended till the next World Environment Day.

We need to change such coldhearted attitude for a clean future. Rather, we need to examine critically the state of our environment and to consider carefully the actions which each of us must take, and then address ourselves to our common task of preserving all life on earth.

Bush's bankrupt vision

Noam Chomsky

IN MID-May, President Bush travelled to the Middle East to establish his legacy more firmly in the part of the world that has been the prime focus of his presidency.

The trip had two principal destinations, each chosen to celebrate a major anniversary: Israel, the 60th anniversary of its founding and recognition by the United States, and Saudi Arabia, the 75th anniversary of US recognition of the newly founded kingdom. The choices made good sense in the light of history and the enduring character of US Middle East policy: control of oil, and support of the proxies who help maintain it.

An omission, however, was not lost on the people of the region. Though Bush celebrated the founding of Israel, he did not recognise (let alone commemorate) the paired event from 60 years ago: the destruction of Palestine, the Nakba, as Palestinians refer to the events that expelled them from their lands.

During his three days in Jerusalem, the president was an enthusiastic participant in lavish events and made sure to go to Masada, a near-sacred site of Jewish nationalism.

But he did not visit the seat of the Palestinian authority in Ramallah, or Gaza City, or a refugee camp, or the town of Qalqilya - strangled by the Separation Wall, now becoming an Annexation Wall under the illegal Israeli settlement and development programmes that Bush has endorsed officially, the first president to do so.

And it was out of the question that he would have any contact with Hamas leaders and parliamentarians, chosen in the only free election in the Arab world, many of them in Israeli jails with no pretense of judicial proceedings.

The pretexts for this stance scarcely withstand a moment's analysis. Also of no moment is the fact that Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that the United States and Israel have rejected, virtually alone, for more than 30 years, and still do.

Bush did allow the US favourite, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, to participate in meetings in Egypt with many regional leaders. Bush's last visit to Saudi Arabia was in January. On both trips, he sought, without success, to draw the kingdom into the anti-Iranian alliance he has been seeking to forge. That is no small task, despite the concern of the Sunni rulers over the "Shia crescent" and growing Iranian influence, regularly termed "aggressiveness."

For the Saudi rulers, accommodation with Iran may be preferable to confrontation. And though public opinion is marginalised, it cannot be completely dismissed. In a recent poll of Saudis, Bush ranked far above Osama bin Laden in the "very unfavourable" category, and more than twice as high as Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, Iran's Shia ally in Lebanon.

US-Saudi relations date to the recognition of the Kingdom in 1933 - not coincidentally, the year when Standard of California obtained a petroleum concession and American geologists began to explore what turned out to be the world's largest reserves of oil.

The United States quickly moved to ensure its own control, important steps in a process by which the United States took over world dominance from Britain, which was slowly reduced to a "junior partner," as the British Foreign Office lamented, unable to counter "the economic imperialism of American business interests, which is quite active under the cloak of a benevolent and avuncular internationalism" and is "attempting to elbow us out."

The strong US-Israel alliance took its present form in 1967, when Israel performed a major service to the United States by destroying the main center of secular Arab nationalism, Nasser's Egypt, also safeguarding the Saudi rulers from the secular nationalist threat.

US planners had recognised a decade earlier that a "logical corollary" of US opposition to "radical" (that is, independent) Arab nationalism would be "to support Israel as the only strong pro-Western power left in the Middle East."

Investment by US corporations in Israeli high-tech industry has sharply increased, including Intel, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Warren Buffett and others, joined by major investors from Japan and India - in the latter case, one facet of a growing US-Israel-India strategic alliance.

To be sure, other factors underlie the US-Israeli relationship. In Jerusalem, Bush invoked "the bonds of the book," the faith "shared by Christians like himself and Jews," the Australian Press reported, but apparently not shared by Muslims or even Christian Arabs, like those in Bethlehem, now barred from occupied Jerusalem, a few kilometres away, by illegal Israeli construction projects.

The Saudi Gazette bitterly condemned Bush's "audacity to call Israel the 'homeland for the chosen people' - the terminology of ultrareligious Israeli hardliners.

The Gazette added that Bush's "particular brand of moral bankruptcy was on full display when he made only passing mention of a Palestinian state in his vision of the region 60 years hence."

It is not difficult to discern why Bush's chosen legacy should stress relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, with a side glance at Egypt, along with disdain for the Palestinians and their miserable plight, apart from a few ritual phrases.

We need not tarry on the thought that the president's choices have anything to do with justice, human rights or the vision of "democracy promotion" that gripped his soul as soon as the pretexts for the invasion of Iraq had collapsed.

But the choices do accord with a general principle, observed with considerable consistency: Rights are assigned in accord with service to power.

Palestinians are poor, weak, dispersed and friendless. It is elementary, then, that they should have no rights. In sharp contrast, Saudi Arabia has incomparable resources of energy, Egypt is the major Arab state, and Israel is a rich Western country and the regional powerhouse, with air and armoured forces that are larger and technologically more advanced than any NATO power (apart from its patron) along with hundreds of nuclear weapons, and with an advanced and largely militarised economy closely linked to the United States.

The contours of the intended legacy are therefore quite predictable.

Opinion: Preserving the coral reefs

Dipa Paul Chowdhury

Coral reefs are vital to island and coastal communities that rely on them to support the fishing that provides their livelihoods. They are also complex and have the highest biodiversity of any marine ecosystem. They provide important services and direct economic benefits to the large and growing human populations in low-latitude coastal zones.

The natural habitat of coral reefs near the meeting between land, sea, and air can be a stressful environment. Reef organisms have evolved ways to adapt and recover from such stresses over hundreds of millions of years.

However, recent global increases in reef degradation and die-back suggest that both the rate and nature of recent environmental changes are exceeding the capacity of coral reefs to adapt.

This can lead to reefs being displaced by seaweeds and other non reef systems. Such ecosystem shifts are already well advanced in the Caribbean region, where two of the major reef-building coral species have been devastated by disease. In the Indo-Pacific region, repeated episodes of lethal 'bleaching' suggest that reefs cannot recover sufficiently between such events. This crisis is almost certainly the result of interactions between pressure from local human populations and global climatic stresses.

The former includes direct destruction, coastal habitat modification, contamination, over-harvesting, and increased nutrient and sediment build-ups. The latter includes rising ocean temperatures implicated in chronic stress and disease epidemics, as well as mass coral-bleaching episodes and reduction in necessary calcium levels, which provides the building blocks of coral reefs. Increasing atmospheric CO2 levels can also inhibit calcification. These stresses may interact with each other and exacerbate other stresses like disease and predation. As with many ecosystems, it is difficult to separate the effects of global climate and local, non-climate impacts.

Predicting the future of reefs is difficult because current environmental changes are causing a combination of surface ocean chemistry and temperature conditions that have almost certainly never occurred in the evolutionary history of modern coral reef systems.

Key uncertainties include the extent to which human activities will continue to alter the environment; how climate variability such as the frequency and intensity of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events will change relative to global temperature; and the biological and ecological responses of coral reef communities to unprecedented future conditions.

Although climate change has the potential to yield some benefits for certain coral species in specific regions, most of the effects of climate change are stressful rather than beneficial.

Continued climate change will almost certainly cause further degradation of coral reefs, which will be even more devastating in combination with the continuing non-climate stresses that will almost certainly increase in magnitude and frequency. Reef systems that are at the crossroads of global climatic and local human stresses will be the most vulnerable.

Research into adaptation and recovery mechanisms and enhanced monitoring of coral reef environments will help us to learn from and influence the course of events rather than simply observe the decline.

A significant step would be an international network of marine-protected areas to provide refuges for future generations of coral reef organisms. Yet, even with such efforts, recent degradation of coral ecosystems combined with future climate change will pose a significant challenge to the global sustainability of coral reefs.