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.