Bangladesh faces a crucial election on December 29, returning to civilian rule after almost two years of a military-backed administration. In this episode, 101 East asks: What is the future of Bangladeshi politics?

Here are some Bangladeshi blogs worth checking out:

Bangladesh from our View
An Ordinary Citizen
Bangladesh Corporate
Bangladesh Talk
Back to Bangladesh (photoblog)
Bangladesh Media Forum
Bangladesh Watchdog (Canadian-based)

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Politics in the Time of Cholera

Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, has written a powerful letter in The Observer on the need to remove by force Robert Mugabe from in Zimbabwe. I concur. By force and as soon as possible. How much is the life of a Zimbabwean worth? Where is our conscience? The age of petty brutal dictators that terrorize a country is over. Zimbabwe deserves better. It is clear that Mugabe will not yield to reason. He has held democracy at bay for too long and the world watches as a country is degraded beyond recognition. It is time for Mugabe to go and be tried for crimes against humanity.

When Jesus Christ wanted people to know what he was doing, he chose a passage from the Old Testament to describe his mission. It was a passage from the prophet Isaiah, written to encourage a disillusioned and demoralised people. It looked forward to a new day when there would be justice for people being treated unjustly and in poverty and release for the oppressed. It promised new life for the present and hope for the future.

President Robert Mugabe was right when he said only God could remove him. That’s exactly what happens. No tyrant lives for ever. No cruel regime lasts. God acts. And he is acting. An international chorus is at last being raised to bring an end to Mugabe’s brutal regime.

As cholera devastates a Zimbabwe already on its knees, our Prime Minister, our Foreign Secretary and the US Secretary of State have all called for an end to the regime of Mugabe. Now these voices must unite for a further call to bring an end to the charade of power-sharing that has enabled Mugabe to remain in office, assisted by his ruthless politburo.

Mugabe and his corrupt regime must go. Lord Acton said: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ How can anyone share power in a thoroughly corrupt regime?

The sterility of the power-sharing agreement can be seen through this broken land where its people die from eating anthrax-infected cattle or from starvation. Where sewers are open and there is no running water in towns hospitals any longer. A place where there is no electricity to operate the most basic services. A land where cholera is claiming more lives by the day.

The time has come for the international community to recognise that the power-sharing deal signed in September is dead. The impasse within the South African-sponsored negotiations between the MDC and Zanu PF has been sustained by a Mugabe regime which is unwilling to give up power and refuses to recognise the rule of law.

Last week in London, I spoke to the father of Ben Freeth, the man who had his farm seized on the day Mugabe was sworn in as President. Ben was abducted from the farm while both he and his father-in-law were unconscious with severe head injuries. Ben’s mother-in-law had her arm broken and had a stick from the fire thrust into her mouth for refusing to join in pro-Mugabe songs. She was made to sign a bit of paper with a gun to her head. The paper said that they would not challenge the seizure.

In a search for justice, Ben, with other farmers, brought his case to an international court with international jurisdiction. At the end of last month, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) tribunal of five judges sitting in Namibia ruled unanimously that the farm seizures had been unlawful, that the 75 white farmers who brought the case had been discriminated against on the basis of their race and that compensation should be paid. The Zimbabwean Minister of State for National Security responded by saying that the tribunal was ‘daydreaming because we are not going to reverse the land reform exercise … we will take more farms’.

The time for any negotiated settlement which leaves Mugabe and his regime in power is over. Mugabe has had the opportunity to share power and to restore the land that he brought to ruin. Instead, that path of ruination has become a slope falling away into a humanitarian disaster.

Where are the African governments or leaders with the courage of Julius Nyerere, the former President of Tanzania, who ousted Idi Amin after recognising that his neighbour had become a tyrant and who marched an army into Uganda to bring an end to the killing fields? In Uganda, we were beaten, tortured, abused and hundreds were murdered, but never did we starve to death or see the level of suffering which is to be found in today’s Zimbabwe. We went into exile but not by the millions as Zimbabweans have.

We look for leaders of resolution and courage to lead the people of Zimbabwe out of their suffering. The late Dr Martin Luther King Jr said: ‘We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.’

Mugabe may well brand anyone who criticises him as a ‘colonialist’ or an ‘imperialist’ for any action they take, but the people of Zimbabwe look to the international community, especially the SADC, to heed the cries of their suffering and the voices of our own conscience.

More than 20 years ago, Joshua Nkomo gave an address at the funeral of Lookout Masuku who had been imprisoned for an alleged plot to overthrow Mugabe. Nkomo’s words need to be heard afresh, not least by the President of South Africa, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Mugabe’s neighbours.

Nkomo said: ‘We cannot blame colonialism and imperialism for this tragedy. We who fought against these things now practise them. Our country cannot progress on fear and the false accusations which are founded simply on the love of power. There is something radically wrong with our country today and we are moving, fast, towards destruction. There is confusion and corruption and, let us be clear about it, we are seeing racism in reverse under the false mirror of correcting imbalances from the past. In the process, we are creating worse things. We have created fear in the minds of some in our country. We have made them feel unwanted, unsafe. We cannot condemn other people and then do things even worse than they did. We cannot go on this way.’

The time has come for Mugabe to answer for his crimes against humanity, against his countrymen and women and for justice to be done. The winds of change that once brought hope to Zimbabwe and its neighbours have become a hurricane of destruction with the outbreak of cholera, destitution, starvation and systemic abuse of power by the state.

As a country cries out for justice, we can no longer be inactive to their call. Mugabe and his henchmen must now take their rightful place in the Hague and answer for their actions. The time to remove them from power has come.

I concur and I affix my name to this call.

Charles Lemos
San Francisco, CA

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On the 60th anniversary of the UN universal declaration of human rights Al Jazeera visits Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan to find out how conflict hinders the education each country’s future generations.

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Earlier in the week I wrote on Mexico’s under-reported drug war in the wake of 37 deaths in Tijuana last weekend. I am relieved that this week there has been some attention paid to the spiraling violence. I had reported that drug related deaths had surpassed 4,000 for the year and that was up about 50% over last year’s 2,700 deaths. The various reports that I have seen this week are both reporting much higher numbers. This report from Al Jazeera puts the death toll at 4,500 and the New York Times in its front page story put the tally at over 5,000. Here’s the New York Times on how Mexican hospitals are now a theater in Mexico’s drug war.

The sedated patient, his bullet wounds still fresh from a shootout the night before, was lying on a gurney in the intensive care unit of a prestigious private hospital here late last month with intravenous fluids dripping into his arm. Suddenly, steel-faced gunmen barged in and filled him with even more bullets. This time, he was dead for sure.

Hit men pursuing rivals into intensive care units and emergency rooms. Shootouts in lobbies and corridors. Doctors kidnapped and held for ransom, or threatened with death if a wounded gunman dies under their care. With alarming speed, Mexico’s violent drug war is finding its way into the seeming sanctuary of the nation’s hospitals, shaking the health care system and leaving workers fearing for their lives while trying to save the lives of others.

“Remember that hospital scene from ‘The Godfather?’ ” asked Dr. Héctor Rico, an otolaryngologist here, speaking about the part in which Michael Corleone saves his hospitalized father from a hit squad. “That’s how we live.”

An explosion of violence connected with Mexico’s powerful drug cartels has left more than 5,000 people dead so far this year, nearly twice the figure from the year before, according to unofficial tallies by Mexican newspapers. The border region of the United States and Mexico, critical to the cartels’ trafficking operation, has been the most violent turf of all, with 60 percent of all killings in the country last month occurring in the states of Chihuahua and Baja California, the government says. And it has raised fears that violence could spill across the border, because dozens of victims of drug violence have been treated at an El Paso hospital in the last year.

The federal government argues that the rising death toll reflects President Felipe Calderón’s aggressive stance toward the cartels, which has forced traffickers into a bitter war over the dwindling turf that remains.

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First of all, good for them. Second of all, here’s one place where we can learn from Latin America because this sort of thing became rather common in the economic crises that befell the region in last past decade. No where more than in Argentina in the period from 2001 through 2003.

During the economic crisis of 2001, when politicians and banks failed, many Argentines took matters into their own hands. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems and grassroots, micro- credit lending programs. Community groups were created to provide solidarity, food, and support in neighborhoods across the country. Perhaps the most well known of these initiatives was the recuperation of bankrupt factories and business, which were occupied by workers and run cooperatively. Two recuperated businesses with stories that are representative of this movement are the Hotel Bauen and the Chilavert book publishing factory.

Here’s Naomi Klein writing on the Argentine experience in the UK Guardian back in April of 2003:

In 1812, bands of British weavers and knitters raided textile mills and smashed industrial machines with their hammers. According to the Luddites, the new mechanised looms had eliminated thousands of jobs and broken communities and deserved to be destroyed. The British government disagreed and called in a force of 14,000 soldiers to brutally repress the worker revolt and protect the machines.

Fast-forward two centuries to another textile factory, this one in Buenos Aires. At the Brukman factory, which has been producing men’s suits for 50 years, it’s the riot police who smash the sewing machines and the 58 workers who risk their lives to protect them.

Last Monday, the Brukman factory was the site of the worst repression Buenos Aires has seen in almost a year. Police had evicted the workers in the middle of the night and turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns and attack dogs. Unable to get into the factory and complete an outstanding order for 3,000 pairs of dress trousers, the workers gathered a huge crowd of supporters and announced it was time to go back to work. At 5pm, 50 middle-aged seamstresses in no-nonsense haircuts, sensible shoes and blue work smocks walked up to the black police fence. Someone pushed, the fence fell and the Brukman women, unarmed and arm in arm, slowly walked through.

They had only taken a few steps when the police began shooting: tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, then lead. The police even charged the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in their white headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. Dozens of demonstrators were injured and police fired tear gas into a hospital where some had taken refuge.

This is a snapshot of Argentina in the week of its presidential elections. Each of the five major candidates is promising to put this crisis-ravaged country back to work. Yet Brukman’s workers are treated as if sewing a grey suit were a capital crime.

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President-elect Barack Obama is inviting Americans to share their thoughts about fixing the nation’s health care system this holiday season, as families and friends gather to celebrate and spend time together. It’s another brilliant move from the President-elect. It’s time to have a national conversation about health care. If any of you have Republican friends, talk their ears off. Bludgeon them with hard cold facts about the awful state of American health care. Make it known to everyone who will listen, that we will accept no more excuses. Health care is not a commodity to be served by a free market, it’s a moral obligation that government must provide.

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about health care but I read enough about it to know this. In the United States, we spend about 16% to 17% of GDP on health care and yet almost one in six Americans doesn’t have access to regular health care. In Europe, most countries spend between 8% to 10% of their GDP on health care. Germany spends the most about 11% of GDP and they cover everybody. Part of our problem here I think is that we fail to connect the dots properly. We subsidize corn to such any extent that corn pervades almost every thing an American eats thus leading a rate of obesity that with Australia ranks the highest in the world. And therein start our woes. Our diet is pitiful and our diet starts in the Farm Bill which no one pays attention to because it’s misnamed. Call it the Food Bill and more people might pay attention. I bring this up because just yesterday I was stunned to learn that 10% of US health care expenditures right now revolve around complications from diabetes.

About 17 million Americans (including 6.2% of adults) are believed to have diabetes. About one third of diabetic adults do not know they have diabetes.

* About 1 million new cases occur each year, and diabetes is the direct or indirect cause of at least 200,000 deaths each year.

* The incidence of diabetes is increasing rapidly. This increase is due to many factors, but the most significant are the increasing incidence of obesity and the prevalence of sedentary lifestyles.

We need to rethink our addiction to corn. And it is definitely time to rename the Farm Bill, the Food Bill. Maybe just maybe that alone will get more people to pay attention to it and then there might be some push back on the gross amounts of Federal subsidies for corporations that don’t need them.

The above video is the trailer for King Corn which is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

Next time you have a Coke or a Pepsi, just think of it as drinking an ear of corn.

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Word perhaps I thought I would never utter but I must admit I like the kitchen sink tactic that President-elect Obama’s economic recovery programme encompasses. I am also a big proponent of vast infrastructure investments, they are long overdue especially in the mass transit and energy sectors. As Todd Beeton over at My DD astutely notes:

Notice what else is included under the umbrella of economic recovery: his economic recovery plan IS his energy plan, it is his healthcare plan, it is his education plan and the list goes on. By getting buy-in on the overall economic recovery plan, he’s winning support for everything that falls under that, a point made more specifically in his weekly address.

Whether or not you agree with the specifics of each proposal, Obama does seem to be a master political tactician. The comprehensive approach means it will all get passed and enacted. This tactic is especially important in the health care debate because it is pretty clear that is where the GOP will draw their line in the sand.

Below the fold, the text of President-elect Obama’s remarks. (more…)