Anti-semitism, and the 9/11, Israel-Mossad Connection Part IV

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Rahnuma Ahmed

“History cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.”

- Dr Jakob Ruchti (1915)

Why should people who are highly knowledgeable in western diplomacy, intelligence, counter-terrorism, false flag operations, defence and security matters—including some who occupied very high leadership positions in the west—risk making utter fools of themselves by claiming that 9/11 was an inside job? Unless it was. False flag. Covert operation, you name it.

Michael Meacher, Tony Blair’s environment minister, thought 9/11 was “bogus.” Drawing parallels with Pearl Harbour, he said 9/11 had the hallmarks of a “political myth” made to pave the way for America’s goal of world hegemony. Japanese lawmaker, Yukihisa Fujita alleges, the official claims just don’t fit the facts. Plane crashes always yield plane fragments which can be identified by the plane’s serial number. The US government produced passports and DNA samples of individuals killed but no identifiable plane parts. Strange, no?

General Albert Stubblebine, the commanding general of US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), now retired but with a 32 year army career says, I was in charge of the Army’s Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence during the Cold War. It was my job to measure pieces of Soviet equipment from photographs. “I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. ‘The plane does not fit in that hole.’ “So what did hit the Pentagon? Where is it? What’s going on?” If a plane had hit the Pentagon, there’d have been wing marks on the walls of the Pentagon. Someone told me, you’ve got it all wrong. One wing tipped down, hit the ground. Broke off. Fine. But what about the other? “I haven’t met an airplane with only one wing.” He adds, We pride ourselves with the “free press.” I do not believe the “free press” is free anymore.

His observation seems equally valid for the “free press” in western Europe. Euro-parliamentarian Giulietto Chiesa, one of the team members which produced the 9/11 film Zero, organised its screening at EU Parliament on February 28, 2008. Despite having personally invited all 785 EU parliamentarians and nearly a thousand journalists, only 6 Europarliamentarians and 2 journalists turned up. When asked, Chiesa replied, “It shows that the US is controlling everything. They are all powerful. No politician in the European Parliament can ignore the power—or wrath!—of the US.” The Belgian media obliged by not publishing or broadcasting news of the screening and discussion that took place, either on that, or the following day. Suspecting Bush administration’s version of the 9/11 attacks, says Chiesa, is taboo. People just can’t handle 9/11 truth.

“The deathly precision,” “the magnitude of planning” behind September 11 attacks would require “years of planning,” says Eckehardt Werthebach, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Verfassungsschutz. An operation as sophisticated as this would require the “fixed frame” of a state intelligence organisation. Not something a “loose group” of terrorists, one led by a Mohd Atta studying in Hamburg, could pull off. Colonel Ronald Day, deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration and a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran expresses his incredulity at the Bush administration’s story:  “Half a trillion dollars a year and a bunch of guys over in a cave in Afghanistan were able to penetrate that half a trillion dollar network that’s supposed to provide Americans with national security.” Hah!

To Horst Ehmke, the televised images of 9/11 looked like a “Hollywood production.” Coordinator of the German secret services under prime minister Willy Brandt, Ehmke maintains, “Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with 4 hijacked planes without the support of a secret service.”

“The planning of the attacks,” says Andreas von Bulow, “was technically and organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes, and within one hour to drive them into their targets with complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry.” A former minister, and Bundestag member who served on the parliamentary commission which oversaw the three branches of the German secret service, von Bulow insists, Mossad (Israeli intelligence service) was behind 9/11. The attacks were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs. To boost military and security spending. To justify building military bases in the Middle East for future confrontation with China. The story of 19 Muslims working with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda is an “invented” one. WTC Building 7 (the one that fell on its face without being being hit by a plane) was a command bunker, later demolished to destroy the crime scene. “The BND (German secret service) is steered by the CIA and the CIA is steered by Mossad.”

Former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, famous for his honesty and outspokenness, who had revealed the existence of, and his part in setting up the false flag operation, Gladio, also thinks that the 9/11 attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad. Operation Gladio was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices—overseen by US intelligence agencies—that carried out bombings across Europe in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra had stated in his sworn testimony,

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force…the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Cossiga says, it is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies that 911 was an inside job. The reason? To put the blame on the Arab countries. To induce western powers to take control of Iraq and Afghanistan.

September 11, writes David MacGregor (author, September 11 as ‘‘Machiavellian State Terror,’’ 2006), may be an example of “expedient destruction ordered from within the state, a macabre instance of a state protection racket.” Inspired by the sixteenth century Italian thinker Machiavelli, MacGregor writes, Machiavellian state terrorism, as distinct from those that are publicised, are often “initiated by persons or groups other than those suspected of the act.” Most importantly, they are secretly perpetrated by, or on behalf, of the violated state itself. Machiavellian state terror advances the ruling agenda while disguising itself as the work of individuals or groups opposed to the state’s fundamental principles. Convenient opportunities for maximum impact of terrorist events—and this includes pyrotechnic effects, spectacular deaths—may be best known by, and available to those in power.

Or, as Dr Alan Sabrosky (director of studies, US Army War College) had put it, it would have been impossible to stage 9/11 without the full resources of both the CIA and Mossad.

One must not underestimate the side actor roles played by the ISI (Pakistan), and the Saudi intelligence agency, I hasten to add. Most crucial.

Meacher had said, 9/11 had the hallmarks of a political myth. From Shlomo Sand’s When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (2008) it seems that the idea of a Jewish nation too, is a political myth. Alongwith the idea that the Jews were exiled from the Holy Land. So also, the idea that most of today’s Jews have a historical connection to the land called Israel.

Dr Sand, a courageous Israeli historian, draws on extensive archaeological and historical research to argue that the idea of a Jewish nation is an early 20th century idea, one created by Zionist Jews to justify the founding of the state of Israel. “Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in.” He writes, like all other Israelis I had taken it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea, that they were exiled by the Romans in 70 AD. But historical evidence says that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends. That the Romans didn’t exile people. “In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands.”

But if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them? Answering his own question, Sand says, “It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”

Both myths—America was attacked because they hate our freedom, Jews existed as a people separate from their religion—have been artfully spun. Both are unable to withstand scrutiny.





Three of the 5 Israelis detained for 10 weeks, later deported to Israel after FBI cleared them of any involvement in 9-11 (on Israeli TV talkshow, Nov 2001). They told the Israeli audience that their purpose was to document the event. But who were they documenting the event for? And how did they know the attack was going to be that particular morning?

Israelis were caught with a van on September 11 which had a mural painted on the side literally depicting the 9/11 attacks.

Published in New Age, May 31, 2008

Tags: 9/11, Israel, Mossad, Palestine, Rahnuma Ahmed, Shlomo Sand, USA, Zionism

Anti-semitism, and the 9/11, Israel-Mossad Connection Part III

Rahnuma Ahmed

“Investigators within the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service], and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying…  is considered career suicide.” Carl Cameron, investigative reporter, Fox News

Cameron made this remark in `Israeli Spying in the US,’ a 4 part Fox News channel series, aired in mid December 2001. The programme contended that Israeli intelligence had advanced information about the September 11 attacks.

It didn’t assert (of course not) that Mossad had `done’ 9/11. As did Dr Alan Sabrosky, former director of studies of the US Army War College, recently.

But that was bad enough. The programme was pulled down from the Fox News website. So was it’s transcript. All references were deleted. No explanation was ever given by Fox.

Career suicide? Hmm, reminds me of how the BBC conveniently lost the original footage, the one where Jane Standley, news correspondent, reports the collapse of Building 7. Wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that the building was still standing. The BBC’s news editor dismisses the footage loss casually. No `conspiracy.’ (No destruction of evidence). Just a `cock-up.’

But Israelis have spied on the US. And to top it all, they traded US state secrets with the USSR. Its sworn enemy. Jonathan Pollard, an American of Jewish descent, an intelligence analyst in the US Navy, stole and sold to Israel more than a million pages of classified material. Israel secretly passed on to the USSR those which did America the greatest damage—relating to the US Nuclear Deterrent relative to the USSR. In exchange, emigration quotas for Soviet Jews to Israel were increased. Information about American agents operating within the USSR also found their way to USSR via Israel. After 13 long years of denial, Israel finally acknowledged, in 1998, that yes, Pollard was an Israeli spy. He was a LAKAM (Israeli Scientific Liaison Bureau) agent.

The Pollard affair still rankles among US ruling circles. The US government has declined to release him from life imprisonment—interestingly, he was tried for espionage, not treason—despite repeated public relations campaigns and requests by Jewish Americans. By Israelis. By prime minister Netanyahu himself. “[It is] difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by… Pollard’s treasonous behavior,” said Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense.

The greatest harm to US national security done by its “closest” ally? By the nation which has,  according to three-fourths of the US Senate, and most  of Congress members, an “unbreakable bond” with the US—words used to describe the relationship in a recent letter addressed to Hillary Clinton, one that has been interpreted as implicitly rebuking president Obama for his confrontational stance towards Israel.

Known as the AIPAC-backed, pro-Israel letter (April 13, 2010), it has created waves of consternation among America’s informed circles: what comes first for our lawmakers? Surely it is the US? Surely it is not Israel?

I myself, as I read and reflect on the unfolding events, am reminded of General Leonid Ivashov’s (former joint chief of staff of Russian Armed Forces) comment: the 9/11 attack was the result of “a clash of interests among US leaders.”

Is the clash finally coming to a head? According to close observers, what is taking place at present is unprecedented. Tony Judt did issue a warning several years ago, “something is changing in the United States”. There has been a sea change, he had said.



But how did it get to be this way? How did the American-Israeli lobby—in former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s words, “We the Jewish people control America”  (`Jewish’ here is not anti-Semitic, no? Oh good, what a relief)—get to own America? History tells us, it all began with Harry Truman. He had succeeded to the presidency but in the 1948 campaign, he trailed behind. In the polls, in fundraising. His prospects brightened however, after he recognised Israel. A network of Jewish Zionists funded his campaign, gave him $400,000 in cash ($3 million in 2009 dollars) . It was crucial to his victory.

For those readers who are new to these issues, who have by now become thoroughly confused over the entanglement of religion, race and ethnicity (Jewish), nation, nation-state (USA, Israel), national sovereignty (American), have been wondering whether AIPAC is a national lobby or a foreign lobby, why Sharon had said “we Jewish” and not “we Israelis” control America, which Jewish people he had meant, whether Israeli Jewish or American Jewish, whether by saying “we Jewish” he had implied that the loyalties of both American Jewish and Israeli Jewish people were owed to Israel, not to the US etc., etc., I will just mention another instance from history. In my opinion, a highly significant one.

President John F. Kennedy had insisted that the American Zionist Council (AIPAC’s predecessor, American Israel Public Affairs Committee) should register as a foreign agent under the provisos of FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) . His assassination (1963), and later, that of his brother Robert F Kennedy (1968), the attorney general, and also a presidential candidate—somehow led to the order that the AZC should get registered as a foreign lobby, getting buried too. Five years later, the late Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee was heard telling Americans on CBS’s Face the Nation programme: the Jewish influence completely dominates the scene. To the extent that it makes it “almost impossible to get Congress to do anything they [the Jewish] don’t approve of” (1973).

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s publication of The Israel Lobby (albeit from London) is part of the sea-change that Judt spoke of. Ten years ago, he wrote, that’d possibly not have happened. In their book, Mearsheimer and Walt, who are political scientists at Chicago and Harvard university respectively say—after having surveyed a wide coalition of pro-Israel groups and individuals (American Jewish organizations and political donors, Christian fundamentalists, neo-con officials in the executive branch, AIPAC, media pundits ready to accuse anyone critical of Israel of being an anti-Semite)—the pro-Israeli lobby has an `almost unchallenged hold on Congress.’ The authors are not loath to point out that their’s is a serious study. It’s not a conspiracy theory.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s work is undoubtedly, politically-speaking, highly significant. Even though they have been severely ostracised (as is only to be expected, after all, the AIPAC’s annual budget is reportedly $15 million), for conservative American academics to come out and declare that Israel is a “liability” for the US, is, well, as Judt suggested, a sea-change. But I myself, have found two other academic studies to be more insightful theoretically-speaking. One is the highly-acclaimed study by Peter Dale Scott, a professor of English. It predates 9/11—interestingly enough, it was inspired by the Kennedy assassination, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)—but the events of 9/11 have reinforced its significance in helping us to examine and analyse American politics.

To understand Deep Politics, says Scott, one must understand the difference between traditional conspiracy theory, and deep political analysis. Those who are schooled in the first approach, will look for conscious secret collaborations toward shared ends. But if one adopts the deep politics approach, then instead of looking for conspiracies, for that which is `consciously secretive,’ we will re-conceptualise, we will think of the deep political process or system as one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures, both outside, as well as inside, those publicly sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures “deep” is the fact that they are covert or suppressed. They are outside general awareness, outside acknowledged political processes. Some secrets are open. But some, says Scott, are more closely held.

The other is by an article by David MacGregor, September 11 as “Machiavellian State Terror” (The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, published 2006). Machiavellian state terror, writes MacGregor, advances the ruling agenda, while disguising itself as the work of individuals or groups opposed to the state’s fundamental principles.

To be vitally active in the political universe, says the author, one must theorise “oppositionally.” One must question the government. One must look for connections between events.

I’d like to add, one must think oppositionally, even if it be suicidal for one’s career. Better that, than be controlled, by others.

More next week

Published in New Age 24 May 2010

Tags: identity, Israel, Mossad, Palestine, Rahnuma Ahmed, USA, Zionism

Anti-semitism, and the 9/11, Israel-Mossad Connection Part II

By Rahnuma Ahmed

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,”
an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind,
quoted by Eric Alterman, Bush’s War on the Press, The Nation (2005)

Even when the US hadn’t been the only empire around, powerful members of the American administration had collectively attempted to create their “own reality.” One such plan, Operation Northwoods, consisted of staging terror attacks. To justify the launching of a war against Cuba. To (of course) defend America.

The secret plan was drafted by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, signed by its Chairman, and sent to Robert McNamara, secretary of defense. Declassified in 1997 by a federal agency overseeing records relating to president John F Kennedy’s assassination, the plan proposed real or simulated actions against various US military and civilian targets: landing `friendly’ Cubans to attack US base (Guantanamo). Sinking a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida. Building a Soviet MIG aircraft to be flown by an American pilot, which would attack and destroy a US military drone aircraft. Launching a wave of violent terrorism (bombings, hijackings) in Washington D.C. In Miami. Elsewhere, too. The desired result? To convince Americans and the larger western public that the Cuban government was not only “rash and irresponsible” but a threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere. That America had no option but to `retaliate.’

Operation Northwoods was not implemented because, as the story goes, Kennedy had rejected it. But other false flag operations designed to create America’s own reality—to deceive the public, to manufacture support—have been successfully conducted. Of course, America is not the only culprit, as history attests. The Japanese blew up a section of the railway to annex Manchuria in 1931; kidnapped one of their own soldiers to invade China proper, 1937. The Soviets shelled their own village near the Finnish border, 1939. The Israelis secretly sponsored bombings of US/British interests in Cairo to sour relations between Egypt and the West, 1954.

Central to America’s “our own reality” story are two myths: it is America’s enemies who are `sneaky.’ The government goes to war only to `save the lives’ of US soldiers. Historical research proves otherwise: president Roosevelt let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor (1941). Nearly three thousand American service men including civilians were killed which by fuelling public outrage at Japan’s so-called sneak attack, enabled FDR to overcome massive opposition to war.

According to America’s ideologues, if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been bombed—still described in official history as the “least abhorrent choice”—the lives of 500,000 American soldiers would have been at risk. But in reality, as people connected to history know, Japan was ready to surrender.

Dissenting opinion did exist, and in powerful circles, too: Japan was already defeated, dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary (Dwight Eisenhower). The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare are frightening (Admiral Leahy, chief of staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman). The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul. (Herbert Hoover, 31st US president). There was no military justification. I was not consulted (General Douglas MacArthur).

More than 103,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were unrecorded deaths. There were slower deaths, caused by radiation.

But surely, just because previous US administrations have committed false flag operations, it doesn’t mean that 9/11 too, is an inside job? Granted. True. Except that when one looks at the mass of evidence, including oral testimonies, diligently gathered by physicists, pilots, architects, structural engineers and a host of other professionals (firefighters, whistle-blowers) over these last couple of years, also by grassroots people, under the rubric of what has come to be known as the 9/11 truth movement, even the blind are bound to be convinced.

What persuaded me most was the strange response of the Bush administration. Why was the government reluctant, why should family members of 9/11 victims have to insist that a commission be established to investigate the failures that made 9/11 possible? Why did Bush want someone as disreputable as Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state (who should be tried for war crimes in Bangladesh and Cambodia for starters), to head the Commission? Why should Bush and vice-president Cheney agree to testify before the Commission on the condition that they should not have to take the oath, that their testimony should not be electronically recorded nor transcribed, nor made public? Why did the Commission co-chairmen allege later that the CIA had not cooperated with the Commission? Why did NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) officials provide inaccurate information in their testimony to the Commission, and in media appearances? Why should the Commission have to use subpoenas and force NORAD and FAA to release evidence? Why did the Commission chairmen say that the Commission was “set up” to fail? Why did the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) not hold enquiries into any of the 4 plane crashes, which is required by law?

Another thing that I find odd, like many others, were the words blurted out by Bob Kerrey, a 9/11 Commission member. Several months ago he was pressed by a member of We Are Change who said, according to the constitution, a cover-up of an act of war is treasonous, the Pentagon continually changed its story, the country needs to get to the bottom of 9/11 etc., etc.,

Bob Kerrey: It’s a.. the problem is that it’s a 30 year old conspiracy.
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel: No, I’m talking about 9/11.
Bob Kerrey: That’s what I’m talking about too. Well anyway, I gotta go.

Listening to Kerrey reminded me of what the Bush official, who I quote at the head of the column, had gone on to tell Suskind, “And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

General Leonid Ivashov, former joint chief of staff of the Russian Armed Forces did just that. Having found the free-fall collapse of the towers disturbing, he instructed his staff to search for answers. Three days later he came to the conclusion that the 9/11 attack was the result of “a clash of interests among US leaders.”

While more recently, a Vietnam war veteran, former director of studies of the US Army War College, Dr Alan Sabrosky, has come out with the bold statement that 9/11 was not only `an inside job,’ but more specifically, a CIA-Mossad job. Nine-eleven would have been impossible to stage without the full resources of the CIA and the Mossad. Its Building 7, he says. It was not hit by a plane but still went down. “If one of the buildings was wired for demolition, all of them were wired for demolition.”

And it was my column on Sabrosky that yielded me accusations of being anti-Semitic. I wonder whether part of the problem lies in the strong western belief, an indissoluble one, that `the government loves them.’ Despite the history of false flag operations.

May be the Bush official, utterly contemptuous and disdainful as he was, knew what he was talking about. We create our own reality. And our people fall for it.

First published in New Age

Tags: 9/11, Anti-Semite, Arab, conflict, Israel, Jew, killing, middle east, Military, Occupation, Palestine, Rahnuma Ahmed, USA, War

Anti-semitism, and the 9/11, Israel-Mossad Connection Part I

By Rahnuma Ahmed

We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors — not even to save our lives. Even at Auschwitz, I sensed that such a moral downfall would render my survival meaningless.

– Hajo Meyer, An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. Huffington Post, January 27, 2010.

If it had been Daniel Pipes, an Islamophobic American columnist, I wouldn’t have bothered. According to him, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels too, are anti-Semitic.

But these were close friends of Shahidul, both are Jewish, both are gentle, thoughtful and intelligent people who had read my columns posted on his blog, had written to say that they were deeply upset at my “anti-Semitism.” One of them, as she explained in her letter to me, had demonstrated with Palestinians against recent Israeli attacks on Gaza. Against earlier attacks too, the ones in Lebanon. She was no lover of Zionism, definitely not of Mossad, she wrote. The other, a much older friend of Shahidul’s, said that he wholeheartedly supported the existence of a Jewish state, and a Palestinian state in it’s own right. But what I write on Israel and Palestine is `nonsense,’ the sort of stuff that a fine scholar like myself shouldn’t be writing.

What does one do in such a situation? Besides feeling deeply upset, of course.

Read what one has written through their eyes. Turn one’s ideas this way and that. Look underneath. Reflect.

For today’s column I had thought of writing about what has led careful observers to not only think that 9/11 was an inside job but, that Israel and Mossad are connected to 9/11. Regular readers may remember that I have directly, or indirectly, written about 9/11, in many of my previous pieces. `Conspiracy theories.’ Learning from 9/11 (April 13, 2009). Al-Qaeda and Western intelligence operations (April 27, 2009). The Unfolding Crisis in Pakistan, parts 1 – 4 (May 11, 17, 18, 19 2009). The West’s immortal terrorist (December 21, 2009). 9/11 suicide hijackers. Risen from the dead (December 28, 2009). Pentagon’s prayers (January 4, 2010). Padded underwear (January 11, 2010). Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who provides the best security of them all? (January 25, 2010).

Regular readers also know that I analyse and critique not only western powers, but also, dominant institutions and ideologies, at home. That some of my recent pieces had discussed how Bengalis are prone to portray themselves as `victims’ rather than perpetrators of violence and injustice in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (April 5, 2010). How nationalist narratives of Bangladesh, whether celebrating the language movement of 1952 or the liberation struggle of 1971, have always been ethnically `singular’ (March 8, 2010). How Bengalis have begun mimicking their erstwhile Pakistani rulers when it comes to explaining what has gone wrong in the CHT: they have blamed it on others. How Bengali/national imagination needs to be de-colonised (March 26, 2010). Those who’ve read what I’ve written in Bangla know of my edited and translated collection of interviews and writings by contemporary Muslim intellectuals who engage with questions that are considered to be socially taboo in Bangladesh: do Muslims need to re-imagine Allah in a manner appropriate to the 21st century? Should the state intervene (and govern) the relationship between Allah, and His believer, since in Islam, Allah is sovereign? Are hadis and shariah patriarchal? Since homosexuality is real, and homosexuals are discriminated against by the Belgian government, shouldn’t Belgian Muslims who’ve also been victims of government discrimination, extend their support to homosexuals? (Islami Chintar Punorpothon: Shomokaleen Musolman Buddhijibder Shongram, 2006).

Nothing short of wild horses would have driven me to make this list but I do so to pre-empt attempts to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism, usually conducted by raising counter-questions: But what about the oppressions and injustices in your own society? Why don’t you write about those?

I do.

And when I do, I don’t try to `balance’ my account of atrocities committed in the name of Bengalis in the CHT (can atrocities ever be balanced?). On the contrary, as a Bengali, I think it is obligatory that I write in the strongest possible terms, and what better day than our independence day to pen lines such as these:

“Thirty-eight years on and I look at myself. I look at us women. I look at our normal, peacetime lives. And I wonder, if justice had been done, if the war criminals had been tried, if women had returned to their families, to their parents, husbands, lovers, brothers, if they did not have to go Pakistan, or to brothels, or to Mother Teresa’s in Kolkata, if those pregnant could have had their babies if they had wished, would my life, would our lives have been differently normal? If justice had been done, would the rape of hill women have been a necessary part of the military occupation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts? Would the offenders have enjoyed impunity? Would there not have been independent judicial investigations? Would those guilty have gone unpunished? Would the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been militarily occupied at all?” (Distances, Independence day supplement, New Age, March 26, 2008).

As the writers of When Victims Rule: A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America argue, `Injustices perpetrated by the powerful, whoever they are, must always be challenged.’

Exactly. No balancing acts please. Like Yael Kahn, a courageous Jewish activist, who termed the recent JCall petition of 3,000 European Jews to the European Parliament as being “wholly inappropriate” to what the present demands. The petition had said that the systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous. That the Israeli occupation and settlements are morally and politically wrong. That Israel is going down the wrong path. That the current Israeli policies are a source of injustice for the Palestinians. Kahn welcomed the petititon but blasted JCall for failing to mention Israel’s barbaric seige of 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Neither do the petitioners speak out against Israeli restrictions on the amount of food Gaza’s Palestinians are allowed to have. Every person of conscience, she said, must take action to lift Israel’s seige of Gaza (al-Jazeera, May 4 2010).

And to this I’d like to add, why is it that these actions of the Israeli government are not considered to be anti-Semitic? As Curt Day points out, there are three dictionary definitions of Semite and one of these includes those living in Southwest Asia . In other words, Arabs. If Semites include Arabs, then is not this restricted use of the term anti-Semitism “racist”?

And maybe that is part of the problem. The assumption of an essential anti-Semitism. Fixed. Unchanging. Outside history. Regardless of what Jews do. Even if they become oppressors. Even when they become oppressors, so intent on oppressing that they become forgetful of which lessons to learn from history. For instance, this Israeli officer:

“In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the (occupied) territories said not long ago, it’s justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then we must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles—even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.”

Amir Oren, military correspondent, Haaretz, had added: If this officer believes that the casbah of Nablus resembles the Warsaw ghetto, who, in his mind, resemble the officers of the Israeli army?

But then, as Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer tells us, Auschwitz and the Holocaust have been elevated into a new religion in Israel. “In the beginning is Auschwitz,” as Elie Wiesel had said. “Nothing should be compared to the Holocaust but everything must be related to it.” It is this that has allowed one of the worst genocides in history to be “exploited for political ends.” When Holocaust was turned into a religion it came to mean that Israel can do no wrong.

And I would like to add, Israel’s wrongs are not only confined to the occupied territories/ Palestine, but extends to Afghanistan and Iraq. To Pakistan. It reaches out to Iran, too.

Had the situation been the opposite, I would have been as vocal in defence of what would then have been the Israeli cause.

An earlier version published in New Age

Concluding instalment, next week

Earlier version published in New Age Monday May 10, 2010

Tags: Anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Holocaust, Israel, Jews, Palestine, Rahnuma Ahmed, religion

9/11, Mossad, and a super 9-11 in the offing

By Rahnuma Ahmed

Anti-Semite, Jew hater, Holocaust denier are the epithets one is bound to gather if one voices criticism of Israel. Of Zionism.

Historian Tony Judt, of Jewish background himself, had written on Israel’s 58th birthday, Israel is like an adolescent. It is convinced that it can do as it wishes. That it is immortal. That no one understands it. Everyone is against it. It is unique (`The country that wouldn’t grow up,’ Haaretz, May 2, 2006).

And after all, as God’s “chosen people” how can they be blamed? Self-deluded into thinking that they are distinct—especially from their Arab neighbours who are barbaric, fanatics, dirty, smelly—imagine their shock when a research aimed at studying genetic variations in immune system genes among Middle Eastern people discovered otherwise, that Jewish people are genetically not distinct from their neighbors. What was to happen now to the Jewish claim that they are special? That Judaism can only be inherited? (`Mideast Jews, Palestinians Virtually Genetically Identical,’ The Observer, November 25, 2001).

And how did the scientific community react? Did members scratch their heads and say, Oh good, now the Israelis will realise that it was all a big mistake. They’ve been slaughtering and grabbing land from people who’re actually their brothers… All this horror can stop. We can have peace. Finally!

No. The paper was pulled from Human Immunology, the American journal in which it’d just been published. It was removed from the journal’s website. Academics who had already received journal copies were urged to rip out the offending pages. Libraries and universities throughout the world were asked to either ignore it or “preferably to physically remove the pages.” The author, Spanish geneticist professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena was sacked from the journal’s editorial board.

If Arnaiz-Villena had found evidence that instead of being “ordinary,” Jewish people were genetically “very special,” wrote a fellow scientist, “you can be sure no one would have objected.”

Israel, as we can all see, has refused to grow up. If it had, it would have, at the very least, done what Judt had advised 4 years earlier: dismantle the major settlements. Open unconditional negotiation with Palestinians. Offer Hamas leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire.

It would have realised that it cannot count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the United States. That the worldwide scrutiny of its everyday behaviour towards the Palestinians, only a TV button or a mouse click away—curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, home destructions, land grabbings and settlements, slaughter in Gaza dubbed the world’s largest open-air prison, apartheid wall, targeted assassinations, theft of western passports—would eventually lead to a situation where, as Judt puts it, “the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka,” or Auschwitz, is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. That it would lead to a situation where Israel would no longer be able to cash in on the Holocaust.

It will be most unfortunate. Zionism will provide the excuse for the rise of genuine anti-Semitism, for exacting the price—from both Zionist, and non-Zionist Jews—for not having learnt lessons from history.

Judt had issued a warning: “something is changing in the United States.” Ten years ago, he said, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby would possibly not have been published. Not even from London. A sea-change is taking place. It is leading prominent thinkers, including erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer and Walt (“prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials”) to voice the concern that Israel is “a liability.” If America is to regain her “foreign image and influence” the umbilical cord which ties US foreign policy to the needs and interests of Israel must be severed.

US military circles apparently are not far removed from these changing concerns. As Dr Alan Sabrosky, former director of studies of the American War College said in a recent interview, his article, in which he alleges that 9/11 was a Mossad-CIA operation, is being read by people in the Headquarters Marine Corps, the Army War College. At first it is met with disbelief. But once people get convinced, they get angry. Very angry, he said. That’s because the military, unlike the Congress, the White House, and the media, has not been bought (see last week’s column, The `Mad Dog’ in the Middle East).

It is a conviction that seems to be shared by Gordon Duff, a Marine Vietnam veteran, and a widely published expert on military and defense issues. Israel’s powerful group around Bush —the PNAC-ers, the neo-cons—is not present in the current administration, but the idea, as Duff explains, had been that regardless of who was voted to power, whether it was John McCain or Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel would be there, “to pull his strings”  (Emanuel is the White House chief of staff at present). And they still have the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, the State department, and “AIPAC’s ability to put 75% of the members of congress around anything from a resolution that the moon is made of green cheese to `National Have Sex With Your Child Day.’ Equally importantly, the media giants controlled by Israeli assets and Christian Zionist allies are in position in Germany, the UK and the US, and along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, these assets are quick in “suppressing news, running any story and manipulating the masses.”

Things started to go wrong for Israel, writes Duff, when top military leaders increasingly became suspicious of 9/11 (April 24, 2010). Of the possibility that Israel was involved in 9/11. It is a suspicion which has festered like an open wound. General Petraeus, the senior operational commander, the person really in charge of the US military, has told Admiral Mullen that Israel is not subjected to any foreign threat. That it has become “a massive liability.” Obama, writes Duff, was confronted with a choice. He was told that neither the military nor the intelligence services are prepared to participate in attacks on Iran “under any imaginable circumstances.” That, if the US wanted to attack Iran, “he and Emanuel Rahm would have to invade Iran personally” (and I cannot help think who’d blame them with 18 attempted suicides per day among American war vets?).

As Israel lined up its collaborators in the US, Obama went after “Israel’s biggest prize in America, Goldman Sachs,” its prime asset for controlling America. For looting America. According to Duff, the alliance between the US and Israel has totally broken down. The most liberal and the most conservative members of congress have signed up in support of Goldman Sachs, and lined up against the President and Pentagon, who are are aligned together. In support of his argument, he asks: why [else would] extreme liberals and conservatives all attacking President Obama and, less visibly, our military leaders, all at the same time? Who is orchestrating this oddest turn of political events in recent history?

And in this oddest of situation backroom chatter has increased: a terror attack is imminent. Iran will be blamed for it. The primary suspect is Israel since “only a new 9/11 can bail Israel out,” writes Duff. According to rumors, the weapons are in place in Europe and the US. Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, some kind of Islamic terrorist group, have already been recruited. Or invented. News stories have already been drafted (I’d like to remind skeptics of 9/11, when BBC news correspondent Jane Standley had reported the collapse of Building 7, a good 23 minutes before the actual collapse time). Film crews are on alert. Witnesses will be briefed, they will say, Yes, it was an Arab dirty bomb. We saw them. Middle Eastern-looking. They must have bought the bomb from North Korea. After the story has hit the news, these stunned survivors will suddenly disappear. We all know where.

A super 9-11. But will this one, now that suspicions have been raised, now that Israel’s cover has been blown, will it generate `super’ sympathy for Middle East’s `mad dog’?

May be not. Once bitten, twice shy.

Published in New Age

Tags: 9-11, Deception, Mad Dog, middle east, Mossad, Rahnuma Ahmed, the Israel lobby, US foreign policy, war on terror

The `Mad Dog’ in the Middle East

By Rahnuma Ahmed

What Dr Alan Sabrosky has done is bell the cat. Except that it’s a dog, and not a cat.One that’s utterly mad. Insane.

In the words of late General Moshe Dayan, who went on to become Israel’s defense minister, and later foreign minister, Israel’s security depended on its being viewed by others as a mad dog.

Dr Sabrosky, who has been calling for a new investigation on 9/11 for some time, said in a recent radio interview (March 19), it would have been impossible to stage 9/11 without the full resources of both the CIA and Mossad. Nine-eleven, he said, served the interests of both the agencies. “They did 9/11. They did it.”

“..it is 100% certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation. Period.” (Full transcript). Now if Dr Sabrosky had been let’s say, a Pakistani, or worse still, an Iranian, one could have pooh-poohed. A loony, like all mollahs are. If he’d been Muslim, one could have labelled him an anti-Semite. After all, the Iranian president denied the holocaust. That’s what the western media said and they’d never lie, would they? Crazy dictator with nuclear weapons. Will deny being from his mother’s womb next. Pathetic.

But unfortunately Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, university of Michigan) is a ten year US Marine Corps veteran. A Vietnam war vet. An American of Jewish ancestry. He’s not only a graduate of the US Army War College, he was director of studies there. For five and a half years. Now if he says he’s convinced the Israelis did it… it’s to say the least, pretty difficult to ignore. Although the mainstream western media, the beacons of the free world, are doing their darndest best. Do a google search on Dr Sabrosky plus any of these beacons New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian… BBC, CNN websites, your search will come to nought. It’s only in the alternative press. A few blogs. Pravda online. Less than a handful of 9-11 truth websites (no, not all, interesting, eh?). It’s only in these places that you’ll come across links to his interview. And his recent article, `The dark face of Jewish nationalism’ (March 12, 2010).

Jewish nationalism is unique, he writes. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had said at a Likud gathering “Israel is not like other countries.” For once, he was speaking the truth. What makes its nationalism distinct to that of other countries—all the rest have both positive and negative aspects, both unifying and extremist features—Jewish nationalism is extremist per se. Among both secular and practising Jews. It is a real witches brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism and militarism, a mixture that cannot be contained within a `mere’ nationalist context. Its `others’ have to be pushed out. Either into camps, or out of the country. Second, Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries. Loyalty to Israel supersedes the loyalty to the country to which one belongs. Whether US or UK, or any other. For instance, Rahm Emanuel. He’s the White House chief of staff. The second most powerful person in the US. He served in the Israeli army but not in the US armed forces. Once independence is achieved, and this is the third feature of Jewish nationalism, it’s not unusual to have normal relations with the former occupying power. But no, not in the case of Israel. It has a long list of enemies. They have become America’s enemies too. Lastly, nationalist movements usually don’t displace the indigenous population wholesale, instead, they incorporate. They accommodate. The Americans are an exception, look what they did to the Indians/native Americans. Maybe that’s why most of them don’t care about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.

In his radio interview with Mark Glenn and Phil Tourney (USS Liberty survivor), Sabrosky explains, most Americans don’t care much about what happened to the USS Liberty. For those who don’t know, I add, Israel attacked the US Naval ship USS Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day war. It was a false flag operation (like 9-11), the plan was to blame the attack on Egypt, to drag the US into the war. President Johnson seems to have known about it in advance; 34 Americans were murdered, 173 were wounded. Sabrosky says, That’s history. But 9-11 isn’t.

It has led directly to 60,000 Americans dead and wounded. In other countries, “hundreds of thousands of people.” Killed, wounded, made homeless. Tourney is sore about the Liberty, while Sabrosky himself is sore about Vietnam. But Americans are sore about 9-11 which is an “open wound.” He says, If Americans ever know that Israel did this, they’re gonna scrub them off the Earth, and they’re not gonna give a rat’s ass—forgive my language—what the cost is. They are not going to care. They will do it. And they should.

When Glenn asks Dr Sabrosky what is the reaction in US army circles (his work is being read by people in the Headquarters Marine Corps and at the Army War College) to his conviction that 9-11 was a Mossad operation, he answers, at first, astonishment. Disbelief. He does not get into arguments, he says. Who was flying what, who was where, whether there was nano-thermite (high-tech energetic materials prepared under military contracts in the USA, part of secret military research) or not, “those things are true, but they’re incidental.” What is necessary is to tell people that three buildings went down, the third was not hit by a plane. He then shows them an interview with a Danish demolitions expert, Danny Jowenko. It shows WTC7 going down. I tell them, “Now you understand that if one of the buildings was wired for demolition, all of them were wired for demolition.” And that, says Sabrosky, is the tipping point. At that point, people get angry. Really angry. And they say, “They did it, didn’t they.” He replies, “Yep—they did it.

” While asking Dr Sabrosky what he thinks is going to happen, Glenn says he himself thinks that Israel is going to pull off another 9-11, “sooner than any of us realize or would like to envision.” That powerful people think so too, such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen who cut short a trip to Europe several years ago (July 2008), quickly flew to Israel, to warn them that there should not be “another USS Liberty part two.” That a part two would already have occurred if increasing numbers of people had not been talking about 9-11. He adds, “I think that Israel has been watching all of this and has been saying, “We need to kind of let things cool a little bit for now—if we try to pull another one off right now then that’s it: we’re going to blow our cover.”

Sabrosky butts in saying, If Americans ever truly understand that they’ve been had, Israel will be history. “It’ll be a bloody, brutal war.” Israeli leverage, he explains, is confined to political appointments—to the Congress, to the White House. And to the media (“the mainstream media have paid more attention to Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than they have to dissecting blatant falsehoods”). But “the military has not been bought.” It is loyal. If it ever really, really deeply understands this, that they did 9-11, that the US government could in any way be involved in high crimes and treason against the people of the United States, “Israel’s going to disappear. Israel will flat-ass disappear from this Earth.”

And what does he think is going to happen soon? “We’re going to have a war with Iran.” The Arab street is going to explode. There are American forces, American units, like the 5th fleet headquarters in Bahrain, there’s going to be a long casualty list. If the Iraqi resistance had not been so strong, the attack on Iran, which was the “big prize” all along, would have happened in the second Bush administration. The pattern, he’s convinced, was: Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq 2003, Iran 2005, Syria 2007. The time frame now is a bit different, and although he’s not sure as to how it’s playing out, they are trying to “create an excuse for a war.”

I myself find it interesting that the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General (April 13, 2010) urging him to appoint an independent fact-finding team, a trustworthy one, to launch a comprehensive investigation into the “main culprits” behind the September 11 attacks since that is the “principal excuse” for attacking the Middle East. For NATO’s military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. For making policies and launching military actions on the “pretext of fighting terrorism.

” Israel is a “monster,” Dr Sabrosky has written elsewhere (`I Express My Jewish Identity in Cuisine, Not in Foreign Policy’ July 9, 2009). And although more and more American Jews are speaking out, it might be too little too late. “Excising this ultra-Zionist/neo-con cancer is not going to be easy.” Maybe what needs to be done, an option that general Dayan had neglected to note, is to “kill that mad dog before it can decide to go berserk and bite.”

Extreme nationalism begging extreme solutions.

Published in New Age, April 26, 2010

Tags: 9-11, Israel, Israeli lobby, Military, Rahnuma Ahmed, us policy, USA, war on terror

Chhatra League’s Sexual Offences. A Widespread State of Denial

By Rahnuma Ahmed

While working on last week’s column, `The Nation, or Chhatra League…?’ (published on Monday, April 12, 2010), I had been in two minds.

Should I include sexual offences—aggressive behaviour, molestation, physical assault, violence, rape, asking a buddy to video the incident of rape for subsequent commercial release as pornography, gang-rape—allegedly committed by Bangladesh Chhatra League leaders and activists?

No, it deserves a separate column, I thought.

I was unaware of media reports on Eden college. For over two months, I’d been totally absorbed in researching and writing the Weather series (1 February – 29 March), and had been oblivious to much of what was happening around me. This included allegations against BCL’s women leaders and activists at Eden. But more on that later.

By all accounts, there seems to have been a sudden and horrific increase in nationwide violence, largely against girls and young women, over the last couple of months. Ten year old schoolgirl Shahnaz Begum of Digalbagh village in Mymensingh was raped by two brothers. Killed. October 2009. Eti Moni, a class ten student of Jaldhaka municipality in Nilphamari was raped. Strangled to death. October 2009. A schoolgirl of class three was raped at Ramanandapur village in Pabna sadar. October 2009. Nashfia Akand Pinky, a class IX student, committed suicide by hanging herself because she had been mercilessly teased and harassed, Pashchim Agargaon, Dhaka. January 2010. Nilufar Yasmin Eeti’s parents were shot dead by a young man after they turned down his proposal of marriage, Kalachandpur area in Gulshan, Dhaka. March 2010. Fourteen year old Umme Kulsum Elora, a student of class VII, committed suicide by taking pesticide because of continued harassment. April 2010. Mariam Akter Pinky, a student of class ten, died of burn injuries fuelled by kerosene in Konabhaban village in Kishoreganj; her mother says, she saw the young man who had harassed her for the last two years run out of the room. April 2010 …. there are many more. I stare uncomprehendingly at the horror of it all.

As I scan the newspapers, a recent headline catches my eye, Man stabs himself over refusal of marriage proposal. One lone man. He had preferred to kill himself. Not the woman.

And what about sexual offences which, according to media reports, have specifically been committed by BCL leaders and activists? Ahsan Kabir Mamun, also known as Mamun Howladar, information secretary of Pirojpur district committee of BCL, raped a class X student in Pirojpur, Barisal. September 2009. The incident was recorded on cellphone by his childhood friend `Ganja’ Monir, who happens to be a BNP activist. It was later available as a pornographic CD for sale in local video shops. Mamun insists it was recorded “secretly,” while Monir says he was carrying out Mamun’s instructions. Mamun did not deny having raped the girl, but added, the recording (not committing the crime itself, mind you) had been done to “tarnish” his political and business image. The two families, he said, were closely related. He was to be married to her soon. Her family responded by demanding that he should receive “exemplary punishment.”

A group of 16 young men, in September 2009, abducted a class VII student of Pakhimara in Kalapara upazila in Patuakhali. The young girl was returning home from a Puja mandap accompanied by her cousin Nasir, whom the men beat up and drove away. They took her to a nearby garden. According to media reports, she was gang-raped, allegedly by ten of her abductors. All BCL activists. More recently, in February 2010, four students of Chittagong Medical College, all BCL leaders and activists, allegedly raped a girl on a hill adjoining CMC campus.

Young women, who are either university students, or walking through campuses, have complained of being physically assaulted by BCL activists. In early November, a Rajshahi university student was assaulted and confined for an hour. One of the assaulters was Kawsar Hossain, a fellow student of the same university who had declared his love for her but had been turned down. A similar incident had occurred several months earlier, on the same campus, when another BCL activist, accompanied by his associates, assaulted a woman student and her companion. On February 21, BCL activists beat up a young girl and her friends who were returning from the central Shahid Minar, in front of the Dhaka University vice-chancellor’s residence. A BCL activist of Jasimuddin Hall approached the young girl, and began harassing her. Her companions and passersby came to her aid but other BCL activists, from nearby halls, joined in the attack. Five people were injured. This month, in April, students of statistics department of Jagannath university refused to attend classes until a BCL activist, who had reportedly asaulted a woman student belonging to their department, was punished.

What is wrong with BCL? Or, more precisely, what wrongs do its leaders and their followers commit? Violence. Extortion. Tenderbaji. Sexual offences are never mentioned. Not by the prime minister, nor by any high (let alone, low-) ranking AL member. It is an offence that has no name. And therefore, it does not exist. If it does not exist, its existence need not be acknowledged… That is how denial has worked. And at the ground level, someone or the other obliges, whether it be party functionaries. Or local-level police. Or the college principal. For instance, in the case of Pakhimara, where the gang-rape occurred, local-level AL leaders fined the 16 young men 10,000 taka each for having “tortured” the girl. Their offence was characterised as `intent to rape.’ Not gang-rape, no. The victim’s family was forced to declare this at a hurriedly called press conference. Forced to file a defamation case against the publisher, editor and reporter of a Bangla daily for having reported the rape as rape. AL leaders pressurised the editor of a local daily to sack his reporter for having reported the rape. The culprits were not arrested. The victim’s family fled in fear of reprisal. The allegation of gang-rape had been manufactured to taint the ruling party’s image, said Rakibul Ahsan, Kalapara upazila AL secretary.

In Pirojpur, Mamun was expelled from his post of information secretary. His membership was cancelled for life, but he, alongwith Monir, is still absconding. In Chittagong Medical College, an emergency academic council meeting suspended the four alleged rapists. News reports add, the identity of the girl was not known. Hence, no rape case was filed. In RU, although Kawsar was expelled from the university, was imprisoned, he was still allowed to take his exams. On flimsy grounds. The departmental chairperson had not received his expulsion order from the university authorities. In DU, although BCL activists who caused assault and injury on February 21 have been suspended, they are still staying in the residential halls. Two have been given executive positions in the newly-formed BCL hall unit.

But after the Pohela Boishakh concert fiasco at Raju chottor in DU, it has become increasingly harder to deny that which has no-name. According to newspaper reports, 20 female students were molested. By BCL cadres. Also, by outsiders. Women concert-goers complained. They were pinched. Grabbed. Breasts. Buttocks. Two women students kameezes were ripped, forcing them to accept shirts offered by male concert-goers, to cover themselves. Police rescued fifteen young women from among dense crowds, encircled by men. The concert was abruptly closed down as things threatened to get out of control. According to newspaper reports, groups of BCL activists had battled with each other over splitting 40 lakh taka given by a private mobile phone company. To DU BCL leaders, for having organised the concert. But no, the university authorities claimed not to know anything about it. Neither did the BCL leadership. No, they hadn’t heard anything.

A Bangla proverb, shaak die maach dhaka, the (foolhardy) attempt to cover live fishes with spinach leaves, expresses well the attempts of DU authorities post-concert. The DU vice-chancellor professor AAMS Arefin Siddique inaugurated a 3 day Rover Scout campaign. Petitioning signatures. Processions. Rallies. The slogan? `No to Eve teasing.’ Surely this undermines last year’s High Court ruling? A ruling which was heartily welcomed by women’s organisations in Bangladesh. Any kind of physical, mental or sexual harassment of women, girls and children at their workplaces, educational institutions and at other public places, including roads, is a criminal offence punishable by fine and/or imprisonment. The ruling has the status of law. So where does this all this drivel about Eve-teasing come from? As feminists have repeatedly pointed out, eve-teasing is a western and Christian construct, it refers to the temptress nature of Eve, thereby placing the responsibility for sexual harassment on women. On the victims, not the perpretators. From earlier denial, looking-the-other-way, to victim-blaming? Is this the new AL strategy being fashioned by its ideologists? Why should women’s organisations and women’s rights activists who have struggled hard for women’s right to public space for many long years be a party to undermining our hard-won HC ruling? One which we had all agreed was a `revolution’?

There are other things that I find deeply troubling. The recent revelations sparked by squabbles over dividing the loot earned from admission profiteering at Eden Women’s University College. According to newspaper reports, factions opposed to BCL unit president Jasmine Shamima Nijhum and general secretary Farzana Yasmin Tania, have alleged that besides admission profiteering, these women leaders are involved in tenderbaji, wheeling and dealing, buying up BTV slots, and lobbying. They use first year students, those from village backgrounds, telling them that this is the way to fulfill their dreams of becoming leaders, and becoming wealthy. The girls are encouraged to dress up. They are taken to the houses of different leaders. Sometimes to hotels. And asked to entertain them. According to the allegations, the BCL leaders leave the hostel after 10 at night. Returning the next day, at 10 in the morning. Women students who refuse to do as told are either turned out of the hostel, or their room is broken into, or locked-up. The principal of the college, according to news reports, is fully complicit in these happenings.

Both Khaleda Zia, the leader of the opposition (`the girls of Eden college are being used to entertain the ministers and MPs whose salaries and allowances have been raised’) and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, Jamaat secretary general (`women students are used to satisfy the leaders’) have capitalised on these stories, using them as opportunities to attack the government.

While AL apologists shush the leader of the opposition for having defiled the honor of `all’ students of Eden college for a bad apple or two, while a journalist friend tells me that one or two students of Eden have since retracted their statements, I return to my memories of Jahangirnagar university, to the anti-rape movement in 1998 when the university authorities, to quell the movement, had barked: which one among you have been raped? Come, stand up, be identified.

Hundreds of women students had spoken up in a single voice: we have all been dishonored. Both the prime minister, her women cabinet ministers, and the leader of the opposition could take lessons from that.

Published in New Age April 19, 2010

Tags: Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), Eden Women's University College, Gang-rape, Rahnuma Ahmed, rape, sexual harassment, Suicide

Representing ‘Crossfire’: politics, art and photography

Shahidul Alam in an interview with New Age

by Rahnuma Ahmed

Media reports on “Crossfire” exhibition

Latest report in Indepndent

Shahidul Alam’s exhibition, ‘Crossfire’ (a euphemism for extrajudicial killings by the Rapid Action Battalion), was scheduled to open on March 22, at Drik Gallery, Dhaka. A police lockup of Drik’s premises before the opening prevented noted Indian writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi from entering, forcing her to declare the opening on the street outside Drik. The police blockage was removed soon after Drik’s lawyers served legal notice and the lawyers had moved the Court, and after Government lawyers i.e., the Attorney Generals office, had contacted the Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s office, and the Home Ministry, during the hearing on the government. The court commented that even after repeated rules had been issued on the government, crossfire had continued to occur. The court’s response and subsequent events enabled Drik to open the exhibition for public viewing on March 31.

Shahidul Alam in front of a collage, part of his Crossfire exhibition. Cartoon in the background of Home Minister Sahara Khatun, ‘No crossfire killing taken place’. — Wahid Adnan/DrikNEWS

You work in the documentary genre, this work is show-cased as being symbolic, interpretive. Does this mean a change in genres?

I find these categorisations problematic. I see myself as a storyteller. There’s fiction and non-fiction. This is clearly non-fiction, though it draws upon many of the techniques that fiction would use. The allegorical approach was deliberately chosen as I felt it had, in this instance, greater interpretive potential than the literal approach. Quite apart from the fact that one could hardly expect RAB to allow photographers to document their killing (they do sometimes have TV crews accompanying them on ‘missions’ but they are never allowed to be there during ‘crossfire’), I felt that showing bodies, blood and weapons would not add to the understanding people already had. We are not dealing with lack of knowledge. ‘Crossfire’ is known and, in fact, it is because it is known that the exhibition is seen as such a threat. So, while reinforcing the known with images would have a value, it would be unlikely to be as provocative as these more subtle but haunting images are likely to be.

I wanted the images to linger in people’s minds, perhaps to haunt them. They are desolate images, quiet but suggestive. The attempt is not one of inundating the audience with information, but leaving them to meditate upon the silence of the dead.

Crossfire deaths continue despite regime changes. How do you view this?

Criminals have survived because of patronage of the powerful. The removal of criminals, through ‘crossfire’, does not affect the system of control, but merely substitutes existing criminals for new ones. This is why crimes continue unabated under RAB. All it does is to undermine the legal system. Unless serious attempts are made to remove such patronage and, better still, catch the godfathers, the extermination of thugs and local-level criminals (and many innocent people are also killed) will have no effect on crime. The ruling elite knows this. So why use RAB at all? I believe it is to keep control. Dead criminals don’t speak. Don’t give secrets away. Don’t take a share of the spoils. They are disposable, and RAB is the disposal system.

Every government has used RAB and other law enforcement authorities to remove troublemakers. Bangla Bhai had become a liability when he was apprehended. He didn’t die in crossfire, but was hurriedly hanged all the same despite the fact that he wanted to talk to the media as he had ‘stories to tell’. Dead people don’t tell stories. So, all governments would rather have RAB, to clean up their mess, than be confronted by their own shadows.

A change of government does not change this structure.

The inclusion of the Google map has turned this exhibition into a collective, history-writing project. Why that added dimension?

Art projects are generally about the glorification of the artist. The audience is generally a passive recipient. I see this as a public project. I have a role to play as a storyteller, but my work is informed by not only the collective work of my co-researchers, but also that of human rights groups, other activists, and most importantly by the lives, or deaths, of the people whose stories are being told. The survivors, the witnesses and others affected by these deaths are important players in this story and it was essential to find a way to make this project inclusive. I would be kidding myself if I assumed this show would put an end to extrajudicial killings. I also believe there are still many unreported cases.

The Google map has the twin benefits of being interactive and open. We have already been told of one person who had been crossfired but his name hadn’t come up in the archival research.

The internet will also allow a much wider participation than might otherwise have been possible.

Besides the Awami League’s electoral pledge of stopping extrajudicial killings, it had also promised us a ‘digital Bangladesh’. I think it is appropriate that this digital Bangladesh be claimed by the people.

What is the significance of research—in the sense of dates, names, places, events—for this project, and for the exhibition?

The assumed veracity of the photographic image is an important source of the strength of this exhibition. We have deliberately moved away from the mechanical aspect of recording events through images, but supplemented it by relating the image to verifiable facts. Meticulous research has gone into not only providing the context for the photographs, which has been included in the Google map, but each image, in some way, refers to a visual inspired by a case study. By deliberately retaining some ambiguity about the ‘facts’ surrounding the image, we invite the viewer to delve deeper into the image to discover the physical basis of the analogy, and to reflect upon the image. The photographs therefore become a portal through which the viewer can enter the story, rather than the story in itself. Yet, each image, relates to a finite, physical instance, that becomes a reference point for a life that was brutally taken away.

Your exhibition is political, with a capital ‘P’. Why is political engagement generally not seen in the work of Bangladeshi artists?

Art cannot be dissociated from life, and life is distinctly political. To paraphrase the renowned Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, the price of tomato is political. However, life is also nuanced and multi-layered. Our art practice needs to be critically engaged at all levels. While the war of liberation is understandably a source of inspiration for many artists, there are many other wars of contemporary life that seem to slip from the artist’s canvas. Most artists, with some exceptions of course, claim they produce art merely for themselves. I don’t believe them. Of course there is great joy in producing art that pleases oneself. But I believe art is the medium and not the message, and all artists, I suspect, want their art to have an effect.

I know it is passé in some quarters to be producing art that is political. Being apolitical is a political stance too. While I can understand schools of thought that have rebelled against the traditional trappings of art, I do not see the point of producing art that is not meaningful. Strong art is capable of engaging with people. It is that engagement that I seek. My art is merely a tool towards that engagement.

I understand what you mean. A lot of the artwork that’s being produced in Bangladesh stems from commercial interests. Producing formulaic work that sells is the job of a technician and not an artist. Sure, an artist needs to survive and we all produce work which we hope might sell, but once that becomes the sole purpose of producing art, one is probably not an artist in the first place.

There is a strong adherence in Bangladesh to an antiquated form of pictorialism. This applies both to representational and abstract art. Ideas seem to take back stage. While I’m wary of pseudo intellectualisation of art, I must admit that the cerebral aspects of art excite me. The politicisation is an extension of that process.

Books on crossfire have been published, roundtable discussions have been held. Why did the government react as it did, do you think it says something about the power of photography?

The association of photographs with real events makes the photographer a primary witness, and thereby the photograph becomes documentary evidence. This makes photography both powerful and dangerous. Way back in 1909, much before Photoshop came into play, Lewis Hine had said ‘While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.’

Today, liars who run corporations and rule powerful nations, also have photography at their disposal. This very powerful tool is used and abused, and it is essential that we come to grips with this new language. Advertising agencies with huge budgets use photography to shape our minds about products we buy. Politicians and their campaigns are also products that we, as consumers, are encouraged to buy into. I see no restrictions on the lies we are fed every day through advertising or political propaganda. It is when the public has access to the same tools, and in particular when they use it to expose injustice that photography becomes a problem. These seemingly ‘innocent’ photographs become charged with meaning as soon as we learn to read their underlying meaning. This makes them dangerous.

Perhaps this is also why photographic education has been systematically excluded from our education system. A tool for public emancipation will never be welcomed by an oppressive regime. And we will have oppressive regimes for a while to come.

‘Crossfire’ was curated by an international curator, and you yourself have curated exhibitions abroad. Do you think international curators are more likely to engage with work such as ‘Crossfire’ on the basis of aesthetic considerations rather than lived, political ones, since s/he will  be less knowledgeable about its history, meanings, metaphors, how the government has manufactured popular consent, resistance, etc. For instance, and you mention it in the brochure: John Pilger, the well-known journalist, had written when Barrister Moudood Ahmed had been arrested during the Fakhruddin-Moeenudin regime, he’s ‘a decent, brave man.’ And of course, it’s quite possible that Pilger didn’t know that the Barrister saheb, as law minister, was one of the political architects of RAB.

Ah yes, Pilger bungled that one. I think artistic collaborations create new possibilities. Our art practice is so often informed by western sensibilities that we at Drik deliberately explore southern interactions. The discussions between Kunda Dixit of Nepal and Marcelo Brodsky of Argentina in Chobi Mela V (our festival of photography) pointed to the remarkable similarity between the political movements in Peru and in South Asia. This made the inclusion of a Peruvian curator even more interesting, and Jorge Villacorte is a respected Latin American curator and art critic. Several other recognised international curators, from Lebanon, Tangiers and Italy had seen the show. I was somewhat surprised that while they introduced interesting ideas about curatorial and art practice and were hugely appreciative of the aesthetic and performative elements of the work, not one of them ever asked me about the impact it might have upon crossfire itself. Though it would be arrogant to suggest that this show would put an end to that.

As someone deeply in love with my country (I find words like patriotic and nationalistic problematic), my primary concern is the welfare of my community. If my work can contribute to improving the lives of my people, I will have been successful, regardless of how my art is perceived by critics. If the work is perceived as great art, but fails in its ultimate goal of furthering the cause of social justice, then I will have failed.

That said, the exhibition was only a small part of the larger movement for democracy. The activism surrounding the show, the legal action, the media mobilisation, and the spontaneous popular actions were all part of the process. The international curator had an important role to play, but only as a point of departure. We have since had students critiquing the curatorial process, where they have brought in elements relating to their political practice and social concerns. The debate resulting from the work is more important than the work itself. But it is the power of art, and particularly photography that makes such actions so vital.

There is an interesting sub-text to this exercise. The dinosaurs of Bangladeshi art have been incapable of recognising photography as an art form. Photographers are still not invited to participate in the Asian Biennale (though foreign photographers have even won the grand prize in the event). There is still no department of photography in either Shilapakala Academy (the academy of fine and performing arts) or Charukala Institute (the institute of fine arts). These are 19th-century institutions operating in the 21st century. It is interesting however, that while Charukala Institute refused to show my work in 1989, because it was a photographic, and not a painting, exhibition, it was the students of Charukala Institute who organised the first public protests when the police came and blockaged our gallery to prevent the opening of the Crossfire exhibition. It is reassuring that the students at least can raise their heads and look above the sand.

Drik under Crossfire (Independent)

Posted in New Age on 8th April 2010

Media reports on “Crossfire” exhibition

Tags: Art, censorship, crossfire, culture, exhibition, extra judicial killing, government, Law, media, Photography, police, Rahnuma Ahmed, Shahidul Alam

THE POLITICS OF WEATHER: LOCAL AND GLOBAL

`Owning’ the weather? PART IX

By Rahnuma Ahmed

Does something lie behind the global warming agenda, behind the UN Summit at Copenhagen where world leaders had met to agree on how to tackle global climate change? Has weather warfare, as Michel Chossudovsky, director, Global Research (Canada), asks us, already started?

Some observers think, climate wars, caused by uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions, are the future. That the world will be ravaged by wars over land, food and water, forcing countries to use the military to barricade borders.

This scenario—climate wars caused by global warming—is distinct from the weather warfare one, which is related to planned projections of `owning’ the weather, of developing technologies which `weaponise’ the weather (`Weather as a Force Multiplier. Owning the Weather in 2025,’ US Air Force commissioned study, 1996). This is real, admittedly so, by top-ranking US policy makers. By Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, “techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm” (1970). By William Cohen, former US secretary of defence, “alter[ing] the climate, set[ting] off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electro-magnetic waves…It’s real” (1997). By US Admiral Pier Saint-Armand, “We regard the weather as a weapon” (US Senate, 1972).

A reality further attested to by the ratification of an international Convention by the UN General Assembly, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (Geneva: 18 May 1977), one to which both the US and Soviet Union were signatories.

I find it interesting that both global warming and ENMOD are assumed to lead to similar environmental disasters—droughts, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes—and thereby, to untold human suffering, but that global summits and international meetings express an orchestrated alarm over only set of anthropogenic activities, i.e., CO2 emissions. No mention of warfare. Of depleted uranium. Or CO2 emissions caused by warfare in Iraq. The Pentagon’s daily fuel consumption. Or, for that matter, HAARP.

Many scientists and climatologists have repeatedly pointed out that climate change is a misnomer because climates do change. Should change. That change, for God’s sake, is natural. Climate science, they say, is in its infancy. We know very little. In such a situation, to commit the whole planet to policies that are extensive and far-reaching—and in reality, are based on shaky scientific findings, the result of computer modelling, simulation exercises, anecdotal evidence, and worse still, what we now know post-CRU, that the data was forced to fit a pre-determined theory, that the raw data of temperature records was not stored but (horror of horrors) deleted—is downright stupid.

And close on the heels of Climategate were a series of other `gates,’ Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. Okay, we should have learnt our lesson, no rush. Calm down. Go slow.

But, as Andrew Orlowski points out, Climategate raises far more questions than it answers. How did such a small group of scientists, backing a new theory, in an infant field, come to have such a huge effect on global policy making? Why is the climate debate beset with “a sense of crisis and urgency, and the ascendancy of a quite specific and narrow set of policy options”? Why has it become the “Rosetta stone” of a whole political and business movement? Does the answer lie (only) in the billions to be made from carbon trading, predicted to become the world’s largest commodity market 5 years from now, worth $10 trillion?

There was another leak at Copenhagen in December 2009, the Danish text leak. Taken together with the CRU e-mail, close watchers are more convinced than ever that these are the acts of whistle-blowers, of dissident insiders. An idea difficult to stomach for those who think that dissidence belongs to the Cold War era. To people yearning to be free of the Iron Curtain. To flock to the `free world.’

Developing countries reacted furiously to the leaked draft agreement. It proposed to hand more power to rich nations. To sideline the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations. To abandon the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding treaty on emissions reductions. It “force[d] developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement.” It proposed a green fund, to be run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (a partnership of 10 agencies including the WB and the UN Environmental Programme). It sought to put “constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”  According to a diplomat, “being done in secret” it is effectively “the end of the UN process” (Guardian, December 8, 2010).

Pray, to be replaced by what? The UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon spoke of a global governance structure.  The new EU president Herman van Rompuy said, it was another step towards the global management of our planet. Global governance and global agreements, said Al Gore. at 1:14 mts

Billed by the UN as possibly the most important meeting in the history of the world, the leaks, says Alex Jones (an American talk radio host and filmmaker, violently anti-communist he describes himself as an “aggressive constitutionalist”) discredited the globalists. It exposed the conspiracy of the international elite, a group of industrialists and bankers, to secretly institute a regime of global authority and global rule by an unelected bureaucracy. To scare the “world population into relinquishing their rights and turning it over to an IMF-World Bank elected government that taxes the West, then takes that money, and turns it back to third world and first world nations and then makes those nations agree to a list of demands to destroy their industrial capacity which will result in a death sentence.” To institute a system of climate colonialism. To conceal the fact that while the World Bank chief revels in biofuels having boosted food prices, ethanol production in the US took a third of grain production out, causing an additional 10 million people to starve to death in 2008. The Copenhagen summit, says Jones, was undoubtedly a massive failure. The conspiracy to coopt national sovereignty and elected governments, to force the people of the world to live under structures like the European Union which has forced Europeans to lose their sovereignty to “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” was successfully resisted. But these elites will try again, this year. In Mexico. The fight against the usurpation of civil liberties and sovereignty, says Jones, must go on.

Has weather warfare really started? Some HAARP-watchers think that the earthquake in Sichuan province in China, which killed 68,000 people, was not natural. They cite the observance of luminous, glowing cloud-like phenomena in the sky 30 minutes before the earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 (recorded by cellphone in Gansu province 450 km northeast of epicenter). According to Epoch Times, several weeks after the quake, high-level Chinese military sources secretly disclosed that it had destroyed the Chinese army’s largest armory, new weapons test bases, and part of nuclear facilities including several nuclear warheads. Initial calls for help were reportedly ignored by the Chinese authorities for the first 72 hours because they did not want “potential spies from the outside world” snooping around. The presence of concrete debris, including concrete slabs and blocks, reported by witnesses, have led some experts to think that a nuclear explosion had occurred near the epicenter, that the concrete belonged to the concrete cover of underground military bases. News of nuclear explosion has raised questions about cause-and-effect: whether a nuclear explosion caused the earthquake or the earthquake caused the explosion. A nuclear accident was also said to have occurred, 2,700 chemical workers were sent to parts of the earthquake-hit area to help cleanup.

Benjamin Fulford, a Japan-based journalist, claimed in early 2007 that while interviewing Heizo Takenaka, a former finance minister in Japan, he confronted Takenaka, and accused him of “having sold the Japanese financial system over to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.” According to Fulford, Takenaka’s response had been that a group representing “American and European oligarchs” had used the threat of manmade earthquakes in an attempt to pressure the Japanese government to “hand over control of the Japanese financial system.” Japan had intially refused, only to relent after the July 17, 2007 Niigata earthquakes. I have not come across any refutation or rejoinder of Fulford’s claims/allegations by any Japanese government spokesperson. Fulford further says, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake had coincided with the BRIC meeting [Brazil-Russia-India-China]. Two days before it took place, a Taiwanese satellite had reportedly “detected a 50% drop in the amount of electric energy in the ionosphere above the earthquake zone.”

Working on the Weather series, and writing it has not been easy. Least of all, because as I explained to Anu Mohammed, who had called to tell me that he was eagerly reading each instalment, But Anu, I am not into weather and climate and such stuff. I’d only thought of writing about the earthquake in Haiti. But what I don’t understand is what on earth are our climate activists doing? The people on whom we rely to inform and educate us, to tell us what the score is, so that we can create well-informed demands in our struggle for social justice. I will skip what Anu replied. Shireen Huq, another friend said, I’m sure our climate activists have contacted you… No Shireen, I replied, no one has. I don’t expect anyone to, either.

I think they are too busy regurgitating what’s said at international conferences and seminars. But I want to be proven wrong. There’s too much at stake.

Published in New Age 29 March 2009

Tags: Copenhagen, Global governance, Global Warming, HAARP, Sichuan earthquake, Warfare, weather

Land and people. De-colonising the national imagination

By Rahnuma Ahmed

I see no reason not to be worried.

For we have, over the years, begun mimicking our erstwhile Pakistani rulers when it comes to explaining what went wrong in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

The `tribals’ want to secede. They want to breakup the nation. The loyalty of the `tribals’ has always been suspect, in 1947, they didn’t want to join Pakistan, they had wanted to be part of India. The Shanti Bahini was aided and abetted by anti-Bangladesh forces outside. It is an Indian conspiracy to destabilise the country. Agreeing to the `tribal’ demand for autonomy diminishes the sovereignty of the Bangladesh state.

And what had our Pakistani rulers said, both before, and during, 1971?

The Bengalis want to secede. It’s an Indian conspiracy. Our mortal enemy India, wants to break up Pakistan. These Bengalis began agitating from the word go, first they wanted their own language, 1949, 1952, and then, from 60s onwards, they began demanding regional autonomy. Those in the Mukti Bahini are India’s paid agents. The Bengali Muslims are Hindus, anyway. They listen to Rabindra sangeet, the women wear saris, they put teep on their forehead. Agreeing to the Bengali demand for autonomy will be a threat to the sovereignty of the state of Pakistan.

There are other reasons to be worried, too.

There are some similarities in the responses of both sets of rulers: a militaristic response. In the case of ekattur (our liberation war), this was accompanied by Lieutenant General Tikka Khan’s declaration, `I want the land, not its people.’ Tikka was the architect of Operation Searchlight, launched on the night of 25th March 1971. We will always remember him as the Butcher of Bengal. A military commander, deluded into thinking that his efforts would save the nation.

The Awami League government had initiated and eventually signed a peace treaty with the PCJSS (Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti) in 1997. A few weeks after the signing of the Treaty, Khaleda Zia, as leader of the opposition, had declared: it will lead to the setting up of a parallel government. Others said, it was signed to please the Indian government. Writ petitions have been filed since, challenging the validity of the Peace Treaty. During a recent court hearing, the petitioners listed some of the reasons: the former chief whip of Parliament had no authority to sign the Treaty. He was not authorised by the President. A treaty can only be signed between two governments, the CHT people are not only not a government (!), they are “controlled by an Indian intelligence agency.” They are not indigenous to the land, “they” are settlers etc., etc. (New Age, 17 March 2010).

As things stand, some may think that the Awami League, by virtue of having initiated and signed the Peace Treaty, want peace in the hills, while the BNP (and its bed-fellow, the Jamaat), doesn’t want peace in the hills. There may be some truth in it.

But there’s more truth in what Bhumitra Chakma, a Jumma academic who teaches politics at the university of Hull, says: the recent attacks, on 19 and 20 February 2010, carried out by Bengali settlers in Baghaichari, backed by the armed forces prove yet again that unless the Bangladesh state addresses the structural roots of violence, the “cycle of violence” will continue (Economic and Political Weekly, 20 March 2010).

“At the core of the problem,” writes Chakma, is the Bangladesh government’s “politically-motivated Bengali settlement policy” aimed at changing the “demographic character of the CHT, which inevitably leads to clashes over land.”

The Bengali settlement policy, in my mind, was diabolical. By selecting “landless” Bengalis, it seemed that the military government was concerned about the futures of those who are poor, it helped hide the fact that their landlessness and abject poverty made them more amenable to military direction and control; that, as far as the military leadership was concerned, they were civilian subalterns/canon fodder. The settlement policy whipped up populist sentiments in the rest of Bangladesh: `If someone from the CHT can settle in Rangpur, if he can buy land there, why can’t someone from Rangpur go and live and work in the CHT? It’s one country, after all.’

The settlement policy seeped into public discourse, it helped re-define Bengali nationalism on territorial lines—as all nationalism is, is bound to be—but the new sense of territory/ nationalism was not of the resisting kind, of the kind that grows out of an urge for self-defense (like 1971), but one which encroached.

I am persuaded that this newly developing form of nationalism was distinct to the nationalism of the Mujib era (1972-1975). When Sheikh Mujib had exhorted the indigenous peoples “to forget their ethnic identities,” to merge with “Bengali nationalism,” what lay behind his words was a heady cultural arrogance, deeply entwined with feelings of racial superiority.

Bengali nationalism as encroaching, in a territorial sense, one which could be implemented through the planned deployment of coercive power, came later. After 1975.

I am inclined to think that it was at this historical moment that we i.e., the Bengalis as a nation—began to sound like our erstwhile rulers.

The latter, according to us, were colonisers.

Colonial orientation to land, and its people

One of the greatest liberal philosophers John Locke, analysed English colonialism in America in terms of his theory of man and society. I present Locke’s arguments below, based on a discussion by Bhikhu Parekh (The Decolonization of Imagination, 1995).

Locke had argued that since the American Indians roamed freely over the land and did not enclose it, since they used it as one would use a common land, but without any property in it, it was not `their’ land. That the land was free, empty, vacant, wild. It could be taken over without their consent. The Indians of course knew which land was theirs and which was their neighbours, but this was not acceptable to Locke who only recognised the European sense of enclosure.

However, there were native Indians living by the coastline, who did enclose their land. English settlers were covetous of these lands, they wanted these lands for themselves as it would help them avoid the hard labour of clearing the land. They argued that the native Indian practice of letting the soil regenerate its fertility, to let the compost rot for three years, meant that the natives did not make “rational use” of it. Locke agreed with them. Even enclosed land, he said, if it lay without being gathered, was to be “looked on as Waste, and might be the Possession of any other.”

Some Indians, however, not only enclosed the land, they also cultivated it. But they were still considered guilty of wasting the land because they produced not even one-hundredth of what the English could produce. The trouble with Indians was, according to Locke, they had “very few desires,” they were “easily contented.” Since the English could exploit the land better, “they had a much better claim to the land.” It was the duty and the right of the English to replace the natives, and, as long as the principle of equality was adhered to, no native should starve, nor should she or he be denied their share of the earth’s proceeds, English colonisation was infinitely more preferable. It increased the inconveniences of life. It lowered prices. It created employment.

The culture of indigenous peoples the world over, as has been noted by many political theorists, is inextricable from their culture. Take away their land, and you take away their culture.

Land in the Chittagong Hill Tracts belongs to the paharis. It is their land. A refusal to understand this means opening us to the allegation of whether our nationalism is their colonisation.

Bhumitra Chakma speaks of the “cycle of violence.” It is a cycle that is embedded in larger cycles. Nationalism. Colonialism.

My Bengali sense of freedom surely cannot be paid for by the blood of others?

A genuine leap of the national imagination

George Manuel, Secwepemc chief from the interior of British Columbia (Canada), indigenous activist and political visionary whose work on behalf of indigenous peoples spans the globe, writes:

When we come to a new fork in an old road we continue to follow the route with which we are familiar, even though wholly different, even better avenues might open up before us. The failure to heed (the) plea for a new approach to ..[Bengali-pahari] relations is a failure of imagination. The greatest barrier to recognition of aboriginal rights does not lie with the courts, the law, or even the present administration. Such recognition necessitates the re-evaluation of assumptions, both about [Bangladesh] and its history and about [Jumma] people and our culture-…Real recognition of our presence and humanity would require a genuine reconsideration of so many people’s role in [Bangladeshi] society that it would amount to a genuine leap of imagination. (Cited by Paulette Regan, Canada, 20 January 2005, by making the replacements in square brackets I have taken a liberty for which I hope I’ll be forgiven).

Are Bengalis capable of making a genuine leap of imagination? However hard, however difficult, we must. For the sake of the nation. For the sake of ekattur.

First published in New Age 26th March 2010

Tags: aboriginal, Bangali, Bengali, CHT, conflict, Indigenous, Jumma, Military, Occupation, pahari, peace, peace treaty, politics, Rahnuma Ahmed, settlers, Violence