The photograph above of a man and a woman found dead at the collapsed ruins of Rana Plaza, the eight-story building in Savar, Bangladesh was shot by Dhaka-based photographer and workers’ rights activist Taslima Akhter. The photograph stands, by itself, for both the tragedy that took the lives of nearly 400 garments workers and for the heroism that’ll always go under-reported about the many ways many lost their lives trying to protects their friends, brothers and sisters from the concrete crush that overwhelmed them all the morning of April 24th.

I have no doubt the man cradling the woman in the photograph died of suffocation after struggling hard to keep himself and his protected charge alive. He’s a young man, you can see; she’s a young woman. His beard is neatly trimmed; her blouse sports a neatly embroidered white flower.  Her gold bracelet suggests she was married. Perhaps the man and the woman were married to each other, loved each other. Perhaps they were friends. No doubt they were co-workers at one of the several factories that churned out inexpensive clothes for international high street retailers. No doubt they embraced each other in direct opposition to the clouded piles of enveloping detritus that took both their lives.

I have no doubt no news report will shed more light on Savar than the illumination this one photograph delivers.

I have no real need to see more photographs of the initial and unfurled, unconcealing horror in Savar. This photograph, in both its present state and its exploded high-resolution form, will do for the duration. It comes to me, it comes to you courtesy of Ms. Akhter herself. You can find her heart-rending work on the Savar building collapse, here, published only yesterday at the excellent group blog Alal o Dolal and on her website.

Photo: © Taslima Akhter

Two days ago an 8-story building collapsed in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh. That building housed garment factories; at least 300 people were crushed to death, many must have suffocated after surviving the initial burial under concrete. More victims are sure to be dragged out dead as the minutes and hours tick by and the calendar page turns to tomorrow and tomorrow.

The people of Dhaka have mounted an admirable rescue operation with the help of the military and even though its standing as a model of cooperation, its urgency is nothing short of astonishing there’s only so much air trapped in dusty pockets between stacks of nearly pulverized concrete.

And those of us who know nothing about that life, that kind of work, can only wonder, argue and look at images. Those images won’t let out any more than a tiny charge of the story. Those of us who understand Bengali will forget soon enough the shrieks, cries and howls of what sounds like many survivors who wish they were dead already. They plead that the concrete slabs on their chest hurts too much. And they know there’s not much time left for a rescue operation to work out well. For us, far away from Savar, there’s time yet to read and comment on things far away.

Most garment industry workers work and churn without even modestly decent compensation; capitalism devised thus, there, serves a starvation diet for its workers. No wonder then that thousands of workers turned out into the streets and set ablaze at least two garments factories.

Conditions are so dire that workers’ rights are in fact human rights in Bangladesh. And, though I suppose, technically, a country could do without both-worker rights as, and, human rights–that’s no way to be a growing nation in the 21st century. That’s no way to attract investment, if investment means–and it seems to mean so in Bangladesh–that something gets put up without much care and little inspection and investigation on the matter of structural and public integrity.

And so, we’ll likely have more buildings collapse soon. This, if the government and its opposition doesn’t figure out a way to work together in the service of the citizens of the country they dare to claim they serve.

But–this “but” requires that I move beyond this moment’s head-shaking skepticism– reports tell of two babies born to women buried in the rubble. One child died. The other is still alive. Let’s hope that child grows up in a better Bangladesh than the country that served as the context of his birth.

Update: The boy born underneath the rubble in Bangladesh is alive and safe. So is his 27-year-old mother. Here’s their story.

This is the third in a 3-part series on Shahbagh, its history, its politics and the normative views it captures (and fails to capture).

What recommends the Shahbagh movement for any praise whatsoever? Mainly that it registers in form the demands for justice for those killed during the Liberation War against Pakistan in `1971; justice for the murdered and raped. Even if, like me, you think the Shahbagh movement really calls for a re-examination of justice for crimes committed and seemingly gone long ago, this turn toward the publicity of, for, justice is a good turn; maybe, the only good turn in the gathering storm to come later this year. Its consequences remain to be examined. So here we are.

Proponents have tagged Shahbagh as something as a return to Zion moment for secularism and nationalism (of the proper kind, the kind that won Independence in 1971) in Bangladesh.  That Shahbagh is a peoples’ movement, a demand that the people, united in some non-trivial sense, finally be heard. Indeed, not only is Shahbagh tagged as all this, it is seen as a particular manifestation of the deferred desires and political interests for secularism and what I’ll call “liberal’ nationalism in Bangladesh.  That it is seen as a manifestation of all this is precisely the problem: Shahbagh is at best a promise of a range of desirable values; it is a not a manifestation of those values.

I propose that Bangladeshi nationalism is best defined as a liberal nationalism because it was constructed as a foil against colonial and later neo-imperial tyranny. It functioned and grew through the call to unity under the aegis of freedom and liberty for all within the borders of the demanded Bengali nation-state. (That the same Bengali nation state has turned minority populations into the neglected–and often persecuted– Other is only one of the problems that confronts those who try to reconcile Bengali, Bangladeshi values with Bangladeshi political action.)  Bangladeshi nationalism was devised as a rather egalitarian liberal enterprise that sought independence from Pakistan and devised a range of schemes to construct a community to that end. The content of that enterprise broadly mirrored the American Revolution: a people were being governed without their outright consent; then-East Bengal was a majority population that was denied majority leadership of Pakistan in the 1970 election.  The moral victory of that enterprise lay precisely in the fact that it was a broadly liberal concern that allowed different groups to fit their interests into the overarching cause of liberation from West Bengal.

The Shahbagh crowd and their mantra  now demands the dismemberment of Jamaat’s voice from the vox populi. Now, Shahbagh points out that the alleged rajakars (collaborators with the Pakistan military in 1971) eventually became the leaders of Jamaat in Bangladesh and, moreover, that, Jamaat initially led the counter-independence strategy against Bengali nationalism, as I’ve defined. That all accepted, at most, justice is served only when the alleged collaborators are brought to justice and their crimes read off and assessed against given procedures by which verdicts can be announced and then sentences given.  Shahbagh’s demands go well past that: it demands a wholesale destruction of Jamaat as a political vehicle for the political interests of millions of people. Like it or not  (and I don’t like it; I am a secularist, agnostic liberal who nevertheless is deeply disturbed by Shahbagh’s demands) those millions of people do not deserve to be silenced. To that end, Shahbagh’s demands are not morally legitimate.

More immediately, Shahbagh demands the death of any and all convicted as rajakars (again, collaborators). This is tantamount to the demand that the court deliver a sentence along with the verdict for the crimes in question. That is the sign and deliverance, sealed, of tyranny. For it assumes that one’s punishment for a crime simply is tantamount to being guilty of that crime. To be deemed an adulterer is then (automatically) to be stoned to death. And, here, we might do well to think whether legal doctrine has superseded Biblical narratives of justice. And there’s the simple argument that Bangladeshi nationalism was cut from a liberal cloth and liberalism is not consistent with the death penalty. No matter how agog we are that tens of thousands demand the penalty in one ringing, clear voice.

And, anyway, we know that the International Criminal Tribunal is, was, beset with such malfeasance that the whole process is tainted with the fishy smell of parliamentary politics in Bangladesh.

To the view that Shahbagh embodies “people power” and that, as these things must be, is an unalloyed good, let’s not forget that lynchmobs in small towns and large cities are also the manifestation of people power. The “peoples” swaying moves in unison doesn’t imply that the body politic is moving in the right direction.

The best that Shahbagh can do, the promise that it’s strength in numbers is a value, is to demand that justice be done for the raped and killed. And more than 40 years out that can only mean a truth and reconciliation commission. Let the story of the past be told and let judgment be made. Let’s not run justice and politics together to get death and only death.

I wonder: Is it the case that the youth of Bangladesh want a country where you just kill off your political enemies, no matter the judgment dealt by– yes, yes, corrupt– state institutions? For that’s what, finally, their demands sound like. . At best, if you give the different youth(s) groups their due, it seems what they want will wind up with something like a perpetual “1971″ memorial. Now, that’s not a bad thing but it seems odd that a future oriented movement should be so enraptured by the past. At worst this is a public mob bent on death.

(Photo credit: Zahidul Salim, Copyright: Demotix)

My previous attempt to get ahold of Shahbagh, its recent history and its politics has left many questions answered, many issues untouched.

In this present attempt to gather some understanding of the currents in Shahbagh, I’ll address the political resonances of the protests begun February 5^th, 2013, on the heels of Abdul Qader Mollah life imprisonment sentence. I’ll also parse the ways the Awami League (AL) has used Shahbagh and the ways we can separate out Shahbagh from the AL.

As before, the Shahbagh movement got its quick start after Abdul Qader Mollah a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party, convicted of crimes against humanity, was spared the death penalty and was, instead, sentenced to life imprisonment. Thousands of Bangladesh’s “youths”, led initially by a small group of bloggers who’d been actively pushing death for the ’71 rajakars demanded the death penalty for Qader Mollah despite the High Court’s judgment. This, because they viewed the pronouncement of life in prison as only a signal that a deal had been made between Jamaat and the Awami League; alternatively, that the sentence was a signal that when the opposition rightist BNP coalition returned to power, Qader Mollah would be freed.  The number of protestors demanding death for Qader Mollah grew into the high hundreds of thousands and, sure enough, the government responded to the peoples’ demands, urgently, swayed by the peoples’ democratic voice.

Proponents claim the Shahbagh movement is a “peoples’ movement”, that it is a political and moral awakening. Now, no doubt there’s much to recommend it: any movement that helps people throw off the apathy that blankets their lives will have done good, so it will be deemed good.  But this is only a formal good; the substantial value of that good resides in what is done with that form of public awakening, with the form of protest in which Shahbagh is now cloaked. For now, in substance, Shahbagh seems to track the Awami Leagues political platform and that, without substantial changes to its demands, amounts to nothing but a call for blood.

Consider: the Awami League leadership promised, on their electoral platform, that they would finally bring the 1971 rajakars (collaborators) to justice. It was well understood that justice meant the death penalty and that sort of token justice would be colored in political hues. So, the populist call that rajakars be brought to justice and that justice is nothing but death for rajakars fits well into the Awami Leagues political calculus for the coming election. To have delivered on a promise, and that in spades, and now to be aggressively responsive to populist demands for deferred justice can only look good for a party’s attempt to win its first ever second term in office.

Further, that the opposition BNP will not be able to put up a challenger governing coalition without a strong turnout in Jamaat’s favor in the coming election can’t fail to play into the ruling party’s moves against Jamaat’s leadership.  Knowing this and apparently seeing the writing on the wall, the BNP has endorsed the Shahbagh movement as a strong display of national voice, while denouncing the ruling Awami Leagues moves against Jamaat and its leadership. It is clear that the BNP does not want to be strongly associated with the “collaborator narrative” whatever its strong anchored history of political collaboration with Jamaat. That’d be political poison.

So, the politics of Shahbagh strongly endorse a positive response to those demands by the Awami League. Indeed, the AL moved to push new rules that speak to those demands and moved to retroactively render insufficiently just “inadequate sentences” open to government appeal. It’s not hard to think that the AL has all but appropriated the Shahbagh Youth movement. The news and spin on the disappearance of a defense witness suggests the AL’s hand. Indeed, Amnesty International has called on the regime to make transparent its moves to find this particular “disappeared” man. So, far, to no avail.  However, the fact that this disappeared man’s disappearance runs with Shahbagh’s demands does not offer enough reason for Shahbagh’s silence.

All this means that whatever the positive case for the Shahbagh movement, and, again, there is much to that, (on that, later) one cannot discount entirely the political factors underlying and perhaps underwriting the popular moves on the ground. Certainly Jamaat and its student organization Shibir thinks Shahbagh mirrors the governments move to throttle out whatever passes for the political mainstream Islamist voice. And that view has led to unnecessary bloodshed, on both sides.

Consider also that Jamaat mobilized it’s base in cities all around the country; armed with homemade weapons and explosives they got out on the street to protest the governments moves against their (party) leaders. The police and government sanctioned paramilitary intervened brutally and in the melee, over the course of the last weeks hundreds and more people have died.  A young pro-Shahbagh activist-blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was found murdered, his throat slit a scarf wrapped around the fatal wound. Some sources reported that he was found dismembered.  Many think Jamaat and Shibir activists were behind the crime. Haider’s murder has only further inflamed the Shahbagh movement.

Tit for tat moves against killings on both sides will not end up well. This movement, burgeoning according to some reports near the high hundreds of thousands, could well spin out into massive factional violence. A year out before the next election, both leading parties can’t want that. In fact, the BNP’s weak embrace of Shahbagh for fear of contagion and taint strongly suggests that though it is glad to blame the AL for all its troubles, it too is wary of prolonged bouts of nation-wide civil strife.

Finally, the popular view that Shahbagh is helping—forcing, really—the Awami League turn more secular has been undercut by recent news that the AL put together a standing committee to monitor and move against objectionable comments made about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad on social networking sites. This move cannot jibe with Shahbagh’s call for secularism and indeed, falls within the broad scope of Evangelical Islam that the AL has supported from time to time.  Shahbagh needs to separate itself out from the AL. Its first moves on those terms must be to denounce the Awami League’s reprehensibly repressive moves against Jamaat. It must show itself capable of making its demands on judicial treatment of the rajakars without insisting that all of Jamaat are rajakars.

International forums have been broadly silent on Shahbagh as has been the United States, though it has been watching the politics of Shahbagh unfold. The United States’ silence on Shahbagh may have more to do with the fact that it favors an Awami League government, in league with India’s Congress Party. That the United States still has the death penalty in its books and that as a federal matter it has not abolished capital punishment save the occasions and circumstances where the United States Supreme Court has deemed capital punishment cruel and unusual under the 8^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Nevertheless, I submit that the U.S. still has the political and moral weight to argue against Shahbagh’s blood cry. For Gregg v. Georgia showed that the death penalty does not come up against cruel and unusual punishment as long as the verdict of the case at issue and capital sentence are ascertained on different terms. In other words, a guilty verdict need not automatically trigger a sentence death. Of course Shahbagh’s major demand (and perhaps the only one) is that a rajakars’s guilt be allayed only by his death. This division points out not only the ways in which the U.S. can intercede even though it supports capital punishment but also the ways in which Shahbagh has gone wrong.

You don’t need to be a rajakar sympathizer nor a Rightist BNP’er—much less Jamaat—to think that the contents behind Shahbagh’s protests are deeply troubling, though their form might well be admirable. All you need to be is a liberal who tries as consistently as she can to maintain whole sum values that entail the liberty tinged commitments that make up the main meat of freedom and equality under the law. Hold those values tight and you must find that Shahbagh to have started wayward and have gone that way, however much we glow over and sing praises to its form.

The third and final part of this story will be published soon. It will deal with the moral implications of Shahbagh’s demands and will endeavor to put forth some ways that Shahbagh’s energy could be used for more useful, better, ends.

A picture of an Afghan soldier; A picture of U.S Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel after touching down in Afghanistan; a picture of Afghan president Hamid Karzai; a picture of members of the Taliban (as represented in their own promotional video); a picture of Secretary of Defense Hagel in Afghanistan before his meeting with President Karzai; a picture of Bagram prisone; a picture of a corridor of jail cells there; a picture of a prisoner there; a picture of former Afghan Ambassador to the U.S Said Jawad on the PBS Newshour; a picture Secretary Hagel with U.S. Commander in Afghanistan General  Joseph Dunford.

President Hamid Karzai’s comments on national television have set off a quiet firestorm in the United States. Whether Karzai’s choice assertion that the U.S. wants Afghanistan to stay weak so it can monopolize its standing military and, therefore, political might  were employed to shore up his fantastical legacy as a liberator, a founding father of a new Afghanistan, or whether to challenge the perception that he is a the poodle to the incumbent U.S. President, nevertheless they have inflamed a sense of unnecessary harm (at the wrong time) and bitterness within American diplomatic circles. Certainly they’ve inflamed biting rhetoric in the mainstream press from many seasoned foreign policy experts who are usually known for their tact and politic persuasion.  More worryingly, for the U.S and for Karzai, the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan General Joseph Dunford has warned U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan that Karzai’s comments might trigger a new round of increased violence.  For, it has become clear that U.S. soldiers face enemy fire from both the Taliban and, often enough, from within the ranks of the so-called Afghan Army.

It seems Hamid Karzai’s comments haven’t helped along his credibility with the United States, the one power that over others bank-rolls him and has helped him keep his shaky and troubled grip on power.  Nevertheless, we’d all do well to think whether things on the ground there, in Afghanistan, will change. We’d do well to consider whether Karzai has any incentives to change track from his regular moves to spite the U.S. and then play nice-nice. Moreover, as the U.S. starts to draw down next year, in 2014, would it not make sense to involve Afghanistan’s neighbors into the discussions and propositions about Afghanistan’s future? So that, finally, yes, Afghanistan’s sovereignty remains forevermore in check.

How ironic.

A picture of Indian Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde; a picture of murderer and rapist Ram Singh; a picture of a guileful, fatal bus ride, caught on CCTV.

Ram Singh, age 34, the leader of the gang of six that raped and murdered a 23 -year-old physiotherapist, was found dead yesterday, hanging in his jail cell in Delhi. Now, criticized for the way in which the original case was handled and the national public outcry that surrounded it, the Indian Home Minister has promised an investigation into the case and the manner and means of Ram Singh’s apparent suicide.  The other five accused, one of them, Singh’s brother, have not yet been duly prosecuted.

Is this the story of India? And if so, is there anything anyone can learn from it? Do we assume that a young woman’s brutal rape and murder and a government’s lagging efforts to prosecute that and other acts of sexual assault and murder can constitute a teachable moment? Or do we condemn both this act and the societal conventions that allow these acts, and similar ones to go unnoticed, unreported, unseen?

India may be a lot of things: Bangalore’s rise; shantytowns next to Bollywood; billionaires and new art markets. But it is also the grounded anchor of the story of a deeply divided, deeply sexist, classist, unequal society slowly coming to terms with–and sometimes failing to make common cause with– the cosmopolitan conventions that we hope now make up conditions of a humane contemporary world.

Shahbagh: The Set Up (Part 1 in a 3 Part Series about the Shahbagh Movement, its Politics and its Moral Content)

Since this past February 5, now for the past month and more, the “youth” of Bangladesh have ebbed and flowed in the hundreds of thousands from the neighborhood of Shahbagh, in Dhaka. An occupying protests begun by bloggers, the Shahbagh Movement quickly consolidated around the populist demand that rajakars (local intelligence for, and collaborators with, the Pakistan army’s genocidal turn against Bengalis in 1971) aligned with the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami must face the death penalty for their crimes against humanity as adjudicated by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT).

These protest, tagged the Shahbagh Movement, have rocked Bangladesh’s politics and there might well be more rocked trouble to come.  Some say this is Bangladesh’s account of a Tahrir-like Arab Spring. Some, that the movement is Dhaka’s own occupy movement: a popular call to open wide the public discussion about contemporary politics and welcome turn to revisit history.  Or that’s the way the story goes.

In this three-part analysis I will argue that that view is not entirely right. That Shahbagh, though a populist movement (though not quite a popular one) backed by the young and the middle class — with a strong political voice has much to commend it — with its political associations and stances against democratic — though hardly liberal — political parties and its support of the government crackdown on right-leaning protesters make for a turn that should issue concern from many quarters.

To see this, it may help to turn to a conventional account of  “1971” history in Bangladesh and trace a path from then and there to now: In 1971 and into early 1972, in order to disempower a burgeoning separationist-nationalist movement and to choke off and kill out liberationist political moves in then-East Pakistan, the Pakistan military with the help of Bengali collaborators (rajakars) went on a genocidal killing spree that many say mounted to three million casualties, with millions of women raped, and the country and her cities purged of a generation of intellectuals, engineers and organizers.

The first post-liberation Awami League government promised to prosecute alleged rajakars but a series of compromises both pragmatic and ameliorative and the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the so-called founding father of Bangladesh, and the following rise of the Rightist BNP spared the alleged rajakars their likely impending death by hanging. In time, some of those collaborators became leaders of the lslamist Jamaat-e-Islami and of the more moderate BNP.  (It is a hush-hush secret, but it’s not unlikely that some rajakars have also taken up with the AL, but more on that later.)

That genocidal turn from within marks off  “1971” as something beyond a simple and clean liberation, unmooring from her imperial, colonial yolk. Bengalis aligned against other Bengalis for different and differing political ends and the trauma of those differing goals seems to have partitioned Bangladesh into those who see prosecuting the rajakars as a political goal that supersedes all other political goals; they see it as the foundation of a moral doctrine of Bangladeshi-ness. Others view the prosecution of rajakars as a desirable goal that must consist in the proper course of justice due them.

Indeed, liberals are now split on what Shahbagh means: Some, mostly those in Bangladesh and those who lived in the midst of and, or, were weaned on the stories of 1971 see the calls for capital punishment as just deserts. After all the rajakars were not friends of the liberal lot; instead, they persecuted the liberals and sought to devastate the land of the Bengalis via the destruction of liberalism. Moreover, Jamaat isn’t friendly to the liberal cause either. Theirs is a view of some global umma of Islam that has more political ends than the sociological ones that have lone sustained Islam and every other flourishing, religion.

Those who seem to have some distance from the goings on there believe that a coherent liberalism requires a hard stance against capital punishment, and that, moreover, it commits one to the demand that there be a fair trial procedure that ensures that one judged guilty is done so through the transparency required of a burden so heavy that it requires a state to put one of its own citizens to death, a burden so heavy that the proper adjudication of it, leads a man to his own end. After all, though rajakars are guilty, they are not guilty by association with the term. Moreover they deserve to have their rights observed, as would any individual who wishes to promote the democratic and liberal values that sustain the constitution of Bangladesh. Finally, those liberals insist that not all rajakars are Jamaat, nor are all Jamaatis rajakars.

Now, over the decades, the nationalist—let’s say liberationist–Awami League has laid down its political fortunes on finally prosecuting the rajakars. In 2010 and later, in 2012, it moved against the rajakars and sought to bring an end to the narrative of justice deferred.  However, so far, it has prosecuted the alleged rajakars against widespread condemnation of the fairness of the trials brought against them under the auspices of the International Criminal Tribunal. It has not gone unnoticed that by aligning the so-called rajakars with the leadership of Jamaat (for good reasons and bad) the AL’s prosecution also has the politically salutary effect of seemingly destroying Jamaat as a credible political party able to convey its preferences through domestic and international politics.

Finally, at the beginning of the year, the tribunal sentenced three individuals for high crime against humanity, two to death, one to life imprisonment.  That life sentence of one Abdul Qader Mollah, a leader of the Islamist and in 1971 anti-liberation, pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami has been widely viewed as the trigger for the Shahbagh Movement.

The conventional and anecdotal account suggests Qader Mollah committed high crimes against the Bengali people. But barring the 40-year evidentiary record to support beyond reasonable doubt the charges and the strengths and weaknesses of such a record, the evidence of the proceedings of his trial itself suggests that his defense was not given the opportunity to support his side of the story. The street-level view of the case however holds that the government colluded to let Qader Mollah go and that there’s some deal in the works to allow Mollah back in, some deal to let Jamaat rise ascendant again.

So, the Shahbagh movement ostensibly started out and grew as a protest against that narrative of collusion and corruption, the story that now, for once, the government will be held, must be held, to its own platforms and its own commitments. That (most galling) the sentence handed out was not sufficiently serious for the conviction on record. That punishment for crimes against humanity is consistent only with capital punishment. However, quite beside the morally disgusting insistence on the death penalty as the sole purveyor of justice, Shahbagh is sidling up with the ruling party’s political incentives. The government wants to destroy Jamaat and its leadership and it would welcome a movement that holds it own feet to the fire. The government wants to look responsive to its people, and so far, this is precisely what seems to have happened, and it seems there is no end to this happening.

More recently, as the government publicly endorsed the Shahbagh Movement’s aims Shahbagh seemed ready to be complicit in the Awami League government’s move to shut down its opposition. It has endorsed banning Jamaat and, at least on this issue (there are many others), it seems hard to determine the line that separates the government from the movement.

Consider finally that though Jamaat activists came out on the streets on the heels of the AL’s moves against them and promoted strikes and turned violent, the government with its monopoly on the military cracked down on the Right in such a way that many liberals have taken to equate the police interventions to extrajudicial killings, Indeed, many protesters have died, on both sides; civilians and police. The Movement has yet to condemn the government’s brutal crackdown on the Right. This is a two-turn problem: whether the government is in the right or no, to abolish Jamaat, it isn’t allowed to roll over the Right, knocking out their communications, their voice.  By not condemning the government’s moves the Shahbagh Movement has aligned itself with the governments turns against its opposition. No doubt, then, that if the AL government comes back into power, they will have done so with the Youth movement pushing and pulling right behind.

Part two of this series to be published early next week will examine the political incentives for the Awami Leagues moves against Jamaat and whether or not Shahbagh’s alignment withholds its claim to (moral) independence

Part three of this series to be published on the latter end of next week will seek to examine the moral dimensions of the protests and whether liberals can consistently stand with Shahbagh while Shahbagh crows about capital punishment.  I will also offer some considerations on the implications of Shahbagh’s demands and some views of the things that might, better, come off them.

(Photo credit: bdnews24.com)

President Hamid Karzai will go down in Afghan history as a weird sort – of politician, of man, who dresses with flagrant panache, favoring a mix of traditional outfits and English tailored clothes and who lives a strangely, elegantly mixed up pro-Western and half-traditional life, guarded, in Kabul.

In his politics, too, he favors a mix of traditional tribal politics and tailored Western media-baiting demagoguery. That this mix is hard to come by is an understatement. In his person, in the political stances he’s taken, Karzai, viewed by his person and priorities, is downright baffling. He is patrician through and through but seems approachable; he is admired by General Stanley McChrystal, disfavored by General David Petraeus and has been pushed and pulled by scandals and blood-soaked news over two American administrations and yet he stands, though as one who looks like he’s surprised he’s made it so far. Karzai is a hard one to beat. The thing is, though, he’ll need to make it so that for the sake of Afghanistan’s secure future someone else will have to outdo him as president, even if Karzai himself cannot, will not be beat.

Known for the last decade and more as the president whose family runs Afghanistan, President Karzai is running out of room to maneuver both Afghanistan’s future and his family’s fortunes: he will soon be term limited in office and will have to leave his role (rather more, truly his “office”) in April 2014 for another man to take up.  What will happen to Afghanistan then? What will happen in Afghanistan then?

And that’s the thing. More than his troubling moves to require the Afghan military stand on its own capacities and refrain from seeking help from NATO air strikes and more than the future and stability of the Afghan military on which depends the tone if not the conduct of U.S. foreign and humanitarian policy, everything turns on the results of the 2014 elections. Everything turns on who stands victorious as the President of Afghanistan come 2014 and whether his final standing is challenged by his opposition in that electoral battle.

Everything turns on the determination that in whatever minimalist way Afghanistan is, in fact, a democracy. That, whatever corruption that plagues it, Afghanistan politics is in fact determined by political interests that transparently seek a route to declare their wants and desires through individuals who make themselves available to seek high office. Everything turns on the determination that Afghanistan, stable and some what not entirely dangerous for the world at large is not, was not so only through the sheer willpower of one Hamid Karzai.

This is the Madisonian turn. This Madisonian view of Afghan democracy would go far to assure international donors and funders that the country is not a lost cause, that, though the writing on the wall says different, it is not a failed state.

And the fact that international, Afghan and U.S. based media has reported hardly a peep about the 2014 elections is a bit worrisome. No, it’s a lot worrisome. (The last piece the New York Times published ran in October 2012.) For 2014 will determine who gets to steer Afghanistan, corruption-ridden, resource rich, to some not-too desolate future.  He, the next President of Afghanistan, will get to run the tables on the “War on Terror” game in Central and South Asia. All eyes will be on him—and it will most assuredly be a “him—and how he works with and maneuvers past Pakistan’s increasingly chaotic politics. And he’ll have to be better at all that than Karzai has shown himself to be. He will have to be a stronger personality than weird o’ Hamid Karzai. This, even though Karzai has no doubt done a tremendous job to hold onto his office—charges of high corruption notwithstanding, of course.

Finally, that man will have to show that local politics in Afghanistan can run by means other than vacillating corruption, that clientelism is not the only way to get things done there. That donor funding for welfare increasing projects can be implemented without greasing the wheel and that billions of dollars poured into Afghanistan stay in Afghanistan and work to the benefit of the Afghan people. Success in demonstrating all of this will be a demonstration of the outlines of Afghanistan’s future. Failure will mean nothing short of panic in all the circles that might soon get staffed by vultures.

To achieve success, for his successor as much as for himself, President Karzai will have to think about the ways he can clear the path for the next generation of leaders in Afghanistan. One of the heart-breaking aspects of Karzai’s presidency, of course, has been that no such generation was on hand. Or, if it was on hand, hidden away somewhere it’s membership wasn’t available for public comment.  Karzai will need to speak to the future, for the future clearly, transparently, without mendacity. Karzai will have to hold to his pledge that the elections will turn on April 2014 and he will have to be seen as not dominating the results of the process therein.

The last thing Afghanistan needs is a Russia-styled “democratic” turnover in office: Putin for Medvedev, Medvedev for Putin and Putin, once again. It would, indeed, be a shame if it turned out that, no, Afghanistan needs to have precisely that kind of turnover in the highest office in the land.

(Photo credit: Getty)

Just yesterday at least another 80 people were massacred in the Syrian village of Qubair by Assad regime-supported militia.  Women and babies were executed at a low angle, crouching; another turn at Houla. Upon threat of even more brutality the bodies of the victims were buried before U.N and other international outfits could lay witness to the day’s horror.

And what is the international response to all that? Well, ostensibly, a lot of diplomacy. Though when it comes to action, no country with near-monopoly firepower has any appetite for any muscular intervention against the Assad regime. Indeed, as Kofi Annan, the diplomat attending to this crisis–badly, at that– said today standing pat next to Hilary Clinton, his 6-point peace plan is not being implemented.  Or it’s just not plain working. (Is not the plan too feeble now to be implemented?)

Now, as a matter of realpolitik, no bargain between the Assad regime and the international community will move without Russia’s  say-so. Are we to await the Kremlin’s move to entice the Assad regime to step away from power? Is it not too late for that? And what of Russia’s credibility on human rights?

These images are photographs of the Syrian activist shot real-time video footage of the then ongoing attacks in rebel-held Houla. These images are a partial record of what must have been the stunting confusion, deafening noise, and blinding dust that marked that day. And even if removed from the widely-circulated devastating images that make something inhuman out of their beholders, they still only hint at the brutality with which the attacks on that village were conducted.  The massacre, only a week ago, of men, women and children, slaughtered, and just as easily summarily executed, one blast of a gunshot to the head, beggars the imaginations of all of us who are now comfortable at home or at work, necessarily away from that scene.

But stop there and take on the facts behind these images: the violence allegedly committed by militiamen from neighboring Shia Alawite villages is no less brutal and no less categorically genocidal than what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s. No less terrible than the violence village to village and between villager against villager in Rwanda.  (Do numbers matter, here?) But how much more terrifying violence are western nations willing to countenance until something is done for the people of Syria who seek to exercise their political voice or until we all speak in hushed sighs that we are witnessing a new turn marked earlier by events in Bosnia and Rwanda?

We in the United States may well have nothing to do with how things turn out in Syria. Certainly the Obama administration is loathe to intervene, and it looks like there are months yet to go until the murderous Assad regime is taken down and more thousands are likely to die along that chilling timeline.  But what about the opposition? As western countries and partner countries in the wider Middle East get their strategy in order–if they get their strategy in order–to oust Assad, will the people of Syria have a standing government to fall back to?

Bashar-al Assad’s all too deadly caricature as an ass.  The Syrian Army lying in wait. Night-vision shots of night-time attacks. A bombed out car. An anti-Qaeda revolutionary insurgent who insists that al Qaeda’s presence in Syria, the popular narrative nowadays, is more tall-tale than truth; that the attacks roiling the country have been mainly perpetrated by the Syrian regime to discredit the opposition. A leader of the Syrian Free Army begging the United States to intervene against the  Syrian regime’s brutal crack down that began in the easier days of the Arab Spring.

Even as Egypt is slowly figuring out its path forward with a new President– uncharismatic, anti-revolutionary and doggedly ensconced in older ways of thinking he might be– in Syria more than 9000 people are dead. And more are dying every day.

The Syrian people can be forgiven for thinking the international community of democratic, civilized nations has sat out this fight.

Even while American news outlets drone on about the November presidential elections at least 4.7 million people in South Sudan are at risk everyday of severe food shortages.  That’s half the population of the newest country in the world, having wrested independence from Sudan. In the Nuba Mountains alone, more than 1million people are starving.

Suffering in the aftermath of famine has turned critical as Sudan has imposed restrictions on food delivery into South Sudan by NGOs and international agencies. Moreover, border skirmishes, tribal clashes–really, armed military interventions from Sudan into sovereign South Sudan in which hundreds of people have been killed– and a choke hold on  South Sudan’s legitimate mineral and oil deposits has forced the severely deprived country into the maw of crippling destitution.

Now, since the so-called civilized countries in the world are standing pat while the tragedy in South Sudan is unfolding, it may be morally problematic to write stories that no one will read, to which nearly no one will respond–after all, advertising dollars seldom flow towards stories about humanitarian crises. The moral issues cuts because replaying and re-arranging stories of suffering may well turn on a certain stripe of voyeuristic viewership and witnessing. Certainly, making images that respond to crises is morally problematic: pictures make suffering seem beautiful since pictures are often taken and arranged through the impulse toward the beautiful. (Perhaps directly staring down a tragedy through beautiful pictures can’t get at the truth; maybe artists need to elide the truth in favor of some necessary distance.)

Still, it is precisely those stories the responses to which are morally problematic, that should– must–demand our attention.

How do you tell the story of the latest notice of violence in Syria, the devastating twinned car bombs in Damascus that killed at least 55 people, of Syria’s politics and the illegitimate government’s repression against its own people without admitting that one way or another the terrifying status quo–8000 people, or many more, dead– is both repugnant and attractive?

Deep division on what to do to arrest hostilities in Syria prevents our governments, now watching by the sidelines, from making a move  they might regret.  (Is flooding Damascus and Homs with arms for the rebels the right move? Do we give Kofi Annan’s turn at diplomacy another try?)  Though the outcomes on the ground are repugnant to all the parties at hand so is getting mired in an intervention that might spread epidemiologically across the entire Middle East. No doubt, on those terms, stasis is attractive so that no party is seen getting his hands too deep and too dirty.

In the crossfire between opposing means and ends: the people of Syria

Bangladesh was Clinton’s gateway into India, a figurative and literal go-between in the political jockeying that has pit India against China. The trip, starting in China and culminating in New Delhi, has been prominently political. It has all been a signaling game for straight-forward political exchange of goods and good will for broader U.S. support of the status quo.

The Secretary’s visits have mapped the Obama administration’s political calculus to first hold its strategic competitive friend China close while holding closer allies who are more important for holding Pakistan (and therefore, Afghanistan) at bay while the administration figures out a way to leave Afghanistan with both dignity and certain assurances. The rough gambit has been that things are going well between the U.S., China, Bangladesh and India and there’s no reason to mess with a good thing.  The U.S will hold steady during tumultuous times that have shaken the Asian economy down to its roots; in exchange China, India and Bangladesh, each suffering slower growth, are being cajoled to stay set on the status quo.

This gambit is carries the most risk in South Asia.

Secretary Clinton’s political signaling game extends the political calculus of President Obama’s recent night-cloaked visit to Afghanistan. No doubt Iran’s leaders have noticed as has Pakistan’s military.  Pakistan, an ally on rather more unfriendly terms with the U.S. since 2011 or so, notably, was not offered the public relations bonanza that a Clinton visit confers to any locale, any political leader. Indeed, far from an olive branch, Pakistan was first reminded that Osama bin Laden had successfully found refuge in Abottabad, one of Pakistan’s most militarily guarded, strategically outfitted cities when on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing, President Obama signed a deal with President Hamid Karzai to throttle down the war in Afghanistan. Before ending her trip, on Indian soil, Secretary Clinton reminded her audience in every city and town in every country in South Asia that the alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks is even now squired in Pakistan.

Consider, then, the political significance of Secretary Clinton’s visit to Dhaka. There can be little doubt that the U.S. wants to frame Bangladesh as an exemplary friendly, moderate Muslim country that values the rule of law on liberal grounds and conducts its affairs in accordance with the political and sociological aspirations of human rights. This, while both Pakistan and Afghanistan seemingly go off the rails into Islamist, ethically fundamentalist territory. The visit signaled that the ruling Awami League had better shape up on those grounds. This, even if the moves are insincere. This, even if the ruling party is taking an authoritarian turn away from doctrines that support greater political freedom.

Clinton’s later visit to Kolkata en route to New Delhi and her discussions with Mamata Banerjee, the right-leaning chief minister of West Bengal featured conversation about foreign direct investment and partnerships of an undefined and unremarkable sort.  Bangladesh’s water rights disputes with India and the border clashes that have defined Bangladesh’s relations with its neighbor to the West were hardly discussed. And then, onto a chat in New Delhi with the leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party; quite likely about precisely the same bland discussion about cooperation, without defining what cooperation entails.

The signal that both President Obama and Secretary Clinton are eager to send is that everything geo-political and strategic that the administration has worked up for South Asia remains steadfast just six months away from the November presidential elections and that an Obama re-election would ensure the status quo that broadly favors each one of those countries: steady as she goes!  (In no small way candidate Romney strengthened President Obama’s signal by earlier offering some strange views on Asia and the U.S. government’s political and strategic calculus there.) More importantly the various visits massage a signal that each one of the visited countries, chosen as friends, would do well to refrain from making moves that might scare off investors in their markets and lead to a global sell-off; all other shores are turbulent; the final view: that no move be made that might hurt the pocket books of voters back home in the United States.

Nevertheless, quite apart from weighty talk about specific political and economic issues, the arc of Secretary Clinton’s visit bent toward the aspirations of justice and equality in China, and more so in Bangladesh. Clinton’s defense of human rights and women’s’ empowerment in places where such concepts are little more than cheap talk, was a helpful turn.  A joint statement signed by Clinton and Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni affirmed:

“Leveraging the values of tolerance, respect for human rights, inclusion and resilience of Bangladesh society, including a robust civil society, we intend our broader collaboration to be anchored in a strong bilateral development partnership focused on joint development priorities, including food security, maternal and child health, family planning, climate change, strengthening democracy, youth and women’s empowerment, among others.”

That was the good bit of the story. Secretary Clinton ‘s visits show the purely accommodationist nature of the U.S. alliances with ruling parties in Bangladesh and India. Clinton’s visit with the opposition BNP leader Begum Khaleda suggests that the government’s political disappearances cannot and should not  (must not is perhaps too strong an admonition, here) continue.  Secretary Clinton’s visit with Begum Zia suggested that if the need should arise the Obama administration could just as well work with the opposition BNP.  As expected, Clinton affirmed her support for her friend and founder of Grameen Bank, Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

Could it be that the Secretary’s visit with India’s ruling Congress’ opposition implies that the BJP might be an equally agreeable partners if and when Congress gets too complacent in the way it delivers goods and opportunities to India’s growing middle-class and, therefore, through globalizations supply chain and demand functions, America’s middle-class?

I don’t doubt it.