Oil - Gas Deal Infuriates The Allience Partners Too

Bangladesh government's deal with the US oil giant ConocoPhillips has provoked a hostile reaction amongst the opposition as well as the partners of the Awami League- led grand alliance.    Bangladesh workers' Party and Jatiya samajtantrit Dal - grand alliance partners with representation in the parliament - have openly criticised the government deal with the US oil giant ConocoPhillips. The Communist Party of Bangladesh ( CPB), also a close ally of the Awami League, has been criticising the deal, describing it as against the national interest and that it would also endanger the country's energy security.    The government on June 16 signed the production sharing contract (PSC) with ConocoPhillips for oil and gas exploration and extraction in deep sea hydrocarbon blocks 10 and 11 amid protests from experts, civic forums, and political organizations. The agreement gives ConocoPhillips the right to explore two offshore blocks, which lie in disputed waters in the Bay of Bengal, was approved by the cabinet earlier this month.    ConocoPhillips will search for oil and gas only in undisputed areas in blocks 10 and 11 - some parts of which are claimed by both India and Myanmar.    Terming the deal "suicidal" for the country, National Committee on Protection of Oil, Gas and Ports, a left-leaning umbrella group launched a series of demonstrations and a half- day general strike on July 3.    Meanwhile, addressing a roundtable discussion last Monday, Bangladesh Workers Party president and lawmaker Rashed Khan Menon said the government would not be allowed to export oil, gas, and other mineral resources from the country. Menon, along with other political leaders in the grand alliance, urged the government to enact the Mineral Resources Export Prohibition Act 2010 that has already been placed as a bill in the parliament.    He said the bill which he placed in the parliament last year was nothing but a reflection of Sheikh Hasina's stance in 1998 in response to the suggestion of gas export from the Bibiyana field made on the premise that the country was supposedly floating on oil and gas.    Criticising the contract with the US company, Menon said in the Jatiya Sangsad last Saturday that the present prime minister once had opposed any export of gas and said no gas would be allowed to be exported without keeping an adequate reserve for the country for the next 50 years but now her own government has signed a deal which contains the provision for gas export by a foreign company.    Menon demanded that the government should make public the production-sharing contract signed with ConocoPhillips. He also demanded open discussion in the parliament on the deal and said it is not acceptable that only some government officials and advisers should know the details of such an important deal while the people, who are the owners of the country' s resources, are kept in the dark.    Reminding his fellow MPs that a minister of the BNP-Jamaat-led four-party alliance government was allegedly bribed by Canadian company Niko, he said, 'It is not unlikely that such corruption will be unearthed in the future in connection with the ConocoPhillips deal.'    The Workers Party president lambasted a state minister for terming a leader of the oil-gas protection committee a 'foreign agent' and said people know it very well who the real foreign agents are.    Addressing the roundtable on energy security of Bangladesh last Monday, Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal president and lawmaker Hasanul Haq Inu urged the government to scrap the deal, which has a provision that will encourage ConocoPhillips to export 80 per cent of the gas it will extract from hydrocarbon blocks 10 and 11 in the form of liquefied natural gas.    'Otherwise, the power-starved people of the country will start a massive movement against it,' he warned.    Inu said Bangladesh is suffering from severe energy shortage and it is not acceptable to sign any deal that gives the contractor the scope to export the country's mineral resources.    Pointing at the Niko deal and other one-sided contracts made in the country's energy sector, lawmaker Amena Ahmad termed such contracts 'anti-state'.

Awami League Chooses To Be A Slave, Not Master, Of History

THE passage of the 15 th amendment to the constitution in parliament on Thursday marks a sad episode in the political history of Bangladesh. By pushing the amendment through, the ruling Awami League officially completed its deviation from the spirit of the liberation war and bracketed itself with all those that it has consistently castigated as forces opposed to the spirit of liberation. In the objective clause of the amendment bill, the law minister claimed that the legislative exercise is aimed at restoration of the essence of the 1972 constitution by reinstating certain provisions therein in respect of fundamental rights of the people, fundamental principles of state policy, etc. The claim cannot be any farther from truth, since the amendment approves functioning of political parties formed on the basis of religious faith, and retains ‘Bismillah’ in the preamble of the constitution and Islam as the state religion, which were not in the 1972 constitution and run counter with the secular-democratic spirit of the liberation war. Notably, these were inserted in the constitution by the regimes that the party has always projected as undemocratic. The chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on law, justice and parliamentary affairs in its report on the amendment bill termed the retention of Bismillah and Islam as the state religion and allowance of religion-based politics a ‘compromise…in the greater welfare of the people.’ He suggested, albeit not in so many words, that his ‘matured’ understanding of the ‘importance’ of religion in power politics over the past three decades or so. In other words, the ruling party, which dictated history when it presided over the country’s war of liberation, has now chosen to be a slave of history despite its numerical strength in parliament. The compromise regrettably has resulted in dichotomies on the basis of not only religion but also ethnicity, between Muslim and non-Muslims, Bengalis and non- Bengalis. The amended Article 6 ( 2) says the ‘people of Bangladesh shall be known as Bengalees’, essentially relegating the members of the non-Bengali ethnic minority communities, who have lived in this country for generations through centuries, to second-class citizens, just as retention of Islam as state religion has done people of other faiths. While Bangladesh is the country of Muslims and non- Muslims, Bengalis and non- Bengalis alike, its state has become primarily of the Bengali Muslims. The consolation clauses, so to speak, in this regard, i.e. Article 12 (b) that says the state shall not grant ‘political status in favour of any religion’ and Article 23 A that says the ‘State shall take steps to protect and develop the local culture and tradition of the tribes, minor races, ethnic sects and communities’, tend to highlight the contradiction on the one hand and the Awami League’s nationalistic chauvinism on the other. The religious and ethnic stratification, needless to say, would contribute to further deepening of the sense of insecurity of non-Muslims and non-Bengalis. The least said about the essential hypocrisy behind the retention of socialism as one of the fundamental principles of state policy the better. The Awami League has long ceased to be a party ideologically inclined to socialism, if it ever were, and pursued anti-people neo-liberal economic policies, prime concern of which is profit-making, not people’s welfare, let alone egalitarianism. By pushing the amendment through the parliament, the ruling party has not only deviated from the spirit of the liberation war, which was fought in the hope of establishing a state that would be politically a people’s republic, culturally secular-democratic and economically egalitarian, and betrayed the people but may also have committed a political suicide. After all, the party now stands bereft of even the moral right to claim itself to be committed to the spirit of the liberation war and at par with the pseudo-democratic and autocratic military regimes of the past. Simply put, the Awami League has ultimately joined the ranks of its political rival, whom it has called anti-liberation. As for scrapping the election-time non-party caretaker government provision, which the party forced upon the constitution in 1996 to pave its way to power, it only proves that the politics of the ruling class is about crude struggle for retention of or return to state power. Understandably, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is now fighting for its retention. Under these circumstances, it also draws the battle line between the power-obsessed ruling class and the politically conscious and democratically oriented sections of society. The latter needs to realise that they need to win the battle for realisation of the values and ideals of the liberation war so many people sacrificed their lives for. They also need to realise that, to win the battle, they must strive to become the master of history, not its slave, as the Awami League and its allies have chosen to be.

Q + A Is Bangladesh Heading Back To Political Violence?

Bangladesh on Thursday repealed a system of holding elections under a non- partisan caretaker administration that was introduced in the mid- 1990 s to try to end the violence and fraud that have often marred voting in the South Asian country. The constitutional amendment provoked unrest earlier this month, when opposition supporters clashed with security forces during a general strike called to protest against the move. It could trigger more violent protests by the opposition. Bangladesh has lagged behind the region in economic growth partly because of its history of political violence since independence in 1971 , and analysts fear more confrontational politics could derail its goal to become a middle- income country by 2021. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took office in early 2009 and a general election is not due until late 2013. The campaign against the electoral change by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamic allies piles pressure on a government already struggling with discontent over high prices, growing unemployment and poor utility services. Following are some questions and answers relating to the renewed unrest:     WHAT IS THE MAIN ISSUE? Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said the non-party caretaker system had to go after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in May.     The system, introduced in 1996 , generally worked well in keeping the peace and avoiding widespread rigging and fraud in parliamentary polls, though the losing side always complained of such abuses. Hasina's rival opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia accuses the government of attempting to cling to power. The ruling Awami League denies the allegation. Analysts say the brewing conflict over the issue could drag the country back into turmoil after the uneasy political peace of recent years. HOW DID THE CARETAKER SYSTEM WORK? Under the system, the ruling party hands power to a non-party interim authority that must hold a parliamentary election and transfer power to the elected government within three months. Bangladesh held three elections under the caretaker system, but it suffered a setback in 2007 when months of political violence prompted the powerful army to set up an interim authority, which stayed on for two years before holding a national vote at end of 2008. The army-backed caretaker government also led a widespread crackdown on corruption, in which both Khaleda and Hasina were put in jail for alleged wrongdoing, which they denied. The two women were freed ahead of the December 2008 election in which Hasina trounced Khaleda by a huge margin, winning more than two- thirds of the seats in parliament. Analysts and diplomats say the worsening political confrontations between the two women, often dubbed as "battling begums", could plunge Bangladesh back into political turmoil, threatening the country's fledgling economy and driving away hesitant investors.     WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHALLENGES FACING THE GOVERNMENT? The government aims to achieve economic growth of 7 percent in the coming fiscal year starting in July on the back of higher exports and stable income from migrant workers. But this target may be missed if an opposition campaign to oust the government turns violent.     Hasina's government was widely applauded for its initial success in bringing down food and other commodity prices, and reducing diesel and fertiliser prices to help farmers, the mainstay of the country's agrarian economy. But soaring prices in global markets and corruption have partly driven costs higher, with inflation racing to a near three-year high. Price pressures are a major concern for the government as nearly 40 percent of the country's more than 150 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. The government has also been criticised fora recent crash in the stock market, where millions of small-time investors had put their money. In an effort to support share prices, the government has revived a tax amnesty offer that allows investors to pay 10 percent on undeclared money if they invest the rest in the stock market.     Unrest could also come from the export-oriented ready-made garment sector, where workers went on strike several times last year, demanding better benefits and wages. The authorities last year nearly doubled workers' pay, but it is still far less than what they had demanded.

Police Action Against Nat'l Committee Betrays Govts Undemocratic Attitude

THE police action against leaders and activists of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power And Ports on Monday as they tried to bring out a procession at Mohammadpur in the capital Dhaka in support of the committee’ s half-day general strike on July 3 tends to lend credence to the public perception of the Awami League-Jatiya Party government’s growing intolerance with dissenting voices in society. According to a report published in New Age on Tuesday, the law enforcers beat up national committee leaders and activists and snatched away banners and placards from them. They also detained two members of the committee. The police action appears in sync with the antagonistic political rhetoric that key functionaries of the government, including the prime minister, have directed at the committee for protesting against the signing of a production sharing contract with the US oil giant ConocoPhillips on June 16 for hydrocarbon exploration in, and extraction from, two offshore blocks. The national committee, a citizens’ forum featuring eminent intellectuals, has provided critical views on and analysis of the economic and energy policies pursued by successive governments since its inception in the late 1990 s. Time and again, it has mobilised public opinion and organised popular protests against non-transparent agreements that the ruling quarters have entered into with international oil companies and multilateral lending agencies, apparently compromising the state’s policy sovereignty on the one hand and undermining the people’s interest on the other. Ironically, after the national committee had forced the previous elected government of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party- led alliance into shelving a plan to engage Asia Energy for open-pit mining in Phulbari through a popular movement, the current prime minister, then the leader of the opposition in parliament, went all the way to Phulbari to express her solidarity with the committee. However, since coming to power, she and her government seem to have thus far been antagonistic towards the committee and the cause it stands for. It may be pertinent to recall here that the police swooped on a peaceful procession of the committee in September 2009 leaving at least 20 , including its member secretary, an eminent economist, injured. The government’s apparent antagonism to the committee has seemingly intensified since the latter started to oppose the deal with ConocoPhillips and called a hartal in protest. Ultimately, the government’s hostility towards the committee seems to stem from its intolerance with divergent and dissenting views, which has found expression time and again in its legal and extra-legal actions to encroach upon the democratic political space of the opposition camp. The government, besides taking recourse to section 144 to foil opposition rally and procession, even obstructed the opposition from holding a decidedly peaceful and innocuous programme such as human chain. Such repressive actions, needless to say, not only are antithetic to universal democratic principles but also runs counter with the constitution of Bangladesh, which guarantees the rights to the freedom of assembly. It is thus imperative for the rights-conscious and democratically-oriented sections of society and the media to raise their voices and mobilise public opinion against the government’s undemocratic attitude and action.

Summersaults, Contradiction And Confused Populace

The bottom line is that the government is confusing ordinary people with not just what they are saying but also with what they are doing. The government seems busy trying to make everybody happy at the same time, writes Mubin S Khan   WHILE speaking to the press on June 25 , Suranjit Sen Gupta, co- chairman of the special parliamentary committee on amendment to the constitution, observed that a constitutional void was unhealthy for a country— apparently as a justification for moving the bill for constitutional amendment in parliament. A rather amusing observation because, if I remember correctly, just the other day, the leader of the opposition in parliament, Khaleda Zia stirred a storm by saying the country was running devoid of a constitution to which members of the government and the party in power reacted with all their rhetorical wrath. Politics is often dominated by rhetoric and, in our country especially, the rhetoric can over a very short time completely switch sides, without changing so much of an ‘adjective’ in its content. Take the example of the caretaker government issue. In 1996 the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, and its allies Jatiya Party and Jamaat-e-Islami claimed that ‘ for a free and fair election a neutral caretaker government was necessary to save democracy, people’s voting right and national economy.’ Khaleda Zia, then the prime minister, ‘rejected the opposition guideline for caretaker government terming it undemocratic, unconstitutional and insulting to people’s verdict.’ Khaleda kept asking the opposition to sit for talks, offered to strengthen the Election Commission by reforming relevant laws, and asked the opposition, repeatedly, to come to parliament and make their observations heard. Hasina refused to go to parliament ‘until and unless the government makes an announcement of its readiness to move a bill on an acceptable caretaker government’. In the most amusing of political rhetoric, according to The Bangladesh Times in 1996 , Khaleda Zia said ‘since her government came to power there had been a number of elections including 16 by-elections.’ ‘These elections were free and fair, even the ruling party candidates were defeated in Dhaka and Chittagong city corporation elections. This highlights the fact that our government believes in free and fair election,’ she had said. Déjà vu indeed! In a world with an eroding value of idealism and fleeting public memory, it is quite understandable that politicians will resort to just about anything to retain, or regain, power. Often, it provides fodder for the round-the-clock media, and healthy amusement to a lot of people otherwise strained for entertainment in a country whose entertainment industry provides very little—in fact, rather ironically, is riddled in politics. In a conservative society where the young are raised to never question the virtues and wisdom of the elderly, I am sure, it is more amusing for the younger generation to watch middle-aged men and women, of the generation of their parents and grandparents, take centre stage and utter gibberish, discard opinions and positions like they discard dirty laundry and quibble like children in a football match gone awry. Ever since the AL-led government came to power two and half years back, political rhetoric has been at one of its finest best in terms of doing summersaults and providing contradictions. To be fair to them, the expansion of the mainstream media may also have increased the attention of such utterances and brought more of them into public domain. With the 30- odd seats in parliament, the opposition seems to find it more airy to stay on the streets, while the parties-in-power- run parliament has been a feast in the exercise of ‘democracy’, with heads of the parliamentary affairs committee and many of the potential minister-rejects more often assuming the roles of pseudo-opposition. One is almost tempted to wonder if the unfulfilled dream of BKSAL would have looked something like this. From the very beginning of this government we have enjoyed many a battle—Suranjit vs. HT Imam (the prime minister’s adviser), Suranjit vs. Shafique Ahmed (the law minister), Tofail Ahmed (a former commerce minister) vs. Abul Hossain (the communications minister), Syed Ashraful Islam (the LGRD minister and AL general secretary) vs. Abdul Jalil (former AL general secretary), the list goes on and on. There have been further battles—AL MPs Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir and Abdul Jalil’s crusade to see the Moeen Uddin-Fakhruddin government brought to book, Alamgir’s crusade against the Anti-Corruption Commission, or the entire government’s crusade against former Grameen Bank managing director Dr Yunus. In all the battles, the divisions that gaped in the beginning and merged at the end provided ample entertainment to news followers. Suranjit no longer boasts the supremacy of the legislative over the judiciary; there are no longer battles between the victims and beneficiaries of the Moeen Uddin-Fakhruddin government, Muhith no longer stands up for Yunus’s innocence while the Rapid Action Battalion, once referred to in parliament by the prime minister ‘as an institution which has tasted blood’ receives an unprecedented level of political and rhetorical support from all quarters of the government. But the lines between amusement and troubling can often get blurry. Take the instance of the amendment to the constitution. The Supreme Court has declared the fifth amendment, the seventh amendment and the thirteenth amendment to the constitution illegal. We have been informed through the media that the constitution is being reprinted at government-owned BG Press and yet, the parliamentary committee for amendment to the constitution went around discussing with various groups amendments to the constitution. The committee members in the midst of their discussions voiced their support for election-time caretaker governments in the future, and yet went completely silent when the prime minister discarded their long list of possible forms of caretaker government, taking refuge in a single portion of a Supreme Court judgement. Amidst all this, Ziaur Rahman retains his signature in the constitution through ‘ Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem’ and HM Ershad through ‘Islam as the state religion’ while the constitution apparently also retains secularism as one of its pillars. At the present moment, it is safe to say that nobody knows exactly what social contract binds together the people of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Contradictions and summersaults have not just remained in the world of rhetoric and polemics, but have also stepped into policies of this government as well, and that is where it gets dangerous. During the much-hailed National Education Policy of 2009 , the committee first gave the impression that the government would finally remove the constitutional anomaly of various streams of education in the country but in the end settled for a more uniform curriculum, also omitting the word ‘secular’ from the policy. In the Women Development Policy 2011 , the government made a long list of proposals for the emancipation of women in the country and then conveniently refrained from guaranteeing equal inheritance to women, the issue that had made the policy imminent in the first place. The bottom line is that the government is confusing ordinary people with not just what they are saying but also with what they are doing. The government seems busy trying to make everybody happy at the same time. A look at the proposed budget for the fiscal 2011-2012 aptly illustrates this point, where there appears to be huge allocations for almost every citizen and every sector—from social safety nets to provisions for turning black money white— without hurting anyone’s sensitivity. In the end we have a humongous deficit of Tk 45 ,204 crore. Reaching the two-and-a-half year mark in tenure is an important landmark for any elected government in Bangladesh. It is often when people decide, and begin to voice their impressions of the government in power. Sitting on such an important juncture, the AL-led government should better decide whose government it exactly is, rather than try to win over everyone. It should finally try and answer questions which they have so far either left ambiguous or bombed confusion, with contradictory statements. Does the prime minister think ‘Moeen Uddin- Fakhruddin’ government was a ‘ crocodile’—if we infer from her most recent comments—or does she think, like her telecommunications minister Raziuddin Ahmed Razu, that Moeen U Ahmed is one of the finest Bangladeshi generals of the last forty years? Does she intend to ever rein in the Rapid Action Battalion as she promised in parliament or does she now believe that it has never committed extrajudicial killings like a host of her cabinet members? Will the finance minister please tell us whether we are pursuing free-market economic policies or socialist economic policies? And most importantly, will the prime minister and the government please tell us whether we live in a secular country or an Islamic one? If the government fails to answer these questions, they will not only ever win over the ones that did not vote for them but may also lose the ones who voted them to power.