Articles on Bangladesh

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Dubai horror still haunts Jamila
By Shahin Mollah and Bishawjit Das

The Daily Star - Tuesday December 14, 2004

Jamila, the teenage Bangladeshi girl who was seriously assaulted by her employer in Dubai and was robbed of her possessions on arrival at Dhaka Friday, is still numbed in an unimaginable horror of her experience.

The working day of the 16-year-old house help began in Dubai at five in the morning.

Before even being allowed to take her first meal, she swept the lawn, prepared tea and breakfast for a 17-member family, fed the cattle, pigeons, poultry, washed the dishes and cleaned the rooms of the house.

Shocked by the reports of Jamila's treatment as a maid in Dubai, published Sunday in The Daily Star and other papers, hundreds of local people gathered at her village-home of Jangail, Banglabazar under Sonargaon upazila in Narayanganj.

Jamila's mother, Begum, along with seven male and female villagers, rushed to Dhaka Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) Sunday. Although doctors and nurses of the DMCH tried to stop her, Begum took her daughter back to Jangail. "I will treat her in my village and try to keep her close to me," she said.

It is not known whether Jamila's father, Abdul Kader, who sells khoi (local pop-corn) in the capital, is even aware of the fate of her daughter.

JAMILA'S BACKGROUND
With eight mouths to feed, and having lost his job with the closure of Adamjee Jute Mills in 2002, Jamila's father felt he had no choice but to send one of his family members abroad.

Two local brokers -- Moslema and Mostafa -- of nearby Keodhala village in Sonargaon upazila, came to him with the proposal of sending a female family member as a house help to Dubai, Jamila's mother Begum said.

"They offered to organise a job in Dubai with a salary of Tk 5,500 per month if we could pay a fee of Tk 60,000. They said she would not have to work much in one of the richest countries of the world," Begum said.

Jamila's father first thought of sending his wife, but Begum said that "Jamila was chosen since I had breast-feeding children," she told The Daily Star.

Kader paid the Tk 60,000 fee as he had received a 'golden-handshake' from the government in compensation for losing his job.

LIFE IN DUBAI
Jamila, the eldest of four sisters and two brothers, went to Dubai in mid-2003 when she was only 14-year-old and studying in class four at a Brac school in her village.

She worked about 22-hours a day for the Dubai family which was headed by a 70-year-old Madrasha teacher named Saud and his wife Ayesha. She does not know the family's last name, nor the place in Dubai where they lived.

"They forced me to wake up at dawn," she told journalists Sunday. "Each day seemed never-ending, just loaded with work."

Jamila said that the hardest work was the ironing which she often started after lunch and continued, with only a break for dinner, until three in the morning. "Sometimes in the early hours of the morning, when the house was silent, I fell asleep whilst working," she said.

"It was not that bad when I went there first as there was another Sri Lankan maid in the house, but the amount of work increased day-by-day and after the Sri Lankan maid left, I had to do it all by myself," she described.

She said it was very difficult to manage the large family comprising seven sons, five daughters, two son-in-laws, one infant of one of the daughters as well as the parents.

"They used to beat me everyday in the last couple of months whenever I could not satisfy them. If the clothes were not ironed well, or they did not get the clothes they expected, or if the food was late or if any of the glass-ware was broken I was tortured," Jamila said as tears rolled down her face.

"Two months ago, one of the daughters, 22-year-old Asma, burnt my right hand with the hot iron," Jamila narrated.

"One of the boys Hammud, 18, threw me to the floor, kicked me and stepped on my belly. One of the daughters Maryam, 20, once poured boiling water over me, and others beat me with sticks. The owner of the house herself, 60-year-old Ayesha, used to grab my hair and strike my head against the wall," Jamila said.

PAYMENT
Jamila's mother said that the family did not receive any regular money from Dubai, and had not received any money in the last six months.

"Finding me of no use to them in the last few months because I was ill from over-work, they did not pay me any salary and kept all the gold-ornaments, clothes and valuables that I had bought there," Jamila said.

Jamila's mother said that she used to make phone calls to her daughter about four times a month but the family in Dubai did not let Jamila speak. "They kept on making excuses that she was not at home,' Begum alleged. I have talked to her only four times in the twenty two months she stayed in Dubai."

"We never knew she was working that hard. Jamila never told us what was happening and that she was ill because of her job."

ANOTHER JAMILA?
Jamila's ordeal is now over, but she is afraid that another young Bangladeshi girl is now suffering the same fate.

She said that three months ago the Dubai family has employed another teenage girl Sufia, aged 15, though the family never let them talk together.

"Sufia is working and suffering as much as I did and probably will have the same fate as I have had," Jamila said.

Jamila told journalists that she wanted the family members punished for torturing her, she wanted to receive the wages that were due to her and she wanted her property returned.

"No other maids working abroad should suffer like I did," Jamila said.

Source: The Daily Star

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Muslim names harm job chances
By Hugh Muir

The Guardian - Monday July 12, 2004

Job applicants from minority communities, particularly Muslims, are still suffering widespread and overt discrimination from virtually every sector of the market, according to investigators.

Research into jobs advertised in commerce, sales, the media and leisure found that candidates with English-sounding names were nearly three times as likely to get an interview as those with names indicating that they might be Muslim. Applicants with names indicating they might be black Africans were half as likely to gain an interview as those with English names.

Investigators from BBC Radio Five Live sent off carefully-worded job applications using six fictitious names for 50 jobs.

These were sent to a variety of employers who had placed advertisements in newspapers and on recruitment websites.

The applications, submitted over a year, were written so as to ensure all the candidates appeared to have comparable qualifications and experience.

The jobs were in various parts of the country, as were the addresses given.

Researchers found that the white candidates - John Andrews and Jenny Hughes - were successful in getting interviews 23% of the time while the black African applicants - Abu Olasemi and Yinka Olatunde - had a 13% success rate. For Fatima Khan and Nasser Hanif, the Muslim candidates, the success rate was just 9%.

The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, called on the government to introduce new race regulation in the jobs market.

"Statistics as shocking as these suggest that many people recruiting for private-sector firms are harbouring inherently racist views," he said.

The research mirrored an exercise in the US last year where researchers from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found US managers seemed to discriminate on the basis of names.

Shahistra Zamir, 21, a law graduate, says the same phenomenon plagues Muslims here. "I have been applying for placements and I find, along with many other people I know, that we have to write a lot more applications than other people simply to get the same result."

In some respects, the research is dispiriting for all jobseekers. Of the 294 applications, 183 received no reply at all.

- Do ethnic minorities get a raw deal in the workplace? Today on BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Asian Network.

Source: The Guardian

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Bangladesh Says Peacekeeping Key to Diplomacy
By Anis Ahmed and Nizam Ahmed

Reuters - Wednesday July 28, 2004

DHAKA (Reuters) - Mohammad Ali Hasan, who retired as a brigadier general in the Bangladesh army, says the year he spent as a peacekeeper in strife-torn Sierra Leone was the best in a military career that spanned 35 years.

Hasan commanded more than 4,000 Bangladeshi troops that joined a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the African country for 12 months from December 2000.

"There I saw the difference between peace keeping and peace enforcement," Hasan told Reuters. "Peace keepers are loved by people on both sides of the conflict. The peace enforcers often work to achieve an ulterior motive."

Bangladesh, once described as an "international basket case" by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, is the world's biggest contributor of troops to United Nations peace missions.

Frequently associated in the public mind with disasters, strikes and natural catastrophes, it is now projecting a new role for itself on the international stage by dispatching its troops to wear the blue helmets of U.N. peacekeepers everywhere.

It has about 7,000 soldiers serving in seven countries, and defense officials say a total of about 50,000 Bangladeshi troopers have participated in U.N. missions since 1988.
"Peacekeeping is a part and parcel of Bangladesh's foreign policy," said Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan. "Bangladesh is ready to undertake any peacekeeping duty.

"We are also ready to go to Iraq wearing blue helmets under U.N. supervision," he added, but cautioned, "Bangladesh troops go to foreign countries only to maintain peace, not to shoot anybody or to get shot by any one."

SUCCESSFUL PEACEKEEPING

Retired peacekeeper Hasan said he learned valuable lessons during his stint in Sierra Leone.

"Successful peacekeeping needs understanding of the grievances of the people in conflict and trying to appease them. We could do it, so we were successful," Hasan said

"I came back in late 2001 with happy memories of the country, where we were able to strike a cease-fire and then establish peace between the government and rebels."

The peacekeepers were able to do this through steps to build confidence with the rebels, by training them in agriculture, sharing rations with them and distributing medicines, he added.

Peacekeeping is the cornerstone of Bangladesh's diplomacy, said Reaz Rahman, an adviser to the foreign ministry.

"Bangladesh was the main peacekeeping force in Mozambique," he told Reuters. "In Kuwait we did an excellent job in clearing mines and bombs. Look at Sierra Leone, where our soldiers stood their ground and earned the love of the people."

But success in peacekeeping operations has had its costs.

Bangladesh has lost 62 army officers and troops to accidents such as air crashes or disease during peace missions. About 70 more were wounded, say officials.

The latest Bangladeshi victim was Maj. Mohammad Shahjahan, killed in a helicopter crash along with 23 U.N. staff in Sierra Leone last month, though an air crash in Benin last December that killed 15 army officers was its most tragic loss so far.

Yet Bangladesh, which won independence from Pakistan after a bloody nine-month war in 1971, at a cost of millions of lives, remains undaunted and keen to participate in future U.N missions.

Army officials said the aim of the blue-helmet soldiers was to raise high the flag of Bangladesh. "The glorious role of our peacekeepers has helped erase the country's bad name and spruced up its image. Now we are a respected nation," Reaz Rahman said.

Every death of a peace keeper triggers profuse tributes at home and abroad, and the government promises life-long support for his dependents.

Recently thousands gathered to pay their respects when the coffin of Shahjahan, killed in the helicopter crash, was brought back to his home in Comilla district, south of Dhaka.

He had joined the peace mission only two weeks earlier.

"Bring they home the peacekeeper dead," chanted a village teacher, as the corpse arrived, draped in a U.N. flag.

Peacekeeping garners not only prestige but also money and affection from distant lands.

Bangladesh joined the U.N. peace missions in the late 1980s but its troops were only freed up in large contingents after it struck a peace deal in 1998 with rebels at home -- tribal insurgents in the southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts.

(Additional reporting by Masud Karim)

Source: Reuters

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Why Bangladesh floods are so bad

By Tracey Logan
BBC Science Unit

There seems to be no end in sight to the misery of around 30 million Bangladeshis affected by flooding.

Part of the answer is due to the fact that Bangladesh receives enormous amounts of water from four major rivers.

The Padma - more widely known as the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Jamuna and the Meghna.

Himalayan snows

All are filled up from melting snow in the Himalayas.

While the monsoon season always brings flooding in Bangladesh, devastation on the current scale is less frequent.

Recently it has been happening on a 10-year cycle. The last major floods were in 1998 and 1988. But this year the floods have arrived three years early. Deforestation may be partly to blame, causing soil erosion which reduces the ability of the land to absorb water. Irrigation for farming is a factor, because this causes river channels to silt up, reducing their capacity to hold flood waters.

According to some experts, irrigation interferes with river drainage into the sea.

Climate experts also believe global warming is partly to blame, by increasing monsoon rainfall and speeding up the melting of Himalayan snows.

'Quicker rehabilitation'

But Barbu Alam, a researcher at the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, says that the country's poverty also hampers its ability to cope with floods.

He argues that its weak economy, and low levels of technology and infrastructure combine to make matters worse.

And after the deluge, more funds would mean quicker rehabilitation for those affected.

But more strategic planning ahead of time and better information sharing with Bangladesh's neighbours is also required, he says, so that the country does not continue to be caught unawares.

Source: bbc.co.uk

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Gulzar: The Bengali connection
Pallab Bhattacharya, New Delhi

Why not? After all, 68-year-old Gulzar, whose real name is Sampooran Singh, spent his formative years as a school and college student reading the translations of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Jibananda Das and Subhash Mukhopadhyay. The writings of the Bangla literary stalwarts left an indelible mark on the young and evolving mind and sensitivity of Gulzar, born in an area now in Pakistan, whose fondness for Bengali literature also inspired him to learn the language. The poet in Gulzar blossomed and his first collection of poems in Urdu came out in 1962.

When Gulzar began his film career in the 1960s, he was again in the company of eminent Bangalis in the cinema world. He began as an assistant to renowned director Bimal Roy and later worked with legends like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay and Kishore Kumar. Gulzar's association with them contributed to his achievements later.

Gulzar's career as a film director in 1969 too began with Mere Apne (starring Meena Kumari, Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha), the Hindi re-make of Bengali feature film Aapanjan by Tapan Sinha.

Gulzar's career as a lyricist also started with Bimal Roy's famous movie Bandini in 1963 and who can forget the song he had penned Mora Goraa Ang Layee Le.

Left to himself, Gulzar says he would love to make movies based on the writings of Tagore. 'Tagore fascinates me. It will be a real challenge for me to reproduce his works on the screen,' said Gulzar. The film director was in Delhi last week to announce state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan's decision to show films directed by him based on the novels and short stories by leading Hindi writer Munshi Premchand.

'In fact, I had told Prasar Bharati (which controls Doordarshan) CEO K S Sharma that I wanted to work on Tagore's works but he laughingly dismissed it saying I should leave Tagore for some Bengali film-maker,' Gulzar told reporters here.

To this, Gulzar replied by saying that it would be interesting to seek how a non-Bengali interprets Tagore's works.

It has been quite some years that film buffs have not had a film from Gulzar. His previous two films were national award-winning Maachis adjudged the best feature film in 1996 and Hu Tu Tu. So when Doordarshan announced that Gulzar would be recreating Premchand's works on the small screen, it could not but be happy news for lovers of literature as well as good cinema alike. Gulzar's association with cinema has earned him national awards seven times, including best director for Mausam (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Sharmila Tagore in double role) in 1976, best screenplay for Kowshish (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri) in 1972, best lyricist for Ijajat in 1988 and Lekin in 1991.

Source: thedailystar.net