Information Minister Inu egged in London TV studio as diaspora disgust grows at 6th May Dhaka massacre and coverup

Bangladesh Minister for Information Hasanul Huq Inu was egged as he walked into a TV studio in London. He was in London on a Digital Bangladesh junket.

In the context of UK politics egging is pretty main stream, John Prescott attracts a lot of it, Peter Mandelson got green custard and Fathers4Justice made a purple powder stunt occur in the House of Commons.

In this BanglaVision TV analysis of the protest intervention to the right, Inu Skypes in and gives an account of the incident. The dishonourable Minister for (mis)Information was at his very best, terming it "an attack on Bangladesh's Democracy (4:45)".

Coming a close second is his performance on the Channel S talk show Obhimot, where he justified the closure of popular opposition daily Amar Desh and now 6 month detention of its editor Mahmudur Rahman through the analogy of mirror cleaning. I fear that Mahmudur Rahman will not make it out of detention, where he has been tortured, alive.

Who is Hasanul Huq Inu, why is this important?

For those who do not know, Inu is the head of the JSD (National Socialist) party and as Information Minister has played a leading role in the cover up of the Dhaka Massacre on 6th May. Questions remain unasked and unanswered as to his participation in the massacre itself.

His ministry's exchange of letters with local human rights group Odhikar who documented the massacre, and the Government's subsequent arrest of its secretary Adilur Rahman Khan made even the most fawning governmental yaysayers cringe.

Odhikar's fact finding report on the Government attacks on Hefazot's Assembly on 5th and 6th May remains the most detailed account of the terrible state crimes committed that day. Its incompletion is a function of the corrupt  media and a very real fear of government reprisal. On this matter it is very much a police state.

That defenders of the regime have reduced  the massacre and the report to a silly numbers game is par for the course. It reminds us also of the need to create new forms of protest that elude the censor and which are less predictable than huge protests, hartals and agreeable rants.

These images have been swirling around Facebook to much applause.

These young people who egged Inu probably performed the most democratic act Bangladesh has seen for a while. The deshi press, for example The Daily Star and its more OC-inspired stepdaughter The Dhaka Tribune,  have failed to rise to the (business) challenge of the government account of the Motijheel Massacre and their own roles in making it possible.

As the current government makes moves to tell itself and the world what a good job it is doing on development (over the carcasses of those it has slain), we should  make sober assessments of their records and step up the lampooning.

Transnational Localism through further Civil Disobedience

I remember those bloodied twitching bodies on the streets of Dhaka in May breathing their last, and the video of the young boy being shot in the head at point black range earlier in the spring. I believe that a whole load of deshis (and people who love desh more than an NGO ever could) have been politicised over the state brutality from the Bangladesh Awami League led government this year, in new ways that elude partisan capture.

The Prime Minister has announced her intention to attend the 68th session of the UN Assembly which takes place on 23 Sept to 4 Oct in the coming weeks. I notice a special session on "disability and inclusivity" and my heart goes out to the disabled people her regime has created..

New York will be crawling with high officials of the regime, family members and taggers on.
I practically hope that they should be met patiently and theatrically for the sake of peace, with egg, red dye, clearly expressed arguments and camera phones.

***

The red dye is significant because that is what Prime Minister and Awami League head Sheikh Hasina Wazed accused the victims of her security forces of smearing on themselves (see below). In a related not, if you want a path into the mind of the psychopaths who run Bangladesh and the lengths the Awami League leader will go to for political and financial gain, please read the Rentu Memoirs carefully.

[New Word] Political load-shedding

The troublesome process of contesting power (re)distribution. Although better timetabled these days, the hartal, or strike, causes problems for the public, which in addition to their existing problems is not the politics of mercy.

By mixing metaphors we avoid depoliticizing strikes, their need, and their impacts on people, power structures and pauperisation.

Political load-shedding is a non-solution to the problem of sustainable and just power generation and distribution.

So if you think that you, or your tribe, have what it takes to lead the people. Find another way. Don't (mis)lead dedicated young people to their martyrdom, bring sakina, or tranquility, to the streets and lives of the people.

As The Tailor once said, the prison has escape encoded in its very bars.

Shahbagan: Garden of Hate and Fear

For the last week or so, the spectacle at Shahbag has continued to drive and distract political attentions in Bangladesh. This gathering calls for the execution of people it designates 1971 war criminals and the banning of religion based political parties, namely Jamat e Islami. Meanwhile the government has been busy passing legislation to allow itself the facility to hang people that its courts decide not to.

Without being a member of the party, standing for fair trials for the accused and non-secular political rights should be a no-brainer position. However, it requires a lot of people to argue uphill against their received wisdom and against a secular liberal establishment that has raised a blinded generation over some years. It doesn't help that Jamaat's own leaders have failed to address these issues directly, introspectively and convincingly enough.

Sentiment built over decades.

Into the mouths of babes:
"They are war criminals. We want them hanged."

The Shahbag demo is the descendant of a collective that rose to prominence in March of 1992 by holding mock trials of its designated war criminals. The demands and narrative of this Nirmul Committee match Shahbag, which builds on its emotional, organisational and (mis)informational foundations. The younger generation will have had less contact with people lived through enough of our political history to know history started well before 1971.

There has been a disappointing but predictable cover-up of the negative nature of the protest, a cover-up which shows not just me, but a wider audience how superficial so many of Bangalee Nationalists are with their oft-advertised liberal values.  From the naff novelist daughter of the Dhaka press baron, to the BRAC PR man, who used to run a human rights blog, and the trendy lefty anthropologist.  It's just quite sad.

Playground politics learnt from an earlier generation.
Nothing new here.

The twitter behaviour has been interesting to participate in. The intolerance of the proShahbag twitterati really is something of a liability to the liberal's projection of a new political horizon.  Detractors are put onto hit-lists and functionaries ordered to report them as spam (see left).

Such silencing of dissent is not confined to social media, but extends to print media, with Jamaat's newspaper Naya Diganta's building burnt by the ruling party student thugs. These are messy, dirty and greasy times. Mess has taken on new forms, for example, one of the things that Shahbag has prompted is a wider spread adoption of twitter amongst the different political camps in Bangladesh.

Shibir, Jamaat's student front, are not responding to violence against them in an angelic or cheek turning fashion. Accusations abound regarding their violence, from the usual quarters and usually without too much context. It appears that they have not, as yet, decided to go ape shit. It is difficult to know whether they have a creative way out of this. What would I do if I were them? Either way looks deadly and oppressive. Desh watchers have their work cut out for them establishing the truth of the violence these days.

Starting to unwind
Yesterday was Friday, the day of Jumma prayers. In the coastal areas of Cox's Bazaar, police fired on a post Jumma procession of Jamaat activists, killing between 4 and 7 individuals including a child and a random female bystander. Later at night, a young pro-Shahbag blogger was murdered in a grisly fashion in Dhaka.

All loss of life is to be mourned, and as we know, some loss of life is mourned and politically mobilised more powerfully than others. Late Rajib Haidar's death has unjustly and prematurely been attributed to Jamaat by co-protesters and now it seems the Prime Minster.  It looks set to fuel a new level of paranoia, fear and venom. Today many protesters were scratching their heads over the role of the janaza as funeral rites for someone who apparently didn't self identify with the faith any longer.

Watching the Shahbag nonsense engine deploy its master narrative on the loss of their comrade demonstrates just how a falsity, unchecked and unproven can be generated and spread in very little time. Within minutes of news being broken, the link was made to the Jamat and by morning it was well embedded into common sense.

Alternarratives
You might be interested to know who isn't joining on the bandwagon. An Indian writer mused on the similar sadisms of Indians and Bangladeshis.

...no matter how much we claim ourselves as democracies, at the end of the day we are nothing but a poor people who vent their frustration through sadistic instincts

At the start of the week it looked as in the Bangladeshi Nationalists (BNP) had started to wake up and recognise their irrelevance to an important public issue. The Weekly Holiday featured some less emotional thinking, and the ever challenging MBI Munshi cast a penetrating gaze on Shahbag's imagery, rhetoric and context. In the near future, Mahmudur Rahman's Amar Desh will continue to be one of the few major papers with the balls to face down our politics of hate and the sold-out nature of the main opposition BNP.

The BNP party seems to have left one of its senior member out to dry, Salahuddin Quader Choudhury was Parliamentary Special Adviser during the last BNP-Jamaat alliance government. Not particularly known for their balls-of-steel these days, they might sort their lives out nearer to the elections, but I am not holding my breath. They feed of the same master narrative as the Awami League, but with more militaristic, centre right, General Zia focussed trimmings.

What's a Razakar?
In the context of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the razakars were a paramilitary force raised to counter the Mukti Bahini.  In the context of Shahbag, a razakar, sometimes spelt with a 'j', denotes a person to be eliminated. It is a form of takfir, exclusion and casting out, applied selectively to political enemies of the regime in power.

Not only is this a historical lobotomy of the complex truths of how people tried to protect an established state from disintegration, but it is mighty convenient who isn't labelled a razakar and who overcompensates to distract attention.  HINT: There is a Minister in the Bangladesh Government, the ministry of Law to be precise, who is acting funny. More on him later.

These past days have taught me how little our people have moved on from 1971 thinking. Narrow racial thinking, autotakfir, very bad leadership, and the inability to see anyone else's pain or story.

What now?

• Keep in dialogue with friends and relations in desh.
• Do not feed this monster.
• Encourage press to pay attention to seculib head spinners and less articulate islamists.
• Duas for a Sakina (Tranquility) storm to enter the hearts of the restless.

I am justifiably in contempt of this Kangaroo Court

Tribunalgate is quite fluid these days.

Last night the Economist mumbled something about lawyers and  clearly stated that they were handed data of communications between Justice Nizamul Huq and Dr Ahmad Ziauddin (17 hours audio, 230 emails) and did not solicit them. The comments below the article are amazing, with raw relief from many at the sight of their truth finally in print, as well as secular-takfiri bloodymindedness that we have come to expect from people holding firmly onto the master narrative. Its quite a sad reflection on our internal conversation and adab (manners) that 1971 has become such an infantalising matter, enfooling and humiliating.

Legal eagle BangaliVabna finds the Economist a little limp-wristed, gives an insight into the tribunals social context and what they have already done to split, confuse and make fools out of the Bangladeshi nation.  David Bergman made an appeal to civil society to show some spine, but more conservative blogs haven't yet commented.

These tribunals don't end impunity, they reconstitute it.

In the real world, a journalist from the Bangladeshi newspaper Amar Desh (My Country)  wrote something brave,  based on what I imagine is the same data that the Economist received.  We probably won't see the western liberal media falling over themselves to protect him, but we should, as he really pushed the boat out. Mahmudur Rahman, the editor of the paper, might also come in for a spot of bother and Awami ultra violence.

The main exhibit of this post is an audio file of what appears to be a conversation between the Judge and the Academic-Activist. Whoever organised this information retrieval from deep inside the rotten core of the Bangladeshi injustice system has done well to make people who will not otherwise listen, look the lie in the face.

This post wiki wolf whistle features them complaining about ministers setting them unrealistic deadlines and discussing how to massage the judgement so that it appears like it meets the standards expected by western powers. In passing Ziauddin observes that the Bangladeshi public will not be critical about this process at all. It seems to me that they are cooking up a judgement. It seems that a key ideological campaigner is having more representation in the tribunal than the accused, whose defence witnesses are denied, kidnapped and written off.

Somehow I can't see myself wearing a t-shirts saying 'Bangladeshi Justice for Bangladeshi Citizens' at this moment in time. These situations do get you thinking about the nature of the human intellect, its moral detuning and role in power play. You can listen to some more of the alleged audio on SonarBangla and make up your own mind.

When I was on field work in Bangladesh, during the last-but-one government, a young man, who had a small mobile phone shop by the oncoming River Jamuna said to me:

Over here, the educated people try to make fools of the illiterate.

bad poem alert.

 

 The day their music died

The Awami League of Liars stared
Their version of the past declared,
An exaggerated Jatra play
A power game, a truth to flay

No party is exonerated,
Our ranks were still quite decimated,
Yet, may the future flow uphill in wonder,
With dignity and hope not blunder.

We recognise that modus operandi,
Can only beg for foreign candy,
Terrorise and halt the nation,
With political emaciation

Noble souls,
Our thoughts controlled,
Questions patrolled,
Now, may His truth unfold.

Khutbas from our Kitchens, again

Urban, immigrant life estranges us from the rest of creation.  We are becoming part of the problem. So let us alter the relations between the built, lived environment and the (mal)functionings of the urban ummah which we see being stripped away from soulfulness and plunged into consumerism.

Khutbas from the Kitchen is an idea, potentially an institution,that intervenes practically in our lives to help embody Islamic principles in our relations with creation, not least the food system, family and social relations. It is as simple as recording short educative videos from eachother’s kitchens about the ethics and values behind what we eat, warts, proverbial kitchen sink and all.

Competing with slow, unjust people over reclaiming the mimbar in the mosque is probably a useful expenditure of some people's energy. It need not distract us from the potential of networking and reimagining our existing networked ummahstuctures to overcome the cultural degradation arising from some of the activities of Islam Channel, PeaceTV, ISB, the Quilliam Foundation, Saudi Arabia/America.

Khutbas from our Kitchens rehonours the domestic, creative, hospitable space. For certain, it is not some kind of come dine with me/ready steady cook/diary of a bad man goes for chicken and chips venture. The objects around this vital room tell stories that are mostly hidden and unmarked. The packet of plain flour tells us of the history and politics of American grain surpluses. The dish rack, which bears a lot of the burden, tells us of steel, geometry and evaporation. Not to be funny or anything, but the kitchen plan itself speaks about the design and food values at the time of the building’s construction.

Kitchen media is interesting, televisions entered a lot of them in the late 80s, but now the direction of travel has reversed and one–to-many communications can be exchanged for more realistic many-to–many relationships. And perhaps the people in them have changed, less learned in some ways (humanity), more so in others (web search).

The kinds of impacts I would anticipate from this collective endeavour include a practical, shared space for learning, ensouling, deciding and creating more Creator-conscious and justice-based patterns of life and consumption.

An ode to Bangladesh Prime Minister Hasina on her treacherous Rohingya policy

It's hard to express
The horror distress
Of fleeing from where you call home.

The killing and burning,
From Buddhists a'learning
Exclusively nationalist blows.

Our brothers and mothers,
and countless more others,
Seek refuge upon our green fields.

Our leaders just spurn them,
Say "Let the Maghs burn them,
Those extremist, rajakar foes."

I hate you Hasina,
Political dustbin cleaner,
The most unworthy leader I know.

Lets launch you to Mars,
Blow you up to the stars
JUST LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE.

Mid Ramadhan Movements at home and abroad

It is half way through Ramadhan, the moon has fattened up.


The Bangladesh Government is stopping groups from assisting Rohingyas it deems terrorist/ extremist, in line with that authority on mercy and humanity, the Myanmarese Buddhist Monk-Government complex. I understand that the Ansar approach is our starting point, and that the Awami League, who created Bangladesh largely with Indian Assistance and Refuge have turned the country into a porch of Developmentishire and beggardom.We know from the video below that all Bangladeshis aren't such arseholes.

To donate, the Turkish IHH is getting through, the Government of Bangladesh probably wouldn't dare close down its operations. However the political solution mustn't be sidelined and the debate must find its ovaries. We must pour scorn on the mean minded awami-think that has produced such a shameless approach to those fleeing despicable conditions.

On the Olympic front, The Brotherhood of neoliberal Muslims continues to suckle on the teat of its Olympic credibility cow, with FOSIS recently joining the fray with "Olympic Iftar" and the MCB leadership backing the ISBs Ramadhan Disasterval 'Inspired by London 2012'. Its dawa, mainstreaming and good apparently.

Meanwhile, last week, as many enjoyed Danny Boyle's Showcialist Opening Ceremony that completely airbrushed out British imperial legacy but gave the nearleft a warm glow inside,  scores of cyclists on a regular city ride with the #CriticalMass group were being kettled, arrested and bundled away outside the stadium.   For cycling.

In the next video we see a poetic Muslim articulating his need for iftar being denied by the police and arrested. Allahumma accept his roza and those of all your servants with a taste for justice.