Surveillance vs. democracy in Sweden. Nerikes Allehanda.

[Stater som overvakar: PDF in Swedish.]

[English: The Local.]

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“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin.

At a personal level, it remains an irony of fate that exactly one year after I was granted political asylum in Sweden, the Riksdag has passed the draconian surveillance law, on June 18 [2008]. I was awarded the asylum along with my wife and my son, on June 18, 2007.

I am sure, people who have fled from police states around the globe and found refuge in Sweden will understand my emotions. Those 143 Riksdag members who have voted in favor of the bill, will never understand. Till date, Swedes do not have to watch their back while walking the streets, or invent a code-language for talking to their wives over telephone, or use cryptic sentences in their emails. Unlike them, I have suffered the pain of surveillance, at its worst.

Back in Bangladesh, my home country, I was under constant surveillance for months: I was being followed by operators, my phones were taped and my office computer was bugged. That surveillance was followed by my detention and torture at the hands of the Bangladeshi military intelligence agency, on May 11, 2007. I was arrested from my home after midnight, blindfolded and taken to a torture chamber inside Dhaka cantonment where my captors tortured and interrogated me for 22 hours.

One of the most unnerving aspects of those interrogation session was involving me sitting on a torture-bench, blindfolded, while someone described very private details of my life to me: how many cigarettes I smoked a day, how much I suffered from bronchial asthma, what were the places I have been to in the last 3-4 years, whom did I met. As if I was sitting naked in a room full of strangers.

Then, a few days after I was released, my private emails started appearing in pro-military newspapers, since they were trying to prove that I was plotting to overthrow the government. To realize how a state-agency can gather so much private information about an individual, just by keeping him under surveillance, remains an utter shock.

Now, for me, after what I have been through, it is pathetic to see that Sweden has just joined the surveillance club. The country that gave me refuge, promised me dignity and security is now set to cross the line and spy on its own population. One Turkish journalist, now a political refugee in Sweden, summed up this development, “I feel violated, as if someone has broken a promise. What we hold so dear, sacred freedoms, are now being taken away. That is so painful to watch.” No, we never wanted to see this country become a surveillance state.

What then is the difference between Sweden and China, may I ask? Well, the answer may be that Sweden is a democracy, unlike China. That brings us to a more serious issue: shameless trampling of public opinion. It is a fact that every major newspaper condemned the bill, urged politicians to vote against it while a large number of activist groups came out on the streets to protest. As far as I could gather from my conversations with people, every single person opposed it.

If the governments of China, Zimbabwe or North Korea ignored such level of public opposition, I would have understood. The Riksdag is not the polit bureau of an authoritarian communist party that can pass such a black law, blatantly ignoring opposition from the public. By voting in favor of the bill, Riksdag members have not only sold out essential public liberty, but also betrayed the basic tenets of a democratic state.

If a state-agency turns its guns, cameras and radars at its own people, that is a disaster. If a democratically elected parliament empowers the agency to carry out mass-surveillance, that is a greater disaster.

Globalization of torture. Nerikes Allehanda.

[Tortyr genom ombud: PDF in Swedish.]

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I love reading Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a master story-teller. Thanks to his classic novels, The Metamorphosis and The Trial, “Kafkaesque” is now a synonym for senseless, disorienting and bizarre storylines with menacing complexity. Take The Trial, where Kafka writes about Josef K, who wakes up one morning, gets arrested, then prosecuted for an unspecified crime. Now, the real-life developments in an Italian court would easily have failed even Franz Kafka’s imagination, I bet.

In 2003, Abu Omar,¹ an Egyptian political refugee in Milan, was abducted by the CIA. He was secretly flown out of Italy to Egypt as a suspected terrorist. Readers of Nerikes Allehanda surely remember a similar case involving two Egyptian asylumseekers in Sweden. In 2001, abiding by a CIA request, Swedish authorities secretly deported Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery² to Egypt where both men were reportedly tortured. In 2004, Agiza was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a military court for his connections with Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda. al-Zery was released from prison in 2003.

Italian prosecutors have now opened a trial into the Abu Omar case. 25 CIA agents, one US Air Force colonel and at least six senior officials of the Italian secret service have been indicted for approving, masterminding and carrying out the kidnapping plan. The US government has said it will not extradite the American suspects.

On May 14 [2008], Ghali Nabila, Abu Omar’s wife, appeared before the court to describe how her husband was kidnapped and sent to Egypt, his torture and imprisonment. According to a report in the International Herald Tribune: Nabila described her shock at seeing Abu Omar in Alexandria, Egypt, during one brief respite from Egyptian prison in October 2004.

“I found him wasted, skinny — so skinny his hair had turned white, he had a hearing aid,” she said. Nabila at first rebuffed prosecutors’ requests to describe the torture her husband had recounted, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. Advised by prosecutors that she had no choice, she tearfully proceeded, “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beaten up, especially around his ears. He was subject to electroshocks to many body parts.” “To his genitals?” the prosecutors asked. “Yes,” she replied.³

Extraordinary rendition — the practice of transporting suspected terrorists or other individuals to third countries for interrogation and imprisonment — is practically an euphemism for torture by proxy. Omar, Agiza or al-Zery, all victims of this bizarre torture game, could have become characters in Franz Kafka’s nightmares.

And if Kafka wrote a novel today, it could have been the latest Human Rights Watch report: “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan,” a 36-page investigation that documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) secretly detained, interrogated, and tortured at least 14 non-Jordanians on behalf of the CIA from 2001 until 2004. Many of these individuals later landed in the prison cells of Guantanamo.⁴

Joanne Mariner, author of the report, tells me, “President George W Bush declared a global war on terror… and the CIA is a truly global player. This truly is an international phenomenon: individuals from about 40 different countries have been detained and flown to a whole lot of other countries…”

With Kafka dead years back, what we now have is the globalization of torture. In a globalized world, even torture do not have any national boundaries. In a Kafkaesque world divided between terrorists and torturers, since fact has undoubtedly become stranger than the fiction, a report in International Herald Tribune or an investigation by Human Rights Watch can now easily substitute a bizarre novel.

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hassan_mustafa_osama_nasr
2. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ahmed_agiza_and_muhammad_al-zery
3. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/14/europe/italy.php
4. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/jordan0408

Peacemaking lessons for Carl Bildt. Nerikes Allehanda.

[Forhandla med terrorister: PDF in Swedish.]

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Peacemaking is not a peaceful business. When Sweden hosts the international Iraq conference on May 29, this will definitely bug Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister. During a recent press briefing, Bildt was asked whether representation for Iraqi opposition movements would be present at the conference. His answer: “Al-Qaeda will not be invited.” Well, no one is asking Osama bin-Laden to attend the meetings, with his beard combed. But, apparently Bildt has missed a crucial point here: peace will be a far cry in Iraq without negotiations with the Shia and Sunni militant groups active in the conflict, especially the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. It is high time, these groups are invited to the table.

If we look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the peace process in now in a coma, thanks to a counterproductive US-Israeli policy of isolating Hamas and Syria. Hamas is undoubtedly a terrorist organization and Syria a rouge state. However, Hamas is also the most popular political party in Palestine while Syria remains a key player in the game.

Former US president Jimmy Carter is evidently rowing his boat in hostile waters, trying to underline this fact. In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, he writes: “Hamas had been declared a terrorist organization by the US and Israel, and the elected Palestinian government was forced to dissolve… Opinion polls show Hamas steadily gaining popularity. Since there can be no peace with Palestinians divided, we at the Carter Center believed it important to explore conditions allowing Hamas to be brought peacefully back into the discussions… Similarly, Israel cannot gain peace with Syria unless the Golan Heights dispute is resolved. Here again, US policy is to ostracize the Syrian government and prevent bilateral peace talks…”¹

Indeed, the path to peace lies in negotiation, not in isolation.

In Nepal, after a decade of civil-war that saw at least 13,000 dead, the Maoists — a terrorist organization as designated by the US and many other world governments — entered a peace process. The organization that is responsible for numberless massacres and adheres to a murderous ideology, has now surprisingly won the recent constituent assembly elections.

Now, unlike Iraq or Palestine, the US (and other international actors) is ready to do business with terrorists — the Maoists — and has offered assistance to “stability and democracy [in Nepal].” And unlike Israel, India — the US ally in South Asia — is also ready to give peace a chance despite its troublesome relationship with the Maoists.

Is Nepal an example that can benefit the Middle East peace process? When I ask David Pottie, Associate Director of Democracy Program at the Carter Center, he writes, “… a peace process can only succeed when all sides to a conflict are committed to dialog. The Maoists have demonstrated their commitment to multi-party elections and the overall peace process and the other parties to the conflict have signaled their willingness to work with them. Although Nepal’s peace process is ongoing and there remain many serious unresolved issues, there may be important examples for the Middle East.”

Despite their poor human rights record and terror campaigns, “by voting for the Maoists, the Nepali people have voted for peace and change more than they have voted for the ideology,” says Kanak Mani Dixit, Editor of Kathmandu-based Himal magazine.

Rhoderick Chalmers, of the International Crisis Group, believes that the Nepali peace process is ongoing, “It remains to be seen: how a government is formed, how the Maoists go forward with their plan to bring federalism to Nepal, how they carry out land-reforms they promised, and how security-sector reforms take place.”

Chalmers notes the point that the international community plays a major role in the Nepali peace process, even though it has to deal with the Maoists. One reason why unlike Iraq or Palestine, peace is dawning on Nepal.

Sometimes, seating with terrorists at the same table does pay off.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/opinion/28carter.html

Surviving torture in Bangladesh. International Herald Tribune.

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My wife says I talk too much and invite trouble. On May 11, 2007, her observation was confirmed: I “invited” trouble by talking too much against the military-backed interim government in Bangladesh.

With a midnight ring of my doorbell, three or four plainclothes men — who identified themselves as the “joint forces” — entered my Dhaka apartment, detained me without charge, and seized my passport, cell phones, computers and documents. I was threatened at gun-point while my wife, holding my six-month-old son, watched. I was pushed into a car, blindfolded and handcuffed.

Four months earlier, in January, the Bangladesh military had installed a puppet technocrat government through a bloodless coup and declared a “state of emergency.” The junta’s emergency rules suspended parts of the Constitution, made any criticism of the government or the military a punishable offense, put a blanket ban on political activity, and sharply curtailed press freedom.

The military intervention brought an end to gruesome street-battles between two feuding political camps led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, and at first many Bangladeshis welcomed the de facto coup.

But skyrocketing prices, a devastated economy and rampant human rights abuses have changed their minds. Over the past year, the military has set up torture and detention facilities across the country and targeted political parties with an “anti-corruption” witch hunt that saw the arrests of more than 400,000 people, including two former prime ministers who lead the two biggest political parties.

The military intelligence agency, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, or DGFI, which remains the driving force behind the de facto military rule, led a campaign to establish control over civil and political affairs, carrying out overt and covert operations against opposition parties and members of the media.

After my arrest, I was taken to a torture facility set up by the directorate inside its Dhaka headquarters. Thus began my 22-hour ride on the torture train, as my captors — high- and mid-level DGFI officers — tortured me, interrogated me and forced me to sign false confessions. I was questioned at length about my work as an editor for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper, as a news representative for CNN in Bangladesh, and as a consultant researcher for Human Rights Watch.

In all these jobs, I obviously talked too much. As a journalist, I reported and commented on extra-judicial executions and torture by the Rapid Action Battalion, a paramilitary force; persecution of Ahmadiya Muslims (a heterodox sect of Islam) by extremist-Islamist groups with the active patronage of intelligence agencies; military repression in the region known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts in southeaster Bangladesh; and, perhaps most dangerous, sponsorship and patronage of Jihadist outfits by the DGFI and the National Security Intelligence agency. As a consultant for Human Rights Watch, I documented Bangladesh military involvement in extra-judicial executions and torture, systematic curtailment of press freedom, and rampant human rights violations carried out by the security forces under the “state of emergency.”

So I became a target for a junta that considered itself above criticism, even above the law. The military labeled me an “enemy of the state.” In the torture chamber, five or six DGFI officers took part in nightmarish torture sessions, using batons, boots and fists to inflict serious injuries on me. I saw sophisticated torture equipment. When I was moved out of a soundproof torture chamber, I could hear other detainees, locked inside cells, screaming and moaning in pain. I was forced to record false confessional statements on paper and video, admitting to imaginary terrorist, treasonous acts, and implicating my friends, associates and colleagues. Only when I fell sick from the torture were my blindfold and handcuffs taken off — briefly. I was constantly humiliated, exposed to obscene verbal abuse and racial slurs. My captors kept threatening me with extra-judicial execution.

News of my arrest sparked an outcry. I was fortunate that CNN, The Daily Star and Human Rights Watch stood by me and worked to secure my freedom. A network of bloggers and activists engineered a global campaign demanding my release. Foreign governments lobbied the Bangladeshi authorities. Within 24 hours of my detention, in an unprecedented move, the DGFI set me free. I went into hiding with my family. Eventually, we were allowed to fly out of the country and found a refuge in Sweden, where the authorities offered us political asylum.

I was not the first or last person marched into a torture chamber in Bangladesh. But I have the opportunity to detail my survival, while hundreds, if not thousands of stories relating to inhuman torture and Kafkaesque detentions in Bangladesh remain untold.

I am tempted to remind foreign governments that the abuses happening in Bangladesh in the name of “reform” and “anti-corruption” are possible thanks to their complicity and complacence. The support of donors like the United States and Britain, eager to address political paralysis and corruption but naïve about our history with military governments, has been crucial in providing legitimacy to an illegal, unconstitutional arrangement. Supporting a monster to kill a demon might work for computer gamers, but in politics and diplomacy it is usually disastrous.

It is time for Bangladesh’s friends in the United States, Britain, and European Union to support our struggle for democracy and pressure the military to end its “state of emergency” and declare an early date for free and fair elections. Military torture centers should be shut down and extra-judicial executions ended. And every perpetrator of human rights violations should be prosecuted and punished. No one else should experience what I went through.

Arnold Zeitlin on the undeclared martial law in Bangladesh.

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In Bangladesh, amid the mindless ado about Professor Yunus and his new adventures and the interim government’s angelic mission aimed at rooting out corruption, the least reported aspect of the story is of the martial law that in now calling the shots from the Dhaka cantonment. As usual you are not going to read anything substantial on this in Dhaka newspapers, people are too busy hyping up Professor Y and the so-called “cleansing” drive ongoing.

Arnold Zeitlin — Visiting Professor, Department of Journalism, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies — recently circulated an email detailing his recent visit to Dhaka, that summarizes and analyzes a lot for many of the uninitiated in the Bangladesh story. Republished in a slightly edited form, with permission from the author.

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I am in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for four days to attend the wedding festivities of Maneeza Hossain, the daughter of my long-time Bengali friend, Anwar Hossain Manju, owner of one of the largest Begali-language daily newspapers in the country and a former minister and parliament member for more than 20 years. I came not only because of the wedding, as happy an occasion as it has been, but the occasion presented an opportunity to see many friends in a short time and get an idea of what is going on in the country.

As usual, Bangladesh is in a parlous, if somewhat indifferent state, as the result of an odd, behind-the-scenes martial law coup imposed when the country’s caretaker president declared a state of emergency after a political deadlock prevented national parliamentary elections in January.

The top figure in the country is a civilian known as the chief advisor to the reconstituted caretaker government, also described as the interim government. Behind closed doors, according to common knowledge, sits the army commander in chief. To many, how this arrangement works is a mystery.

“We do not know who is calling the shots,” one of my friends, a senior minister in Khaleda’s government who has held high posts in other regimes, told me at breakfast. I was astonished. If he does not know, who does?

I was told that under the commander in chief, who apparently occupies no position in this quirky, mirky martial law regime, sit five brigadiers making decisions. No, someone else told me, it was the colonels, without whose commands the troops in the field would not move. “It is the majors,” a third party insisted.

Whoever is making the decisions; it was the army who called Bangladesh’s United Nations representative back to sit in the caretaker government as advisor on foreign affairs. A retired foreign secretary told me that.

When the New Age daily newspaper printed a story about military phone taps that military did not like, the army called the reporter who signed the story and ordered him to report to military headquarters. When the reporter told his editor, Nurul Kabir, Kabir ordered him not to go.

When an army major called Kabir and ordered him to appear with the reporter, Kabir countered with an invitation for the major to stop around the New Age office any time for a chat.

Then a colonel ordered Kabir and reporter to appear. Kabir was reminded that since the state of emergency had withdrawn constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights, he could be arrested and brought (presumably in chains) to headquarters. Kabir said he responded with the same invitation to the colonel.

The colonel then explained politely that he had some things to show Kabir and bringing them to his office would be awkward. So, Kabir went, withstood two hours of lecturing, then returned to his office and banged out a half-page article headlined “…the right to say no,” which in the time honored tradition of Bengali intellectuals he started with a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche:

I understand by “freedom of spirit” something quite definite — the unconditional will to say NO, where it is dangerous to say NO.

Kabir still sits in his office untouched but knowing without doubt the army calls the shots and this subterranean martial law acts softly, the big stick so far unwielded. He and many others wonder why the need to scrub fundamental rights. As he stated in his article:

Questionable is the proposition that suppressing the fundamental rights of millions of people is the prerequisite to the streamlining of the corruption-ridden politics, anti-people bureaucracy, anarchic economy and obscurantist education, etc… but the rulers, particularly those who are not the product of a sound process of democratic polity [A reference to the military, of course: My insertion] always love to believe that they can do without the consent of the people…

In the manner of military regimes that take office by force, the interim or caretaker government has been aloof. Although it is committed to creating election reform, it so far has not consulted the public or with the major political parties. Partly as a result, the two political parties have started at a low level to talk to each other, although Khaleda Zia, leader of the BNP, the last prime minister, and Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League, prime minister before Khaleda, hate each other, an affair that has deadlocked Bangladesh politics for 16 years. They last agreed to 1991 when they joined forces in the streets to oust the military ruler, General Ershad, in a people’s power uprising.

At any rate, some Bangladeshis insist the new united nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon gave his assent to the military role because the military came to him beforehand. The Bangladeshi army enjoys a profitable status as a supplier of peacekeeping troops, up to 13,000 forces, to the United Nations. Its leaders felt their status would be damaged and profits lost if it openly declared a military coup.

As one politician from the opposition Awami League political party explained to me, common soldiers get a bonus equivalent to $100-$200 after three years service as a peacekeeper. Officers get up to $400. Officers are carefully rotated so as many as possible get a shot at the money. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the figures.

Issues such as an electoral roll that evidently had millions of false or outdated names led to the election deadlock. The Awami League charged that in handing over the government to a caretaker before the election — as mandated by the constitution as a measure to rule out favoritism by the government in power — the ruling Bangladesh National Party (BNP) made sure the caretaker president and the election commission agents in the field were its pocket. The Awami League eventually put up candidates, although it felt the system guaranteed it would lose a rigged vote. It then withdrew from the campaign in the absence of reform.

A key figure in the BNP government insisted that election lists, election commissions and field agents do not decide an election. The voters decided, he said. He pointed out the BNP held power in the 1996 election, and the Awami League won. In 2001, the AL held power when it handed over to the caretaker, and the BNP won. I remember covering the 1991 election won for the first time by the BNP. Sheikh Hasina was stunned that she could lose and insisted fraud won for the BNP.

Elections in Bangladesh often are circuses of vote buying and candidate and voter intimidation by party goons who occasionally kill. They also, said my friend, are festive times. “Bangladeshis love elections,” he said.

The task of compiling a legitimate, updated election list is a major priority that seems easily achievable for the interim government. On the proclaiming of the emergency, the caretaker also took on the issue of corruption, which is widespread in Bangladesh. Usually ignoring the corrupt nature of American politics, the sheer volume of which involves more money than everywhere in the world combined, Transparency International, a Berlin-based organization the news media loves to quote, has proclaimed Bangladesh number one on its list of corrupt states.

The government has frozen bank accounts, threatened to withdraw passports to prevent tax evaders from fleeing the country and generally made a lot of people uncomfortable. The daily newspapers are filled with accounts of this or that politician or businessman being raided or having an SUV (always described as “luxurious”) seized. One politician was charged with having a false license plate on his vehicle, another keeping in his home sheets of roofing tin to be used for relief operations, hardly the kind of corruption that has siphoned millions if not billions from the public.

The corruption search benefits from the suppression of fundamental rights (searches are warrant-less, arrests and seizures of property are arbitrary) and has been popular. It seems also to delay the effort to produce a fairer election scenario with new voter lists, perhaps ID cards for voters, more careful regulation of party agents, etc. Parties and many others are growing restive about the government not declaring a new date for election.

The corruption search so far has been small time, although a few big political names have been involved, including Saifur Rahman, a former finance minister who has been active internationally on Bangladesh’s behalf, Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, a powerful, well connected but disliked by many, advisor to the last prime minister, Khaleda, and her political secretary, Haris Chowdhury (no relation; half the Bangladesh population is named Chowdhury). The last two have been arrested.

I once had dinner with Haris, who came to my friend Manju’s house, with his chum, Tarique Rahman, the son of Khaleda, a figure who held no public office but was the prince-ling, the most powerful person in the BNP next to his mother. He has been laying low. Many are waiting for his arrest, partly as evidence of the creditability of the caretaker’s intentions to root out corruption.

The arrest of Tarique would bolster the popularity of the caretaker and perhaps mask the impatience for setting a new election date. In fact, circling tantalizingly around the entire issue is the position of Khaleda and, to a lesser extent, Hasina. People speak openly of getting them both out of the country. Getting the proof of corruption on these figures, as well as anyone else caught in the net, would be difficult to show convincingly in court. That is a circumstance that could undermine the caretaker’s efforts to root out corruption in a society that has been corrupt from independence in 1972.

When I showed one of my friends in BNP a story full of anonymous sources and musings in the local English The Daily Star about senior BNP leaders split with Khaleda over their advice that she own up to mistakes and clean up the party, he said it was not news. “We’ve been telling her that for five years,” he said.

However, the interim regime has been cautious to a fault. In a list of 50 figures whose bank accounts were frozen, 23 of those listed with political party affiliations were from the BNP, 21 from the Awami League, although the BNP has been in power 10 of the past 15 years, twice the time of the AL. Someone carefully balanced the list.

Coming to Bangladesh as I do, from time to time, it is discouraging to see the signs of great wealth in Dhaka, the tall, glass-lined towers that clutter Dhaka and make the city a monument to black money, against the background of abject poverty, the tens if not hundreds of thousands of ragged bicycle rickshaw pullers who scratch out subsistence working every day for pennies as their fathers or even grandfathers did when I first came to Dhaka in 1969. The Daily Star estimated 85,000 registered rickshaws cluttered the roads, with, perhaps another 400,000-500,000 more unregistered. With an estimate of three pullers to each rickshaw working in shifts, Manju said, imagine someone able to organize the anger or desperation of these more than one million pullers in Dhaka as well as those who labor outside the capital.

By the way, that some one is unlikely to be Muhammad Yunus, the presiding genius of the Grameen Bank micro-credit scheme who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to give the poor, mostly women, small loans (at high interest) to start businesses and lift themselves from poverty. He has announced he will start a political party. Hardly striking terror into the hearts of hardened if sidelined Bengali politicians, he has become the target of derision and criticism.

I found no one who took him seriously as a political force. In discussing a new book that researched the impact if micro-credit, another friend, Rehman Sobhan, for four decades one of the country’s most influential economists and thinkers, declared the borrowing money cannot solve the problem of poverty. A survey reported in the book of 2,501 rural borrowers at effective interest rates of 27 to 31 percent claimed 39 percent were unsure of any change in their access to food and 70 percent had no access to better medical care.

Manju and I, with his new son in law, Hasan, a Lebanese, and an older one, Imtiaz, drove the 30 kilometres from Dhaka to Manju’s rural retreat near an area called Savar. All along the way were the remains of shacks and shanties that had been torn down ruthlessly by the caretaker regime in a drive to rid the country of illegal structures. Many had been the homes of poor people, many of who now lived under tarpaulin and blankets in makeshift shelters along the roadside. Manju, who built the road when he was communications minister in the Ershad and Hasina governments, said he always had been bothered by these structures but he never did anything about them because he worried about where those who lived in them would go. They were now torn down without regard to where those sheltered by them would go.

Bangladesh is replete in illegal structures, some as tall as 20 or more stories, many luxury buildings in Dhaka erected illegally on protected wetlands. While some action is being taken delicately in the direction of these more expensive structures, it appears to the faux military regime easier to take out their dictum against illegal structures on the poor.

Editor Nurul Kabir said the drive has continued all over the country, alienating the poor. He said the interim government has alienated both the poor and the very rich. That same drive up to Savar and back in the same day demonstrated another aspect of Bangladesh that receives less notice but is a surprising facet of the country’s condition. Factories, textiles, electronics among others, have sprung up all along the already crowded roadside, noticeably more than the last time I travelled that road in May 2005. A garish amusement park with a giant ferries wheel, erected by the builder of luxury towers in Dhaka, is a centrepiece in one trading town.

Bangladesh curiously prospers in some sectors. A friend I met last in 2004 was then building his second garment factory to fill orders in his markets in Ireland the Britain. This was in the face of predictions then that the end of quotas which had protected Bangladesh’s garment export trade were ending, leaving Bangladesh and other poor garment-producing countries to fend off competition from rising China. My friend’s factory not only has prospered, he is building a bigger one, 120,000 square feet, to provide him the wherewithal to enter the American market.

At the wedding festivities, I met Manju’s son in law, Imtiaz, who returned a couple of years ago to live in Dhaka with Manju’s daughter, Tareen. He gave up a six-figure job at Goldman Sachs and a New York apartment to make the move. He said after some adjustment he thrived in the textile business and is now excited at the prospect of building a factory to make plastic piping for the first time in Bangladesh.

At the same occasion, I met the son of the minister of education in Khaleda’s most recent government, a man who left a luxurious McLean, Virginia, home that I had visited, after 30 rich years as a World Bank executive, to return to politics in Bangladesh. The son grew up in northern Virginia, attended Langley High School but has returned to Bangladesh to be with his parents. He, too, was excited by the business prospects he finds in his somewhat unaccustomed homeland.

Like him was a Bengali economist who has worked for years in Washington for the IMF. He wants to leave his wooded home in Great Falls, Virginia, and his $150,000 a year job, to start an economic think-tank in Bangladesh that he estimates will pay him no more than $7,000 a year.

More people like them see Bangladesh as a land of opportunity. Their experience was an eye opener to someone who has seen intelligent Chinese decide over the past six years to remain in the United States because they had no incentives to return to their homeland.

My short time has been informative and refreshing. Bangladesh has no role other than on the margins of globalization, perhaps not even that in the likelihood no solution is found to political deadlock and corruption and present problems fade away to be replaced by even more urgent problems. Elections alone cannot resolve Bangladesh’s circumstances.