Felani’s hanging body over the road to connectivity

Rumi Ahmed.

Published on 19 January 2011 in BDnews24.com. 

This piece discussed extrajudicial killing by the Indian Border Security Forces at the Indo-Bangla border.

Sex workers and our moral police

Wasfia Nazreen.

Published in bdnews24 on 13 October 2010.

This piece challenges the hypocritical taboo surrounding sex workers in Bangladesh.

Where the Streets Have no Name

Bina D’Costa.

The Daily Star Forum, 6 September 2010.

This piece  looks into displacement and dislocation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Faceblocked

By Fariha Sarawat.

Published in the Daily Star on 2 June 2010.

This piece shows the folly in the government’s recent ‘temporary’ ban on Facebook.

Sexual harassment and our morals police

by Hana Shams Ahmed.

Published in the Daily Star on 25 February 2010.

This piece discusses paternalistic hypocrisies of our society in the wake of a recent Bangla movie.

On withdrawal of troops from CHT

Hanufa Shamsuddin and Jyoti Rahman

Published by the New Age on 29 October 2009.

The underlying cause of tension in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is the reality of continuing discrimination faced by the region’s indigenous peoples in terms of the ongoing land encroachment and eviction, often in the name of development (eco-parks, plantations, construction of infrastructure), discrimination in access to justice and protection of the law.

The ‘Helpers’ of Our Lives

Asif Saleh

Published in the Star Weekend Magazine on 9 October 2009.

I have moved back to Bangladesh recently after spending 19 years abroad. In the process of reintegration to the society, I have been amazed to see how much it has changed. I compare my teenage years with those of a teenager today and I find youngsters are so much more globalised, open to new ideas, and hungry for success.

However, there are certain things that have remained the same. Our attitude towards our domestic help have changed very little. Even though, we, the urbanites, spend a major chunk of our time agonising over our ‘kajer loks’, the issue of our treatment towards them still remains a taboo. Would I be really exaggerating if I say even though I had a full time stay-at-home mother, my life has been surrounded by domestic helps? Would it be any different a story for any of you who are reading this? Are they just our employees, or as people who share our private lives, they are a little more than that? I grapple with this issue while introducing my daughter to the domestic helps whom she calls ‘helpers’.

This write up is an ode to the invisible helpers who helped me become what I am.

Girlhood Interrupted

Hana Shams Ahmed

Published by the Star Weekend Magazine on 9 October 2009.

When Samia arrived at the lawyer’s office with her friend she was hoping to get advice on how to file for a divorce. The lawyer asked her some obvious questions about what was wrong with the relationship and whether she had children etc. When she told the lawyer that her husband had molested two teenage maids in the house, Samia expected the lawyer to be in full solidarity with her decision. The lawyer did not display much emotion, what she said in response shocked Samia instead. “This is quite normal for men of our country,” she said. Instead of pointing out to Samia that her husband had committed a punishable crime which she was an eye-witness to, the lawyer was showing her commiseration and in a meandering way saying that this was not serious enough for the dissolution of a marriage.

In another incident in a corporate office, a woman — involved in among other things, human rights activism — was complaining to her colleagues about how shoitan (evil) her young maid was. When asked what were among her greatest ‘sins’, she replied that the maid lapsed from her work regularly when she went out of the house and watched TV and received phone calls from her boyfriend!

The attitude and choice of words of the female lawyer and ‘human right defender’ points to how deeply embedded this acceptance of abuse of the underprivileged is. The discrimination and complete disregard of a domestic worker’s right to live like a human being has been discussed in the media in small columns, but has had little effect on societal outlook. The middle-aged approach of treating domestic workers as a human punching bag (sometimes literally) of everyone’s anger and frustration stays on, and is still the most exposed, yet invisible, form of human rights violation.

The Nurul Islam case: How long before justice?

Mridul Chowdhury

Published by the Daily Star on 19 September 2009.

WE, in Bangladesh, are used to waiting. We have been waiting to find out the perpetrators of the BDR massacre, who were really behind the August 21 grenade attack, or who killed one of the most brilliant sons of our soil, Shah AMS Kibria. Our waiting does not stop at that — even for cases for which we know who the perpetrators were, we wait for them to be brought to justice. Some of the self-declared murderers of Bangabandhu and his family are still at large. So are the “war criminals” who attempted to eradicate the intellectual backbone of the nation in 1971, only to be riding cars bearing our national flag in less than a generation, as no less than ministers. We live in this ‘strange’ country where one can emotionally survive this uncertain and excruciating wait only if one knows how to wait, wait and wait only to see the reason for the wait becoming a distant memory at one point.

Case distortions and social order

Syeed Ahamed

Published in the Daily Star on 4 Sep 2009.

GRADUALLY we are getting used to the initial covering up and subsequent disclosure of criminal cases. Under one government, we learn how an apparent killing or a bomb blast is either just an accident or deep-rooted political conspiracy. And then after the change of government, we learn how the criminal cases were distorted during the previous regime to cover up the truth. From “media created” Bangla bhai to the attack on Humayun Azad, or from the Ramna bombing of 2001 to 21st August 2004 grenade attacks — it’s the same story.