Bangladesh is growing in size

Country’s landmass has increased by more than 386 square miles since 1973, and could gain another 1,000 sq km by 2050 due to freak environmental conditions. Jeremy Page in The Times:

Bangladesh is often held up as the ‘ground zero’ of climate change, with environmental experts predicting that rising sea levels could engulf much of the country of 150 million people within the next 50 years.

But a recent survey by a Bangladeshi research institute shows that the country’s landmass has actually increased by more than 1,000 square km (386 square miles) since 1973, due to rivers dumping sediment as they meet the sea.

Bangladesh could also gain another 1,000 square km by 2050, according to scientists from the state-run Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

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Terrorists in Bangladesh?

Another Musharraf could emerge if the US doesn’t act, says Selig S. Harrison in The Christian Science Monitor:

While the CIA and the Pentagon search in vain for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan, an Al Qaeda affiliate has been quietly building up terrorist bases in the jungles of Bangladesh under the protective aegis of a new military regime in Dhaka allied with Islamist forces.

The founding leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami in Bangladesh, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, was one of the six signatories of Mr. bin Laden’s first declaration of holy war against the United States, and a US State Department study reports that Harkat “maintains contact with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

Bush administration officials privately endorse mounting Indian evidence that Bangladeshi Harkat agents spearheaded a series of terrorist attacks in India. But the US has conspicuously failed to press Bangladesh’s military ruler, Gen. Moeen U Ahmed, for a crackdown on Harkat and for the removal of highly placed intelligence officials with Islamist ties.

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Indian hopes for a season of friendship

The visit of the Bangladesh army chief followed by the flagging of the Maitree Express is cause for optimism on both sides of the border, reports Jyoti Malhotra in Mint

If wishes were horses, India and Bangladesh could easily ride off into the sunset together.

So, when Bangladesh army chief Gen. Moeen U. Ahmed arrived in Delhi in late February, the first army chief from that country to visit India, army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor gifted him with two stallions and four mares, handpicked from the army’s Remount Veterinary Corps. The six horses cost Rs3.6 crore (Rs1 crore each for the stallions and Rs40 lakh for each mare), but Indian officials are emphatic about the fact that its money well spent. “The fact that this Bangladesh army chief is a muktijoddha (freedom fighter) indicates that he is well disposed to India,’’ said a senior Indian government official, who did not wish to be identified.

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[Pic: The Maitree Express on its maiden Kolkata-Dhaka run on April 13. Madhu Kapparath/Mint]

Previously on AW: London to Dhaka by train

In Bangladesh: fears of a climatic Armageddon

While the least developed countries suffer the worst effects of climate change, brought about by the actions of the rich, they have no voice in global warming talks. Now Bangladesh is leading a fightback, reports John Vidal in The Guardian

On September 27 last year, Fakhruddin Ahmed, chief adviser - or head - of the interim government of Bangladesh, stood in the UN general assembly in New York and appealed on behalf of all the most vulnerable countries in the world for help and justice to cope with climate change. “This year we in Bangladesh have witnessed one of the worst floods in recent times . . . there is little we can do to prevent significant damage . . . a one-metre sea level rise will submerge about one-third of Bangladesh, uprooting 25 million to 30 million people. I speak for Bangladesh and many other countries on the threshold of a climatic Armageddon,” he said.

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[pic: women queue at a flood shelter in Dhaka after floods last August. Abir Abdullah]

Inside the slave trade

They are promised a better life. But every year, countless boys and girls in Bangladesh are spirited away to brothels where they have to prostitute themselves with no hope of freedom. Special investigation by Johann Hari in The Independent, UK:

This is the story of the 21st century’s trade in slave-children. My journey into their underworld took place where its alleys and brothels are most dense - Asia, where the United Nations calculates 1 million children are being traded every day. It took me to places I did not think existed, today, now. To a dungeon in the lawless Bangladeshi borderlands where children are padlocked and prison-barred in transit to Indian brothels; to an iron whore-house where grown women have spent their entire lives being raped; to a clinic that treat syphilitic 11-year-olds…

…Sufia grew up in a village near Khulna in the south-west of Bangladesh. Her parents were farmers; she was one of eight children. “My parents couldn’t afford to look after me,” she says. “We didn’t have enough money for food.”And so came the lie. When Sufia was 14, a female neighbour came to her parents and said she could find her a good job in Calcutta as a housemaid. She would live well; she would learn English; she would have a well-fed future. “I was so excited,” Sufia says.

“But as soon as we arrived in Calcutta I knew something was wrong,” she says. “I didn’t know what a brothel was, but I could see the house she took me to was a bad house, where the women wore small clothes and lots of bad men were coming in and out.” The neighbour was handed 50,000 takka - around £500 - for Sufia, and then she told her to do what she was told and disappeared.

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Review: Written Words

Continuing our occasional series ‘Review’, this time Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age by Amardeep Singh in his blog

A friend gave me a copy of A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, as a present a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week. A Golden Age, it turns out, is a very strong first novel, written in a direct, natural style, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Anam’s is the first novel put out by a western publisher that I know of to have Bangladesh’s war for independence as its main theme, and for that reason alone, I suspect A Golden Age will become the kind of book that is often taught in college classes on “South Asian Literature” (like the courses I myself get to teach every couple of years). The War is important in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, but only at a great distance (Mistry’s novel is set in Bombay). And a section of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children deals with this event, but it comes near the end, and Rushdie addresses it in rather lyrical terms — you don’t really get a solid explanation of how the war started or what it was about.

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This day in history: historic March 7 in Bangladesh

From The Bangladesh Today:

On this day in 1971, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, addressed a mammoth gathering of hundreds of thousands of people at the then Race Course Maidan, now Suhrawardy Udyan, urging them to join a non-cooperation movement and continue the progrmmes until the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country from the colonial rule of the then Pakistan.

Bangabandhu asked the nation to prepare for the war of independence from oppressive Pakistani regime. “The struggle this time is for freedom, the struggle this time is for independence, Joy Bangla,” Bangabandhu declared from the grand rally.

The Awami League and its front organisations have drawn up an elaborate programme to observe the historic day in limited scale due to the on going state of emergency.

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Artefacts to be returned ’soon’, says French envoy

Bangladeshi artefacts still remaining in France could be headed back home, reports The Independent, Bangladesh

The newly appointed French ambassador to Bangladesh Charley Causeret has said the Bangladeshi artefacts remaining in France would be sent back to Bangladesh “soon”.

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Taslima and Aitzaz

Himal Southasian 

Kanak Mani Dixit on Taslima Nasrin, Aitzaz Ahsan and the politics of exile 

There will be serious doubts about how Southasian we are if we cannot care for those who are suffering, and then rise to do something about it. In particular, there is a serious empathy deficit among the countries of our region today, where we seem unable to put ourselves in the sandals of someone across the frontier. We are made remote, of course, firstly by the borders that separate us, and the media that largely concentrates on news within those borders. But we also fail the test of rationality, each of us, because our vision is affected by ideological blinkers. Lastly, perhaps we keep quiet because, on many an occasion, we lack the courage of our convictions.