Word: bangladesh
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...Moeen is conspicuously diminutive and unassuming, hardly looking the part of the South Asian strongman he very well may be. Yet Moeen pulls few punches when speaking of his country's politics and its democracy's many failings. "No systems of government are bad in their own right," says Bangladesh's top-ranking military officer with a thin smile. "It's the human beings who make...
...holds the keys to its future. Over a year and a half ago, Moeen's army waded into a turbulent political crisis, postponed parliamentary elections and helped install a caretaker government of state-appointed bureaucrats known as "advisers," headed by a former World Bank executive, Fakhruddin Ahmed. Since then, Bangladesh has remained under emergency rule: civil liberties have taken a hit and thousands of suspected troublemakers picked up in midnight sweeps. Behind all this, it's commonly understood that Moeen and the military really run the show. The Harvard-trained general was made army chief just under three years...
...months ago. Despite Moeen's insistence that elections will go ahead as planned by the end of this year, the optimism that first greeted his arrival on "1/11," as the epochal event is known there, is gone. Ever since achieving independence from Pakistan in 1971, impoverished, unfortunate Bangladesh has slumped down its path toward democracy. When not under the rule of autocratic generals - as it was twice in the past - it has been the province of two mammoth, bickering political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Their legacy of craven politicking and brazen plundering buoyed...
...Caged Begums Two fixtures of the country's checkered politics remain at the center of things in Dhaka. Bangladesh's Parliament complex, designed by the noted American architect Louis Kahn, looms out of a verdant expanse in the heart of the capital, encircled by palm fronds and crisscrossed by waterways. What was meant to be the cradle of Bangladeshi democracy - described by Kahn as "a many-faceted precious stone, constructed in concrete and marble" - has over the past year been the prison ground for the government's most prominent political detainees: Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda...
...Burma's Plight Cyclone Nargis' death toll is astonishing. Over 100,000 people ought not die from such a disaster. In Bangladesh we deal with floods and cyclones every year. But the Burmese junta is blind and deaf and selfish. The generals have sealed themselves off. News from halfway around the world comes to us here in Bangladesh faster than whatever trickles in from across the border with Burma. Let's hope that the horrors of this disaster will lead to the opening up of the country and a respite for its millions of suffering people. Solaiman Palash, Dhaka...