Author Archive

It’s end of semester crunch time right now so I’ll be off for the next two weeks bar dramatic events. Just wanted to draw attention to the same-old-same-old strategy of EC. Without mainstream BNP participation elections in Bangladesh cannot be credible (same goes for AL), but this EC seems to be bent on engineering an impasse (not hard to do with our crop of politicians). Politicians and people of Bangladesh beware, an impasse will not help you in any way. There is a dire need for unity among political parties. AL and BNP need to focus on the fact that the EC is not a good-faith entity. The EC has been making fairly transparent attempts to foment intra and interparty discord, even violence, so that democracy is discredited once again and the status quo can continue. The EC will only ratchet up these efforts in the coming months. It is imperative that petty differences are put aside in the interest of a transition to democratic government. The parties should fully prepare to engage in elections without Khaleda and Hasina. That will definitely put a damper on this government’s plans.

See New Age’s spot-on editorial pasted below:

EC seems intent on delivering an impasse

The Election Commission�s ill-advised decision to invite the splinter faction of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for talks on electoral reforms has expectedly prompted a strong backlash from the mainstream of the party. On Wednesday, BNP secretary general, Khandaker Delwar Hossain, demanded the resignation of the chief election commissioner, ATM Shamsul Huda, and his fellow commissioners for acting �beyond their constitutional jurisdiction� and has said that the BNP will not participate in parliamentary elections conducted by this commission. �Free and fair elections will not be possible under this Election Commission. It must go�,� Delwar stated while speaking to journalists.
We have on several occasions in the past warned the Election Commission that its seeming complicity in the military-controlled interim government�s perceived political agenda was not only eroding its credibility among the people but would also make its primary responsibility of holding participatory and credible general elections impossible. Unfortunately, not only did our warnings fall on deaf ears, it now appears as though our worst fears have come true � just like the commission led by Justice MA Aziz that preceded it, the current Election Commission is fast making its position entirely untenable.
The re-constituted Election Commission under Shamsul Huda has done little right in the last fourteen months of its existence. While it was not responsible for defaulting on the commission�s constitutional responsibility of holding general elections within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament, the expectation was that it would work overtime to hold parliamentary elections as expeditiously as possible and facilitate the return of power to a democratically elected government. Instead, the Election Commission, in our view, has done everything in its powers to delay elections in order to give the current regime as much time as possible to carry on with its perceived attempts at political engineering.
Moreover, it has increasingly appeared as if the commission has been directly aiding the regime with its perceived political agenda, becoming directly involved in the controversies surrounding the break-up of the BNP into two distinct factions. Having first overtly favoured the splinter faction over the mainstream faction, the commission then unashamedly urged the different factions of the BNP to unite when the High Court put a spanner in its works, as if the break-up or unification of political parties is any business at all of an Election Commission. Now, having had its obstacles removed by the Appellate Division, the commission is once again overtly doing the current regime�s bidding by trying to legitimise the splinter faction on the one hand and isolate the mainstream on the other.
Khandaker Delwar�s contention that his party will not contest national elections under the current Election Commission could well be an early indication of the political climate moving in the direction of an impasse, much like it had when the Awami League had refused to contest polls under the stewardship of the MA Aziz-led commission. In fact, the need to deliver the nation from that stalemate is what supporters of the current unelected regime point to repeatedly to justify the apparent necessity of its irregular nature and undemocratic interventions. It seems more and more likely now that the self-serving attempts at political engineering by the government and its military masters coupled with the Election Commission�s impotent acquiescence are conspiring to serve up exactly what they were ostensibly supposed to rescue the nation from: an impasse.

There’s an article in last week’s New Yorker about the West Bengal part of the Sunderbans. Note the the dire threat rising sea levels poses to the survival of the mangrove forests in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_alexander

Muchhe jak glani, ghuche jak jora

Ogni snane shuchi hok dhora…

Ano ano, ano tobo, proloyero shankh

esho esho.

I wish I were walking somwhere near TSC in a white sari with a red paar.

Shubo Noboborsho dear readers!

2 qwik pts:

1. Adviser Hussain Zillur Rahman has invited AL to join a pre-official dialogue at the state guesthouse Padma by sending an invitation to the acting AL president Zillur Rahman via SMS! Zillur Rahman graciously accepted the invitation, no doubt in the greater national interest. Kudos to him. I don’t know if I would have. I’m no Ms. Manners, but an invitation from the state via SMS, to talks this important, this has got to be a first! How about making a phone call? Hand delivering a letter? What if the adviser picked the wrong number from his address book? What if he mistakenly sent it to AL and BNP both? What if he “mistakenly” invites both BNP factions to meet at the same time via SMS next? Isn’t there any protocol to follow? Are SMSs a safe way to communicate sensitive issues of national interest? Am I not hip and with it anymore?

Ok, here’s a pet peeve disclosure. SMS lingo is annoying. Please no plz.

2. Food riots, they’re almost here. Yesterday garments workers clashed with police demanding wage hikes. 50 were injured.

New Age “Extra” has a thoughtful article this week on the food crisis. This article actually quotes prominent economists who cast blame on the government in addition to the natural disasters and international factors. In case you have been wondering about recent food riots elsewhere in the world, BBC reports on Haiti (where cost of food rose 50%, the costs have risen 40% in Bangladesh) and unfolding crises in Asia, Africa, and Australia (you can access those pages through the Haiti link). This technocrat studded government’s inability to avert/minimize the food crisis in an efficient way may well go down as its greatest failure.

From the beginning many Bangladeshis were skeptical of the CTG’s hubris and overreach. A defensible argument can be made that this government’s political moves have crippled the economy over the last year and half. The frightening part is we have not yet hit bottom, it is still unclear if/when elections will be held, the big questions about Khaleda/Hasina remain unanswered, and general Moeen U Ahmed has generously given himself another year’s tenure in the “national interest.”

If the political parties can focus on reinstating democracy, this government will soon face a powerful coalition of political parties and frustrated masses. In the meantime, CTG has been taking numerous steps to seed dissension both within and among political parties. I think the whole move for war crimes trials, truth commission, in addition to the BNP rift, are parts of this strategy. I am all for war crimes trials, but under a democratic government, simply for legitimacy’s sake, same goes with truth commissions. Frankly, I have had it with this government, the poorest of the poor are starving (see below, people are forgetting what daal tastes like), that means crores of Bangladeshis are going hungry. Most importantly, I do not think the average Bangladeshi trusts this government’s good intentions, let alone ability to implement policies based on those intentions. It is time for elections, and time to wave a sorry goodbye to the CTG. Yes, I know this is easier said than done. Certain steps still need to be taken before we can have fair elections, but I think it is time we gave the CTG a few months to do what it can, and then hold elections. All of this is assuming that the political parties will behave themselves.

The CTG has abused the faith and trust of the people of Bangladesh and is pushing us towards a dangerous and uncertain future with its foot dragging disguised in lofty rhetoric. It is taking gleeful advantage of political parties that simply cannot seem to place the national interest above party/factional/personal interest. I can only hope that our politicians can heed their better angels and unite for democracy above all. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen famously argued that democracies are better at famine prevention than dictatorships. I can only hope that Bangladesh 2008/2009 will not become yet another case that proves Amartya Sen right.

Excerpts from “Extra” below:

Undoubtedly, the worst conditions are with the poorest of the poor, particularly labourers and rickshaw-pullers who are unable to work unless they have their three meals a day.
While their families go without meals for two or three days at a stretch, they must share the largest chunk of their daily earnings on their own food. Economist Abul Barakat estimates that round half of the population are going half-fed or without food.
Nurul Islam, a 38-year-old rickshaw-puller, moved to Dhaka seven or eight months ago. He spends Tk 60 to Tk 80 a day on food, mostly in the mess halls. ‘I start work at 11am and work till late in the evening. It is difficult to make enough money.’
It is the same for Abu Bakr, a 56-year-old who has been pulling rickshaws for nearly twenty-six years. ‘Ten years ago I used to pay Tk 30 for the rickshaw; nowadays they ask for Tk 90 or Tk 100. Then you need at least Tk 60 for food.’
‘For a while, I forgot how dal [lentils] tastes as I could only afford to buy rice and even the price of wheat had gone up from Tk 15 to Tk 45,’ says Fazlu, a rickshaw-puller aged 35.
‘Dal now costs Tk 90 per kilo,’ says Abdus Selim, the owner of a small stall in Moghbazar that sells rice, eggs, oil and other essentials. ‘Hardly anyone buys dal now; it’s too expensive and beyond their means.’
He reports that people have been buying more or less the same amount of rice over the past year, since they cannot choose to buy any less, but instead are cutting down on other costs such as meat and vegetables.

…

The World Food Program predicted that the rising prices of food items (see UN warning from Dec 2007), especially rice, could cause political instability as poorer households spend most or all their income on food. The UN agency said that the possibility of political, economic and social unrest is growing as the price of food is rising much faster than people’s wages in Bangladesh.

Politicians and economists observed that the hard-pressed people would have taken to the streets had the state of emergency not been in force.

‘What has till now prevented a rise in crime is the largely visible security forces and policemen everywhere. But sooner or less, I think it will become inevitable as more and more people reach a point where they have absolutely nothing to lose,’ says N Ahad, a private service holder, also a victim of food shortage.

…

Protests have already begun.

On March 25, several hundreds formed a human chain before the Chittagong Press Club on Saturday, protesting against unusual price hike of essential commodities and sale of unpacked and unhygienic baby food.

In Sylhet, Rajshahi, Bogra, Barisal, Khulna and Jamalpur, according to New Age reports, people have become frustrated with the high prices and only find a small measure of respite from the OMS centres.

Poor response

The continuing crisis of rice is a result of the government’s failure to ensure timely import, point out economists. Although, the twin floods and cyclone Sidr hampered rice production, experts feel, the market could be stabilised had concrete and faster steps been taken.

The government has been slow to tackle the problem and has only recently set up open market sales (OMS) around the country, and that too in small numbers.

….

Economist professor Abul Barakat puts the blame for the current price spiral on the free market economy and specifically ties the rice price rise to market speculation, import problems, high production cost and a lack of coordination among the ministries.

Zaid Bakht, research director of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, says the government was late in making pragmatic decisions keeping the global food production and supply situations in mind. He believes that programmes such as open market sale and vulnerable group feeding should have been launched earlier to keep people’s sufferings at minimum levels.

It is difficult to term a movie about the Cambodian genocide as a personal favorite or to recommend it highly, it is after all, a movie about a harrowing subject. But I believe this one should be seen in every high school history class. The “Killing Fields ” (1984) tells the true story of deep friendship between a NYT journalist Sydney Schanberg and a Cambodian photojournalist, both determined to bring to the world the turmoil engulfing Cambodia as Phnom Penh fell in 1975. As the murderous, ideology- blinded Khmer Rouge regime gained control of Cambodia, the photojournalist is taken to the infamous re-education camps while the American journalist is forced to abandon his friend. The movie presents a chilling portrait of the genocide through the suffering of the photojournalist and his fellow Cambodians as well as a moving tribute to the enduring friendship between the two men, partners in the same worthy cause.

The real-life Cambodian photojournalist of “The Killing Fields,” Dith Pran, passed away last week. You can read his obituary here.

Here is an excerpt from the original article (Jan 20, 1980) that Sydney Schanberg of the NYT wrote about Pran and their time in Cambodia:

After a breakfast of Pepsi-Cola at a restaurant whose French proprietor is glad for company but who has no other food, we walk back to the hotel and decide it is still safe to move around. So we drive to the biggest civilian hospital — Preah Keth Mealea — to get some idea of casualties. People are bleeding to death on the corridor floors. . . .

We can stand to look at these scenes no longer, so we depart. But as we get into our car and start to leave the compound, some heavily armed Khmer Rouge soldiers charge in through the main gate. Shouting and angry, they wave us out of the car, put guns to our heads and stomachs and order us to put our hands over our heads. . . .

They take everything — our car, cameras, typewriters, radio, knapsacks — and push us into an armored personnel carrier, a kind of light tank that carries troops in its belly that they have captured from the Government army.

We all get in — three journalists and our driver, Sarun — except for Pran. We hear him continuing his entreaties in Khmer outside. . . . Finally, he climbs in and the armored car starts to rumble forward. After a few minutes of chilled silence, Sarun turns to me and in French asks me if I know what Pran was doing outside the vehicle. I say no, since the talk was in Khmer. Sarun tells me that Pran, far from trying to get away, was doing the opposite — trying to talk his way into the armored car. The Khmer Rouge had told him to leave, they didn’t want him, only the Americans and “the big people.” He knew we had no chance without him, so he argued not to be separated from us, offering, in effect, to forfeit his own life on the chance that he might save ours.  As the armored car moves through the city, it becomes an oven. Sweat starts pouring off us as we stare at one another’s frightened countenances. . . .

Meanwhile, Pran is keeping up his pleading with the driver of the armored car, telling him that we are not soldiers or politicians or anyone hostile to the Khmer Rouge. No one here is American, he insists, they are all French, they are only newsmen. Whatever meager words we exchange among ourselves are in French. . . .

Suddenly, after a 40-minute ride, the vehicle stops and the rear door clangs open. We are ordered to get out. As we move, crouching through the door, we see two Khmer Rouge soldiers, their rifles on their hips pointing directly at us. Behind them is a sandy riverbank that slopes down to the Tonie Sap River. Rockoff and I exchange the briefest of fear-struck glances. We are thinking the same thing — they’re going to do it here and roll us down the bank into the river.

But we climb out, like zombies. No shots are fired. Pran resumes his pleas, searching out a soldier who looks like an officer. For a solid hour he keeps appealing, cajoling, begging for our lives. The officer sends a courier on a motor-bike to some headquarters in the center of the city. We wait, still frozen but trying to hope, as Pran continues talking. Finally, the courier returns, more talk — and then, miraculously, the rifles are lowered. We are permitted to have a drink of water. I look at Pran and he allows himself a cautious smile. He’s done it, I think, he’s pulled it off

 

Bangladeshis have been enduring stratospheric food prices for almost a year now. The combination of Sidr and flooding all but ensured that our rice output would fall well below expectations. Given the global trend in rising costs of agricultural inputs and commodities, especially rice, (see today’s NYT article) it is more important than ever for the government to focus on boosting domestic production and move quickly towards free and fair elections.

Unless both of these things happen, the danger of food riots is something Bangladeshis have to start worrying about. This is because food riots, as sociologist Javier Auyero convincingly argues in the context of Argentina, do not occur in a vacuum. The two key ingredients of food riots are food based grievances within a large population and a capacity for organization of would-be rioters. Bangladeshi society qualifies on both counts. In Argentina, the Peronist party played a key role in organizing ordinary Argentinians, many of them slum-dwellers, to engage in food rioting with an eye to unseating their political opponents from positions of national power. They succeeded in pulling of a de facto coup after several rounds of rioting across the country. Our political parties are experts at organizing violence. They may start to take bolder steps in that direction in the not too distant future if the current administration keeps doddering on its various meandering roadmaps.

The Washington Post has an Op-Ed regarding Harvard’s seemingly controversial policy of reserving a few hours at a gym for women so that Muslim women can doff their headscarves and work out. Women-only gym hours do not seem strange to me, if I remember correctly, my undergrad school had women-only hours at the swimming pools. That there’s any debate at all probably has to do with advocacy by Muslim women at Harvard for these gym hours. And that’s probably what is bothersome to opponents, why the special treatment for Muslim women? Universities have an obligation to make special accommodations for all its students as long as those accommodations do not become an undue burden for their fellow students. I agree with the WashPost columnist that in this case this is a reasonable accommodation. Devout Muslim women have every right to a healthy life-style. It would be unfair to systematically bar them from gyms. Granted, I have hijab wearing friends who still run NYC marathons and hit the gym daily. But it must be nice for these observant women to let their hair down every once in a while. Imagine what it would feel like to think that going to the school gym is never an option.

The controversy regarding playing the call to prayer on the quad during Islam Awareness Week is ludicrous, seeing that church bells are a fact of life, and have been for centuries, on Sundays at most universities with chapels.

I do think America is far ahead of Europe in treating religious minorities with respect by granting them rights to practice freely in public. However, it is also true that it is rare to run into a full-burqa clad woman in the streets of New York. To my knowledge there hasn’t been any problems with niqab wearers as there have been in England either, precisely because Muslim women in the US mostly limit their observance to the head scarf. Would it be correct to say that Muslims in the US are generally more moderate than in Europe?

Maybe I spoke too soon, here’s another article from yesterday’s NYT on a supposed trend of homeschooling Muslim children. The article makes an interesting distinction between converts and immigrants, arguing that immigrants are less likely to home school children than converts, seeing that the US educational system is a major draw in immigration in the first place.  I’ll leave you to consider a disturbing excerpt:

In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.

Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.

“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.

Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.

As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

…

Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

Thus, she is raising the crucial issue, who is in charge of the schooling for these children? What are their qualifications? And what role is the state government playing in ensuring that these children are properly educated? We certainly hear about the homeschooling success stories, but what percentage of homeschooled Muslim children actually end up going to college?

Akhil Reed Amar, professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School, has a fun article in SLATE regarding the possibility of swapping the presidency between Obama and Hillary on the same ticket within the same term (with or without congressional approval). He suggests that this dream team, under ideal circumstances, could remain at the helm until 2016!  Sounds a bit zany to me. More seriously, Article 25 of the US Constitution may have some lessons for close elections in polarized states like Kenya and Bangladesh.

Very nice article on climate migration in Bangladesh by Nicki Bennett for the NYT. BTW if any of you have been wondering what’s up with Saif, he was last seen in Istanbul and I hear it has something to do with wordpress being blocked in Turkey . Ok, he just might sue me now…for using an emoticon more than anything else.

Note: link has been updated.

Obama gave a masterful speech on race in America today. I just read the transcript and it is impeccable as well as powerful and heartfelt. He went well beyond the need to defend his relationship with his controversial pastor to describe his thoughts on race with eloquence and clarity. I am pasting the whole transcript below (sorry it’s too good to cut up and the effect is cumulative). Here’s Slate’s take on the speech if you don’t want to read the whole thing…but believe me it’s worthwhile. Another beautiful article from the New York Times describes his mother, a pioneer and inspiration in her own right.

The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign (from the NYT).

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

As Hillary Clinton faces the two crucial primaries in her run for the Democratic Party nomination, pundits seem to have reached a consensus that her campaign is flat- lining. Blame has been cast all over, from her greatest asset turned liability, Bill, to her costly and clueless advisers, the trigger-happy staff, and finally onto Hillary herself: she’s just not likable enough, she’s too calculating, wants to win too badly, she’s been planning this for too long, trying too hard, looking too desperate…the list is long.

Elections are popularity contests writ large. No other race embodies this fact more prominently than the American presidential contest. Who would have thought that Barack, a product or racial and cultural admixture, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii well outside the US mainstream, would ever become a plausible presidential candidate! It seemed like the democratic roster was stuck between a likable candidate who wasn’t winnable, and a winnable candidate wasn’t all that likable. But Obama has definitely proved the pundits wrong, at least as far as the primaries are concerned, he’s winning because he is likable and Hillary is losing because she is not. Likability is her brick wall. The heart overrides the mind all too often for us mere humans, sometimes we can’t help who we like, and voting is an emotional act as much as it is a rational one. Of course it doesn’t help that while lacking “experience” Barack is just as smart and credentialled as she is. He is easy to like and easy to vote for.

The main question I have though is whether the issue of likability can become a no-win trap for female presidential candidates in the US. Women are fainting at Obama’s rallies and it’s not from the crowdedness or the heat alone. Gail Collins from the NYT points out:

Contrary to rumor, he is not planting those people who faint from excitement at his rallies. Nevertheless, they continue to topple, and by now Barack is so used to this particular crisis that it has become almost a part of the rally routine. “If we have an E.M.T. in the house, I think somebody got faint,” he said calmly when a woman keeled over in front of the stage in Cincinnati. “They just need a little water and some juice.”

Check out Obama’s own narration of these incidents at various rallies:

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/48404.html

Wall Street Journal’s article We Shall Be Overcome is quite entertaining:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110011130

Charisma, that ineffable star quality, is key to rendering unconventional candidates palatable to the general public (see JFK vis a vis Catholicism). However would sheer charisma be an asset for a woman the way it is for a man? This whole fainting business I think encapsulates the catch-22 that any female presidential candidate would face. Obama’s charisma is an unadulterated good for his campaign. The more women that faint at his rallies the better. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. But imagine if men were catcalling and serenading Hillary at her rallies. For a woman who attempts to run for arguably the most high status job in the world, there is a such a thing as being too attractive, too distractingly beautiful for the all too serious job. A successful female candidate has to be likable in a particular way without being too likable. She must avoid sexualization and fit herself into the matronly mold without being perceived as a boring scold. Seems next to impossible to me as a winning formula in the American context. A male candidate however does not need to worry about all that, he can be a hunk, a brainiac and “presidential” enough to be commander in chief. Basically, he can have it all.

So as long as a qualified and smart woman like Hillary is running against a somewhat less qualified, just as smart, rockstar candidate like Obama, the ending seems unlikely to be a happy one for her. If she is however running against a mere human male then her chances might become a tad more favorable. The odds stacked against Hillary are fundamentally more daunting than those against Barack. Charm and charisma allow people to look past his blackness and his “other” ness. Lack of charisma all but dooms Hillary. However, even if Hillary had boatloads of charm and charisma unless she could modulate it just right, she as a woman would surely risk being categorized in less than flattering ways by the general public and the media.

It’s easier to criticize than to govern. This lesson applies to military adventurers all over the world. New Age’s Editorial today is worth highlighting, although the question remains as to where we would be today had the army not stepped in. Gotta love those counterfactuals!

If we were an ethnically defined society would we be in the grips of a civil war without army intervention (look at Kenya)?  Would we have faced a civil war regardless (Colombia in the 1950s)?  Are army takeovers a necessary evil in countries like Thailand and Bangladesh? Military coups are certainly better than full blown civil wars but is it an either-or choice that we faced in 1/11? What could the army have done short of taking over the reigns of power and disrupting democracy? Is it a good idea to have the army waiting in the wings as some sort of an overseer of national destiny (Greece, Turkey). How can we fix our political parties so that they know when to bow out in the interest of the greater good (like Al Gore in 2001)?

Lessons to learn from Thai army’s admitted misadventure

It is hardly surprising that the military council, which ousted former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 in a coup, accusing him of corruption and irreverence towards the Thai monarchy, and governed the country for the past two years, has proved entirely inept at running state affairs. So much so, in fact, that the council has promised that ‘there will be no more coups,’ as a Thaksin-backed political party prepares to assume office after the country’s recent elections, according to a report published in New Age on Wednesday. What is surprising, however, is that the Thai military has acquired the wisdom to recognise that ‘the military should not be involved in politics’ as the council’s spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday.
   The Council for National Security has been widely derided in Thailand over the past two years for its inability to handle the country’s economic and social issues. Even though the council accused Thaksin of rampant corruption, they have so far only been able to prove one of the cases against him in court, and have had his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) political party’s senior leadership disbanded and banned from political activity for five years. Thaksin himself is living in exile, facing imprisonment if he returns to Thailand, but this has not decimated his popularity in predominantly rural Thailand. Thaksin supporters and activists joined the almost defunct PPP en masse and, on a pro-Thaksin platform, have fallen just short of gaining an overall parliamentary majority in the recent elections. While Thaksin’s regime is widely accused of corruption, his tenure as prime minister also saw unprecedented economic prosperity in rural Thailand.
   There are important lessons to be learnt from these international experiences with military interventions into the polity, especially in South Asia, and specifically in Bangladesh. The concept of political and socio-economic reforms imposed in a top-down method, while undoubtedly tempting, is also heavily weighed down by historical proof of its utter lack of success. In Nepal, the frustration and animosity that ordinary Nepalis felt towards corrupt political parties ultimately led to their popular support for a state of emergency which made way for King Gyanendra’s dictatorial rule in 2005. That violent and autocratic regime ultimately had to be toppled by a popular uprising in the spring of 2006. In Pakistan, popular support for General Musharraf’s 1999 coup has not only led to his destructive and polarising autocracy, it has paved the way for the largest contingent of radical Islamist parties in the Pakistani parliament. As lessons may be learnt from the processes through which such top-down reforms are instituted, so lessons should be learnt from the outcomes of such attempts.

“She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule…She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary…She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.”

–1993 Profile by Mary Anne Weaver for the New Yorker

Benazir is no more. Pakistan’s tryst with misfortune continues. Her loss is catastrophic and  irreparable.  It  is difficult to see how anything good could result from this. Benazir’s return home brought some hope that democracy would be restored, if not immediately, then eventually. These hopes rose high especially after she nixed the pact with Musharraf. In addition, she seemed to be taking a determined stance against extremists, although the Taliban did expand its foothold in Pakistan during her second term. Maybe this was a ploy on her part to gain US support, but if in fact she was being sincere, this was exactly what Pakistan needed.

Pakistan has been in desperate need of credible and legitimate leadership for years. Benazir’s death has only strengthened the dictator’s hand and created chaos and confusion that actually helps extremists expand their grip. Benazir was a consummate politician, no stranger to corruption charges (must read fascinating report from the New York Times), unsavory deals of expedience, but also not free of the oversight of the all powerful army and burgeoning Islamists. Nevertheless, Benazir was a true leader and a liberal one at that. Read the first page of the Dawn newspaper from yesterday (before her death) and you will be shocked at the number of forces ripping this state apart. Her death could not have come at a worse time. Pakistan is not too far from becoming the next Afghanistan.

Love them, hate them, given the cult of personality that defines politics in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, loss of leaders is a major blow to stability and national unity especially when those leaders are substantively committed to some (albeit imperfect) form of democratic government. I, like others before me, wonder how Pakistan would have fared if Jinnah hadn’t passed away so shortly after independence.

No amount of condemnation and condolences will make things right again. The finality of death is a jarring but indelible fact. Nor is there much hope for justice. News channels are reporting that the evidence was literally washed off the streets hours after the blast. The Musharraf government doesn’t really have to answer to anyone, anyway. As the Dawn editorial below makes clear, political deaths in Pakistan tend to remain shrouded forever. We Bangladeshis need to learn from that alternate reality. All politicians in captivity must have speedy, fair, open trials. We must  insist that democracy is restored without delay. There really is no defensible alternative form of government. We certainly don’t want to end up like Pakistan. 

http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/28/top3.htm

Not only is the UK visa authority raising fees (what’s new?) and halving stay time, now sponsors may also have to post cash bonds to keep their errant relatives in line! Yup, that’s right, sponsors of visitors to the UK may have to pay up to 1000 pound deposit to ensure that their visitors return home. This legislation, if passed, will definitely prevent poor people from visiting their relatives in the UK. If you didn’t feel like a criminal (on bail) yet for having a Bangladeshi passport, you will if this legislation gets passed and you happen to have family in the UK that you’d like to see every once in a while:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7146527.stm
What a sad world we live in. I would have thought the required in person interview would be enough.
There are few easy answers to the immigration debates raging across Europe and the US. Prof. Amy Chua of Yale Law School wrote a tough but mostly fair piece in the Washington Post. It’s a few steps right of “kumbayya” which is probably more realistic anyway.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401333.html

Thanks for your comments! I was going to post the points below in a comment but just wanted to make sure it got a wider reading.

What can we learn from the Malawi article? The state was facing a food shortage, it went against the advice of the international development community, provided steep subsidies (one third of market price), and in two years the farmers virtually tripled their output in the presence of favorable weather. The article does not tell us about the rate of subsidies in Malawi in previous years, let alone why and how subsidies worked so well this time. Nor do we find out much about how the fertilizers were distributed. But given that we too are facing a potential food shortage, I thought Malawi could provide us with a useful lesson in the sense that when farmers are given what they desperately need, the results can seem miraculous. The title ofmy post was basically a description of the NYT piece and what happened in Malawi rather than an outright recommendation for Bangladesh. It is entirely possible that our subsidies are steep enough already but there are other inefficiencies at work that are causing problems for farmers.

As far as the Bangladesh situation is concerned, I know woefully little. So, here are the questions that I have. Some of these have been already raised:

1. What are the current level of subsidies and do we actually need more or less subsidies? I too have read about subsidies being inefficient, and direct transfers being better in a strict theoretical sense in my early years of grad school, but does that work on the ground in Bangladesh? What are the intervening factors? It is a fact that subsidies are a mainstay of the relationship between the agriculture lobby and governments in Europe and the US. Why do subsidies persist if they are so inefficient? This is where politics seeps into economics pure and simple. Malawi was advised to reduce subsidies but it went against the tide. How did that work out so favorably for them?

2. How does the fertilizer market work at the international and local levels (international production and prices, current import rates, local demand, credit and domestic distribution systems in particular)? Is the current system better or worse than the previous ones? We lack basic descriptive data on this. Newspaper reports are piecemeal at best.

3. Variation in demand/ protests over time and space: Is the crisis actually worse this year than all the previous years in terms of fertilizer provision? Is there variation across the country in farmer protests? What is the variation in terms of needs and how well those needs are met? Are certain areas faring better than others? If so, what factors are at work?

Like I said I know far too little to comment knowledgeably. As for the smuggling I’m pretty sure I read a few weeks ago that fertilizer was going to Burma in an article on smugglers being caught in Chittagong… presumably there was profit to be made because prices were higher there at the time.

The fertilizer crisis is not new. I have been reading newspapers since 1991 for my own work and it comes up pretty much every year. Farmers have been protesting, often violently, over the past decade and half at least. In the past the issue was politicized and whatever government was in power was blamed.

There are predictions of potential famine in the air. In areas unaffected by Sidr, farmers are protesting fertilizer pricing and shortage almost weekly (most recently in Jamalpur) in desperate violation of SOE laws. At times they resort to violence against government offices and representatives in their localities, barricade highways etc.  Fertilizer pricing and provision has been a consistent problem over the past two decades.

The current administration claims that we have enough fertilizer but distribution networks are the main problem. The issue is not that simple. Newspapers often report on how fertilizer is smuggled out of the country to Burma and India. There are allegations of rampant profiteering and mismanagement. The bottom line is that the farmers are not getting what they need. There is no time to play the blame game this year. We need to extract every last bit of agricultural output from the next crop season if we are to avert food shortages. In fact, the areas unaffected by Sidr will have to produce bumper crops to cushion the devastating losses in approximately one third of the country. In light of Bangladesh’s current situation, today’s NYT article on Malawi is particularly edifying, not just for this year, but for years to come.

Excerpts:

Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid. But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached. Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices…..

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention. In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

You can read the rest of the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?em&ex=1196658000&en=daf2c73a7680b282&ei=5087%0A

Turns out the New York Times is predicting a political fallout, gloom and doom, in a far more trenchant voice than any writer on this blog.

Somini Sengupta, South Asia correspondent of the NYT, describes the events of the past 11 months highlighting the erosion of popular support for the Caretaker Government and the current problems under the Fakhruddin regime (continuing SOE, muzzling of political parties, persecution of political leaders, dubious outcomes of prosecution against politicians, uncertainty regarding election road map, spiraling prices of essentials, three debilitating natural disasters…the list is long and blame is laid largely at the CG’s door). None of these points are new. But Sengupta constructs the article in a way that is totally unflattering to the CG. The basic message is that Bangladesh may be heading towards a serious crisis and the CG has not lived up to its promise. The uncritical treatment accorded to a Abdul Awal Mintoo towards the end of the article is worth noting and refuting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/world/asia/26bangladesh.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Most of the article is provided below:

The political storm that preceded nature’s latest assault on this country still swirls overhead. Nearly a year into an army-backed state of emergency, basic freedoms remain suspended, a sweeping anticorruption drive has stuffed the jails with some of Bangladesh’s most influential business leaders and politicians, and a fragile economy is tottering under the pressure of floods at home and rising oil prices abroad.

The soaring cost of food is potentially the most explosive challenge facing the military-backed government that has run this country since Jan. 11, when, after debilitating political protests, scheduled elections were scrapped and emergency law was imposed. Climbing inflation was compounded by an unusually harsh monsoon, which destroyed food crops along the flood plains in July. Then, the Nov. 15 cyclone destroyed acres of rice paddy, ruined the shrimp farms that dot the southern coast, and, according to the World Food Program, left roughly 2.3 million people in need of urgent food aid.

Storm relief is now the government’s most pressing test, including averting famine and disease outbreaks, and ensuring that aid distribution is perceived to be fair and without corruption. The government estimates that six million people were affected by the storm. “This is going to be the real defining challenge for them,” Rehman Sobhan, the chairman of the Center for Policy Dialogue, an independent research group based in Dhaka, said of the administration. “A huge effort is going to be required.”

Bangladesh is among the world’s poorest nations, with a Muslim-majority population of more than 140 million and nearly half of its youngest children suffering from malnutrition. Polls indicate that even before the cyclone, confidence in the caretaker government was declining.

The way the ordinary Bangladeshi is being pinched every day was on stark display the other day in a working-class quarter of Dhaka called Begunbari, a crowded warren of tenements amid the roar of factories that supply cheap clothes for sale abroad, including in the United States.

Some interviews with locals lamenting prices and then…

…Election Commission workers were going door to door this afternoon taking names and addresses so they could compile a fresh list of those eligible to vote. Fakhruddin Ahmed, the civilian leader of the country’s military-backed caretaker administration, has promised national elections by the end of 2008.

But exactly how soon elections will take place and under what circumstances, remain mysteries, considering that several major politicians are in jail or in exile. The leaders of the two top political parties, Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and Sheik Hasina Wazed of the Awami League, are in custody on various graft and extortion charges. Whether they will be allowed to take part in the election is anyone’s guess.

Under emergency rule, the press is prohibited from publishing anything deemed “provocative” and political activity is banned, including demonstrations. Holding a political meeting outdoors is punishable by up to five years in prison. The restrictions were loosened slightly in September when indoor political meetings were allowed to resume, but only with permission from the police and with no more than 50 people in attendance.

According to a monthly public perception survey by a consortium of civil society organizations called the Election Working Group, the share of Bangladeshis who expressed high confidence in the caretaker government fell between March and September, while the share of those who had low confidence sharply increased. This was true of respondents from “ordinary” and “elite” socioeconomic groups.

In the latest survey, conducted in face-to-face interviews in late September, the rising price of essential commodities was identified as the biggest concern, and even as the government got good marks for cracking down on corruption, respondents were divided about whether the government had any bearing on their daily lives: 42 percent of them said they were “better off” but about the same percentage said they were “worse off or that there has been no change in their personal situation.” The government’s anticorruption crusade continues to be seen as a turning point for Bangladesh, which has consistently ranked at the bottom of the annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

Bank accounts have been frozen. Luxury cars have been impounded by the state, or hidden indoors by their owners for fear they will be taken. Nearly 100 prominent politicians and business people have been taken in for questioning, and an unknown number of people have been detained without charge, which is legal under the new emergency laws. A little more than a dozen have been convicted by anticorruption courts, and how quickly, or fairly, the other cases will be tried is unclear.

If entrenched corruption was seen as damaging the economy, the crackdown has also sent shocks through the private sector. The government appears to be retreating from its initial wide sweep and has in recent months, released some detainees. “Informally, the government wants some sort of reassurance for the business community that they will be allowed to function,” said Akbar Ali Khan, a retired senior government official. He declined to grade the government’s overall performance (criticizing the government is now a punishable offense) except to say that it was vital for the government to prepare for elections and restore business leaders’ confidence in the country.“The economic problems are very serious and acute,” he said. “These will have to be addressed with more vigor.”

Abdul Awal Mintoo, the chairman and chief executive of Multimode Group, was among the most prominent millionaires taken into custody in May on a vague charge of destabilizing the government, then released six months later. Mr. Mintoo said that while he was in custody he was interrogated less about his own assets than about what evidence he could furnish against Ms. Hasina, the Awami League leader and a former prime minister with whom Mr. Mintoo was friendly. A naturalized United States citizen, Mr. Mintoo returned to his native Bangladesh 27 years ago and established a number of businesses, from dealing in agricultural seeds to real estate. He estimates his assets in Bangladesh to be $30 million.

Mr. Mintoo, 58, insists that he did not bribe anyone in government in exchange for contracts. But he concedes that he did what he says everyone else has long had to do in this country: grease the wheels of politics and government to get basic things done, including installing a telephone line and getting imported machine parts out of customs. If that were the grounds for his arrest, he said, then “50 million people, every adult male” should be arrested.

“It’s aimless what they’re doing,” he said of the government in an interview, and added that he planned to divest himself of his investments in the country slowly. “I’m not sure how this will end up. I don’t want to take a risk and live in uncertainty.”“If you take blood out of the arteries,” he added, “it just paralyzes.” The only charge remaining pending against Mr. Mintoo accuses him of extorting about $700 from a private citizen. Mr. Mintoo laughed at the charge, saying it was too paltry a sum for him to demand of anyone.

Thank God the blog and my computer are back to life. Although Sidr did not hit Dhaka very hard, we did have a 24 hour power cut across the country. During the outage the day after Sidr we had no way of knowing about the carnage in detail. The papers had no real news. There was an eerie silence over the city as we collectively suspected the worst.

That Saturday night, generators kept the lights on in some buildings, shops, and apartments. Entire swathes of the town, however, were lit by lamps and candles. By chance I was driving by the Parliament building quite late. The building, in fact the entire compound, lay in total darkness. It was an apocalyptic vision. One of the major landmarks of the country, the stately symbol of our democratic government, had melted into the night. I could only imagine what Khaleda and Hasina were doing in their sub-jails at the parliament compound: writing memoirs by candlelight, knitting sweater vests, regretting their misdeeds…what a sorry state for Bangladesh. There were rumors everywhere: the dead could number into the hundreds of thousands! The government has cut power on purpose! All cell phone signals are down! No one knew any real news, how many had died, how many were affected, when the electricity would return. Over those 24 hours water stopped running as the pumps no longer worked, generators failed, cell phones ran out of charge, there were fuel shortages everywhere and food prices inevitably lurched up. Relief came the next day for Dhakaites as power was restored in spurts, a few hours here and there.

Words cannot describe the agony and grief that is all over the TV channels now. To have lost everything after surviving two rounds of devastating flooding, to have lost little ones to the tides, corpses of man and beast rotting in the same watery grave…the living are in mourning. At this hour we need not only monetary aid but also spiritual succor.

I recently came across this 1988 Op-Ed in the NYT that is still sadly relevant:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7DA1F3FF934A25752C1A96E948260

The Chief Election Commissioner has invoked the doctrine of necessity as his justification for inviting Mannan/Saifur led BNP faction to pre-election discussions. See http://www.newagebd.com/2007/nov/07/index.html. This move has

1) Deepened the carefully orchestrated schism in BNP into something uglier and potentially irreparable.

2) Brought his allegiance to democratic norms into question.

3) Sullied the neutral image of the Election Commission.

1)It can be easily argued the CEC’s decision has played a key role in the scuffle between Hannan-Mannan factions at Zia’s mazar on the 7th. Although splits and divisions within political parties can be considered a natural part of the growth process, a split which seems to be carefully encouraged and engineered in part by party outsiders only serves to bring the fledgling democratic process into question.

2)The doctrine of necessity is basically a lazy name for naked power grab. I am not sure whether the CEC is aware of its notorious history. If he has knowingly cited this doctrine, then his commitment to democratic norms becomes immediately suspect. In the post independence South Asian context, as far as I know, this reprehensible doctrine was first cited in 1954 after the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan was dissolved by General Ghulam Muhammad. The president of the Assembly Moulvi Tamizuddin challenged this seizure of power as unconstitutional in the Sindh High Court and won. However, Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the Sindh High Court’s decision on the basis of, you guessed it, doctrine of necessity, opening the way for other such future power grabs…waves upon waves of them…watched the BBC lately?

Here’s the link I used: http://www.rghr.net/mainfile.php/0825/1130/

The “doctrine of necessity” justification (for state preservation) is a not too distant cousin of the national security justification that is flung around at will by certain administrations to subvert due process and rule of law both at home and abroad.

3) Our CEC should have known better than to become a party to the internal politics of BNP. Instead of favoring one side over the other why couldn’t he invite both for the time being? Surely this was within his discretion? It is understandable that the election clock is ticking and a decision had to be made. However, the bottom line is that the BNP constitution cannot justify the invitation of the Mannan faction as the true BNP. I think the New Age editorial from Nov. 7th is right in this regard.

The CEC has to actively stay above controversy. Hard as it may be, it is part of his job. His failure to do so (and justifying it by a heinous doctrine) has only worsened the intra BNP rift, brought his very allegiance to the democratic process into serious doubt, and sullied the public image of the Election Commission. “CEC,” after all, does not stand for “Chief Election Czar.”

Since we’ve had a lot of talk about cartoons in this blog recently, I present one that made me laugh out loud today. Sharier, the famed Daily Star cartoonist, always delivers. Brilliant! I am interested to hear readers’ take on the “war of liberation” vs. “civil war” debate. From a cut and dry academic perspective, all wars of independence are actually also civil wars since they involve secession from an existing sovereign state or colonial state. But obviously the 1971 war was fought for the independence of Bangladesh (interestingly enough it can also be correctly characterized as falling into the category of an international war given the India-Pakistan dimension). Ultimately, the academic point is moot in this case because the characterization as “civil war” is generally assumed to be politically motivated, meant to trivialize the independence movement.

The Star mentions “Witness to Surrender” by Siddiq Salik as a good source concerning Jamaat’s true allegiances. I would be interested in learning about some other good historical sources on the collaboration of Jamaat and other political groups with the Pakistani army. That reminds me, I need to visit the liberation war museum. They are bound to have some documentation on this.

Does Pakistan provide clues to the future of Bangladesh? On the surface the similarities are striking: dysfunctional democracy, corrupt politicians locked in an unending feud, general arises vowing to clean up, minus two plan successful, general ascends to power buoyed by popular discontent with the status quo, he gains guarded kudos from the international community. Now fast forward eight years: general’s popular support wanes, corruption allegations and army entrenchment grows, failures in governance looming all around, bideshis are unhappy with the results, popular demand for democracy is a rising threat. Then comes the lady to the rescue, bearing blessings from abroad, carrying the standard of democracy, and paving the way for the general to become president and for a king’s party to thrive. Yet, she is tainted, having made a pact that wipes away all questions about her past sins. She is now seen by many to be providing him a much needed life line, a reprieve from the burgeoning democracy movement, and an exit strategy from military to civilian office. Now that Benazir is back, the international media is clamoring for Nawaz Sharif’s return.

The New York Times opines:

Ms. Bhutto’s greatest challenge will be to redeem this tawdry trade-off by using her popularity and skills to leverage this modest political opening into something resembling genuine democracy. Her first step should be to insist that those parliamentary elections are open to all, including her longtime political rival, Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister. His previous tenure, like hers, was badly flawed. But they are Pakistan’s two most popular politicians, and without the participation of both of them there can be no Pakistani democracy.

Had the minus two plan worked would we one day have to hear that there can be no talk of genuine democracy in Bangladesh without the Hasina-Khaleda duo? What kind of democracy will we have in their absence? They are, after all, the only leaders we have who are actually “popular.” They have the unique power to draw spontaneous crowds of hundreds and thousands, and they win their seats in parliament with natural ease. This is not an exercise in nostalgia. No doubt both have failed us as leaders. But what are our alternatives for credible, legitimate leadership? As two astute columns in today’s New Age by Mahtab Haider and Nihal Singh point out, there is a possibility that Benazir will play democracy while Musharraf carries out business as usual.

http://www.newagebd.com/edit.html

The Pakistan saga is unfolding so it is unclear whether Benazir will indeed keep her side of the bargain with Musharraf. But the question worth raising is: Are we to face a similar fate where a bickering litter of neophytes in parliament play democracy while real power remains in other hands?

Following the national id card plan, a considerable imposition on the poor, the army chief revealed the government’s plans to henceforth provide VIP treatment for expatriates. As reported by New Age Oct. 23 front page http://www.newagebd.com/front.html#e:

The army chief informed the audience that the matter of giving national VIP treatment to expatriate Bangladeshis was now at the final s