At least eleven
students died and six others were in critical condition after a fire in a
school for the blind in central Uganda, police said on Tuesday.
The fire broke out around 1 a.m. at the Salaama School for
the Blind in Mukono, about 30 km east of the capital Kampala, and the cause is
so far unknown, police said in a statement.
Deadly school blazes, which often tear through dormitories,
are relatively common in Uganda and often blamed on faulty wiring, although
authorities say some have been started deliberately.
- Reuters
Comment
Four
Bangladesh nationals have been arrested in Gujarat on charges that they
illegally entered the country and were trying to radicalise local youth in
Ahmedabad and collecting money, according to a statement by Gujarat’s
anti-terrorist squad (ATS) on Monday.
The four
were part of a local al-Qaeda module trained by their handlers in Bangladesh,
the statement issued by deputy inspector general (DIG) Gujarat ATS, Deepan
Bhadran said
The four
persons were identified by the police as Mohammad Sojib, Munna Khalid Ansari,
Azharul Islam Ansari, and Mominul Ansari.
“Based on
the received intelligence, four illegal Bangladeshi immigrants involved in
recruiting for ‘al-Qaeda’ were arrested,” said Bhadran.
He added
that the police first picked Sojib, who earlier lived in Ahmedabad’s Rakhial
area, for questioning.
“Sojib
revealed that he and three other individuals are associated with al-Qaeda’s
network and were receiving instructions from their handler based in Bangladesh,
identified as Shariful Islam. Through Islam, these youths came into contact
with Shayba, who is reportedly heading al-Qaeda’s operations in Mymensingh
district, Bangladesh.”
According
to the ATS, the suspects were trying to radicalise people in Gujarat and were
also transferring funds to Bangladesh. The ATS did not, however, indicate how
much money had been transferred.
“Gujarat
ATS received information about four Bangladeshi nationals residing illegally in
Ahmedabad’s Odhav and Narol areas, using duplicate IDs. They are associated
with al-Qaeda and have been motivating Muslim residents of the city to join the
militant organization, as well as collecting funds for al-Qaeda.”
ATS said
fake identity documents and literature produced by the terror group’s media
wing were seized at the instance of the four suspects.
ATS said
the focus of its inquiry was to identify individuals who facilitated their
border crossing, ascertain methods to raise funds, identify local contacts, and
individuals who may have been influenced by them.
Comment
Last weekend the New York Times published
a report that President Biden has been missing in action in recent
months when it comes to serious question-and-answer sessions with the
Washington press corps. The obvious reason for the lack of press conferences
is “to protect” the president from unscripted exchanges that often result in
missteps and confusion. Had I been writing the piece, I might have added that the
president is intent on not blurting out an unwanted truth. And he is not
alone in avoiding the press. The fact is that Secretary of State Tony Blinken
and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan have similarly disappeared in
recent months when it comes to give-and-take sessions with the White House
press corps. In their place we now have John Kirby, a retired admiral
who is a nice enough guy. He was a press guru at the Pentagon a decade or so
ago when I was writing lots of tough stuff on national security issues,
usually with no named sources, for the New Yorker. He made no
pretenses then about being a policy maker, and he is no different now. Yet it
was Kirby who was left to take a battering from a miffed press corps press
earlier this month when the administration released a blame-anybody-but-us
policy paper—distributed on just a few moments notice—dealing with the flawed
US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The senior officials who should have been explaining that
policy were Blinken and Sullivan—and perhaps even the president. In my view,
his decision to pull the American military out was a high point of his
diplomacy since taking office. It was bad luck that a terrorist bomb killed
thirteen US soldiers and at least sixty Afghans, eviscerating all that was
good in America’s change of policy. Yes, mistakes were made—the rush to get
American troops out of harm’s way led to the disastrous early shutting of the
vital Bagram airbase—but Biden did what he is being paid to do: he made a
tough decision. He has yet to do so about Ukraine, or China, or the recent
perhaps game-changing developments in Israel. And he has not addressed the
fact that under his administration signs have emerged that America may
no longer be the dominant global power in foreign policy, international
trade, and general esteem. At some point, if Biden wants to be re-elected, he
will have to face a press corps that will ask the questions about
subjects—such as his current low standing in the polls—that now seem to be
taboo. All of which brings me to tell you what I know about going
with the second string in dealing with the media. I was definitely below the
cut line during my five months as press secretary and sometime speech writer
for Senator Eugene McCarthy, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota who decided in
late 1967 to challenge fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson for the presidential
nomination the next year. McCarthy had spent a decade in the House before
winning a Senate seat in 1958, and was far from a flame thrower when it came
to the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, he decided to do what Senator Robert
Kennedy, the all but inevitable heir to the throne, chose not to do in late
1967: take on an unpopular sitting president. I was not a political junkie and knew nothing about
McCarthy, a two-term senator whose contempt for the war turned out, to my
surprise, to be extreme. But I did know that the antiwar Democrats were
desperate to find someone credible to challenge Johnson and get him out of
office. Not likely, so I thought. In mid-December a neighbor of mine named
Mary McGrory, then the must-read columnist of the Washington Star,
a long gone daily, came over for a martini, which she often did, and told me
I needed to be McCarthy’s press secretary. Mary was a fixture in Washington’s
Irish mafia and since she had given up on Bobby making the run she decided it
was up to Gene to do it. The ambivalent McCarthy, she said, was willing to
take a flyer, but he needed help, lots of it. And I needed to be his press
secretary and write his speeches. I hated politics and all the compromising involved, but I
had resigned from the Associated Press’s Washington bureau earlier that
summer and just finished a book—any money coming from it was months away—and
I was anxious about being just another freelance, and thus broke, Washington
journalist. So it was arranged—the next day, if I recall it right—for me to
sit down with the senator and see if it could work. I had gotten to know
three or four senators since I hit Washington two years earlier, and I liked
their quickness and willingness to work. At his office, I got the
immediate sense that the Minnesotans working there were hostile to the notion
of a separate campaign office that would include none of them. McCarthy
himself was a handsome man who’d been a varsity athlete in college and looked
fit. He was totally diffident toward me, just as he was about the idea of
challenging a fellow Democrat who happened to be in the White House. I gave
him a sheaf of magazine stuff I’d written—slim pickings to be sure—and he
glanced at the pieces, looked over the young punk in front of him, and said,
“I guess you’ll do.” I don't think our meet and greet took more than ten
minutes. I called McGrory up and told her she’d thrown me to the
wolves. Stick it out, she said. Gene was giving a speech the next night in
New York City to an anti-Johnson Democrat group. She said it could lead to
some serious campaign money, and I should go listen. I did, and I heard the
senator, who I thought had been disdainful of the antiwar movement, give a
forceful and compelling denouncement of the Vietnam War as immoral and take a
step further by accusing Johnson of violating his oath of office. I’d been
obsessed about the war for years—it wasn’t an accident that I would pursue a
tip two years later and find the story of the My Lai massacre—and I had never
heard a national politician describe Vietnam as the moral horror it clearly
was, let alone suggest that Johnson was denigrating his office. And so I decided to give it a shot. A McCarthy campaign
press office had been set up in downtown Washington and I was suddenly in
charge of it. The young anti-war woman running it seemed terrific, and she
became my deputy. I needed one quickly because the senator and I were to fly
to Los Angeles the next day, and I was going to be his batman for the trip. I
spent the rest of the day and much of the night going through my collection
of antiwar tomes by authors such as Bernard Fall, then the leading expert on
Vietnam and the war, and various publications by church groups that had been
tracking the murderous war since the first American troops arrived. I put
together a collection of 40 pages of homework and gave it to McCarthy. He brought his poetry to read on the trip—he was
passionate about it—and wasn’t interested in his first class seatmate. But
one of the articles was about the trial of five antiwar activists, including
Dr Benjamin Spock, America’s favorite pediatrician, accused of aiding and
abetting draft dodgers. McCarthy, who had four children, was interested. When
we hit Los Angeles, the senator did a fund raiser or two with the Hollywood
crowd, but the big event for him was a long-scheduled speech at an
end-the-war rally at UCLA. It was a big audience—maybe seven or eight
thousand in all—and during the Q&A session he was asked about the Spock
trial. I learned about the genius of the senator as I listened to him put
what he had casually read on the plane into a strident and accurate defense
of what Spock and his colleagues had done. He was with them, he said to a
roar of applause. Most important, as we learned the next morning, the
senator’s defense of Spock and his co-defendants made national news, and I
had helped him do so. It was the high point of my tour as a press
secretary. Not being house-trained in public relations, I broke every taboo
of the trade. A few days after returning from Los Angeles I got a
telephone call from the candidate’s wife, Abigail, who told me to minimize
any public emphasis on the family’s Catholicism, which she thought would be a
disadvantage in southern New Hampshire. I told her I worked for her husband
and not for her. I learned quickly that Gene was deeply religious and had
spent time in a seminary after college but had moved back to the secular
world after less than a year of seclusion. His faith was his own business,
and no one else’s, and to pretend he wasn’t a Catholic was loony. Big
mistake. I did not know about “pillow talk,” the political phrase for the
power of a candidate’s wife. I had made her a pillow talk enemy by my second
week on the job. I was later exposed to the power of pillow talk in 1981.
Ronald Reagan had won the presidency and I was two years into a long book on
Henry Kissinger. Reagan’s national security adviser was Richard Allen, an
arms control expert who worked for Kissinger in the early Nixon
Administration days and was unafraid to tell me things I needed to know.
Allen was most puckish and he and I sometimes exchanged stupid and smutty
jokes when he was in the White House. Reagan adored this sort of thing, Allen
told me, and one afternoon after I came up with a a good one over the phone,
Allen said, “The President would love this one,” and he asked me to hang on.
I listened as Allen then called the Secret Service agent on duty outside
Reagan’s office and asked, “Is she there?” She being First Lady Nancy Reagan.
The agent said yes and Dick told me he’d deliver my joke when she was not
around—not a good move. Allen would not last many more months as national
security adviser. But he did tell one story worth repeating. It was known
that Reagan did not want to be awakened even if the National Security Agency
came up with a hot intercept marked “Critic”—the designation meant the
message had to be on the president’s desk within minutes. One very early
morning Allen was informed that the Israeli air force had successfully
attacked and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. This was
something that had to be shared with Reagan. He called the special telephone,
and the president answered, listened carefully to the message, and after a
long pause said, “Well, Dick, boys will be boys,” and went back to bed. (Dick
told the story in different ways over the years, but the punchline has
remained intact.) I thought my job was getting reporters to interview
McCarthy and generate publicity and perhaps a few more contributions to the
campaign, which needed money badly. Nope. McCarthy was not a fan of the
Washington press corps, especially because he was treated as an oddity by
reporters. I constantly urged and begged him to do more interviews, and
he—this was two months into the New Hampshire campaign—accused me of planting
reporters in the back seat and trunk of every car he was riding in. “The
reporters love you,” he said to me again and again, “but they’re supposed to
love me.” As McCarthy was gaining traction among moderate Republicans and the
working class in New Hampshire, Ward Just, a wonderful reporter for the Washington
Post (and later a prolific novelist), fresh from a long stint in
Vietnam, called me to say he wanted to come up to New Hampshire to see
firsthand how an avowedly anti-Vietnam War candidate was doing. I told the
senator about Ward’s plan and, to my surprise, he made a face and said, in
essence, No way. Why not? He gave me a sharp look and said, “Don’t you
remember what Ward wrote about me in Newsweek?’ I had to call
the Newsweek offices in Washington to find the quote: Ward
had written a small gossipy item six years earlier about McCarthy in a
section of the magazine called Periscope that was filled with little
oddities, and he depicted Gene as walking like a priest. The senator kept on
asking me for days if knew how a priest walked. Ward came, of course, and McCarthy
spent time with him, but he resented every minute of it. Most important in my demise were my constant attempts in
the speeches I occasionally drafted—the campaign had hired someone much more
gifted in the role—to get the candidate to include a call for a guaranteed
annual income of $12,000 for every American in need. My staff had been
pushing me to get the senator on board, but the operatives running the
campaign, most of whom were already measuring their White House offices,
thought the idea was political suicide. I finally got McCarthy to sign off on
the proposal, and it was included in a speech he was to give in early March,
when the polls were showing that President Johnson, who had hesitated about
running in New Hampshire and was a write-in candidate, was not going to win
big, if he won at all. By this late date—the primary was on March 12—McCarthy’s
surge was a great political story and my office was responsible
for chartering a commercial jet and billing the reporters on each leg as the
candidate gave speeches to constantly growing crowds. The job was getting
less and less fun for me, because with success came more reporters and more
demands for unwanted interviews, and less access to the man himself for me.
But the final draft of the speech included the call for a guaranteed annual
income and the press release I wrote for the forty or so journalists that
were following the campaign and traveling with us emphasized it. Some of the
old-timers asked me again and again whether the senator was really going to
do it. The speech was going to begin late and the reporters for morning
newspapers and the wires had to file early to make the first edition. I
assured them all that the commitment was in. But McCarthy dropped the commitment when he delivered the
speech. I was off stage and as the senator went by he asked me, “Whatcha
think?” I said D-minus. Wrong answer, as he and I knew. At the bar that
night, two or three of Gene’s old pals told me they had been upstairs in the
hotel having a drink with Gene and some of his wife’s money boys and I was
doomed. And so I was. I hung in past the primary, in which McCarthy came within
a few points of the president, who then announced that he would not run for
re-election. That would bring Bobby Kennedy into the race, and surely
undercut the McCarthy campaign. I had done the best I could, but I was never
inside the decision-making process of the campaign, just as John Kirby and
others in the press operation in the White House will never be, either. To pretend that President Biden is focused on trying to reach the American people by different means, and not avoiding the give-and-take of a news conference open to all, as a White House aide told the New York Times, is just horseshit. |
Comment
Almost 2 tonnes of cocaine with a market value of more than $440 million (400 million euros) were found floating at sea off eastern Sicily, in what Italy's tax and customs police on Monday (17 April) called a record seizure.
The drugs were stored in about 70 waterproof packages,
carefully sealed, held together by fishermen's nets and equipped with a
luminous signalling device, the Guardia di Finanza said in a statement.
The "peculiar packaging methods and the presence of a
luminous device to allow tracking" suggest the haul was dumped at sea by a
cargo ship in order for it to be recovered later, the statement added.
Monday's seizure compared with the 20 tonnes
of cocaine that Italian police managed to intercept over the whole of
2021, its anti-drugs unit said in figures released last June, stressing that
was the highest yearly amount on record.
Cocaine seizures increased more than five-fold from 3.6
tonnes in 2018, police noted at the time, describing Italy as a key transit
route for the cocaine trade, and where Balkan criminal gangs were
consolidating their positions.
"Congratulations to the Guardia di Finanza for this
extraordinary operation: (I am) against all drugs and for life, no matter what",
Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini tweeted on
Monday.
-
Reuters
Comment
The US Justice Department on Tuesday (18 April) charged the founder and three members of a half-century-old Black nationalist group with working with Russian intelligence to influence elections in the United States.
Omali Yeshitela, the founder of the African People's
Socialist Party (APSP) and the Uhuru Movement, and two other party members,
Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Nevel were charged with acting as unregistered
agents of Russia, which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.
All three, as well as another member named Augustus Romain,
have also been charged with conspiring to act as agents for Russia, which
brings up to 10 years in prison.
According to an indictment, the four people took money and
other support from US-based Russian Alexandr Ionov and Moscow-based officers of
Russia's FSB intelligence agency who directed Ionov.
Ionov was charged last year for running a political
influence operation directed by the FSB, but his US contacts were not named,
though APSP facilities were raided by the FBI at the time.
Charges against Ionov, who is believed to be back in Russia,
were updated in Tuesday's indictment filed in Tampa, Florida.
Undercover as president of the Moscow-based
Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, Ionov used the APSP and Uhuru movements,
and Romain's Georgia-based spinoff Black Hammer, to promote Russian views on politics,
the Ukraine war and other issues.
Yeshitela travelled to Russia in 2015 where he entered a
partnership with Ionov's group, according to the indictment.
In 2016 Ionov funded a four-city protest tour by APSP
supporting a "Petition on Crime of Genocide against African People in the
United States," according to the Justice Department.
In 2017 and 2019, the group also actively sought to
influence local elections in St. Petersburg, Florida -- where the four
Americans are based -- and then the 2020 national elections, according to the
charges.
It said that in 2022 Romain and Black Hammer received
funding from Ionov and his group "to further the interests of Russia in
relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
The Justice Department said the Americans all knew Ionov
worked for the Russian government.
The indictment, which also charged two FSB officers based in
Russia, said Ionov had provided funding to an unnamed political group in
California that advocated California's secession from the United States.
And in a parallel indictment filed in Washington, the US
charged Russian national Natalia Burlinova, the head of the academic outreach
organization PICREADI, with operating with the FSB to recruit Americans.
"Today's announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit US citizens to their efforts," said FBI Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow.
- BSS/AFP
Comment
The US
deep state and policy establishment seems very fond of right-wing Islamist
radicals or the 'mullahs'. They used them to bring down Iran's secular
nationalist and democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh regime
when it threatened to nationalise Iran's oil industry in the 1950s.
The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the radicals backed and sheltered by
Pakistan to torpedo Afghanistan's Saur revolution that was doing wonders for
women's emancipation and the end of clan-based feudalism.
They
backed the Pakistani military using radicals to attack India or suppress the
1971 Bengali uprising.
The US
brought down Saddam Hussein with a fake scare that he had developed weapons of
mass destruction -- the bluff was called by the BBC at some cost to its
finances. The net result -- the rise of ISIS in the vacuum caused by the
withering away of the secular though autocratic Baath Party.
The
US-sponsored Arab Spring ended Hosni Mubarak's 'police state' but propelled the
Islamic brotherhood to power. General Fateh Al Sisi has restored Egypt's
secular polity in the great military tradition of backing secularism in the
Islamic world, but US efforts to keep the Talibans out with a parachuted liberal
like Ashraf Ghani failed miserably because Washington's regional favourite -
Pakistan's military - played both sides -- supporting NATO forces with
logistics and selective intelligence while backing the Talibans.
The US
failures in fighting asymmetric campaigns across the world failed despite its
overwhelming military power, because its deep state and military-industrial
complex suffered from the: cowboy mindset' with overwhelming emphasis on force
and confused approach to politics.
In the
Islamic world, the US has always floundered because it has often found value in
radicals/ mullahs for immediate tactical gains, but then seen them emerge as
huge long-term threats.
Osama Bin
Laden's saga comes to mind but is too well known to be recounted in detail.
Fearing
that the US was about to repeat its historical mistake in Bangladesh which
India could ill afford for an awful long list of reasons, Pranab Mukherjee (
later President) fought a long verbal duel with US Secretary of State Hilary
Clinton during the unfolding of the 1/11 Minus Two saga, reminding her that
Islamic radicals in Bangladesh have to be fought by 'homegrown secular forces '
rather than US Marines or some propped up pot-bellied Bengali general.
Mukherjee
prevailed and Bangladesh got a free and fair poll that brought back the Awami
League to power. The late president has recounted this graphically in his
memoirs "The Coalition Years".
Now the US
is back to its old mischief of regime change using a mix of 'civil society'
figures, Trojan horses inside the national power structure ranging from
bureaucracy to political parties to military, and media assets.
The
trouble is the US deep state rarely conjures up new innovative operational
plans -- rather they prefer sticking to an accepted template.
In the
case of Bangladesh, the US deep state and its cohorts in the policy establishment
are following the 2013 Euromaidan model that worked so well in Ukraine. In
fact, many from the Euromaidan team are handling the Bangladesh regime change
operations. Now what works in Ukraine may not work in Bangladesh. But the
Knight charlatans in Washington and Langley often miss out on regional
peculiarities.
The latest
US human rights report is part of the regime operations in Bangladesh. It seeks
to boost the radical outfit Jamaat-e-Islami at a time when it has unleashed a
hate campaign against the Ahmediyyas.
“Leaders
and members of Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat), the largest Muslim political party in
the country, could not exercise their constitutional freedoms of speech and
assembly because of harassment by law enforcement authorities. Jamaat was
deregistered as a political party by the government, prohibiting candidates
from seeking office under the Jamaat name,” observes the human rights reports
on Bangladesh.
Ironically,
the state department is not in keeping with the issues that the Ahmediyya
community raised with US Bangladesh Ambassador Peter Haas about the
fundamentalist pro-Pakistan party running a boycott Ahmediyya campaign and
pressing the government to declare them as “Unislamic”.
According
to a press release issued by the Ahmediyya community, Ambassdor Haas, during
his courtesy call to some of their leaders was told about "the serious
concerns over the Jamaat-sponsored hate campaign and the highly communal
statement from BNP’s secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir calling the
attempt to hold the Ahmediyya rally controversial .
Days after
the attack, Jamaat acting Secretary General Maulana ATM Masum issued a
statement on March 5, asking the government to officially declare the Ahmadiyya
community “non-Muslim”.
Moreover,
an ardent Jamaat-backed Twitter handle named Basherkella posted a series of
tweets asking people to boycott Ahmediyya, in clear evidence of a vicious hate
campaign by the minority community.
The US
human rights report also projects controversial rights body Odhikar as an
“independent body”, oblivious to the fact that its founder Adilur Rahman Khan
Shuvro was a deputy attorney general during the BNP-JAMAAT coalition government
(2001-06).
'Odhikar'
has been the moving force behind human rights data faking like blowing up the
casualty figures during the 2013 police crackdown on ardent hardliners from
Hefazat-e-Islam, then joined by opposition parties including Jamaat who even
vowed to siege the capital to bring in Sariah Law, which was exposed by
national media.
The UN
ended up with eggs on its face when its reports contained names of
hail-and-hearty Indian insurgents in the Bangladesh country report on Enforced
disappearances -- again based on data fed by Odhikar and its fraternal
organisations.
Moreover,
the US report seems to quote frequently about Jamaat’s key ally, Bangladesh
Nationalist Party’s (BNP), claims centering shrinking freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly, but ignores the party’s series of attacks on the country’s
press and role in instigating communal violence.
This has
provoked sharp reactions from Awami League leaders and their concerns are
valid. But what top civil society personality Sultana Kamal has approached will
hopefully compel Washington into some kind of introspection.
She said
in an interview and I quote:
"This
report concerns the Jamat- e-Islami (Jamaat) Bangladesh, a political party
which has a proven record of collaborating with the Pakistani Military Junta in
1971 in the acts of Genocide, abduction, loot, arson, rape and other kinds of
violence against women.
It is
an established fact that its military wings in the name of Al-Badar and
Al-Shams were responsible for the intellectual killings between December 10 and
14. With due respect, I would like to submit that scanning through the media,
Pakistani government communications and international reports on the Bangladesh
genocide of 1971, one can not miss seeing what the role of Jamaat was during
the nine months of massacre of Bangladesh from March to December.
It was
through a process of law that Jamaat was de- registered. As a freedom fighter,
I would like to also ask whether the Nazi party be allowed to function in
Germany?
I have
no idea on what basis the report states the war crimes trial in Bangladesh was
flawed. Since I have not seen any clear explanation as to why some quarters
make such remark about the war crimes trial, I prefer not to comment. However,
my experience with the tribunal was that the accused's right to self defence
was fully respected."
Now if the
US wants us to believe Zillur Rahman’s Center for Governance Studies is a more
credible institution than those helmed by Sultana Kamal, they are making a vain
effort. We know how the ISI funded his so-called glorified interview of war
criminals, along with the self-confessed killer of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with
one reportedly recorded in Pakistan, and how they then passed him on to the
Chinese who took care of his TV show. Now the US finds value in him because he
is agreeable, like a few others, to play a role in facilitating regime change
in Bangladesh.
"The
US agenda of demeaning the Hasina government is so preponderant that it goes
all out to support a dangerous group like Jamaat which not only joined the
Pakistani army in 1971 in perpetrating horrible atrocities. They nearly killed
me in 2001 because my liberal views were unacceptable to Jamaat," former
actress-playwright and minister Tarana Halim told a media outlet recently.
Halim, now Central Executive Member of the Awami League, said the West pitches for women's rights and human rights and then in the same breath upholds a group like Jamaat-e-Islami which is determined to impose Shariat law and curb gender rights in Bangladesh.
"The Western hypocrisy is so palpable and annoying. How can they get away
with this," Awami League women leader Shahanaz Parvin Dolly told
Bangladesh media.
A joint secretary at the Jubo Mohila League until the recent reorganisation of party committees, Dolly said the West talks of reconciliation in Bangladesh.
"That is impossible. How can we accommodate Jamaat-e-Islami, which opposed our freedom struggle and sided with Pakistan's occupation army to commit horrible brutalities on our people, especially against our women? As a Bengali woman, I will never accept their attempt to curb women's rights. We can't allow our country to be another Afghanistan," said Dolly.
According to the country’s eminent rights activists, the BNP’s top leadership, Tarique Rahman was convicted in cases of money laundering and holding a strong nexus with proscribed terror outfits during their rule in power back in 2001 to 2006. Tarique is now leading a fugitive life in London, who left the country having submitted an undertaking.
Under the rule of Tarique Rahman, Bangladesh became a hot bed for transnational terrorists while militants enjoyed a free reign with the highest state patronage, while a nefarious attempt known as the 21st grenade attack was executed in collusion with radicals that then opposition leader Sheikh Hasina has narrowly escaped.
Moreover, the absence of BNP’s threat of replication of the 1975-style assassination, calling out rights activists as AL sympathisers, and warning of capturing state power through violence — all that made the report ring hollow, according to experts.
So, from overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the 1950s to using hardcore Islamists to fight the Afghan Jihad to backing the most regressive regimes of Saudi Arabia, the US has always found radical forces as ready-to-use material for regime change operations to defeat progressive forces in the Islamic world.
For Washington during the Cold War, Arab or Persian nationalists like Gamal
Nasser, Saddam Hussein or Mossadegh were the principal enemy. On occasions, the
script has gone wrong for Washington when volcanic events like the Islamic
revolution unfolded in Iran in 1979 or when the Taliban took over Afghanistan
in 1996.
Those like us who covered the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War closely and the events that followed find a continuity in US policy – first in backing the bloodthirsty Pakistan army and followed by Washington's covert backing to the brutal 1975 coup. For the Nixon-Kissinger duo, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – the founding father of the nation – was a "Soviet-Indian proxy". So Washington's dislike for Arab nationalists like Nasser easily translated into distrust of Bangali nationalists like Mujib and Sheikh Hasina.
So this ardent US defence of Jamaat in the State Department report proves a
striking continuity in American policy of backing pro-Pakistan forces in
Bangladesh. The US always had problems with passionate nationalists like Indira
Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Gamal Nasser. Regressive regimes like Saudi
Arabia or Pakistan have always fitted Washington's bill by being too willing to
play by Western strategic interests.
Not to
mention a slew of earlier reports by the country’s leading outlets that laid
bare how Jamaat's former money man Mir Quasem Ali schemed to foil the war crimes
trial with a $25 million deal with one of the most influential US lobby firms,
Cassidy & Associates, for engaging with the US government and the
Bangladesh government "to protect his interest".
Sukharanjan
Dasgupta is a veteran columnist and author of "Midnight Massacre" on
the 1975 Bangladesh coup. As chief correspondent of Anandabazar Patrika, he
reported on the Liberation War by gathering information from freedom fighters
in Bangladesh.
Sukharanjan Dasgupta is a veteran columnist and author of "Midnight Massacre" on the 1975 Bangladesh coup. As chief correspondent of Anandabazar Patrika, he reported on the Liberation War by gathering information from freedom fighters in Bangladesh.
Source: IndiaToday
Comment
Four Bangladesh nationals have been arrested in Gujarat on charges that they illegally entered the country and were trying to radicalise local youth in Ahmedabad and collecting money, according to a statement by Gujarat’s anti-terrorist squad (ATS) on Monday.
Last weekend the New York Times published a report that President Biden has been missing in action in recent months when it comes to serious question-and-answer sessions with the Washington press corps. The obvious reason for the lack of press conferences is “to protect” the president from unscripted exchanges that often result in missteps and confusion.
Almost 2 tonnes of cocaine with a market value of more than $440 million (400 million euros) were found floating at sea off eastern Sicily, in what Italy's tax and customs police on Monday (17 April) called a record seizure.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday (18 April) charged the founder and three members of a half-century-old Black nationalist group with working with Russian intelligence to influence elections in the United States.
The US deep state and policy establishment seems very fond of right-wing Islamist radicals or the 'mullahs'. They used them to bring down Iran's secular nationalist and democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh regime when it threatened to nationalise Iran's oil industry in the 1950s.
