বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮

আজকের লিন্ক

মুক্তাঙ্গন-এ উপরোক্ত শিরোনামের নিয়মিত এই সিরিজটিতে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। কী ধরণের বিষয়বস্তুর উপর লিন্ক সুপারিশ করা যাবে তার কোনো নির্দিষ্ট নিয়ম, মানদণ্ড বা সময়কাল নেই। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই তাঁরা মন্তব্য আকারে উল্লেখ করতে পারেন এখানে।
ধন্যবাদ।

আজকের লিন্ক

এখানে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই সুপারিশ করুন এখানে। ধন্যবাদ।

৭ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (১১:৪৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    প্রয়াত কবি মণীন্দ্র গুপ্ত, শেষ হল বাংলা সাহিত্যের এক বিশিষ্ট অধ্যায়

    চলে গেলেন কবি মণীন্দ্র গুপ্ত। বুধবার রাত সাড়ে দশটা নাগাদ কলকাতার এক বেসসরকারি হাসপাতালে তিনি শেষ নিঃশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন। মৃত্যুকালে তাঁর বয়স হয়েছিল ৯৪ বছর। তিনি বার্ধক্যজনিত অসুখে ভুগছিলেন।

    মণীন্দ্র গুপ্তর জন্ম ১৯২৬ সালে অবিভক্ত বাংলার বরিশালের গৈলা গ্রামে। কৈশোর কাটিয়েছেন অসমের বরাক উপত্যকায় মামার বাড়িতে। একই সঙ্গে কবি, প্রাবন্ধিক, কথাসাহিত্যিক ও চিত্রশিল্পী মণীন্দ্রবাবু দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধে ব্রিটিশ ভারতীয় সেনাবাহিনীতে যোগ দেন।

    কবিতা লিখেছেন ১৯৪০-এর দশক থেকে। প্রথম কবিতার বই ‘নীল পাথরের আকাশ’ প্রকাশিত হয় অনেক পরে, ১৯৬৯ সালে। লিখতে এসেই পাঠকের নজর কাড়েন তিনি। বাংলা কবিতার তৎকালীন অভিমুখের সম্পূর্ণ বিপরীতেই অবস্থান করছিল তাঁর রচনা। এর পরে প্রকাশিত হয় ‘মৌপোকাদের গ্রাম’, ‘লাল স্কুলবাড়ি’, ‘ছত্রপলাশ চৈত্যে দিনশেষে’, ‘শরৎমেঘ ও কাশফুলের বন্ধু’ অত্যাদি কাব্যগ্রন্থ। ১৯৯১-এ বের হয় তাঁর আলোড়ন তোলা প্রবন্ধ গ্রন্থ ‘চাঁদের ওপিঠে’।

    ১৯৯১-এ প্রকাশিত হয় আত্মজীবনী ‘অক্ষয় মালবেরি’-র প্রথম খণ্ড। তিন খণ্ডে বিন্যস্ত এই লিখন বাংলা সাহিত্যের এক উল্লেখযোগ্য সংযোজন।

    সম্পাদনা করেছেন ‘পরমা’ পত্রিকা। ১৯৭০-এর দশকে কবি রঞ্জিত সিংহের সঙ্গে যৌথ ভাবে সম্পাদনা করেছেন ‘এক বছরের শ্রেষ্ঠ কবিতা’-র মতো সংকলন। হাজার বছরের বাংলা কবিতা ঘেঁটে সংকলন করেছেন তিন খণ্ডে ‘আবহমান বাংলা কবিতা’।

    ২০১০ সালে পেয়েছেন রবীন্দ্র পুরস্কার। ২০১১ সালে সাহিত্য আকাদেমি।

    আজীবন নিভৃতচারী, মঞ্চ-বিমুখ, এবং আপসহীন মণীন্দ্রবাবু রেখে গেলেন তাঁর স্ত্রী কবি দেবারতি মিত্রকে। রেখে গেলেন আবহমান বাংলার জন্য আশ্চর্য কিছু গ্রন্থ।

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ১০ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (১০:০১ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    How Myanmar forces burned, looted and killed in a remote village

    On Sept. 2, Buddhist villagers and Myanmar troops killed 10 Rohingya men in Myanmar’s restive Rakhine state. Reuters uncovered the massacre and has pieced together how it unfolded. During the reporting of this article, two Reuters journalists were arrested by Myanmar police.

    Bound together, the 10 Rohingya Muslim captives watched their Buddhist neighbors dig a shallow grave. Soon afterwards, on the morning of Sept. 2, all 10 lay dead. At least two were hacked to death by Buddhist villagers. The rest were shot by Myanmar troops, two of the gravediggers said.

    “One grave for 10 people,” said Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from Inn Din’s Rakhine Buddhist community who said he helped dig the pit and saw the killings. The soldiers shot each man two or three times, he said. “When they were being buried, some were still making noises. Others were already dead.”

    The killings in the coastal village of Inn Din marked another bloody episode in the ethnic violence sweeping northern Rakhine state, on Myanmar’s western fringe. Nearly 690,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled their villages and crossed the border into Bangladesh since August. None of Inn Din’s 6,000 Rohingya remained in the village as of October.

    The Rohingya accuse the army of arson, rapes and killings aimed at rubbing them out of existence in this mainly Buddhist nation of 53 million. The United Nations has said the army may have committed genocide; the United States has called the action ethnic cleansing. Myanmar says its “clearance operation” is a legitimate response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.

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    Rohingya trace their presence in Rakhine back centuries. But most Burmese consider them to be unwanted immigrants from Bangladesh; the army refers to the Rohingya as “Bengalis.” In recent years, sectarian tensions have risen and the government has confined more than 100,000 Rohingya in camps where they have limited access to food, medicine and education.

    Reuters has pieced together what happened in Inn Din in the days leading up to the killing of the 10 Rohingya – eight men and two high school students in their late teens.

    Until now, accounts of the violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state have been provided only by its victims. The Reuters reconstruction draws for the first time on interviews with Buddhist villagers who confessed to torching Rohingya homes, burying bodies and killing Muslims.

    This account also marks the first time soldiers and paramilitary police have been implicated by testimony from security personnel themselves. Members of the paramilitary police gave Reuters insider descriptions of the operation to drive out the Rohingya from Inn Din, confirming that the military played the lead role in the campaign.

    The slain men’s families, now sheltering in Bangladesh refugee camps, identified the victims through photographs shown to them by Reuters. The dead men were fishermen, shopkeepers, the two teenage students and an Islamic teacher.

    Three photographs, provided to Reuters by a Buddhist village elder, capture key moments in the massacre at Inn Din, from the Rohingya men’s detention by soldiers in the early evening of Sept. 1 to their execution shortly after 10 a.m. on Sept. 2. Two photos – one taken the first day, the other on the day of the killings – show the 10 captives lined up in a row, kneeling. The final photograph shows the men’s bloodied bodies piled in the shallow grave.

    The Reuters investigation of the Inn Din massacre was what prompted Myanmar police authorities to arrest two of the news agency’s reporters. The reporters, Burmese citizens Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were detained on Dec. 12 for allegedly obtaining confidential documents relating to Rakhine.

    Then, on Jan. 10, the military issued a statement that confirmed portions of what Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo and their colleagues were preparing to report, acknowledging that 10 Rohingya men were massacred in the village. It confirmed that Buddhist villagers attacked some of the men with swords and soldiers shot the others dead.

    The statement coincided with an application to the court by prosecutors to charge Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo under Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act, which dates back to the time of colonial British rule. The charges carry a maximum 14-year prison sentence.

    But the military’s version of events is contradicted in important respects by accounts given to Reuters by Rakhine Buddhist and Rohingya Muslim witnesses. The military said the 10 men belonged to a group of 200 “terrorists” that attacked security forces. Soldiers decided to kill the men, the army said, because intense fighting in the area made it impossible to transfer them to police custody. The army said it would take action against those involved.

    Buddhist villagers interviewed for this article reported no attack by a large number of insurgents on security forces in Inn Din. And Rohingya witnesses told Reuters that soldiers plucked the 10 from among hundreds of men, women and children who had sought safety on a nearby beach.

    Scores of interviews with Rakhine Buddhist villagers, soldiers, paramilitary police, Rohingya Muslims and local administrators further revealed:

    • The military and paramilitary police organized Buddhist residents of Inn Din and at least two other villages to torch Rohingya homes, more than a dozen Buddhist villagers said. Eleven Buddhist villagers said Buddhists committed acts of violence, including killings. The government and army have repeatedly blamed Rohingya insurgents for burning villages and homes.

    • An order to “clear” Inn Din’s Rohingya hamlets was passed down the command chain from the military, said three paramilitary police officers speaking on condition of anonymity and a fourth police officer at an intelligence unit in the regional capital Sittwe. Security forces wore civilian clothes to avoid detection during raids, one of the paramilitary police officers said.

    • Some members of the paramilitary police looted Rohingya property, including cows and motorcycles, in order to sell it, according to village administrator Maung Thein Chay and one of the paramilitary police officers.

    • Operations in Inn Din were led by the army’s 33rd Light Infantry Division, supported by the paramilitary 8th Security Police Battalion, according to four police officers, all of them members of the battalion.

    Michael G. Karnavas, a U.S. lawyer based in The Hague who has worked on cases at international criminal tribunals, said evidence that the military had organized Buddhist civilians to commit violence against Rohingya “would be the closest thing to a smoking gun in establishing not just intent, but even specific genocidal intent, since the attacks seem designed to destroy the Rohingya or at least a significant part of them.”

    Evidence of the execution of men in government custody also could be used to build a case of crimes against humanity against military commanders, Karnavas said, if it could be shown that it was part of a “widespread or systematic” campaign targeting the Rohingya population. Kevin Jon Heller, a University of London law professor who served as a legal associate for convicted war criminal and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, said an order to clear villages by military command was “unequivocally the crime against humanity of forcible transfer.”

    In December, the United States imposed sanctions on the army officer who had been in charge of Western Command troops in Rakhine, Major General Maung Maung Soe. So far, however, Myanmar has not faced international sanctions over the violence. Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has disappointed many former supporters in the West by not speaking out against the army’s actions. They had hoped the election of her National League for Democracy party in 2015 would bring democratic reform and an opening of the country. Instead, critics say, Suu Kyi is in thrall to the generals who freed her from house arrest in 2010.

    Asked about the evidence Reuters has uncovered about the massacre, government spokesman Zaw Htay said, “We are not denying the allegations about violations of human rights. And we are not giving blanket denials.” If there was “strong and reliable primary evidence” of abuses, the government would investigate, he said. “And then if we found the evidence is true and the violations are there, we will take the necessary action according to our existing law.”

    When told that paramilitary police officers had said they received orders to “clear” Inn Din’s Rohingya hamlets, he replied, “We have to verify. We have to ask the Ministry of Home Affairs and Myanmar police forces.” Asked about the allegations of looting by paramilitary police officers, he said the police would investigate.

    He expressed surprise when told that Buddhist villagers had confessed to burning Rohingya homes, then added, “We recognize that many, many different allegations are there, but we need to verify who did it. It is very difficult in the current situation.”

    Zaw Htay defended the military operation in Rakhine. “The international community needs to understand who did the first terrorist attacks. If that kind of terrorist attack took place in European countries, in the United States, in London, New York, Washington, what would the media say?”

    NEIGHBOR TURNS ON NEIGHBOR

    Inn Din lies between the Mayu mountain range and the Bay of Bengal, about 50 km (30 miles) north of Rakhine’s state capital Sittwe. The settlement is made up of a scattering of hamlets around a school, clinic and Buddhist monastery. Buddhist homes cluster in the northern part of the village. For many years there had been tensions between the Buddhists and their Muslim neighbors, who accounted for almost 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 people in the village. But the two communities had managed to co-exist, fishing the coastal waters and cultivating rice in the paddies.

    In October 2016, Rohingya militants attacked three police posts in northern Rakhine – the beginning of a new insurgency. After the attacks, Rohingya in Inn Din said many Buddhists stopped hiring them as farmhands and home help. The Buddhists said the Rohingya stopped showing up for work.

    On Aug. 25 last year, the rebels struck again, hitting 30 police posts and an army base. The closest attack was just 4 km to the north. In Inn Din, several hundred fearful Buddhists took refuge in the monastery in the center of the village, more than a dozen of their number said. Inn Din’s Buddhist night watchman San Thein, 36, said Buddhist villagers feared being “swallowed up” by their Muslim neighbors. A Buddhist elder said all Rohingya, “including children,” were part of the insurgency and therefore “terrorists.”

    On Aug. 27, about 80 troops from Myanmar’s 33rd Light Infantry Division arrived in Inn Din, nine Buddhist villagers said. Two paramilitary police officers and Soe Chay, the retired soldier, said the troops belonged to the 11th infantry regiment of this division. The army officer in charge told villagers they must cook for the soldiers and act as lookouts at night, Soe Chay said. The officer promised his troops would protect Buddhist villagers from their Rohingya neighbors. Five Buddhist villagers said the officer told them they could volunteer to join security operations. Young volunteers would need their parents’ permission to join the troops, however.

    The army found willing participants among Inn Din’s Buddhist “security group,” nine members of the organization and two other villagers said. This informal militia was formed after violence broke out in 2012 between Rakhine’s Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, sparked by reports of the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by three Muslim men. Myanmar media reported at the time that the three were sentenced to death by a district court.

    Inn Din’s security group built watch huts around the Buddhist part of the village, and its members took turns to stand guard. Its ranks included Buddhist firefighters, school teachers, students and unemployed young men. They were useful to the military because they knew the local geography, said Inn Din’s Buddhist administrator, Maung Thein Chay.

    Most of the group’s 80 to 100 men armed themselves with machetes and sticks. They also had a handful of guns, according to one member. Some wore green fatigue-style clothing they called “militia suits.”

    In the days that followed the 33rd Light Infantry’s arrival, soldiers, police and Buddhist villagers burned most of the homes of Inn Din’s Rohingya Muslims, a dozen Buddhist residents said.

    Two of the paramilitary police officers, both members of the 8th Security Police Battalion, said their battalion raided Rohingya hamlets with soldiers from the newly arrived 33rd Light Infantry. One of the police officers said he received verbal orders from his commander to “go and clear” areas where Rohingya lived, which he took to mean to burn them.

    The second police officer described taking part in several raids on villages north of Inn Din. The raids involved at least 20 soldiers and between five and seven police, he said. A military captain or major led the soldiers, while a police captain oversaw the police team. The purpose of the raids was to deter the Rohingya from returning.

    “If they have a place to live, if they have food to eat, they can carry out more attacks,” he said. “That’s why we burned their houses, mainly for security reasons.”

    Soldiers and paramilitary police wore civilian shirts and shorts to blend in with the villagers, according to the second police officer and Inn Din’s Buddhist administrator, Maung Thein Chay. If the media identified the involvement of security personnel, the police officer explained, “we would have very big problems.”

    A police spokesman, Colonel Myo Thu Soe, said he knew of no instances of security forces torching villages or wearing civilian clothing. Nor was there any order to “go and clear” or “set fire” to villages. “This is very much impossible,” he told Reuters. “If there are things like that, it should be reported officially, and it has to be investigated officially.”

    “As you’ve told me about these matters now, we will scrutinize and check back,” he added. “What I want to say for now is that as for the security forces, there are orders and instructions and step-by-step management, and they have to follow them. So, I don’t think these things happened.”

    The army did not respond to a request for comment.

    A medical assistant at the Inn Din village clinic, Aung Myat Tun, 20, said he took part in several raids. “Muslim houses were easy to burn because of the thatched roofs. You just light the edge of the roof,” he said. “The village elders put monks’ robes on the end of sticks to make the torches and soaked them with kerosene. We couldn’t bring phones. The police said they will shoot and kill us if they see any of us taking photos.”

    The night watchman San Thein, a leading member of the village security group, said troops first swept through the Muslim hamlets. Then, he said, the military sent in Buddhist villagers to burn the houses.

    “We got the kerosene for free from the village market after the kalars ran away,” he said, using a Burmese slur for people from South Asia.

    A Rakhine Buddhist youth said he thought he heard the sound of a child inside one Rohingya home that was burned. A second villager said he participated in burning a Rohingya home that was occupied.

    Soe Chay, the retired soldier who was to dig the grave for the 10 Rohingya men, said he participated in one killing. He told Reuters that troops discovered three Rohingya men and a woman hiding beside a haystack in Inn Din on Aug. 28. One of the men had a smartphone that could be used to take incriminating pictures.
    RETICENT: Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has disappointed many former supporters in the West by not speaking out against the army’s actions in Rakhine. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

    The soldiers told Soe Chay to “do whatever you want to them,” he said. They pointed out the man with the phone and told him to stand up. “I started hacking him with a sword, and a soldier shot him when he fell down.”

    Similar violence was playing out across a large part of northern Rakhine, dozens of Buddhist and Rohingya residents said.

    Data from the U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Programme shows scores of Rohingya villages in Rakhine state burned in an area stretching 110 km. New York-based Human Rights Watch says more than 350 villages were torched over the three months from Aug. 25, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.

    In the village of Laungdon, some 65 km north of Inn Din, Thar Nge, 38, said he was asked by police and local officials to join a Buddhist security group. “The army invited us to burn the kalar village at Hpaw Ti Kaung,” he said, adding that four villagers and nearly 20 soldiers and police were involved in the operation. “Police shot inside the village so all the villagers fled and then we set fire to it. Their village was burned because police believed the villagers supported Rohingya militants – that’s why they cleaned it with fire.”

    A Buddhist student from Ta Man Tha village, 15 km north of Laungdon, said he too participated in the burning of Rohingya homes. An army officer sought 30 volunteers to burn “kalar” villages, said the student. Nearly 50 volunteered and gathered fuel from motorbikes and from a market.

    “They separated us into several groups. We were not allowed to enter the village directly. We had to surround it and approach the village that way. The army would shoot gunfire ahead of us and then the army asked us to enter,” he said.

    After the Rohingya had fled Inn Din, Buddhist villagers took their property, including chickens and goats, Buddhist residents told Reuters. But the most valuable goods, mostly motorcycles and cattle, were collected by members of the 8th Security Police Battalion and sold, said the first police officer and Inn Din village administrator Maung Thein Chay. Maung Thein Chay said the commander of the 8th Battalion, Thant Zin Oo, struck a deal with Buddhist businessmen from other parts of Rakhine state and sold them cattle. The police officer said he had stolen four cows from Rohingya villagers, only for Thant Zin Oo to snatch them away.

    Reached by phone, Thant Zin Oo did not comment. Colonel Myo Thu Soe, the police spokesman, said the police would investigate the allegations of looting.

    By Sept. 1, several hundred Rohingya from Inn Din were sheltering at a makeshift camp on a nearby beach. They erected tarpaulin shelters to shield themselves from heavy rain.

    Among this group were the 10 Rohingya men who would be killed the next morning. Reuters has identified all of the 10 by speaking to witnesses among Inn Din’s Buddhist community and Rohingya relatives and witnesses tracked down in refugee camps in Bangladesh.

    Five of the men, Dil Mohammed, 35, Nur Mohammed, 29, Shoket Ullah, 35, Habizu, 40, and Shaker Ahmed, 45, were fishermen or fish sellers. The wealthiest of the group, Abul Hashim, 25, ran a store selling nets and machine parts to fishermen and farmers. Abdul Majid, a 45-year-old father of eight, ran a small shop selling areca nut wrapped in betel leaves, commonly chewed like tobacco. Abulu, 17, and Rashid Ahmed, 18, were high school students. Abdul Malik, 30, was an Islamic teacher.

    According to the statement released by the army on Jan. 10, security forces had gone to a coastal area where they “were attacked by about 200 Bengalis with sticks and swords.” The statement said that “as the security forces opened fire into the sky, the Bengalis dispersed and ran away. Ten of them were arrested.”

    Three Buddhist and more than a dozen Rohingya witnesses contradict this version of events. Their accounts differ from one another in some details. The Buddhists spoke of a confrontation between a small group of Rohingya men and some soldiers near the beach. But there is unanimity on a crucial point: None said the military had come under a large-scale attack in Inn Din.

    Government spokesman Zaw Htay referred Reuters to the army’s statement of Jan. 10 and declined to elaborate further. The army did not respond to a request for comment.

    The Rohingya witnesses, who were on or near the beach, said Islamic teacher Abdul Malik had gone back to his hamlet with his sons to collect food and bamboo for shelter. When he returned, a group of at least seven soldiers and armed Buddhist villagers were following him, these witnesses said. Abdul Malik walked towards the watching Rohingya Muslims unsteadily, with blood dripping from his head. Some witnesses said they had seen one of the armed men strike the back of Abdul Malik’s head with a knife.

    Then the military beckoned with their guns to the crowd of roughly 300 Rohingya to assemble in the paddies, these witnesses said. The soldiers and the Rohingya, hailing from different parts of Myanmar, spoke different languages. Educated villagers translated for their fellow Rohingya.

    “I could not hear much, but they pointed toward my husband and some other men to get up and come forward,” said Rehana Khatun, 22, the wife of Nur Mohammed, one of the 10 who were later slain. “We heard they wanted the men for a meeting. The military asked the rest of us to return to the beach.”

    Soldiers held and questioned the 10 men in a building at Inn Din’s school for a night, the military said. Rashid Ahmed and Abulu had studied there alongside Rakhine Buddhist students until the attacks by Rohingya rebels in October 2016. Schools were shut temporarily, disrupting the pair’s final year.

    “I just remember him sitting there and studying, and it was always amazing to me because I am not educated,” said Rashid Ahmed’s father, farmer Abdu Shakur, 50. “I would look at him reading. He would be the first one in the family to be educated.”

    A photograph, taken on the evening the men were detained, shows the two Rohingya students and the eight older men kneeling on a path beside the village clinic, most of them shirtless. They were stripped when first detained, a dozen Rohingya witnesses said. It isn’t clear why. That evening, Buddhist villagers said, the men were “treated” to a last meal of beef. They were provided with fresh clothing.

    On Sept. 2, the men were taken to scrubland north of the village, near a graveyard for Buddhist residents, six Buddhist villagers said. The spot is backed by a hill crested with trees. There, on their knees, the 10 were photographed again and questioned by security personnel about the disappearance of a local Buddhist farmer named Maung Ni, according to a Rakhine elder who said he witnessed the interrogation.

    Reuters was not able to establish what happened to Maung Ni. According to Buddhist neighbors, the farmer went missing after leaving home early on Aug. 25 to tend his cattle. Several Rakhine Buddhist and Rohingya villagers told Reuters they believed he had been killed, but they knew of no evidence connecting any of the 10 men to his disappearance. The army said in its Jan. 10 statement that “Bengali terrorists” had killed Maung Ni, but did not identify the perpetrators.

    Two of the men pictured behind the Rohingya prisoners in the photograph taken on the morning of Sept. 2 belong to the 8th Security Police Battalion. Reuters confirmed the identities of the two men from their Facebook pages and by visiting them in person.

    One of the two officers, Aung Min, a police recruit from Yangon, stands directly behind the captives. He looks at the camera as he holds a weapon. The other officer, police Captain Moe Yan Naing, is the figure on the top right. He walks with his rifle over his shoulder.

    The day after the two Reuters reporters were arrested in December, Myanmar’s government also announced that Moe Yan Naing had been arrested and was being investigated under the 1923 Official Secrets Act.

    Aung Min, who is not facing legal action, declined to speak to Reuters.

    Three Buddhist youths said they watched from a hut as the 10 Rohingya captives were led up a hill by soldiers towards the site of their deaths.

    One of the gravediggers, retired soldier Soe Chay, said Maung Ni’s sons were invited by the army officer in charge of the squad to strike the first blows.

    The first son beheaded the Islamic teacher, Abdul Malik, according to Soe Chay. The second son hacked another of the men in the neck.

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    “After the brothers sliced them both with swords, the squad fired with guns. Two to three shots to one person,” said Soe Chay. A second gravedigger, who declined to be identified, confirmed that soldiers had shot some of the men.

    In its Jan. 10 statement, the military said the two brothers and a third villager had “cut the Bengali terrorists” with swords and then, in the chaos, four members of the security forces had shot the captives. “Action will be taken against the villagers who participated in the case and the members of security forces who broke the Rules of Engagement under the law,” the statement said. It didn’t spell out those rules.

    Tun Aye, one of the sons of Maung Ni, has been detained on murder charges, his lawyer said on Jan. 13. Contacted by Reuters on Feb. 8, the lawyer declined to comment further. Reuters was unable to reach the other brother.

    In October, Inn Din locals pointed two Reuters reporters towards an area of brush behind the hill where they said the killings took place. The reporters discovered a newly cut trail leading to soft, recently disturbed earth littered with bones. Some of the bones were entangled with scraps of clothing and string that appeared to match the cord that is seen binding the captives’ wrists in the photographs. The immediate area was marked by the smell of death.

    Reuters showed photographs of the site to three forensic experts: Homer Venters, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights; Derrick Pounder, a pathologist who has consulted for Amnesty International and the United Nations; and Luis Fondebrider, president of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, who investigated the graves of those killed under Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s and 1980s. All observed human remains, including the thoracic part of a spinal column, ribs, scapula, femur and tibia. Pounder said he couldn’t rule out the presence of animal bones as well.

    The Rakhine Buddhist elder provided Reuters reporters with a photograph which shows the aftermath of the execution. In it, the 10 Rohingya men are wearing the same clothing as in the previous photo and are tied to each other with the same yellow cord, piled into a small hole in the earth, blood pooling around them. Abdul Malik, the Islamic teacher, appears to have been beheaded. Abulu, the student, has a gaping wound in his neck. Both injuries appear consistent with Soe Chay’s account.

    Fondebrider reviewed this picture. He said injuries visible on two of the bodies were consistent with “the action of a machete or something sharp that was applied on the throat.”

    Some family members did not know for sure that the men had been killed until Reuters returned to their shelters in Bangladesh in January.

    “I can’t explain what I feel inside. My husband is dead,” said Rehana Khatun, wife of Nur Mohammed. “My husband is gone forever. I don’t want anything else, but I want justice for his death.”

    In Inn Din, the Buddhist elder explained why he chose to share evidence of the killings with Reuters. “I want to be transparent on this case. I don’t want it to happen like that in future.”

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ১২ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (৪:৫৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Pakistan Has Lost Its Moral Leader

    Asma Jahangir wasn’t a politician, but she was the country’s most formidable force for good.

    On Sunday, Pakistan’s greatest champion of human rights, democracy, and equality—Asma Jahangir—passed away in Lahore, at age 66, from a heart attack. She leaves behind her husband, three children, and a country that became fairer and more decent because of her work. Jahangir challenged military dictators; lambasted Islamist extremist groups; protected women’s rights; helped to found and lead the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; and put herself at great risk by defending her country’s besieged minorities. She accomplished all this with her fearless voice and a dedication to the hard, practical work of politics and the law.

    Jahangir came from a wealthy family in Punjab, and was only 6 when Pakistan faced its first coup, in 1958. Her father, a civil servant, decided to oppose the new military regime; he was arrested, for the first time, three years later, and his life was continually in danger. Jahangir’s response was precisely not to be cowed into believing that activism in a country like Pakistan is best undertaken hesitantly and intermittently; instead she was inspired to become an activist and human rights champion herself. By her late teens, she was demonstrating against the same dictator who had imprisoned her father and in favor of women’s rights. When she was 18, after her father had been arrested again, she even filed a petition to the Lahore High Court seeking his release. It was unsuccessful, but after she appealed to the Supreme Court, the martial law that had led to her father’s arrest was declared illegal.

    The next decade, the 1970s, was Pakistan’s most turbulent, and by the time it was over, the country had lost half its population; East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh and the remaining western “wing” was ruled over by another brutal dictator, Zia-ul-Haq. Jahangir again chose to act, this time by studying law, and in 1980, she opened the first legal-aid center in Pakistan. (All the lawyers were women.) Over the next decade, she went to prison for contesting Zia’s misogynistic laws, and gave voice and legal support to victims of sexual assault. Zia’s Hudood ordinances, which he pushed through in his Islamicization drive, left women vulnerable to punishment for adultery (if, say, they were raped) and other sexual behavior. Jahangir bravely opposed them and took up a key case which helped ensure that adult women did not require a guardian’s approval to marry.

    It’s easy, when going through Jahangir’s career, to feel like you are reading or typing an endless list of causes, achievements, and struggles. But the breadth of the battles she engaged in and causes she upheld are integral to understanding what was important to her and why she was so important to Pakistan. Like many heroic lawyers the world over, she often grounded her activism in the earthy realities of procedure; she fought for clients, trying to assure that they would have access to a fair trial, and she attempted to enunciate both why Pakistan would be better off if everyone had recourse to the law and why many of the laws should be more equitable. In 2007, she was placed under house arrest for her role in the so-called “lawyer’s movement,” which helped end Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship. Jahangir viewed her legal career as something which could help individual people, and could lead to large-scale societal change. She eventually became president of the country’s Supreme Court Bar Association.

    A friend related to me that when he and someone else were facing tear gas and the prospect of arrest during that same 2007 crisis, their thoughts immediately turned to getting Jahangir’s help if anything bad happened to them, or they were arrested. It was also Jahangir whom abused women were known to mention to their husbands, as if to say, “You keep this up, and I will go to Asma.” If she couldn’t help everyone, she at least gave the less fortunate—too often women—hope that there was someone out there standing up for them. That this same woman was willing to stand up to dictators and Islamist radicals—in a country where Christians and Muslim minorities face severe threats—is part of what made her so formidable.

    While her death is a reminder of the ways Pakistan is not yet the country she fought for, her attachment to the place was profound. She refused to leave the country when she was in danger, and yet she also never let her commitment to Pakistan blind her to its flaws; the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, she explained, would continue its focus on outrages in the country, even though turning the spotlight on other countries, like India, would have eased the nationalist pressure and cries of treason that she faced.

    Her death occasioned a number of tributes from across the Pakistani political scene, proving once again that spineless, shameless politicians will always try to appropriate names or causes that they would never have stood up for in the heat of political battle. (The death of Martin Luther King Jr. had the same effect on the American political scene.) But don’t let the universal acclaim today mislead: Jahangir championed causes and people that few others would. And when they did, they often ended up like the former governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, who was assassinated seven years ago for speaking out against the country’s blasphemy law. Jahangir was not blind to the flaws of the civilian politicians who today have celebrated her, but she understood that civilian supremacy—rather than military rule—was a necessary condition for Pakistan to flourish. “However flawed democracy here is,” she once told the New Yorker, “it is still the only answer.”

    Jahangir’s leadership was unique, but she was not fighting alone. It was impossible to meet anyone in the Pakistani activist or journalist community who did not have a story about her supporting their cause, pushing for their release from prison, or helping out a friend or relative. One journalist recounted to me the story of Jahangir reaching out after seeing her television report in order to offer aid to the person who had been profiled; it was, she told me, “one of the only moments where I felt I’d made a difference.” Many Pakistanis—especially liberal or secular ones—often speak of politics with a practiced, amusing cynicism. That was never the case when anyone brought up Jahangir; she was spoken of reverently, with real awe. She must have had to make compromises in her life—as everyone does, especially if you want to get things done in a country like Pakistan—but she appeared as unsullied by hypocrisy as humanly possible.

    And yet, if Jahangir occasionally seemed to have a saintly glow, she was also biting and funny in public—just see her Twitter feed—and would get down in the muck with her adversaries. Heroes sometimes take the guise of apparitions, or seem unwilling to get their hands too dirty. She was the opposite. There was nothing she wouldn’t push for. The amount of good work and courage she showed should make us all wince a little bit, because it is an uncomfortable reminder that we could all be doing a little more to make our countries better and fairer. How fortunate we are to live among people who will never stop fighting—at least until they are lost to us, much too soon.

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ১৭ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (১১:৩৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    India, Iran and a divided Middle East

    Awareness of Iran’s domestic politics, its involvement in multiple conflicts of the Middle East, must inform Delhi’s engagement

    The first presidential visit from Iran since 2003 comes at a complicated moment in Tehran. For the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Iran’s regional influence has never been as expansive as it is today. Yet, there is a huge push back against Tehran from some of its Arab neighbours, Israel and the Trump Administration.

    More problematic is the increasing internal and economic and political volatility as the Islamic Republic celebrates its 40th anniversary. The Iranian currency rial is rapidly losing its value, hitting a record low of 48,000 against the US dollar earlier this week. High inflation and large-scale unemployment, as well as widespread corruption triggered protests in Iran’s cities around the new year. Some of the slogans in the protests — “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I give my life to Iran” — questioned the costs of Tehran’s expansive internationalism at a time of internal economic pain.

    There are also demands for social liberalisation, with the women protesting the law on the compulsory wearing of the veil in public. While conservatives in Iran trashed these protests, the office of President Hassan Rouhani released the reports of a survey that showed nearly 50 per cent of the population opposes the mandatory hijab rule.

    The faultines within the ruling elite are open and the contestation between different factions is continuous. But supreme leader Ali Khamenei has the last word and towers over the elected presidency and all other institutions. Forty years after the founding of the Islamic republic in 1979, Iran’s internal divisions are getting sharper. President Rouhani has, in fact, called for a referendum to heal domestic bleeding. Rouhani did not say what the referendum will be about, but a group of liberal reformers quickly backed his suggestion by calling for a popular vote on the legitimacy of the current political order.

    While the focus of the engagement between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rouhani will necessarily be on bilateral issues relating to trade, investment and connectivity, Iran’s domestic politics and its involvement in the multiple conflicts in the Middle East must fully inform Delhi’s engagement with Tehran.

    Rouhani’s visit to Hyderabad this week was in part about showcasing Iran’s deep historical connections with India. It also provided an occasion for Rouhani to deliver a sombre message on overcoming sectarian conflict within Islam and promoting harmony between different religious communities. This message is directed not just to the audiences in India but also those in the Middle East.

    That brings us to Delhi’s biggest current challenge in dealing with Tehran — the sharpening conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But Delhi’s public discourse on relations with Iran has for long been framed it in terms of Tehran’s relations with Washington. That tells only one part of the story, but masks others.

    During the early decades of the Cold War, India stayed away from the Shah of Iran, a secular modernising ruler, because he was too close to the United States. After all, the Shah put Iran into the US’s regional Cold War alliances like the Central Treaty Organisation that also included Pakistan and Turkey. Today, one of the main problem is the unending enmity between Iran and the US.

    Delhi was relieved when the US, under President Barack Obama, and Iran in 2015 concluded a nuclear deal and opened up some space for international commercial cooperation with Tehran. President Donald Trump and his Republican party’s hostility towards the deal has created fresh complications for India.

    Although Delhi is looking for ways to sidestep the potential expansion of the US sanctions regime, for example, with a reported rupee-rial arrangement, India’s problems with Iran’s regional rivalries is not going to disappear. While the US-Iran nuclear deal was welcomed in Delhi, it was viewed with great concern in some Arab capitals, especially Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Amman and Cairo.

    Many of them accused President Barack Obama of selling out its long-standing friends and partners in pursuit of a deal with Iran. Even more important, Saudi Arabia has taken matters into its own hands to confront Iran’s growing influence across the region. The conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Lebanon and Yemen have provided a fertile ground for the playing out of the rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh.

    It is not for India to judge who is right or wrong, but to recognise the reality of regional conflicts in the Middle East and limit their impact on India’s ability to secure its goals in the region. India would certainly want to see a serious effort to reconcile the current tensions between Iran and its Arab neighbours, where Delhi’s stakes have risen manifold in recent decades.

    Realism tells us that Delhi does not have the power to mitigate the tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But Delhi can certainly encourage the emerging trends for political and social moderation in the Middle East. India has positively viewed the recent calls from the political leadership in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE for reclaiming Islam from violent extremists. India should also welcome Rouhani’s emphasis on ending sectarian conflicts in the region and his praise of India as a “living museum” of peaceful religious co-existence.

    While Rouhani may not have the command of Iran’s politics, the moderate forces represented by him are critical for the pursuit of three important Indian objectives in the Middle East. One is the promotion of mutual political accommodation within the region; another is pressing for an end to the export of destabilising ideologies from the region; and finally the construction of a coalition against violent religious extremism that has inflicted so much suffering in the Middle East and the Subcontinent.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ২২ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (১:১৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Struggles of the sandbar people

    Hasan Ali is one of 2.4 million people who live on impermanent ‘chars’ or sandbars on the Brahmaputra – without basic necessities, frequently shifting home, their lives dictated by the flux of the mighty river

    Hasan Ali’s life is as fragile as the char on which he lives. Unlike many char -dwellers, who shift to the riverbank or beyond when the river Brahmaputra erodes their land, Ali moved to a char from Panikhaiti village along the bank – making a reverse journey into uncertainty.

    Panikhaiti is a village in Mahtoli panchayat of Assam’s Kamrup district.

    “When floods and erosion washed away our house three years ago, leaving me without a paisa, I came to this char , where I could at least erect a roof over my head to survive,” Ali says.

    Ali had three bigha (seven bigha is equal to one hectare) of agricultural land when they settled on the char , but the entire plot has been lost to erosion over the last three years. He has no idea where he will shift next, when another bout of displacement occurs due to constant erosion of the char .

    Chars – the sandbars or small sandy islands in the braided river – are formed by the mighty Brahmaputra all along its 728-kilometres east-west stretch in Assam. They account for about 5 per cent of the total area of the state, and are spread across 14 districts and 55 blocks.

    Chars are an integral part of the fluvial process of the river and its tributaries, states the Assam Human Development Report , 2014. Suspended particles and the bed load combine during floods to create these almond-shaped formations. Their rich alluvial soil is ideal for crops such as mustard, sugarcane, jute, peanuts, sesame seeds, black gram, potatoes and other vegetables. But the height of a char is never greater than the level of the highest flood, keeping them at perpetual risk of destruction.

    There are 2,251 char villages in the Brahmaputra valley. They sustain a population of more than 24 lakhs, over 90 per cent of them migrant Muslim families from erstwhile East Bengal, according to the Socio-Economic Survey Report (2002-03; the most recent population data available) published by the Directorate of Char Areas Development, government of Assam.

    The colonial British government, in an attempt to extract revenues from agricultural lands, encouraged poor farmers from East Bengal to migrate and cultivate these chars . The generations that have grown up here speak a Bengali dialect as well as Assamese, and are listed as speakers of Assamese in the population census.

    Ali’s char has three different names – Panikhaiti (the eastern part, where he lives), Lakhichar (the middle) and Morishakandi (the western part). Each refers to the original villages from which the inhabitants had been displaced.

    It takes around 25 minutes to reach the char on a bhutbhuti (a mechanised country boat) from the riverbank. The river between the char and the bank is about three kilometres wide today – it was only a small stream of the Brahmaputra separated the char and Panikhaiti village from the riverbank when it was formed nearly 10 years ago. The char , roughly two kilometres wide and two kilometres long, presently houses over 800 displaced families, residents estimate.

    We find only the elderly, mothers and children at home. While young girls here help in household work and are married off by 14 or 15, most of the young boys migrate for work. They go to Guwahati and other cities in the North East, or even as far afield as Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai to work as construction workers, security guards, industrial labourers, or hotel staff. All of them narrate a similar story of displacement and subsequent hardship. Ali’s elder son has also migrated to Guwahati to work as a daily wage-earner after completing his higher secondary exams.

    The older men usually do not migrate because they are not considered employable by contractors; they work on their own plots of land or as agriculture labourers on other farms. Ali, now around 60, has stayed back too. He survives on fishing, earning barely Rs. 1,500 a month. His son sends another Rs. 1,500 home to support the family. Ali has seven children; four of his daughters were married when they were minors; the fifth is around 13 and likely to soon be married.

    When we visit, he has some time to talk because he is not going to the weekly market across the river, which is also a meeting place for char neighbours. “We depend on this market for our daily essentials. The fare to and from is Rs. 20, and I don’t have the money,” says Ali. In the absence of state-run ferry services, privately-run mechanised boats are the only means of conveyance here.

    A Directorate of Char Areas implements specific development programmes on the chars , working alongside the district administrations. Panikhaiti char has two government-run upper primary schools. Anyone who wants to study further must bear the daily cost of crossing the river by boat – a major cause of school dropouts.

    Panikhaiti also has a health sub-centre – without a roof. With vegetation growing in and around the building, it appears to be abandoned. An auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) visits the charoccasionally, but she prefers to work from someone’s home rather than this health centre, the people here say. For a health emergency, they have to cross the river and walk another three kilometres to the nearest primary health centre in Sontali.

    “After the flood havoc in September [2016], no health officials visited us. The administration distributed only two kilos of cattle-feed in the name of flood relief,” Ali says. The walls, made of jute-sticks, bear the marks of the flood levels that have periodically submerged their houses.

    Open defecation is the norm and diarrhoea is common in every household, particularly after a flood. For drinking water, about 10 families depend on a single tubewell, which they maintain at their own cost.

    “Our char is divided equally into two legislative constituencies – Boko on the south bank and Chenga on the north bank. Due to some official anomalies, however, people who belong to Chenga constituency have been deprived of below poverty line (BPL) rations for a long time,” says Ali, who is registered with the Boko constituency but does not get any benefits, apart from BPL rice.

    Electricity is a distant dream and no family has a solar lamp. Instead, they rely on kerosene, which costs Rs. 35 a litre – Ali’s family needs 5-7 litres every month. Even a radio seems to be a luxury here.

    “Life would have been better if a char existed for at least 20 years. But the life of a char is hardly 10 years. By the time we manage to earn something and prepare for a relatively settled life, erosion begins again, forcing us to shift,” Ali says.

    “This is our story, the story of every char -dweller. My story, however, does not end here…” And Ali begins to speak about his second son, 18, a Class 12 science student at a college in Barpeta district of lower Assam. He is now preparing for a medical entrance exam. Ali could not provide for his elder son’s higher education. But, with the help of his teachers, his second son got 83 per cent in the secondary examination two years ago, despite all the hardship.

    “He is determined to get enrolled in a medical college,” says Ali. “His teachers say it would cost at least Rs. 30 lakh to complete the course. I do not know how he will complete it even if he does clear the entrance exam.”

    But Ali’s eyes tell us that he still nurtures the hope that life will take a new turn some day.

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (৮:১২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    A language movement veteran goes unrecognised even after 66 years

    Language veterans are yet to get state recognition even after 66 years of language movement. This is unfortunate told language veteran Khan Ziaul Hoque of Magura.

    Expressing regret Ziaul Hoque told, most of language veterans of the country have already been expired, Those who are still alive are burdened with oldness . But language veterans in the country are yet to get state recognition.

    Ziaul Hoque is the son of late Abul Kashem Khan of village Vina in Magura. In 1952 Ziaul Hoque was elected general secretary of Jessore M.M college students cabinate. He organised language movement in the college. He was then in the politics of Muslim Chhatra League. But as Muslim League leaders did not like his activity over language movement, he resigned from Muslim Chhatra League after police fire on procession of language movement in Dhaka city on February 21.

    Ziaul Hoque returned to his own town Magura and organized a meeting protesting police fire on February 21. He along with Nasirul Islam Abu Mian , Chandu Mian and Jalil Khan arranged a meeting at Shegun Bagicha area of Magura town on February 22. When they tried to go towards Chourongi square of Magura town with a procession police charged baton and dispersed the procession. Police arrested Ziaul Hoque and Chandu Mian from the procession.

    When contacted Khan Ziaul Hoque told Bangladesh became independent through a liberation war in 1971. The spirit of language movement encouraged the nation to fight for independence in 1971. But language veterans are still ignored.

    Expressing regret Khan Ziaul Hoque said, “I have crossed 90 years and I am waiting for death. I have nothing to want as a language veteran during my lifetime, but I desire to be buried with a state honour.”

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১৮ (৬:৫১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Bollywood actor Sridevi passes away

    Sridevi passed away on Saturday night after a cardiac arrest, confirmed her brother-in-law Sanjay Kapoor. She was 54. The superstar of Bollywood was reportedly with her husband Boney Kapoor and daughter Khushi at the time of death.

    Bollywood actor Sridevi passed away on Saturday night after a cardiac arrest, confirmed her brother-in-law Sanjay Kapoor. She was 54. “Yes, it is true that Sridevi passed away. I just landed here, I was in Dubai and now I am flying back to Dubai. It happened roughly around 11.00-11.30. I don’t know more details yet,” Sanjay confirmed the news to indianexpress.com. Sridevi was reportedly with her husband Boney Kapoor and daughter Khushi at the time of death. They were with the entire Kapoor family in UAE to attend the wedding ceremony of Mohit Marwah.

    Born as Shree Amma Yanger Ayyapan, Sridevi worked in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films before entering Hindi films. She started acting in the late 1960s, but her performance in Malayalam film Poombata (1971) won her the state award for best child artist.

    Sridevi made her Bollywood debut as a child artist in Julie (1975). Her first adult role was at the age of 13 in Tamil film Moondru Mudichu (1976). Sridevi went on to become one of the biggest female stars India ever had. The government of India awarded her Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian honour, in 2013.

    Her most remarkable films include Sadma, Chandni, Himmatwala, ChaalBaaz, Mr India, Nagina, Mawali, Tohfa and Gumrah among others.

    After working in Judaai, she took a 15-year break from movies only to be back to winning hearts in her second innings with English Vinglish in 2012. She was last seen in 2017 film MOM.

    Sridevi’s most memorable onscreen pairing was with her real-life brother-in-law Anil Kapoor, while her most successful films were produced by husband Boney Kapoor.

    Sridevi passing has left a gaping hole in Indian cinema. The actor’s last film appearance will be in Shah Rukh Khan starrer Zero that releases in December this year.

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to Twitter to share his condolences. He tweeted, “Saddened by the untimely demise of noted actor Sridevi. She was a veteran of the film industry, whose long career included diverse roles and memorable performances. My thoughts are with her family and admirers in this hour of grief. May her soul rest in peace.”

    Film celebrities have been pouring in their condolences.

    Sridevi is survived by Boney Kapoor and two daughters – Janhvi and Khushi. She was Boney’s second wife. Her elder daughter Janhvi is set to make her Bollywood debut this year with Karan Johar’s directorial Dhadak.

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