I decided to hop over to News from Bangladesh to see if there was anything else going on besides the usual crossfires. I don't plan to do this regularly.
- Bangladeshi Newsman Dies of Bomb Injuries From Reuters
DHAKA, Feb 11 (Reuters) - A Bangladeshi journalist died of bomb injuries on Friday, six days after he and three other reporters were wounded in an explosion at a press club, doctors said.
Sheikh Belaluddin was wounded when a remote-controlled bomb exploded in the parking lot of the press club in southewestern city of Khulna on Feb. 5, the latest in a series of attacks on journalists in Bangladesh...
...Fourteen journalists have been killed in the country's southwest in the past 11 years mostly because they have written against crime and lawlessness in the region. - Letter from Dr. Nazli Kibria, daughter of late Shah AMS Kibria To my friends in the US.
Dr. Nazli Kibria,
Url: www.kibria.org.
As many of you know, my father Shah AMS Kibria, was brutally assassinated in Bangladesh on January 27 2005. My father was a renowned public figure and intellectual; at the time of his death he was a Member of the Parliament in Bangladesh.
Many of you have contacted me to express your condolences. I am deeply grateful for your support at this time. I am currently focused on working to bring the killers of my father to justice. Our family is calling for an international investigation team to be immediately sent to Bangladesh to conduct an impartial investigation. I am asking you to help us in our efforts...
...For ongoing information and news about my father's killing, please refer to the website:
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www.kibria.org.
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I will be deeply grateful for your help in these matters.
Nazli Kibria
Associate Professor of Sociology
Boston University
********************************
Previous Rantburg links on this subject are here, here, here, and here. I can't vouch for which speculation is accurate and which not, but this might give an interesting picture of the progression of events there. Oh, and here's some more:
- FBI Agent in Town
A special of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived in the capital on Wednesday and began parleys with senior home ministry officials to frame the terms of reference for the bureau's assistance in investigating the January 27 grenade attack in Habiganj.
A spokesman for the US Embassy told the news agency Thursday night that the FBI agent, Trung Vu, came to Dhaka to meet the ministry officials about the request for support in the grenade attack case.
'The objective of his meetings is to work out written terms of reference detailing the specifics of the requested assistance and the parameters that would govern the rendering of that assistance,' he said...
I am almost expecting negotiations about when the negotiations will start. Shouldn't the terms of assistance have already been worked out by the State Department? Or are they discussing what the FBI gets in return? Training in crossfires? - Burn Victim Experiences a Life Transformed From off-site, at the Grand Forks Herald
BY AMY DRISCOLL
Knight Ridder Newspapers
MIAMI - (KRT) - To trace her remarkable journey, Bilkis Khatun has only to look in the mirror.
The skin grafts and cartilage and fading scars on her face tell the story of a life rebuilt, from "honor crime" victim in Bangladesh to outspoken survivor in a land halfway around the world.
In the last four years, she has been lasered and stitched, transplanted and tucked. Doctors custom-made a prosthetic ear, surgically implanted a brow, re-created a nose with the last nub of cartilage from her destroyed ear.
But plastic surgery works on the outside. Medical records don't chart the changes within. For Bilkis, now 17 and headed back to her country, the strength and bravery she discovered after enduring an act of unspeakable cruelty may be the greatest makeover of all.
"Oh, my god!"
She cups a hand over her mouth, half laughing, half dismayed. She's watching videotaped news footage of herself when she arrived at Miami International Airport in May 2001. This girl is fresh from Dhaka, in an Indian-style tunic and dark sunglasses so enormous they almost swallow her face. She looks petrified.
The newscasters describe her in grave tones: a disfigured Bangladeshi girl who traveled to Florida for reconstructive surgery after thugs threw acid on her face.
The image shifts to a news conference. Her new plastic surgeon discusses her case and so does her foster mother. On television, Bilkis sits small and silent as a voice-over warns of "graphic pictures" to come: close-ups of Bilkis' ravaged face.
She shakes her head at the big screen. "I've changed a lot."
She is not talking about the plastic surgery.
The Bilkis of today doesn't much resemble her black-and-white schoolgirl picture taken before the attack. She looks like a new self, with scars and uneven skin pigment still evident.
"I worked really hard to have this new face," she says. "But the face, it's not that important. I think what's inside, that's important."
She was 13 at the time of the acid attack. In Bangladesh, such assaults are known as "honor crimes," often committed by spurned boyfriends or angry husbands to avenge themselves, using the most available weapon: battery acid. The Acid Survivors Foundation, started in 1999, reports that there were 283 acid-throwing assaults between January and October last year.
In Bilkis' case, the details are murky. Two men, hired by a would-be suitor she says she never met, broke into her home at night to pour acid on her face. One was later caught, though the specifics of his punishment are unclear. Bilkis spent months in a Dhaka hospital before the Florida/Georgia chapter of Healing the Children stepped in.
Oprah Winfrey had aired a show that spring on international violence against women, including acid attacks in Bangladesh. In Weston, Fla., a single mother with two daughters watched from her sickbed and took action. Within minutes, Heidi Marer was on the Internet offering to help.
"I was saving the world," she jokes.
A few miles away in Fort Lauderdale, someone else was prepared to help, too. Dr. Russell Sassani, who would become Bilkis' chief plastic surgeon and perform 14 surgeries on her, had heard about Healing the Children from his partner, Michael Schneider. Schneider was involved in an airline program that provided adult escorts for children traveling solo, some as part of the charity's campaign.
"As horrific a crime as this was, Mike made me realize it would be a greater crime if we did nothing to help," Sassani said.
Less than two months later, Bilkis stepped off a plane in Miami, armed with a month's worth of English lessons...
There's more, including a comment in the article that states that based on her experiences assimilating to the US, they plan on flying the patients back to their home countries in between surgeries. - Hasina's Call to Remove 'Tyrant' Government
Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina has alleged that the BNP-Jamaat alliance government has been killing her party's leaders and workers one after another implicating them in 'false and conspiratorial' cases.
"As part of its evil design to eliminate the Awami League and prolong its misrule, the government has been implicating the leaders and activists at the grassroots level and killing them after branding them as terrorists," she said when the family of slain Dhaka City Juba League leader Billal Hossain Bepari met her at her Sudha Sadan residence at Dhanmondi in the city yesterday...
...The Awami League leader said there is no alternative left to the citizenry other than to remove the 'tyrant' government through a vigorous mass movement.
While consoling the bereaved family of Billal Bepari, Sheikh Hasina assured his mother Majeda Begum that she would bear the educational expenses of his two minor sons.
The Awami League chief also handed over Taka 10,000 and a sewing machine to Hasina Begum, wife of Billal Bepari whose body was recovered by police from a water body (jheel) at the Maghbazar Jheel slum on January 30, a week after he went missing while taking part in a demonstration in the city.
The Awami Juba League blamed police and the cadres of the BNP for the killing of Billal and dumping of his body on the water body. - Iran and 9/11, GWOT, al-Qaeda.
Part 2- The mullahs of Iran.
Friday February 11 2005 21:19:12 PM BDT
Mostaque Ali from Germany
So someone with an Arabic name, in Germany, is writing material critical of the Mullahs in Iran, and naturally it finds publication in Bangladesh. I wonder if it found publication in Germany?
Some of the mullahs think all is well when in reality it is not. Well how could they be after twenty-five years of dreamy mullah rule, that they should now contemplate consolidating their power.
Perhaps a few of them sense danger, and that their demise is just around the corner? Consolidation includes the execution of 24 key senior officers, including the founding fathers of the Revolutionary Guard earlier this year. The foundation and key of mullah power in Iran (the Pasdaran). They were executed because they had written an open letter protesting about the trafficking of children by certain corrupt government officers.
The closing of 110 newspapers, and the heightened activity of the special 'Press court' whose sole duty is to prosecute journalists who do not sell their truth. The mullahs have also drastically reduced the size of the Basij, the children's militia which until recently could be mobilized to 8 million. The mullahs did this because children along with adult citizens have been very active in protesting against the mullah run government. There is a real fear that with American troops in Iraq, and Afghanistan, that force so large could become a peoples army against the mullahs.
In addition, large sections of the population and especially children look to America for 'inspiration' in most matters, and twenty-five years of mullah rule has not dampened their Western aspirations. In terms of the over all population devoid of government opinion/rent a crowds, Iran is one of the most pro-American societies in the Middle East. Indeed the trend and aspiration is growing, and thus inevitably in time will clash with the increasingly hard line mullahs in Iran. If the mullahs are to be seriously dealt with, then this is the most obvious portal. Primarily through soft power first..
The scope for youthful frustration is thus very enormous, and the logical channel for that latent expanding frustration will find its expression sooner or later against the mullahs. The revolution against the mullahs will come from that section of the population which has no real memory of the 1979 Islamic revolution. It is thus not surprising that the mullahs have executed as a percentage of the over all population, last year alone the highest number of children (Amnesty International 2004).
Some of the mullahs by contrast have been utterly corrupted by power and some in addition have become billionaires, most notably Rafsanjani. Their consolidation of power within Iran, in this year alone, by blocking out 2400 legitimate candidates for the February elections can be seen in this light. On the one hand there is the insecurity of power, and on the other the addiction and corrupting effects of power.
As they say, Read The Whole Thing.
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