Bangladesh updates (July 3, 2010)

Three posts:
1) De javu time...

War crimes trial: Dhaka fears ‘undue pressure’

Dhaka, July 2: The Bangladesh government fears ‘undue pressure’ from Middle East countries, including a risk to jobs of millions of its citizens working there, as it prepares to try Islamists accused of ‘war crimes’ during the 1971 freedom movement, says a report. “A number of middle and top-ranking leaders said the government made the move (on holding the trial) on assurance from influential countries in the West that they would tackle any backlash from Middle East countries against the arrests of Jamaat leaders,” The Daily Star said on Friday.

The trial process began after ‘influential countries of the West’ assured Dhaka that they would ‘tackle’ any such pressures, the newspaper said, quoting sources in the ruling Awami League. The government arrested three top officials of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) earlier this week following a court order on a charge that they had ‘hurt sentiments of Muslims’ at a rally in March. Their custody is being utilised to question them about their alleged role as leaders of youth wings of Islamist parties that targeted unarmed civilians in the run up to the freedom movement, the media report said. These Islamists picked on intellectuals and killed thousands from out of three million who perished in 1971.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government and Awami League officials deny that detention of the Islamist leaders in specific cases is being utilised to start the ‘war crimes’ trial. But the newspaper quoted unnamed middle-level party officials to say that the Jamaat chief Matiur Rahman Nizami and Secretary General Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojahid among others were trying to ‘sabotage’ the war crimes trial and had to be apprehended.

2) It is remarkable to see BD's nuke aspirations grow stage by stage...

Russian experts visit Rooppur plant site

An eight-member Russian expert team visited the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant in the district Thursday. Earlier at a meeting of the Ministry of Science and ICT on Wednesday, the technical support team discussed issues related to installing nuclear reactors for the Rooppur power plant, sources said.

During the visit, the experts also talked about hydrological and environmental condition of the plant site. "The Russian experts visited and studied the entire location and observed it. They were seemingly very positive about the whole issue," a high official of Atomic Energy Commission said, seeking anonymity.

3) Trade, transit time... It is good to see Manik Sarkar and P.A.Sangma run from pillar to post and make things work. But we also know that there are impending elections, and the change of ruling party can spell a big spoke in the works on infra-building in either state. Besides, as we know with the Kaladan road-waterway link building, things move at a glacial pace in India, unless of course INC's h&d is at stake, as in the case of Delhi Asiad 82 or the recent rendition of that, the Commonwealth Games 2010. That said, a post on the economics (or should I say, the lack of economic sense) in hosting big-game events is overdue. Sometime soon.

Transit, Access to Chittagong Port --- India takes mega projects

India has taken up several mega projects to develop its rail and road infrastructure for access to Chittagong Port and transit and transhipment through Bangladesh to remotest northeastern region. Although India has begun its infrastructure building, Bangladesh is still waiting for Indian financial support to develop roads and railways inside its territory to facilitate the connectivity. Bangladesh has agreed to have land, air and waterways connectivity with South Asian countries, especially to allow India, Nepal and Bhutan to use the Chittagong and Mongla ports.

Similarly, India has agreed that Rohanpur-Singabad broad gauge railway link would be available to Bangladesh for transit to Nepal. Bangladesh has already expressed its will to convert Radhikapur-Birol railway into broad gauge and requested for railway transit link to Bhutan as well. The shipping ministry sources say the government is upgrading the Chittagong port so that it can take extra load and handle cargos from the neighbours. The authorities are hopeful about completion of the upgradation within two years.

According to reports available with the Bangladesh government, the Indian Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure has recently approved implementation of four-lane 78-kilometre Krishnanagar-Baharampore road in West Bengal at a cost of Rs 702 crore. This is an important highway for northsouth road link in the State of West Bengal as it passes through the state longitudinally and connects the northeastern states and neighbouring countries such as Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, according to a recent statement of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highway of India.

The Indian government has also decided to construct a bridge over the Feni river in south Tripura to get access to the Chittagong port and upgrade the connecting two-lane national highway into a four-lane one. The proposed bridge would connect Sabroom town with Ramgarh in southeastern Bangladesh. For this, the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has approved a proposal of the state government for conversion of the Agartala-Sabroom national highway into four-lane one.

India will also invest Rs 16.66 billion to develop highways in Tripura and Mizoram to improve connectivity of the landlocked northeastern states with Bangladesh and Myanmar. The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) of India has also given clearance for four lanes of the National Highway from Shillong up to Tripura's southern most border town of Sabroom. India will also extend its railway network to two more places along the India-Bangladesh border by 2014 to improve connectivity between the two countries.

The two border points are Sabroom and Akhaurah in western Tripura, just six kilometres from the Agartala railway station. Bangladesh operates train services on its side up to Akhaurah. Train services resumed in April 2008 between Kolkata and Dhaka. The service was suspended after the 1965 war between India and Pakistan when Bangladesh was Pakistan's eastern wing. It is expected that by 2014, the ongoing work of railway connection up to bordering town Sabroom would be completed.

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar has recently said the railway is also extending tracks up to Sabroom, making it very easy for connectivity with the Chittagong port. "After development of the national highways and extension of railway tracks, Tripura and the entire northeast would be linked with Southeast Asia," Sarkar said. According to the joint communiqué issued in New Delhi on January 12 during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's visit, Bangladesh is supposed to get financial support from India for its infrastructure development, said Communications Secretary Mozammel Haq.

He said this when asked about Bangladesh's preparations to build its infrastructure for connectivity with India. "Once we get the assistance, we will start development of our rail, road and shipping infrastructure," he added. Finance ministry sources say officials of both the countries are working to finalise the modality of Indian line of credit of $1 billion to Bangladesh for a range of infrastructure projects, including setting up or upgrading railways.

Bangladesh (June 30 2010)

Jamaat stalwarts land in jail
http://bdnews24.com/details.php?cid=3&id=166329&hb=3
Comments: What a big news from Dhaka. Sheikh Hasina government is going hammer and tongs on the J-e-I for orchestrating much of the violence in BD during the misrule with BNP. I would nt be too far if I held the failed assassination attempt on SHW as the final nail in the coffin of the J-e-I. For thirty-plus years, folks in J-e-I had learned to live with the 1971 aftermath and if all of a sudden, SHW is going nuts on J-e-I today, J-e-I has noone else to blame but themselves. As the pithy saying goes: don't go after the snake unless you are willing to get the job done.

For those new to this saga (few, I guess), J-e-I honcho Golam Azam was well-documented to have goaded his men (the razakars, the al badrs, the al shams, etc.) to murder Bengali intellectuals (a significant fraction of them being Hindu) during the 1971 war, rape and maim children and women in hundreds of thousands. Folks such as Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury (who is now a member of the BNP!) and his father and many many others have taken a gleeful part in this genocide with no other parallels, the other side of World War II. Many of these slalwarts were motivated by the ideas of Maulana Bhasani and his war-cry for a greater Bangassam (Bengal + Assam with a Muslim majority of course).

To nail J-e-I ameer (chief) Motiur Rahman Nizami, secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammed Mujahid and nayeb-e-ameer (vice president) Delwar Hossein Sayedee in some unrelated charge of hurting the sentiments of Muslims must still require some balls. Kudos to SHW's government. There are still many floating around such as senior nayeb-e-ameer Abul Kalam Muhammad Yusuf, Muhammed Rafiqul Islam Khan, AHM Hamidur Rahman Azad, Mohammad Iqbal, etc. Here is the official charge:
[quote]
The three were present at a meeting on March 17 when Dhaka city JeI Ameer Rafiqul Islam Khan compared Nizami’s perceived persecution by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government with sufferings of Prophet Muhammad. This had hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims, as per a complaint lodged with the police by Syed Rejaul Haque Chandpuri, secretary general of the Bangladesh Tarikat Federation. Bangladesh, an Islamic Republic, has an overwhelming Muslim majority population. Nizami and Mojaheed, both ministers in the government of Begum Khaleda Zia (2001-06) are also on the list of “war criminals” — those who targeted unarmed civilians in the run-up to the 1971 freedom movement.
[/quote]
Sweet comeuppance, if you ask me!

The other giant tasks of the SHW government are:
a) to bring back the killers and conspirators in the Sheikh Mujib assassination case. Easier said than done. Recall that five of them have been hanged on Jan 28, 2010: Syed Farooq Rahman, Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, Bazlul Huda, AKM Mohiuddin Ahmed, and Mohiuddin Ahmed.
http://www.executedtoday.com/2010/01/28/2010-five-for-the-assassination-of-sheikh-mujibur-rahman/
One, Abdul Aziz Pasha, died in Zimbabwe in 2001. There are six of them on the run outside Bangladesh: Khandaker Abdur Rashid, Shariful Haque Dalim, Noor Chowdhury, Rashed Chowdhury, Abdul Mazed, and Moslehuddin Khan. Of these,
1) Noor Chowdhury is believed to be in the US
2) Shariful Haque Dalim is in Canada
3) Faruk’s brother-in-law Khandaker Abdur Rashid is in Pakistan
4) M.A. Rashed Chowdhury is in South Africa
5) Mosleuddin is in Thailand and
6) Abdul Mazed is in Kenya.

b) complete the Pilkhana massacre case and punish the guilty cadres of BDR. The study of this will follow at a later time.
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Two other developments are happening in Bangladesh side-by-side without many in India noticing it. Both are in some sense related. One has to do with the visceral fear of Burma. The Bangladesh government has often exhibited a perennial fear of Burma, even though Burma is only 1/4th the population of Bangladesh (Burma pop \approx 42m, BD pop \approx 160m). My feeling is that a proportionate fear is not exhibited against India (even though India is 8 times the size of BD). One could say: there is only so much that the Bangladeshis can be paranoidal about India, and it caps after a certain point. But then the real reason may lie elsewhere. Burma is equally (if not more) brutal than the civilian as well as military regimes in Bangladesh. This despite Burma being a so-called Buddhist nation. Gen. Ne Win and after that, Gen. Than Shwe have ensured that the Christian minorities in the Shan and Karen provinces have bowed down to the ethnic Burman community. With due measure, the Karen and Shan rebels have not only fostered insurgencies in Nagaland with their fellow Christian Naga brothers (NSCN-K and NSCN-IM have long taken refuge in Burma using the porous Arunachal border districts of Tirap and Changlang, as well as Nagaland border districts), but also acted as pawns in the hands of western interests. The Burmese generals have gone hammer and tongs and the Bangladeshi government fears them, somuchso when the Na Sa Kha (the Burmese border guards) went fishing (pun intended) in the uncalibrated Burma-Bangladesh maritime border, there was such a giant whinefest in Bangladeshi media.

Now, the Burmese are running after nuclear power. And the Bangladeshis truly fear such an eventuality. In fact, read this editorial in the daily star:
Myanmar and nuclear weapons
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=144658
Now, from an Indian viewpoint, Burma going nuclear should make one ponder. Is it in India's best interests? As articulated by the diplomats, it is a clear no. We in India do not want to handle yet another nuclear power in our neighborhood. We already have enough idiocy vis-a-vis pakistan and china. The other giant neighbor of Burma is china. Is it in china's best interests to allow Burma to go nuclear? Only if the Burmese would always be subservient to the chinese in future strategic considerations. But what if the chinese wanted to open a second axis on India and contain India within the subcontinent by making Bangladesh go nuclear in response to Burma going nuclear. The fall of the dominoes will eventually help china, that could well be the calculation. But the Burmese, despite the silence against the chinese, are not afraid of the chinese completely as the Kokang incident showed. The Burmese are diligently buying and using china and will one day bite back against china, when push comes to shove. What if the Burmese going nuclear will make the Thais fear their future and push them closer towards their fellow brothers in Yunnan, the Dai peoples? And what if that makes Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia go nuclear because each one fears the other. In short, all these possibilities are not too far-fetched. But, as we well know, the chinese are more afraid of the U.S. than they are of the consequences of any nuclear proliferation mission. The big game plan of the chinese could well be to make the whole region go down in flames just to ensure that once the dust settles, the U.S. would be out of South China sea and they will lord and master the naval flotillas in that region. What is abundantly clear is that, we are sitting on a keg of nuclear warfare, with de javu all over again written in crisp and clear red ink (pun intended).

The other issue is the hiring of a company by the Government of Bangladesh to fight its maritime boundary case at the UNCLOS mission. There have been many recent reports in the daily star on this:
1) Maritime Disputes with Myanmar --- Dhaka sends documents to int'l court to end disputes
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=144904
2) Bangladesh goes to court
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=144390&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
3) India, China plot Bangladesh woe
http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=144421
4) Bangladesh sea boundary examined through UNCLOS III
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=113923

My take on this matter will be at a later time.

PS:
Some other reports that found my fancy today
1) Maldives government resigns!!
2) Nepal PM resigns!! {Is someone plotting for mayhem in "South Asia?" Can feed many conspiracy theorists with these coincidences}
3) J&K burns, courtesy the L-e-T
4) On the mayhem front, something close to home, but then this was always inevitable. Told you so. Wait for more mayhem.
India's mobile market nightmare
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=144826