30 May, 2015

SECOND EDITION

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

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Jyoistha 16, 1421, Sha’ban 11, 1436

LAND SUBSIDENCE AGAIN AT KARWAN BAZAR PAGE 3

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SHILLONG COURT DENIES BAIL TO SALAHUDDIN PAGE 5

‘It was not about greed. Our life is miserable and hard’ n Abid Azad from Cox’s Bazar Two and a half years ago, twelve indigenous people from Cox’s Bazar, all farmers, set off for Malaysia with dreams of putting an end to their poverty.

They had no idea of the heavy toll the voyage would take on their lives.

Chayikkhiyo Sin, 35, Kiyo Cha, 55, Uthe Chin, 25, Nene Sing, 31, Uthe Cha, 25, Keu Mong, 25, and Zai Mong, 25, are from Monkhali Chakma para, Jaliya Palong Union, Ukhiya in Cox’s Bazar district.

Ong Che, 25, and Babul Hashem Chakma, 35, are from Horikola Chakma para in Teknaf; Soifung Sing, 65, is from Telkhola village in Ukhiya; Keo Zi, 16, is from Matabunia in Ukhiya; and Chhatai Mong, 17, is from Teelkhali, Teknaf.

“In December 2012, we started our journey from Kutubdia after spending a night at a hotel in Chokoria in Chittagong. We had no idea that we were to be imprisoned for a year and a half in a Malaysian jail and would then be deported,” Chaikkhiyo Sing said at Shamlapur Bazar, locally pronounced Shaplapur, in Teknaf.

“We were convinced to make the trip by Shafiullah, a Rohingya living in Monkha-

Regd No DA 6238, Vol 3, No 48

li village. Once a fisherman, Shafiullah was well known to us. He demanded Tk100,000 from each of us to arrange the trip. We paid Tk50,000 each before departing,” he said.

They were to travel in a simple fishing boat Shafiullah brought for Tk500,000 to make the journey to Malaysia.

The outcome was imprisonment for one and a half years in Malaysian custody until 10 of them were finally returned to Bangladesh with the help of the Bangladesh Embassy there.

Keo Zi and Chhatai Mong successfully won the right to live in Malaysia. Shafiullah, who went with them, bringing along his wife and five children, achieved permanent residency after serving a three-month jail sentence.

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TOBACCO FARMING HARMING FARMS PAGE 32

Kutubdia

Andaman Islands

The promise of a better life

Some 155 indigenous families, numbering nearly 1400 people, live in Monkhali village.

The village is afflicted with extreme poverty. Ignorance and a lack of facilities are the main reasons for the migrants’ desire to go to Malaysia. The hope of improving their families’ economic situation is the driving force behind their decision to illegally migrate.

Subrata Chakma, who is a shopkeeper in

Setting off from Kutubdia for Malaysia, a group of Bangladeshi indigenous people spent 18 days in Indian custody in the Andaman Islands and a year and a half imprisoned by the Malaysian authorities during an attempt to illegally migrate to Malaysia in 2012 and 2013. Two of them were later granted residency permits. The rest were sent home GOOGLE MAPS

 PAGE 2 COLUMN 1

Myanmar navy finds 727 migrants packed in boat

Foreign secretary: Govt to bring back trafficked Bangladeshis in a month

n AFP, Yangon

n Tribune Desk

Myanmar’s navy found 727 people crammed on a fishing boat in its waters, the Ministry of Information said in a Facebook post yesterday, adding the would-be “Bengali” migrants had been towed to an island.

“Altogether 727 people – 608 Bengali men, 74 women and 45 children – in a fishing boat have been arrested as a Myanmar Navy ship found them this morning in the delta,” the statement said.

The discovery comes as a Myanmar

Bangladesh is ready to take back all its trafficked victims stranded in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia within a month, said Foreign Secretary M Shahidul Haque.

Shahidul made the statement yesterday at the Bangkok conference where Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed to address the root causes of a migrant exodus from their shores.

But Myanmar’s delegate to the talks on Southeast Asia’s migrant crisis rebuked the UN’s refugee agency for calling on the country to recognise the Muslim Rohingya minority as

 PAGE 2 COLUMN 4

PAGE 3 Negotiations on to secure $3bn Reliance investment

PAGE 5 BNP hopes Hasina to discuss with Khaleda before meeting Modi

citizens to stem their exodus from its shores, reports AFP. According to various preliminary estimates, there are roughly 30-35% of Bangladeshis among the victims, said the foreign secretary.

“We will complete verification of these people within the shortest possible time and repatriate them to Bangladesh preferably within a month or so,” he said.

The conference was organised by Thailand. A total of 17 countries including Myanmar, the USA, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia attended it.

PAGE 8 India battles deadliest heatwave in two decades, 1,800 dead

Bangladesh expressed its readiness to join any regional or global effort to address human trafficking by sea in the Indian Ocean region in an integrated and comprehensive manner, the foreign secretary said.

“We are talking about human beings who are victims or potential victims. They deserve our compassion. Our collective endeavour should be to protect their lives, alleviate their sufferings and uphold their dignity,” he said, adding that to this end, Bangladesh stands ready to join any regional or global effort.

Southeast Asia’s migrant scandal began to  PAGE 2 COLUMN 1

PAGE 32 Factory worker gang-raped on boat in Gazipur

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2 NEWS

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Hasina thanks Indian govt for LBA ratification n Abu Hayat Mahmud Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has thanked the Indian government and all the oppositions for their support that led to the ratification of the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) by their parliament.

She has also said described the ratification of the agreement as a great diplomatic success of her government.

Addressing a reception accorded to her

by Jatiya Nagarik Committee at Suhrawardy Udyan in the capital yesterday, the prime minister said Bangabandhu had signed the land boundary deal and Bangladesh’s constitution was also amended after that.

“But after Bangabandhu’s death in 1975, no

step was taken to implement the agreement. We have resolved the longstanding issue through bilateral discussions after all these years.”

Early in May, the Indian parliament passed a constitutional amendment bill seeking to settle the 41-year-old border dispute between the two neighbouring countries.

The bill will cause the 1974 India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement to take effect, paving the way for the exchange of 161 enclaves held by the two countries.

The premier yesterday reached the reception venue shortly after 4pm and was welcomed with the national anthem. She said the mass reception was not for her but for the achievement of all the people in Bangladesh.

She also said there had been numerous

successes both at home and abroad and the credit for all those should go to the people as they had voted her party to power in 2008 and again in 2014.

“After the killings of my family members in 1975, I returned home just to ensure that people’s rights and democracy were established.

I do not fear death. My fight for the people is going on, and no-one can stop that,” said Hasina, also the Awami League president.

She claimed her government was focusing on regional connectivity to build a developed nation.

“The Awami League always believes that all countries in the world are friends of Bangladesh and not enemies. So we try to maintain healthy ties with any foreign country.” l

Zia’s 34th death anniversary today n Mohammad Al-Masum Molla

Today is BNP founder and late president Ziaur Rahman’s 34th death anniversary.

The BNP and its front bodies have chalked out an elaborate programme for 14 days to observe the party founder’s death anniversary.

Though the death anniversary is on May 30, its observance already started on May 28 through a discussion at Engineers Institute where Zia’s wife Khaleda Zia was present in the audience.

BNP has planned programmes including discussions, wearing black badges, publishing posters and supplements in newspapers, distributing food among the destitute, and voluntary blood donation. l

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Govt to bring back trafficked Bangladeshis in a month unfurl at the start of this month after a Thai crackdown on people smuggling threw the multi-million dollar industry into disarray, reports AFP. It led gangmasters to abandon their victims on land and at sea, and images of stick-thin, dazed migrants trapped on boats or stumbling onto shores and out of forests shocked the world, heaping pressure on Southeast Asian nations to act.

The majority of the migrants are Rohinyga Muslims, who are pariahs in Myanmar’s Buddhist-majority western Rakhine State, and poor people from neighbouring Bangladesh.

The Thai hosts described the day-long talks as “very constructive”, saying all 17 countries at the meeting agreed on a statement to provide humanitarian help to 2,500 migrants believed to still be adrift at sea, as well as to the 3,500 who have already made it to Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian shores since May 1.

The statement also drew a commitment to address the “root causes” and “factors in areas of (migrants’) origin”, including improving

the economy, human rights and security in the source countries.

But the document did not mention the Rohingya – who Myanmar refuses to recognise as an official minority.

Myanmar denies citizenship to the majority of its 1.3 million Rohingya and calls them “Bengalis” – shorthand for foreigners from neighbouring Bangladesh.

The publication of Myanmar’s first census in three decades also failed to include the Rohingya in its tally, after authorities refused to count them if they self-identified.

Communal violence in 2012 between Rohingya and the Buddhist majority in Rakhine State brought their plight to the fore.

In a timely development just as the Bangkok meeting wrapped up, Myanmar’s Ministry of Information said it had rescued 727 “Bengalis” adrift in its waters yesterday morning.

Bangladesh recognises some 30,000 Rohingya as refugees but tens of thousands more are treated as illegal migrants from Myanmar.

Meanwhile Myanmar’s delegate came down hard on the UN’s refugee agency for

calling on the country to recognise the Muslim Rohingya minority as citizens.

On “this issue of illegal migration of boat people, you cannot single out my country,” Myanmar delegate Foreign Ministry Director-General Htin Lynn said in stern response to a UNHCR plea to address the root causes of the ongoing migration crisis including the statelessness issue.

In his opening remarks to a meeting with 17 countries and other agencies, Volker Turk, UNHCR assistant high commissioner for protection, urged Myanmar to tackle the flow of Rohingya southwards, where they have arrived in thousands on the shores of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

To address the root causes of the exodus “will require full assumption of responsibility

by Myanmar to all its people,” he said.

“Granting of citizenship is the ultimate goal.”

The Myanmar delegate called Volker’s comments a “politicisation” of the migrant subject, adding that “some issues” are internal. l

Myanmar navy finds delegation joins an international conference in Bangkok to address a migrant crisis that has erupted since the start of May, leaving around 3,500 people on Thai, Malaysian and Indonesia soil and an estimated 2,500 more stranded at sea.

The majority of the migrants are persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar’s western Rakhine State or people fleeing poverty in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Photographs on the ministry’s Facebook page published yesterday afternoon showed bare-chested men on the stern deck of an old fishing boat packed tightly in rows, while women appeared to be kept below deck.

It was unclear where the migrants were from and where they were headed.

The Navy towed the “Bengali boat people” to a nearby Myanmar island, the ministry said, without giving further details.

Myanmar does not recognise the Rohingya as an indigenous ethnic group and officials routinely refer to them as “Bengalis” from across the border. l

‘It was not about greed. Our life is miserable and hard’ Monkhali village, said: “Most of our people are involved in day labour as there is little scope for our traditional jhum cultivation.

“Some work as farmers although they own no land. Working as a day labourer or farmer can earn you Tk250 a day. However, we do not get hired daily but, perhaps, 4 or 5 days a week. It is very difficult to survive” “We do not get electricity here. Many of our children become fallen before they reach high school. People here think that earning money is more important than being educated,” said Subrata, who is also the Bangladesh Adivasi Forum vice president for Ukhiya.

There is no hygienic sanitation in the village.

“We feel underprivileged as none of our indigenous rights-based organisations or any other people come to see how we are living here,” he said.

So the would-be migrants were easily convinced by Shafiullah’s proposal and decided that they would risk the trip to Malaysia.

“It was not about greed. Our life is miserable and hard.

“When Shafiullah proposed, we thought it would better to go Malaysia rather than dying here. We also thought, if one of our family members could go there, we could live better

and our children could then get a proper education,” Chaikkhiyo Sing said.

The journey and jail When they reached Kutubdia, from where they departed for Malaysia, they found 116 more people who were also going to go with them.

“We were 27 Bangladeshis and 101 Rohingyas. There were also two Rohingya women who also brought 5 children, aged under 10, with them. Both of their husbands lived in Malaysia and they were going to join their husbands,” Chaikkhiyo said.

“We brought rice, potatoes, flattened rice, sweets and 3000 litres of water to last a month for all 128 people,” he added.

They brought with them belongings like clothing and mobile telephones. The simple fishing boat departed from Kutubdia and set sail for Malaysia.

“We were in the boat like sacks. The days in the boat were the most dangerous and fearful of our lives.

“We thrice faced rough storms in the ocean.

We prayed. Some cried thinking this was the end,” said Uthe Ching, another migrant.

“It cannot be described in words how we felt when faced death on the water.”

Voyager Keo Cha said: “After six days and

six nights, we were caught by Indian police in the middle of the ocean.

“Two ships brought us to a nearby town, which we later came to know was in the Andaman Islands.”

“We were captives there for 18 days. Then they released us with 18 days’ worth of food,” the migrants told the Dhaka Tribune.

After another six days and six nights, they reached a Malaysian port and were again taken custody, this time by the Malaysian Navy.

“When they interrogated us, all of us claimed to be Rohingyas as Shafiullah earlier instructed us to do. He also told us if we said we were Bangladeshi, they would arrest us and send us back to Bangladesh,” Chaikkhiyo said.

Although all the Bangladeshi voyagers claimed to be Rohingyas, interrogations proved them to be Bangladeshis.

Chaikkhiyo Sing said: “When they asked several questions we could not reply in Myanmar language. Again we also could not reply the name of the prime minister of Myanmar.

“So they arrested all of us, including the Rohingya people, and imprisoned us for 3 months.

“After three months of jail, we were brought to a military camp in Malaysia. Life was much

harder there. Our bodies became swollen. Our loved ones would not have recognised us. It was very hard.”

Chaikkhiyo Sing continued: “After three months of jail, Shafiullah got a red card allowing him to stay in Malaysia with his family.

We Bangladeshis were brought to the military camp. All the Rohingyas were given red cards. Our two indigenous friends Keo Zi and Chhatai Mong also got red cards because they were under 18 years of age.”

“We saw over a thousand Bangladeshis in the Malaysian camp. There were more than five thousand Rohingyas there,” he said.

The migrants said they prepared for and set off on the voyage in secret. There were no intermediaries or brokers involved in their journey.

Shafiullah acted alone as the captain of the voyage, using the boat he had bought, the returned migrants said.

Chaikkhiyo Sing said: “Many do make it and many manage to send home good money – that is true. But there is a lot of suffering and many risks involved.”

“We will never again think of going to Malaysia. If we knew before what suffering we would have to endure, we would not have gone.” l

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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Third incident of land subsidence strikes Karwan Bazar site n Mohammad Jamil Khan

Another land subsidence occurred at the Karwan Bazar construction site yesterday morning, following two similar incidents on consecutive days since Wednesday.

The extent and damage caused by the latest land subsidence, which happened a little before 9am in the same north-west side as Thursday’s incident, was comparatively less than the previous days.

Kalabagan police station OC Mohammad Iqbal confirmed the latest incident, adding that no one was hurt when it happened; however, the new land subsidence managed to add fresh panic among the office-goers and residents in the area.

Authorities working at the site stayed alert throughout the day for the possibility of further rain that might trigger yet another incident. Although there was some downpour in the afternoon, no more land subsidence happened.

Ahead of the afternoon rain, Gazi Feroz, chief engineer of Dhaka North City Corporation, had told reporters that a downpour might pose new risk to the site.

Following the brief spell of rain, the Dhaka Tribune found that the sand-dumping trucks were parking a bit further away from the site and maintaining caution while approaching the void left by the land subsidence at the under-construction NBL Twin Towers.

As the process of dumping sand into the vulnerable areas of the site continued at a

irresponsibility during the sand filling and recovery measures by neither visiting the accident site nor providing sand to minimise the damage.

The mayor also rebuked the NBL Twin Towers contractor – MS Constructions – for not providing enough sand supply at the excavated construction site following the incident.

Owner of MS Constructions Md Salahuddin, who was present when the mayor made the comment, however told reporters that they had dumped the maximum amount of sand at the site with the help of the city corporation.

Traffic situation

The alley beside Hotel Sundarban subsided in Wednesday’s initial incident of land subsidence, exposing subterranean water pipes and bringing down the hotel’s basement wall RAJIB DHAR sluggish pace throughout the day, the two mayors of the bifurcated Dhaka city corporations again visited there, vowing that anyone responsible for the mishap will not be spared.

Dhaka South Mayor Sayeed Khokon set a Sunday deadline to authorities for achieving significant progress in dealing with the situation. “We will not spare Rajuk or any other au-

Govt prepared to receive Modi n Sheikh Shahariar Zaman The government has taken up massive preparation to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is scheduled to arrive in Dhaka on a two-day visit on June 6.

He is coming at the invitation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and this will be his first visit to Bangladesh.

He will be accompanied by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarker and Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma.

Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also came to Dhaka in 2011 with all the chief ministers except West Bengal.

During the visit, Modi will receive an honour for former Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for his contribution to the Liberation War. Both the governments are negotiating for about 30 instruments including agreement, protocol, memorandum on trade, connectivity, people to people contact, education and other areas to be signed during the presence of the two prime ministers.

“We are negotiating about 30 instruments,” said a senior government official.

According to different sources, a memorandum of understanding on Passenger Movement in the Inland Water Routes and on the Coastal Shipping Routes will be signed by the two prime ministers.

“This is an intention showed by the governments on movement of people through river and coastal routes and that’s why it

would be signed by the heads of the government,” said another official who is involved in the process.

Both the governments have finalised several agreements and protocols to be signed during the visit. These include renewal of trade agreements, coastal shipping agreement, second line of credit, agreement on bus service between Dhaka and Gawhati and agreement on bus service from Kolkata to Agartala through Dhaka.

Renewal of protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade, protocol on bus service between Dhaka and Gawhati and protocol on bus service from Kolkata to Agartala through Dhaka have also been finalised.

An instrument related to Land Boundary Agreement will also be exchanged during the signing ceremony.

Bangladesh and India signed the land boundary agreement in 1974 and Dhaka ratified it the same year. But, the Indian parliament amended the constitution to ratify the Land Boundary Agreement and its protocol early this month to resolve land boundary related dispute.

During the visit, Modi will visit Savar Mausoleum and Bangabandhu Museum.

The tete-a-tete followed by official talks between the two prime ministers will be held on June 6 and after the meeting, the instruments will be signed.

He will pay a courtesy call on President Abdul Hamid. He will also meet Leader of the Opposition Rawshan Ershad, while BNP Chief Khaldea Zia will meet him during his visit.

Modi will also attend a congregation at the Dhakeshwari Temple. l

thorities responsible, if the adjacent roads are not made safe and cleared for traffic by Sunday.”

Dhaka North Mayor Annisul Huq, meanwhile, assured: “We are in a tentatively safe zone. It can be declared a fully safe zone if sand is dumped through the day [yesterday].”

He, however, criticised the National Bank Limited (NBL) authorities for displaying

Commuters passing through the area continued to suffer yesterday as the adjacent Panthapath and Bir Uttam CR Dutta roads stayed out-ofbounds for vehicles because of safety reasons. “[Bir Uttam] CR Dutta Road was closed on Wednesday as it suffered cracks immediately after the land subsidence. Traffic movement on the adjacent Panthapath was closed since the second land subsidence happened on Thursday night,” said Kalabagan OC Iqbal.

A senior DMP traffic (south) official, seeking anonymity, told the Dhaka Tribune that a political rally yesterday put added pressure on the roads near the subsidence site.

If the situation was not solved by Sunday, a bypass route would be opened for vehicular movement in the area, he added. l

Negotiations on to secure $3bn Reliance investment n Sheikh Shahariar Zaman Bangladesh is hoping to secure its biggest ever foreign investment in the infrastructure sector, as negotiations are under way with Indian conglomerate Reliance Group for a $3bn power project.

Under the proposed deal, a 3,000 megawatt power plant will be set up in Chittagong by the Indian multinational, which has expertise in this sector.

According to the Reliance Power website, the company has the largest portfolio of power projects in the Indian private sector, based on coal, gas, hydro and renewable energy, with an operating portfolio of 5,945MW. They will import liquefied natural gas (LNG) to produce gas in the proposed plant as Bangladesh is currently experiencing shortage of the natural resource.

In early 2000, the then BNP government negotiated with another Indian conglomerate, Tata Group, for a $3bn investment in three power and steel projects; but the deal did not go through as the government denied the multinational’s request for a dedicated supply of gas.

The reliance project will be

an independent power plant and it will be constructed in phases.

The government will sign a power purchase agreement at an agreed price, with an option of reviewing the price after a certain interval.

“We are negotiating and hope to seal the deal during the visit of the Indian prime minister [Narendra Modi] to Dhaka,” Energy Adviser Tawfiq-E-Elahi Chowdhury told the Dhaka Tribune.

The energy-starving Bangladesh is currently importing 500MW of electricity from India and is in the process of importing another 500MW. In addition to that, India has agreed to sell another 100MW to Bangladesh from Palatana power plant in Tripura. l

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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Kailash Satyarthi assures quality education for children by 2030 n Shadma Malik Underscoring the need for compulsory education for all children, Nobel laureate and child rights advocate Kailash Satyarthi expressed his commitment to ensure inclusive and quality education for all children not only in the primary level but also in the secondary level by 2030.

“In spite of all the progress we are making in the world, 58 million children are still deprived of education. It is a shame even one child is left out,” he said while presenting a key note speech at the event titled “Interaction with Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi”

organised by Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) yesterday at the Pan Pacific Sonargaon Hotel in the capital.

Blaming child labour as one of the root causes for blocking a child's access to education, he said 168 million children were trapped into various forms of child labour. And out of them 85 million are languishing in the worst part of child labour that includes slavery, trafficking and working in hazardous occupations.

He urged the international community to come forward for children's education.

“Every single child matters. So the international community has to react. All children can be brought to school for twenty two bil-

lion dollars, which is not a very big amount.”

“I strongly feel that denial of education is a violence against children. Every child is born with this divine right to learn. We are living in the age of knowledge economy. So no country or society can participate in human development and economic growth without ensuring education for all.”

Talking about the attacks in schools across the world Satyarthi said: “Quality education can open up the minds of children. That is why terrorists are attacking the schools.”

He also urged the young people across the world to take up the leadership and make sure that every child has access to quality education. l

SSC, equivalent exam results today n UNB

The results of the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and its equivalent examinations will be published today.

The results will be handed over to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at 10am. Later, Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid will formally announce the results at a press briefing at 1pm.

The SSC and its equivalent examinations were held amid nonstop blockade and hartal programmes enforced by BNP-led 20-party alliance.

Not a single written test of the SSC exams could be held on scheduled dates and most of the exams were held on weekly holidays.

A total of 1,479,266 students took part in the exams under 10 education boards. l

JU teacher fired over sexual harassment n JU Correspondent

Authorities of Jahangirnagar University (JU) have fired a lecturer of the accounting and information system department for sexually harassing some female students.

The decision came at a meeting of the university syndicate on Thursday night with Vice-Chancellor Professor Farzana Islam in chair, Registrar Abu Bakr Siddique told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.

The lecturer in question, AKM Anisuzzaman, was found guilty as charged of the offences by the university probe committee, he said.

Earlier, Anisuzzaman was suspended from his duty on August 23 last year following the primary investigation of written complaints submitted by five female students in the department, sources said.

The authorities later formed a higher probe committee headed by the vice-chancellor for further investigation into the allegations, and based on their report the syndicate fired him. l

Foreign student dies at Dhaka University n DU Correspondent

A Nepali youth studying at Ibrahim Medical College died early yesterday at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).

The deceased was identified as Rudro Protab, a fourth-year student and a resident of Sir P.J. Hartog International Hall of Dhaka University.

Confirming the matter, Provost Professor Lutfur Rahman said the student was found unconscious in his room on Thursday night.

As the gate was locked from inside, the authorities had to break open and rescue him.

He was then taken to the DMCH where he died while undergoing treatment.

“He could have died due to drug abuse since doctors had found evidence of narcotics addiction,” the provost said.

He further added that the Nepali ambassador to Bangladesh was duly informed and arrangements would be made to send the body to Nepal. l

Winners of a photography contest arranged by Bangladesh Society of Photographic Art are accorded at the Cadet College Club in the capital yesterday MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

Bangladesh approaches positively for POC n BSS Bangladesh has taken a pragmatic approach to the protection of civilians (POC) mandate for UN peacekeeping operations and considers it to be an important yardstick for the legitimacy and credibility of peacekeeping missions, said State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam.

Addressing the International Conference on the Protection of Civilians, he underlined that the POC is essential for national responsibility because peacekeepers should be seen to be proactive in this regard when the national authorities appear to be unable or unwilling to do so, without compromising on the impartiality principle peacekeeping operations The conference was held in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on May 28-29, following the

Peacekeeping Summit held in New York in 2014 with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as co-chair.

Shahriar highlighted that Bangladeshi peacekeepers had effectively protected civilians in a number of conflict situations, often at great risks to themselves, according to a message received here yesterday.

He referred to the measures taken by BIPSOT to incorporate POC into their training curricula and the recent customised training programme organised in cooperation with the UN Mobile Training Team.

The conference was inaugurated by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and was attended, among others, by JosŠ Ramos-Horta, former president of Timor-Leste and chair of the High-level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations. l

DU student beaten for tearing posters n DU Correspondent

Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) unit of Dhaka University’s Ziaur Rahman Hall on Thursday night severely beat up a student for ripping posters displaying picture of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The victim Mohammad Mukter Khan, a third-year student of the Urdu department, was later handed over to Shahbag police, DU Proctor Amzad Ali confirmed.

Witnesses said Mukter was seen tearing up the posters at around 10pm. He was then summoned by BCL unit President Abu Salman Prodhan Shawon to the guest room of the hall where he was quizzed and beaten.

Abu Salman said: “We found evidence of his involvement with Shibir. We informed the proctor and he advised us to hand him over to police”.

When contacted Proctor Amzad Ali said action would be taken after proper investigation of the incident. l

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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Shillong court denies bail to Salahuddin n Tribune Report

A Shillong court of India yesterday denied bail to BNP Joint Secretary General Salahuddin Ahmed.

Quoting Salahuddin’s wife Hasina Ahmed, the party’s Assistant Office Secretary Abdul Latif Jony told the Dhaka Tribune that Salahuddin was not produced in the court for the hearing as he was ill.

Salahuddin’s lawyer told the court that as

the accused was severely ill, he should get bail, but the court denied the petition. The court, however, ordered the authorities to provide treatment.

Salahuddin, who was placed on a 14-day remand in judicial custody, has been readmitted to North Eastern Indira Gandhi Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (Neigihms) barely hours after he had complained of chest pain.

He had been discharged from the hospital on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier, his counsel SP Mahanta had told the court, which ordered the remand, that his client had been suffering from chest pain and could not sleep since Tuesday.

When Salahuddin was produced in the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate KML Nongbri, he looked weak and he also said the same to the judge, who directed the investigation officer to provide medical treatment.

The BNP leader was arrested on May 12 for entering India without any valid documents

and had last week moved court seeking bail for treatment in a Singapore hospital, where he had been undergoing treatment prior to his disappearance from Bangladesh in March.

After his arrest Salahuddin was admitted to the high security ward of Shillong Civil Hospital and was moved to the ICU at Neigihms on May 20.

The Meghalaya police will submit a report on Salahuddin’s arrest tomorrow when his bail application is also likely to be taken up. l

BNP hopes Hasina to discuss with Khaleda before meeting Modi n Mohammad Al-Masum Molla The BNP yesterday expressed its hope that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina would talk to Khaleda Zia to discuss issues of national interests prior to her meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“As the media reported, the prime minister will talk on several issues with Narendra Modi including Implementation of Land Boundary Agreement, putting an end to killing on border and Teesta water sharing,” said Asaduzzaman Ripon, acting spokesperson of the BNP. “We hope that prior to Modi’s meeting Sheikh Hasina will talk to the largest political party Chief Khaleda Zia. The government can also talk to experts in the BNP on such matters,” he said.

Addressing a press briefing at party’s Nayapaltan headquarters, the BNP leader said Teesta water sharing and border killing issues are not only the demand of a political party they are also the concern of the entire nation.

Reiterating that BNP is not against India, Ripon said a few days back the party had said it had never been against India.

“Our agenda is to raise our voices for the people of the country and to say about the development of the country.”

Praising Modi, the BNP leader said Indian prime minister is coming to Bangladesh along with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Benerjee.

When India signs any treaty, it talks to the provincial government. It is the beauty of democracy, he observed. l

Calling for a mass movement against the ongoing rape and sexual harassments to women, Samajtantrik Mohila Forum brings out a protest procession in the capital yesterday MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

EWG preliminary report on city polls unclear n Sherif Al Sayar

The preliminary statement made by the Election Working Group on April 29, a day after the three city polls, included some ambiguous information which has created confusion in some quarters, and was misunderstood or misreported by some media outlets.

For instance, the EWG statement says that irregularities took place in 90% centres in Chittagong. But it did not clarify that only a single incident occurred in 85% centres, and multiple incidents in only 5%.

In some cases a single incident is enough to spoil the election environment at a polling centre. But it depends on the type and extent of the occurrence. EWG did not give details on those single incidents, thus many media reported that voting at 90% of the voting centres was unacceptable.

99% figure not official In addition, many local and international media who used the EWG data have spread confusion regarding the election environment. Some of them published news items saying “99% irregularities in city polls” while reporting on EWG press conference. But its statement has no such data.

“The matter of 99% irregularities during polls was not part of our statement. One of our colleagues made the comment mistakenly, and we apologised for this during the press conference,” explains Dr Md Abdul Alim, director of EWG. Asked whether they had tried to resolve the matter following news reports, Dr Alim

said: “No, we did not give any statement, as an EGW member made the remark mistakenly and we immediately clarified that it was not part of our statement. If anyone makes a mistake, it is his/her responsibility.”

Prof Maruful Islam of Dhaka University’s development studies department terms such mistake an irresponsible act. “It is methodically wrong to place a research-based statement in a hurried manner. Such an act gives an unclear and unrealistic picture regarding transparency and management during an election. It is harmful for the political culture [of the country].”

EWG – a platform of 28 civil society organisations – was formed in 2006 with an aim to ensure transparency and accountability in election process and strengthening democratic process. It observes national and local-level polls across the country.

Ambiguous sections

According to Dr Alim, EWG had observed election at 181 centres of Dhaka North, 258 in Dhaka South, and 180 in Chittagong City Corporation.

EWG reported that the number of incidents of intimidation in Dhaka North was 33, ballot stuffing 55, violence 66, announcements of closing down polling centres 21, forcing agents out of the centres 28, and arrest inside centres two.

Even though EWG reported the number of incidents, the preliminary statement did not mention how many centres faced such incidents. Many media outlets thus confused the number of incidents with the number of

effected polling centres.

Dr Alim has subsequently clarified that irregularities took place at 88 centres of Dhaka North, 53 of Dhaka South, and 163 of Chittagong City Corporation. This means EWG found irregularities in approximately 49% centres out of the 619 observed.

The preliminary and the detailed reports, it can be assumed that EWG reported a single centre several times with regard to the types of irregularities including violence, intimidation and cancellation of votes More detailed information now available clarifies the preliminary statement also in the case of extent of irregularities.

For instance, EWG covered 163 out of 180 polling centres in Chittagong.

In Chittagong, the number of centres where a single incident of irregularities took place was 139 (85% centres).

EWG did not mention the extent of the single incidents and their impact on the election environment.

From the preliminary and the detailed reports, it can be assumed that EWG reported a single centre several times with regard to the

types of irregularities including violence, intimidation and cancellation of votes. Thus the total number of effected voting centres across the three constituencies was less than 50%.

All this clarifying information would be added to the full report, Dr Alim said, adding that it might take one more month to complete the report.

Asked how many incidents of irregularities can lead to categorisation of an election as not fair, he responded: “The first precondition of a fair election is participation of all political parties. The city elections had such participation. BNP withdrew from the polls at the very last moment. They participated though it is not a political election.

“Having a good number of candidates [so that voters have choices] is the second condition of a fair election, and it was met during the elections.

“Finally, the most important thing is massive presence of voters at the polling centres.

But this did not happen; they were obstructed. Voter turnout at the centres I and our teams visited was low until noon.”

The inconsistencies in the preliminary EWG report do not lead to the conclusion that the elections were free and fair. However, it is important to understand precisely what the preliminary report does and does not say, and that there be no confusion.

DU teacher Prof Maruful said: “There is no scope of hurrying to publish reports or statements on an election. It should be prepared taking enough time and in a well-organised manner.” l

DT

6 NEWS

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Stone crushing mill looted n Our Correspondent, Sylhet

Robbers looted valuables worth Tk3lakh from a stone crushing mill at North Kalabari in Companyganj upazila yesterday.

Locals said a gang of armed robbers, numbering 7-8 swooped on Golap Stone Crusher, around 8pm and kept its manager and five others hostage at gunpoint.

Later the robbers looted Tk3lakh and four mobile phone sets from the mill.

On information, Habibur Rahman, owner of the mill and resident of Rajnagar village, visited the spot and informed police.

Delwar Hossain, officer-in-charge of Companyganj police station, said they are investigating the incident. l

Section 144 imposed

n Our Correspondent, Moulvibazar

Children gather around at a mango orchard near Dipali’s home to receive basic education. Dipali, who is a housewife, has been running this free school for the last five years to spread the light of education at Gangailpara of Naldanga under Natore sadar upazila DHAKA TRIBUNE

A tale of a torch bearer n Kamal Mridha, Natore The school is called ‘Dipali’s School’ and it sits under the open sky at a mango orchard.

More than a dozen children gather here everyday from afternoon till dusk to receive basic education.

Their teacher is an impressive young Dipali Rani, who is otherwise an ordinary housewife. But what sets Dipali and the school apart is her commitment to providing free education to the ultra poor community of Gangailpara of Naldanga under Natore sadar upazila.

Despite her own poverty and limitation, she has been operating the school for the last five years providing the students with pen, paper and books.

BCL man killed in factional clash n Our Correspondent, Rajshahi

A Chhatra League activist was shot dead on Thursday night in a clash between two groups of the student wing of the ruling party at Ranibazar in Rajshahi. The deceased is Jiban Sheikh, 22, son of Hossain Sheikh of Raninagar area.

Boalia OC Mahmudur Rahman said: “Rajshahi City College unit BCL President Robin has beat Tuhin with the same unit over establishing supremacy in the area.”

He was rushed to Rajshahi Medical College Hospital where doctors declared him dead. l

Hailing from the marginalised community herself, Dipali Rani, daughter of Roghunath Hawlader passed the SSC examination from Basudebpur Shirishchandra Bidyaniketon in 2000. Her husband Shadhon Kumar is a barber at Jonail Bazaar of Baraigram upazila.

Before starting the school, Dipali was teaching at a local Brac school but she was sacked without any reason in 2007. This left her devastated. She wanted to do something and tried to get other jobs. But luck did not smile on her.

Understanding her situation, Shadhon managed some students for free education.

Dipali felt better gradually. She went from door to door and asked neighbours to send their children.

“Initially it was not easy as guardians

needed to be convinced. Also I had no proper class room or other facilities. But I continued the free school and found immense pleasure in teaching kids,” said Dipali.

Shadhon said he knew Dipali loved teaching. “So I try to save money and buy her books and pencils. If I could, I would buy a land and build her a proper school.”

As a recognition for her outstanding contribution to spreading education, Dipali was honoured by the government on March 26.

She received a crest from Upazila Nirbahi Officer Sharmin Akter Jahan.

“I will continue my school at any cost.

But yes it would definitely be like a dream come true if I get some government assistance,” Dipali said with a ray of hope in her eyes. l

The local administration imposed section 144 in haor area of the district following a clash between two groups over netting fish yesterday.

Police and locals said there had been a tense situation between two groups of people at Islampur village in Kasimpur area of Kawadighi haor over netting fish in the Koradair River.

Earlier, the two factions of people allegedly got involved in a clash. UNO Iynun Akther Panna told the Dhaka Tribune the section 144 had been imposed for indefinite period to avoid untoward situation. l

Three human traffickers held

n Our Correspondent, Cox’s Bazar Police in separate drives arrested three enlisted human traffickers from different spots in Teknaf of the district yesterday morning.

The arrested were identified as Abul Kalam, 35, son of Gura Mia, Mohammad Hossain, 30, son of Kalu Mia, Gafur, 26, son of late Abdul Kader.

Sources said on a tip-off, two team of law enforcers in a separate drives arrested the human traffickers from Hariyakhali and Katabania areas of Teknaf around 10am.

Teknaf police station Officer-in-Charge Ataur Rahman Khandakar said that the arrested were wanted in several cases. l

Cracks develop, pillars subside at newly built police station n Our Correspondent, Barisal

Cracks developed at 16 points while six pillars subsided of the newly constructed building of Kazirhat police station before it was handed over to the police in Mehendiganj upazila of Barisal.

Superintendent of Police, Aktaruzzaman, visited the site recently and asked public works department authority to inspect and repair the building.

Kazirhat police station Officer-in-Charge

Shawkat Anwar said Tipu Sultan, a contractor started the construction work of the one-storey building at the cost of Tk2.88 crore in 2012.

Former home minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir had inaugurated the under-construction building on September 11, 2013.

Since then, police authority asked PWD to complete the construction work rapidly.

Ignoring repeated requests, the construction work was going on slowly with substandard materials, Shawkat Anwar said, adding that PWD was yet to hand over the building

to police though the scheduled date passed on June 2014.

‘We are now operating our functions at an abandoned house at Kazirhat Bazar facing many difficulties,’ the OC added.

Zakir Hossain, executive engineer of PWD, ruled out any possibility of major risk by the cracks. He said the construction work had been done hastily for the inaugural programme of the minister.

The contractor was asked to repair faults before handing over, the PWD official said. l

DT

NEWS 7

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Govt plans to increase capacity to tackle disasters n UNB Aiming to tackle the risks of natural disasters, like earthquake, the government has initiated a move to strengthen the capacity of the concerned government agencies to efficiently and effectively respond to emergency events.

‘Urban Resilience Project’, an umbrella project supported by the World Bank, involving an estimated cost of Tk1,390.10 crore and having four components is awaiting approval at the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC).

Talking to UNB, a Planning Commission official said that the main objective of this Umbrella project is to strengthen the capacity of the concerned government agencies to efficiently and effectively respond to emergency events in Dhaka and Sylhet.

Besides, the project also aims to strengthen systems to reduce the vulnerability of future building construction in the two cities. Out of the total project cost of Tk 1,390.10 crore, Tk 58 crore will come from the government exchequer while Tk 1,332.10 crore or around $ 173 million as project assistance by the World Bank.

A total of six government agencies and bodies will be entrusted with the responsibility of implementing the four components of

the umbrella project from July, 2015 to June, 2020.

Economic Relations Division (ERD) Additional Secretary Kazi Shofiqul Azam said that the World Bank Board has already approved the fund for this project.

He said that once it is approved by the ECNEC, then the project agreement between the government and the World Bank will be signed by this month or the next month.

Another official at the Planning Commission said that the ‘Component A’ of the project is reinforcing the country’s emergency management response capacity which will be put in place and will mobilize the resources at all levels and assign roles and responsibilities more efficiently.

Department of Disaster Management will implement one part of this component with an estimated cost of Tk 126.20 crore. Dhaka North City Corporation is the implementing agency of another part of this component with estimated cost of Tk 750.80 crore while Dhaka South City Corporation, Sylhet City Corporation and Fire Service and Civil Defense will be involved for implementing this component.

The ‘Component B’ is vulnerability assessment of critical and essential facilities which aims to develop the consensus-driven ana-

lytical foundation required for longer-term investments to reduce risks in the built environment of Dhaka, Sylhet and other cities in Bangladesh.

The ‘Component C’ is improved construction, urban planning and development of which the objective is to put in place the institutional infrastructure and competency to reduce long-term disaster vulnerability in Dhaka. It would address both the existingbuilt environment as well as future development.

Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakhha (Rajuk) is responsible for implementing both the B and C components with an estimated cost of Tk 433.10 crore.

The ‘Component D’ is project coordination, monitoring and evaluation to provide necessary funding for project coordination, monitoring and evaluation. It will also ensure periodic evaluation of the investment program to highlight the outputs and outcomes in support of a longer-term investment program.

Project Coordination and Monitoring Unit (PCMU) of the Planning Commission will implement this component with an estimated cost of Tk 80 crore.

Out of the major project activities under various components, there will be establishment of the national disaster management

Female worker dies in factory fire

WEATHER

n Our Correspondent, Chittagong

THUNDERSHOWER WITH RAIN

SATURDAY, MAY 30 DHAKA TODAY

TOMORROW

SUN SETS 6:41PM

SUN RISES 5:11AM

FORECAST FOR TODAY 35 34 38 30 37 36 27 34

Dhaka Chittagong Rajshahi Rangpur Khulna Barisal Sylhet Cox’s Bazar

27 27 27 22 28 28 22 27

YESTERDAY’S HIGH AND LOW

38.1ºC

22.0ºC

Rajshahi

Dinajpur Source: Accuweather/UNB

PRAYER TIMES Fajr Sunrise Zohr Asr Magrib Esha

research and training institute (NDTRI) to increase national capability of disaster management methods, setting up of an Emergency Operating Center (EOC) in the capital for disaster management alongside setting up of satellite control rooms in 10 zonal offices, establish an Emergency Operating Center (EOC) in Sylhet, improving building code enforcement within Rajuk jurisdiction.

The Pre-Evaluation Committee (PEC) meeting on this Umbrella project was held on February 12, 2015 with Planning Commission member Arastoo Khan in the chair.

Earlier in December 2011, the ERD had requested the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) of the World Bank to lend support to Bangladesh for strengthening capacity to tackle disasters.

Following such request, the Washington-based lending agency through appointing an international consultation firm conducted a comprehensive pre-appraisal or pre-investment study.

Considering the necessity of effective response to urban disasters, reinforcing existing infrastructure and ensuring resilience construction aspects, the World Bank suggested for undertaking such investment project. l

3:42am 5:10am 11:56am 4:36pm 6:41pm 8:11pm SourceL IslamicFinder.org

Demanding allocation for housing and rationing in the national budget, RMG workers bring out a procession in front of the National Press Club in Dhaka yesterday MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

A female worker was burnt to death in a fire that broke out at a cotton warehouse of a spinning mill at Baluchara area under Baizid police station in Chittagong city yesterday afternoon.

The deceased was identified as Monowara, 40, a lopper of PHP Spinning Mills and wife of Md Jasim Uddin, said Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Pankaj Barua of Chittagong Medical College (CMCH) Police Outpost.

Assistant Director (AD) Mohammed Iyahia of Chittagong Fire Service and Civil Defense Headquarters in Agrabad said the fire originated from an electric short circuit at the cotton warehouse of PHP Spinning Mills around 12:30pm and soon engulfed the whole store, leaving the woman seriously burnt. l

50 men missing in Habiganj n Our Correspondent, Habiganj

At least 50 young men from different villages in Habignaj have gone missing after sailing for Malaysia in search of better livelihood, feared to have been fallen victims to human traffickers.

Families of the missing men claimed that they lost all contacts with them as soon as the men left home for Malaysia. Some of them managed to call their families and said they were being tortured, but since then their families have not been able to contact them.

“I sold my house to send my son to Malaysia. He told me to pay his employment agent Tk220,000, and I did. But since then I have had no contact with my son. He has been missing for around two-and-a-half months. He called me only once, and he told me they were torturing him,” said Minara Khatun, whose son

Mozammel Haque is one of the victims. They are from Goborkhola village in Chunarughat.

Sources said Hirai Miah, his brother Bachchu Miah, their cousin Abdul Ali and Riaz, and brother-in-law Mashuk lured the victims with the promise of lucrative jobs in Malaysia and sent them via sea, charging Tk2 lakh to Tk5lakh every person.

The agents are from Kedarakut village in Chunarughat. Among them, Hirai Miah is currently settled in Malaysia. Locals claimed there is another ring of human traffickers who jointly run the business with Hirai’s group.

The victims’ families said Bachchu has not given any information regarding their whereabouts. Despite learning that the victims are being tortured, their families have not been able to muster the courage to take legal action against Bachchu and other agents as Bachchu

is influential in the area.

They demanded immediate action against the agents and rescue of their missing family members to the authorities concerned.

Talking to the Dhaka Tribune, Chunarughat’s Gazipur union parishad Chairman Tajul Islam said: “Around 25 men from this area are among the missing. The agents went into hiding when word got out about this matter. We want immediate action on this issue and will help the authorities concerned as much as we can in this regard.”

Shahidul Islam , additional superintendent of police in Habiganj, told the Dhaka Tribune: “Our detectives have increased vigilance in the area, especially near the border [Bangladesh-India border] area, to catch the human traffickers.

No one has filed an official complaint against the agents yet; we will take appropriate action once an official complaint is filed.” l

DT

8 WORLD

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

India battles deadliest heatwave in two decades, 1,800 dead n AFP, Hyderabad Indian authorities urged hospitals to treat heatstroke as an emergency as the toll from a long heatwave topped 1,800 yesterday, making it the deadliest in more than two decades.

Hundreds of mainly poor people die at the height of summer every year in India, but this year’s figures are already nearly double the annual average.

Experts say the official figures likely understate the true impact because heatstroke disproportionately affects the poor and homeless, who are less likely to die in hospitals.

Most of the confirmed deaths are in the southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, where doctors described hospitals overflowing with victims of severe heatstroke.

P Tulsi Rani, special commissioner for disaster management in the state, said the high number of deaths was down to record high temperatures over a longer period that usual.

“So many people died this year because the heat wave is continuing for a longer period than it normally does, and also record temperatures have been recorded in a number of places,” he told AFP. “It (the heatwave) has been continuing for a longer period, for about 7 to 8 days now, whereas usually it only lasts for a few days.”

Authorities in Telangana said they were

running a television campaign to teach people how to stay cool and recognise the symptoms of heat stroke, which can be fatal if left untreated.

Streets of the state capital Hyderabad were deserted during the hottest period of the day, with many shops and businesses shut.

“All month I’ve basically stayed inside the house,” said 28-year-old Tejaswini Madhabhushi, who works at a policy institute in the city.

“The biggest problem is the power cuts. If they cut power in the afternoon then it gets unbearably hot, and we also run into a water shortage since the overhead tanks can’t be refilled.”

Authorities in Delhi, where top temperatures have hit 45 degrees Celsius, ordered hospitals to treat heat stroke victims as emergency cases.

“The main thing is prevention in this situation, to ensure that preventive measures are being taken,” said Charan Singh, additional director of public health in the state government.

The surge in demand for electricity from air conditioners led to power cuts in parts of Delhi, exacerbating the misery for residents of the capital.

Unconfirmed reports said two people had died in Delhi, where tens of thousands sleep on the streets with little protection from the heat.

Authorities in eastern Orissa state said they had 12 confirmed deaths from heatstroke and were investigating the cause of another 80. l

An eruption of Mount Shindake on Kuchinoerabujima island, is seen from a vessel of Japan Coast Guard, Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, in yesterday’s handout picture provided by the Japan Coast Guard. The volcano on the remote southern Japanese island of Kuchinoerabujima erupted suddenly on Friday, blasting plumes of black smoke high into the sky, prompting authorities to order the evacuation of the island’s residents and forcing airlines to divert some flights REUTERS

Greece mixes S Korea confirms 12 MERS cases messages on advising against travel and is now at a hospin AFP, Seoul in China. A list of 45 people, including colexpectations for deal South Korea confirmed five MERS cases yes- tal leagues and passengers who had sat close to terday, bringing the total number of patients him on the Hong Kong-bound flight, has been n AFP, Athens infected with the potentially deadly virus to drawn up.

Greece said yesterday that the deadline for reaching an accord to release much-needed bailout funds was the end of June, despite officials raising hopes of a deal being imminent as it flirts with the possibility of a default.

Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told VimaFM radio that under a February agreement “the country’s aid programme was prolonged until June 30.”

After four months of negotiating to unlock some 7.2 billion euros ($7.9 billion) in bailout cash with creditors – the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank, Athens’ coffers are near empty.

The Greek government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has consistently stressed the urgent need for a deal, with Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis warning last week that Athens had “no money” to make a series of repayments to the IMF that are due beginning June 5, totalling 1.6 billion euros If Varoufakis sees the end of June as the ultimate deadline for a deal, this would offer Athens and its creditors a longer timeframe to conclude their talks. l

12, including a man who defied a quarantine protocol and travelled to China, health officials said.

The infections were all traced to the original case of a 68-year-old man diagnosed on May 20 after returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is considered a deadlier but less infectious cousin of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus that appeared in Asia in 2003 and killed hundreds of people, mostly in China.

Symptoms may range from flu-like aches and pains to pneumonia and kidney failure.

The health ministry said the new MERS cases included a 30-year-old nurse from the hospital where the original case was reported, and a 56-year-old man who was treated there for other diseases.

A 44-year-old man who left for China on a business trip on Tuesday, a day after his father was diagnosed with the virus, was confirmed yesterday to have been infected, it said.

The man ignored a warning from doctors

The man later travelled from Hong Kong to the nearby Chinese city of Huizhou by bus.

Hong Kong’s health authorities said they had tracked down and would quarantine 12 people – three Korean, nine Chinese – who had close contact with the man on the flight and were still in the city.

“They will be sent to our quarantine camp later this evening,” the Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection chief Leung Ting-hung told reporters.

Leung added that two other passengers on the plane, not part of the group of 12, had shown mild respiratory symptoms and were being examined at a Hong Kong hospital.

South Korea’s second largest flag carrier, Asiana Airlines, remains on alert as the man used one of its flights, Yonhap news agency said, adding six crew members had been put in isolation.

Health officials said more than 120 people were being monitored after they were exposed directly or indirectly to the original patient. l

Hong Kong prodemocracy lawmaker barred from Malaysia n AFP, Hong Kong Malaysia barred a veteran Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker from entering the country yesterday branding him a “troublemaker,” days after student leader Joshua Wong was denied entry over fears he would threaten ties with China.

Leung Kwok-hung – known as “Long Hair” – of the League of Social Democrats was turned away from Kuala Lumpur airport and sent back to Hong Kong.

Leung, 59, had been due to speak about Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong’s electoral reforms to local activists yesterday night with an open discussion on human rights scheduled for Saturday.

“We do not welcome troublemakers into Malaysia and that is why we deported him (Leung) back to Hong Kong.

“We only welcome peace-loving people,” Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar told AFP. Khalid would not say whether Leung’s deportation was tied to Malaysia’s close ties with Beijing. l

DT

WORLD 9

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

IS claims Baghdad hotel car bombings that kill nine n AFP, Baghdad The Islamic State jihadist group yesterday claimed responsibility for car bombings at two upscale Baghdad hotels that officials said killed at least nine people and wounded dozens.

Militants were able to transport the bombs, which exploded just before midnight (2100 GMT) on Thursday and were heard across the city centre, inside the walled compounds of the Ishtar and Babylon hotels in central Baghdad.

IS – which has overrun swathes of territory north and west of Baghdad since June last year – claimed the bombings in an online statement, saying one car bomb was left at the Ishtar while the Babylon blast was a suicide attack.

A police colonel also said that it was a suicide bomber who had targeted the Babylon.

The blast at the Ishtar – formerly a Sheraton – shattered windows of the recently renovated hotel, turning rows of expensive cars and SUVs into charred, twisted metal.

The force of the explosion turned some cars on their sides, and more than 15 heavily damaged vehicles still sat in the car park yesterday.

The Ishtar is a popular site for wedding celebrations, and the area – which also includes a club and the Palestine Hotel – is crowded with people on Thursday nights.

IS frequently targets areas where crowds of people gather, including markets, cafes and mosques.

A man named Raad, standing near the blast site at the Ishtar, said it was one of the most secure places for both foreigners and Iraqis.

That a bombing can still happen even here “means there is no security,” he said.

Inadequate security measures

Despite the bombing, security at the entrance to the Ishtar compound was still light yesterday, and one man told guards that the “same procedures” were in place before and failed to stop the attack.

Other upscale Baghdad hotels also suffer from lax security measures, including cursory searches of vehicles and the use of bomb “detectors” that have been proven to be fake.

A second bombing struck the car park at the Babylon, another upmarket and recently refurbished hotel that overlooks the Tigris river, late on Thursday.

Police said security forces found another car bomb in the Babylon car park and defused the device.

The Babylon blast left holes in a section of the hotel and shattered its windows.

A flatbed truck could be seen carrying

a burned car out of the car park yesterday, while other damaged vehicles remained there.

The government lifted a years-old midnight curfew in February after Iraqi forces retook areas around Baghdad from IS and dismantled a major car bomb-making cell.

Attacks have continued since but are less frequent than in 2014.

IS, which is still battling government forces barely 30 kilometres (18 miles) west of the capital, has claimed many of the biggest attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country.

The Babylon and Sheraton were hit in coordinated attacks in January 2010, as was the Hamra which never reopened.

The attacks five years ago were carried out by suicide bombers and killed at least 36 people. They were claimed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became IS. l

Tripoli govt: IS seizes Libya airport n AFP, Tripoli

Firemen work at the site where a car exploded near a Shi’ite mosque in Saudi Arabia’s Dammam yesterday

REUTERS

Second Saudi mosque attack kills four n Reuters, Abu Dhabi

Islamic State claimed responsibility for a bombing that killed four people at a Shi’ite Muslim mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia yesterday, the second attack claimed by the Sunni militant group in a week in the world’s top oil-exporting country.

The Interior Ministry said a car exploded outside al-Anoud mosque in Dammam during noon prayers yesterday, while witnesses said a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up in the mosque’s parking lot when guards stopped him from entering.

The ministry said four people were killed in the blast, which set several cars ablaze.

Residents circulated pictures of the body of a man believed to be the suicide bomber as

well as pictures of black clouds of smoke billowing over a parking lot outside the mosque.

Video posted on social media showed the congregation inside the mosque reacting with shock and alarm to the noise of the explosion outside the building.

An Islamic State statement named the suicide bomber as Abu Jandal al-Jizrawi and said he had managed to reach his target despite heightened security.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing last week at a Shi’ite mosque in al Qadeeh village, near al-Qatif city, that killed 21 and wounded nearly 100 in the bloodiest militant attack in the kingdom in years.

Islamic State openly acknowledges it is trying to stir sectarian confrontation as a way of hastening the overthrow of the ruling Al

Saud family, and has urged young Saudi Sunnis in the kingdom to attack targets including Shi’ites.

Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, emir of neighbouring Kuwait, said on Wednesday sectarian strife was the most serious threat facing Muslims and called for immediate action to tackle it.

Some commentators in Saudi Arabia discussing the Qadeeh bombing have said the kingdom has not done enough to crack down on online abuse of Shi’ites, a discourse which Shi’ites say provides an incubator for violence against the minority sect.

Islamic State sympathisers exchanged photos of the scene on social media, saying the attack was targeting “rejectionsists” – a term usually used by the militant group or al Qaeda. l

The Islamic State jihadist group has seized control of the airport in the city of Sirte after forces of a Tripoli-based Libyan government withdrew, a spokesman said yesterday.

Mohamed al-Shami, whose government is not recognised by the international community, said its forces pulled out late Thursday from the airport which had “fallen into the hands of the IS organisation.”

He said the forces had pulled out of the airport, which is also a military base called Gardabiya, to redeploy “as part of an operation to secure” two areas east and west of Sirte.

It was the first time that IS in Libya has recorded such a military gain.

“After they left, Islamic State group fighters entered the base which had been completely emptied of equipment, except for one military plane which is out of use,” said Shami.

Gardabiya is located 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Sirte, hometown of late dictator Moamer Kadhafi who was ousted and killed in Libya’s 2011 uprising.

IS itself said it took full control of the airport following clashes with forces loyal to the Tripoli government, in a message posted on Twitter.

Sirte has been the scene of several months of sporadic fighting between IS and the Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn) militia alliance tasked by the Tripoli government to secure the city.

Shami said the pro-Tripoli forces would launch a counteroffensive to retake the airport once reinforcements arrived.

Sirte, 450 kilometres (280 miles) east of Tripoli, has been a bastion of Islamist extremism, with rival groups positioned in the Mediterranean city.

Since Kadhafi was toppled, chaos has gripped Libya as battle-hardened former rebel groups armed with heavy weapons carve out their own fiefdoms.

Fajr Libya seized control of Tripoli last year and set up a government and parliament opposed to the administration recognised by the international community that has taken refuge in the country’s far east near the border with Egypt. l

DT

10 WORLD

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

12 Australian women have tried to join IS n AFP, Melbourne At least 12 Australian women from one city have attempted to join the Islamic State group, police said yesterday, warning of a trend towards a “romanticised view” of violent jihadists.

More than 100 Australians have left the country to support IS in Syria and Iraq, raising concerns about radicalisation and whether they pose a security threat on return, the authorities have said. At least 30 have been killed overseas.

Victoria Police assistant commissioner Tracy Linford said those attracted to IS were

mostly young, isolated people swayed by slick social media propaganda.

In the case of women, they often had a romantic idea of what life would be like under Islamic State control, she said, adding that at least 12 had attempted to join from Melbourne, Victoria’s capital city.

“We’ve got five (women) that we know are over there,” Linford said, adding that two more were unaccounted for, four were turned back outside Australia and one was stopped at the airport before leaving.

“But we also suspect that there are probably more than 12,” she told reporters.

Linford’s comments came just days after

Singapore PM urges nations to end South China Sea row n Reuters, Singapore Singapore’s prime minister called on countries yesterday to break the “vicious cycle” of the South China Sea row, as the United States and China exchanged increasingly angry barbs over reclaimed islands in the disputed waterway.

Inaugurating Asia’s biggest security forum, the Shangri-La Dialogue, Lee Hsien Loong also warned of the threat of Islamic State militancy in Southeast Asia and said it was not inconceivable that the ultra-radicals could establish a base in the region.

Just hours before Lee spoke, the Pentagon said China had placed mobile artillery weapons systems on a reclaimed island in the South China Sea. US Defence Secretary Ash Carter, who is to address the three-day Shangri-La Dialogue today, has called for a halt to the reclamation work, saying it was out of step with the regional consensus. Singapore’s Lee said if the rise of China in the international order was to remain peaceful, US-Chinese relations had to remain strong. “No country wants to choose sides between US or China,” he said. l

A woman holds a placard during a ‘Slut Walk’ protest in Jerusalem yesterday. Several hundred people yesterday took part in the protest, marching through Jerusalem’s center. The SlutWalk movement began after a Toronto policeman suggested in 2011 that women could avoid sexual assault by not dressing like a ‘slut’ REUTERS

a Sydney mother reportedly abandoned her two children and fled to Syria for a new life under Islamic State.

“We think that the young women particularly get a romanticised view of what actually exists for them if they travel to the conflict zones,” she said.

“There is a reach-back from people who are already in the conflict zone telling them, ‘Come over... you will be well looked after, you will have an important position in growing the caliphate, bearing jihadi children in the future, growing the Islamic State’.

“And I think they think they are going to be put on a pedestal and treated very well once

they are overseas, but the reality is, that’s not the case.”

Linford said some women were forced into arranged marriages and others pushed into sexual servitude, while living in often squalid conditions and on rations, with their movements heavily restricted.

“One of things we know about ISIS is that their social media skills are well advanced, and their reach through social media is obviously paying dividends for them,” she said, using another acronym for the jihadists.

Earlier this week Prime Minister Tony Abbott said dual nationals linked to terrorism would be stripped of their Australian citizenship. l

DT

EDITORIAL 11

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

INSIDE

VIETNAM FDI 2014 $24bn Population 93m $258 FDI per capita

Can’t change society without hurting feelings

BANGLADESH FDI 2014 $1.6bn Population 160m $10 FDI per capita

PAGE 12

We need to break the silence, period PAGE 13

Cut red tape to grow FDI to meet Bangladesh’s potential

Arts & Letters PAGE 16-17

Remember Tiger Jatin

PAGE 18-19

Be heard Write to Dhaka Tribune FR Tower, 8/C Panthapath, Shukrabad, Dhaka-1207 Email letters.dt@ dhakatribune.com

Send us your Op-Ed articles:

opinion.dt@dhakatribune. com www.dhakatribune.com Join our Facebook community: https://www.facebook. com/DhakaTribune

W

e welcome the plans announced by the new FBCCI president to encourage new entrepreneurs to help the economy.

The government should support these moves by paying more attention to Bangladesh’s under-performance in attracting overseas investment.

FDI in Bangladesh grew to $1.6bn last year, whereas Vietnam which is benefiting from a similar demographic dividend to Bangladesh, attracted $24bn, a billion more than India, making it the second biggest recipient in Asia.

Bangladesh also compares poorly with Myanmar, which with less than a third of our population attracted over three times as much overseas investment in 2014.

With the continuing shift of the global economy towards Asia exemplified by the creation of the AIIB, and the strong trend of more companies, particularly from China, looking to outsource manufacturing jobs, it is more urgent than ever for Bangladesh to reform the barriers which deter investors.

The IFC’s most recent Doing Business Report marks Bangladesh’s global ranking for ease of doing business at only 173rd out of 189 nations. This is woeful under-performance given the ranking of our economy, which falls within the world top 60.

Bangladesh’s youthful population and growing market located at the crossroads of South Asia and South-East Asia, gives it huge potential to attract investment and create jobs. The government needs to emulate the strategic approach which Vietnam has undertaken to make its economy more conducive to business.

This includes tackling corruption, reforming red tape, and investing heavily in developing a more productive workforce and improving infrastructure, particularly in relation to energy and transport.

We cannot afford not to give more priority to addressing these challenges. The government must work harder at creating a more business-friendly environment if Bangladesh’s economy is to live up to its potential.

The government must work harder to reform the barriers which deter investors

DT

12 OPINION

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

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Can’t change society without hurting feelings n Taslima Nasrin

S

entiments will always get hurt, especially religious ones. There is no other way. Society cannot just stand in one place. Nothing will progress in this way. People averse to the idea of progress will not accept it, and will raise questions.

People don’t act out in such barbaric ways when other sentiments are hurt, as they do when religious ones are hurt. Why are religious sentiments so important?

Some say this is because a large portion of the world is religious. I often hear that it is not right to hurt the sentiments of 1.5 billion people.

People are giving too much importance to the number of people here. It seems like you can offend people in small numbers, but offending large numbers of people is a problem. Would it be okay if it was 150 or 1500 instead of 1.5 billion?

People who support the bloggers are saying that the bloggers did not hurt religious sentiments. So, do they also think that it is wrong to hurt religious sentiments? This is where the problem is. I have noticed that even the liberals seem to find it hard to accept that hurting religious sentiments is not a crime.

It is completely wrong to want to spend your entire life without an instance where your feelings might be hurt. It is normal to be offended by different things. There is not

a single person in this world who has never been offended by something or other. People are bound to be offended multiple times every day when they socialise with different kinds of people. That is just life.

Imagine A says that he believes in socialism and B says that some socialist leader has character problems, and that socialism has no ideological value.

be so respectful of religious sentiments?

Because religion is true, or because many people love the religion?

People who think religion is true should learn to react to it in the same way they react when their other feelings are hurt. The politics of sentiments is not new.

It has been raging against democracy, knowledge, science, women’s rights, human

The battle between science and religion is perennial.

Scientists don’t hack people who refuse to believe their theories, but fundamentalists do

Then is it okay for A to say that B has offended his political sentiments? And this gives A the right to sue B and maybe also slaughter him in public? B has, in fact, hurt A’s political sentiments. The question is, so what?

These incidents don’t happen when other sentiments are hurt. They only happen when religious ones are hurt. Why do we have to

rights, and equal rights for all. Now we must choose which side we want to save -- religious sentiments or democracy, knowledge, and equal rights.

The politics of religious sentiments has taken a violent turn. The solution for this is not to protect religious sentiments. Rather, the opposite. It must be attacked constantly.

Even more so than before. This is how people

will eventually learn how to deal with it. Otherwise, the people in the business of religion will destroy what is left of society.

No one has been able to achieve women’s rights without offending misogynists, and no one has been able to establish human rights without offending people against equal rights for all. From establishing democracy to science -- some people have always been offended. If the business of religion is to be stopped and stale social norms are to be broken, religious sentiments must be regularly attacked.

If you want to side with the bloggers or the atheists, it is not appropriate to say that they did not hurt anybody’s religious sentiments.

Rather, you should say that they attacked people’s religious sentiments because it was necessary to do so. The fundamentalists want the word “atheist” to be a curse word.

If “atheist” is a curse word, then “believer” is the same.

You may curse as you please, but violence is not acceptable. Ideology must be fought with ideology. The battle between science and religion is perennial. Scientists don’t hack people who refuse to believe their theories, but fundamentalists do. This will not stop unless the entire country protests together. l Taslima Nasrin is a feminist writer and columnist currently in exile in India. This article has been translated from the original Bengali.

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OPINION 13

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

We need to break the silence, period n Amina Akbar

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omen and adolescent girls experience a special time every month -- their menstruation time. Although it is entirely a biological phenomenon for women, some societies which are less developed or developing, like Bangladesh, prefer to remain silent about it.

Mothers feel shy and embarrassed to talk to their daughters about the reproductive system. As a result, when a girl experiences her period for the first time in her life, she gets perplexed thinking either she is going to die or something very serious is happening to her body.

The irony is that her social condition puts her in an entirely tricky situation. First, she stops going to school because she is unable to manage her new physical state with proper knowledge as most of our schools do not have toilets -- or more specifically, usable separate toilets for girls that they need in order to deal with the situation.

The second problem occurs when most girls decide to stay home, being deprived of these sanitary facilities in schools. The first thing that immediately comes to their parents’ minds is to marry those girls off.

So, it has been suggested that to keep our girls in schools and help them continue their education, we must provide them with clean, usable, separate toilets with sanitary materials.

A study shows that in India, around 23% of girls aged 12-18 drop out of school after their periods begin, and those in schools miss an average of five days a month.

According to a 2005 UNICEF report, one in ten school-age African girls do not attend schools during their menstruation or drop out from schools at puberty because of the absence of clean and useable toilet facilities in schools.

In Bangladesh and other low income countries, only 45% of schools have adequate toilets. Although our government has made it mandatory for every school to have one toilet for every 25 girls, very few schools actually have those facilities.

We did a survey in 10 rural high schools in Naogaon, Kulaura, and Satkhira, where almost 90% of girls (N=40) said they preferred cloth instead of napkins. Almost every month, girls miss valuable school hours during their menstruation time going home to change clothes, as very few of them use sanitary napkins. Traditional cloth use during menstruation is unhygienic, as bacteria can grow easily if those are not cleaned and dried properly.

The reason behind this preference of traditional methods is that napkins are too expensive for them. Some of the girls pointed out that they find it difficult to throw away used napkins, as their toilets do not have any trash cans to use for waste materials.

Some girls identified another problem with buying napkins from shops: Many girls feel shy about buying napkins by themselves from the market, and also feel uncomfortable to ask their fathers or brothers to buy napkins for them.

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Mothers and female teachers need to talk more openly to their daughters about this issue to dismantle the taboos that shame us and regulate our lives

Women and Girls Lead Global’s “best school for girls” campaign is trying to promote an enabling environment for girls in schools.

From our extensive field visits, we rarely found schools with toilets that were usable, clean, or hygienic for our girls.

Some toilets do not even have doors to give girls privacy. We requested some school headmasters to have those toilets repaired, and they promised us to do so without any

hesitation, but they mentioned fund shortages as a reason to have those toilets remain unrepaired.

Although Bangladesh has been trying hard to build a strongly educated nation, and has made education its top priority for decades and the bigger slice of our budget has been allocated for education, it is surprising how our schools could remain so unfriendly for our girls.

To solve this problem, we need to develop a strategic plan. Governments can subsidise and supply pads to schools to sell them at a very low price. Girls will feel more comfortable buying them from their female teachers than from a male shopkeeper.

Some pharmaceutical company can distribute these as free samples to students to advertise their products, which will eventually help them promote their products to female students.

Mothers and female teachers need to talk more openly to their daughters about this issue to dismantle the taboos that shame us and regulate our lives.

But the most import one is to have usable toilets with baskets and soaps in the schools.

We have to keep in mind that if we leave our girls behind, our entire development plan will be futile.

So, we need to do our best to provide our girls with all the basic facilities that they need to continue their education. l Amina Akbar is Communications Specialist, ITVS.

DT

14 LONG FORM

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Looking beyond the ivory tower

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n Nayma Qayum

I

n the Dhaka of my teenage years, having a child attend an Ivy League or otherwise elite American institution was almost a rite of passage for upper middle class parents. If one attended Harvard, people assumed that they had made it. Their parents beamed with happiness every time they bragged, while the parents of children attending “smaller schools” remained silently sulking.

“Wherever in the world is Colgate?” Someone once asked me of my own alma mater.

“Couldn’t you have transferred to Harvard or Columbia?” And then there was the Bangladeshi gentleman attending a reception sponsored by my public-school doctoral department bragging that his daughter had gotten into a public undergrad institution under the same umbrella as my school, but “you know, I asked her to go to Columbia, because it’s better. It’s Columbia,” he said, while munching on food paid for by my nonelite department.

Many of these parents may not be aware that prestige is not everything. If you want to make money, Harvard may not be the best place to go. A new study found that in order to be a top earner, you need to go elsewhere.

My own unheard-of alma mater ranks fourth on this list. You may be wondering how much money I make. I don’t make a lot. I chose to go into academia. But many of my peers and friends do. Exception: To be a guaranteed high earner, try to get into Caltech. That is like winning the jackpot.

Similarly, potential Bangladeshi students

choosing comfort over prestige (after all, you don’t want to come back over the summer and refuse to get on a flight back to school) may want to look elsewhere. Have a look at the Princeton Review’s list of schools with the happiest students. The Ivies are nowhere to be seen. Small colleges, such as Vanderbilt, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont McKenna top the list, although a few larger universities such as Clemson and Rice have found their way into the mix.

cial aid to non-US students. But the foreign students attending these institutions are usually cream of the crop -- wealthy, connected, and/or exceptionally brilliant.

Not every child can go to Harvard. This fact has less to do with the student’s intellect than their parents’ financial capacity. Unless you are truly exceptional and/or your stars are perfectly aligned, you need a lot of money to go to the elite ivies. In the United States, college admission statistics reflect large soci-

Bangladeshi parents: Don’t be apprehensive about sending your children to non-Ivies. The prestige that comes with attending an Ivy alone lasts for a few years

These schools encompass smaller, close-knit and supportive communities that are especially important for international students, who often leave their homes for the first time as they go to college and find themselves in a strange and unfamiliar academic and social environment.

And yet, we find that elite universities top the ranks of schools with the most international students. That is not surprising. They have huge endowments which allow them to provide substantial scholarships and finan-

oeconomic disparities. Of these, elite schools reflect the highest inequalities. This is largely because colleges rely on high-income students for their finances and cannot afford to support low or middle-income students.

But here is the thing. Not everyone’s child needs to go to Harvard (or Columbia, or Yale).

Let’s face it. The elitist nature of selective schools is undeniable. Even selective public schools see such lack of diversity, very often due to economic disparities in the quality of high school education. Bottom line, if your

child attends a highly selective school, they will probably be socialising with the cream of the crop of elite society -- which is fantastic if that is what they want. But not every incoming college student wants to be locked in that tower.

Let’s stop thinking of the Ivy League world as an unattainable dream and find some solace in the fact that elite schools may not be the only -- or even the best -- choice for all students. The Ivies are large, elite, research-based institutions. I went to a small liberal arts college (SLAC, in academic slang and disclaimer: An elite one). I found some of my mentors there, but others, I found elsewhere.

My math teacher Dr Gopal changed my view of the world and treated me like I was oh-so-exceptionally smart, even when my other teachers were not so sure. I met him during my high school years at a remote hilltop boarding school. I did not do all that well in college calculus, but I do teach statistics now; so something must have clicked there.

In my liberal arts alma mater, I was once locked into a class with a professor whose perspectives were diametrically opposed to mine. Because I was outnumbered (international student, third culture kid), I suffered in silence. My grade reflected that suffering.

I also met two outstanding professors at the very same institution. One worked very closely with me on my senior thesis and led me to discover a new lens to view the world.

He brought out my inner philosopher and social scientist.

I was a misunderstood intellectual rebel, but he spoke my language. My advisor said to

DT

LONG FORM 15

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

me once, “You are like me. We excel at what we love and are terrible at everything else.”

If I had attended a large university, I would have been lost in the masses and he would have never found me.

There is a popular misconception that professors in Ivy League schools are the very best. Yes, they are the most established scholars in the field. However, that does not mean that they are the best teachers. A peek at ratemyprofessors.com, a website where students rate their professors themselves, shows that the best professors do not teach at the Ivies.

Professors at the Ivies and other research-based institutions have low teaching loads and (incredibly) high research expectations for tenure. At smaller teaching schools, the tenure process requires professors to demonstrate teaching excellence above all other requirements. Smaller classes allow students to connect with their professors on a one-to-one basis.

The environment and culture at smaller liberal arts colleges allow professors to devote time and attention to pedagogical methods and bring out the best in their students. This is not to say that professors at elite (and research) institutions are not dedicated teachers. However, research excellence takes precedence over teaching excellence at many of these schools. They may be exceptional scholars, and thus mentors for graduate students, but not always the best fit for all undergraduates. Some liberal arts schools are elite institutions, but many are affordable public schools. I currently teach at one of them.

The kind of college you attend determines how you learn and what you learn.

And to a large degree, what you gain from your college experience is a direct outcome of a match between your personality and learning style on the one hand, and college culture on the other. A small and close-knit academic community allows professors to bring out the very best in their students, whereas in larger schools, the responsibility often falls on the student alone.

Many smaller schools also embrace a liberal arts curriculum, which I wholeheartedly believe in. The best professors that I have met teach students how to think, not what to think. They ask students to question the foundations of their thinking, to sometimes reject those foundations, and at other times, reinforce them. Their students are excited about learning and engage in spirited intellectual debates, both inside and outside of class.

Traditionally, such intellectual adventures were the privilege of the elite. However, one writer eloquently explained why he taught Plato to plumbers -- we all need to strive to be a society of free people and be more than subservient managers. I aspire for my students to experience the freedom found in the realm of ideas. Very often, they find something that ignites a thought, but have no room to let that thought grow. It is up to professors to help them create that space.

“The fire will always be sparked,” the author wrote, “Are we going to fan it, or try to extinguish it?”

I am sure you are wondering why one should choose ideas over prestige. After all, don’t the Harvard and Princeton graduates come with the prestige that every recruiting organisation desires? Perhaps. However, even assuming that elite-school graduates find jobs far more easily than others (and this is not always the case), their degrees are not sufficient to retain those jobs. We live in

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an era of innovation and ideas, where being a good employee is not enough to maintain a steady job. The best get ahead and the second-best often don’t make it. The millennials experience different challenges than their parents did. It takes them longer to find professional and financial security, and exceptional skills and talents to make their mark on the world. In this game, knowing your stuff is not good enough. You have to bring new ideas to the table.

Small teaching schools also help students develop a very different set of skills and values than those developed by students attending large, elite, research-based institutions. The world that we live in faces different threats than it did a generation ago -- inequality, environmental calamities, and conflict, for instance.

It needs students who are equipped to tackle those challenges head on. Arming oneself for the rat’s race is so very nineties. Today, we need more students with non-material values that drive them towards community service, public responsibility, research, and humanitarian work. The academic culture at elite institutions encourages students to sharpen their competitive edge.

After all, they are the very best, competing with each other to come out on top.

While schools across the spectrum offer opportunities for community engagement

and this distinction is by no means absolute, my observation has been that a larger number of students in public and liberal arts institutions pursue careers beyond the private sector. Of course, this distinction is not absolute and many liberal arts institutions are also elite schools.

However, the close-knit communities and collaborative academic culture in liberal arts institutions lead students to community engagement and activism in ways that are not as easy in schools with a competitive academic culture.

The purpose of this piece is not to discredit the Ivies or the private sector -- the world needs those -- but to discuss possible alternate paths. During the annual department dinner at the public liberal arts college where I now teach, I looked around in amazement at the graduating seniors. About a third planned to attend law school whereas another third had plans for humanitarian or NGO-related work.

The last third was undecided and that group included some of the department’s truly exceptional students. They realised the stark difference between the two paths and confided that they did not want to be forty and realise that they were in the wrong career. They would rather take a year off now to figure out what to do with their lives. One future lawyer expressed his guilty reluc-

tance: “I sold out, I know,” he said. I told him not to worry. “We need change-makers on the inside as well as the outside.”

Bangladeshi parents: Don’t be apprehensive about sending your children to nonIvies. The prestige that comes with attending an Ivy alone lasts for a few years. Consider sending them to teaching schools where professors are expected to think more about pedagogy than research. Send them to public schools so that they can learn about diversity and inequality. Send them to a small liberal arts school so that they can learn how to think instead of what to think.

I will not deny that I have my own biases.

I don’t want to teach the privileged. I want to teach those who are just as capable but do not have access to the ivory tower. I want to teach students who are lagging because they could not attend privileged high schools.

Teaching is kind of like building an army -- an army of thinkers, explorers, and change makers. And perhaps the best way to think about college is to identify a school that will arm your child with the best ammunition so that victory can take them closer to a life that they desire for themselves -- and in the process, also figure out what that life looks like. l Nayma Qayum is an academic. This article was first published on www.alalodulal.org.

DT

16 ARTS & LETTERS

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

An interview with Meike Ziervogel At the last Bengal Lights conclave, the Dhaka Tribune sat down with the acclaimed German novelist of Magda. Her latest novel, Kawther, about a woman who becomes an extremist, is slated for release this fall.

It's not about whether or not religion is incompatible with modern life. It's up to every individual to decide for him or herself.

Tell me about Magda. What made you try and get into the mind of Magda Goebbels?

The starting point was my own personal history and in fact, I studied history for the A Level equivalent in Germany. There was a moment in my life a few years ago when I realised that I really want to look into my own history again, and partly it had to do with being German – one of my grandfathers was in the Nazi party and another was a soldier -- and I realised that up to that point, I always thought that my grandparents weren't that clever and it wouldn't have happened to me.

And I thought I need to actually put myself into that position.

I'm very aware of the fact that I'm part of the first generation of Germans who can actually look at that point in history from a psychological point of view because we’re far enough removed. Initially, I didn’t know that it’d necessarily be about Magda Goebbels.

She just caught my attention as a vehicle.

Because she was a very intelligent and well educated woman and yet she became a Nazi.

So I couldn’t give myself the let-out of her being a slightly silly woman who became a Nazi because she had nothing better to do.

Because she was so intelligent, you forced your reader to empathise with how an educated person could be turned into a Nazi?

Yes. Another thing which attracted me to the figure of Magda Goebbels was really that before she married Joseph Goebbels, she was a leading Zionist. She learnt Hebrew, wore the Star of David, and wanted to convert to Judaism. So I thought, what happened for her to switch totally from being a Zionist to marrying a leading Nazi.

Were you able to find out what drove her?

My interpretation is that she was a very ambitious woman but she wasn’t capable of taking responsibility for her own ambition.

What she did was she transferred that on to successful and charismatic men, regardless of their political inclination. She misjudged the Nazis. She thought that by marrying into the leading circle she would gain power herself. And I think she realised too late that this was not going to happen. The Nazis were very conservative on their views on women.

And rather than saying to herself that “oh my

Which would require some kind of compromise on each person's part?

Exactly. Social human existence is all about compromise and that relates to this idea of freedom which people often get wrong. We have freedom but with freedom comes responsibility. We can't just behave the way we want to behave, and just because it doesn’t suit me how you dress or speak, I can’t behave like a little child having a tantrum.

Coming off of that, tell us a bit about Kawther.

god, I made a huge mistake,” she said now I have to become even more “Nazi-esque.” Of course, she became a Nazi, I’m not making excuses, I'm just trying to understand what might've gone on in her head.

I think you said in the panel yesterday that the Nazis are not monsters. Why do you think we dehumanise them so much? Or at least, the West does?

I think it’s a safe thing to do. Because if we're dealing with monsters. It’s against “the Other.” And you and I would never run the risk of ever possibly going down that route. However, we do need to understand and look at all of these phenomenons in the context that these were created by humans.

All these atrocities that the Nazis committed, they could because they were humans, not because they were monsters. There are genocides happening all the time. We still haven’t understood how they come about. We know the facts but I think we need to look at it much more closely in order to understand what makes us tick as humans.

Do you think Islamic extremism is the new “Other”?

There are similarities, but also huge differences. The Nazis set out to exterminate a whole race, to an extent that is unprecedented in history. The Islamic fundamentalists

like ISIS are terrorists, and not on the same scale. They want to impose their beliefs on the rest of humankind but they go about it very differently. Having said that, both the Nazis and ISIS have a religious doctrine.

The Nazi doctrine was a hermeneutic belief system and Islamic fundamentalists have created their own belief system. And I stress “their own” because although it’s called Islamic fundamentalism or extremism, in most cases, they are misinterpreting.

So you believe it's a case of misinterpretation as opposed to religion being archaic?

Yes. I use the example in Kawther. If you read the Old Testament, it's very violent, and it comes up with statements like, “If you see your neighbour work on a Sunday, you may kill him.” And here we are both on a Sunday!

Any religious text is a symbolic text and if taken out of context -- it may be the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Qur’an -- you can play havoc.

In that case, is fundamentalism incompatible with liberal ideologies ?

Yes. But not necessarily Islam. Fundamentalism doesn't equal Islam. One has to be careful -- how much is fundamentalism about Islam as a spiritual system, and how much is it about misinterpreting religious terminology.

You can’t use religious texts like a cookbook.

What I'm fascinated by is how we, as human beings, have the capability to commit incredible atrocities. And the one who commits atrocities is convinced that they're doing the right thing. With Kawther again, the starting point was a very personal one. I studied Arabic in university, lived in Egypt, and there was a moment when I could’ve converted to Islam. I was attracted to the mystical side of Islam, which is very beautiful. I was also very young and I was looking for guidance because the world with all its possibilities seemed overwhelming. It would tell me exactly what to do.

But that moment came and passed. And I think that was the right decision because I would’ve converted for the wrong reasons.

My protagonist, Kawther, is an intelligent, educated woman in her 30s. And she converts to Islam for what I call the right reasons.

And then I wanted to send my protagonist on a journey to see what needs to happen psychologically for her to then start to misuse and misinterpret her religion. And eventually be convinced that she needs to commit a crime in order to prove to god that she loves Him or to get Him to love her.

Does your writing serve a purpose?

Well, as a writer, I let myself down a journey to understand someone’s behaviour. I can’t necessarily even explain it to you. Now that doesn't mean that I excuse or agree but what I’m hoping is by doing that I’m opening up a dialogue somewhere which might lead to the next step out of the dilemmas we’re in at the moment. l

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ARTS & LETTERS 17

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Ali May’s forbidden tales speak for all of us n SN Rasul In “Concerto,” one of Ali May’s beautifully written short stories in the collection Geography of Attraction, the protagonist, Amandine, a cellist and dominatrix, feels that “when it comes to words, she tolerates no sacrilege. Words are tender vehicles, capable of delivering healing of a potency no other medicine can replicate.” And as one reads through the rest of May’s stories, one can’t help but feel a similar sentiment resonate through the other characters and narratives.

This collection of short stories, with each storing a strong erotic undercurrent, exhibits the flair with which May composes his narratives. The first story, “When It Gets Hot In Tehran,” pushes us right into the midst of both this very exact attribute, and the spatial nature of the collection. “The first time I had sex was on a bus,” says the unnamed narrator of the piece. And we, as readers, know we are somewhere we haven’t before: In the Iranian capital, on a segregated public bus, the sun beating down on our skin, the heat infused into the air, sweat dropping like dead flies from our foreheads.

And in the midst of all this, of women clad in burqa and men toiling to work, one can feel the erotic element come through in subtle bursts. The character, an inexperienced young man, is shocked by the forward-nature of one of the “hidden” women on the bus, who starts to rub herself against him.

Much like that, May transports us from one location to another with breakneck speed, and into worlds unknown and unexplored. With each story no longer than a few pages (the entire collection makes up less than a hundred pages), one may be forced to feel that one is not getting their money’s worth. But May’s expertise when it comes to the language is evident, as he weaves from place to place, from conversation to conversation, from one slightly sexual experience to the next erotically charged incident.

The stories cover a variety of locations, from the aforementioned Tehran, to London, to Cophenhagen. Almost cyclically, May keeps coming back to Iran, almost like a scratch that needs to be itched. He doesn’t stick to just one breadth of the sexual spectrum -- he moves from the subtle hints of pleasure felt by teenagers, to the flirtations of an older woman seeking to explore, to the taboo nature of a dominatrix leading a double life.

It would be a mistake to consider May’s collection as just stories about sex. He explores the nature of humanity subtle but effectively. The conversations carry the weight of a thousand experiences beforehand, but manage to exhibit them with acute emotion. The alternative viewpoints cascade into each other, the multiple narratives etching into our minds, struggling for coherence among a multitude of voices in the urban landscape.

What May does, really, is not just explore the geography of literal space, but of the minds and hearts of people, whose interactions and experiences are dictated by the location of all three. l SN Rasul works for the Dhaka Tribune.

You may now call me endeavour n Elizabeth Jordan Today I’ll shave my legs to silk, And maybe trim my hair too, And use the golden threads left over, To twist a choker.

BIGSTOCK

Then I’ll maybe dye the rest mauve, And cut myself a fringe, Then only wear turquoise, darling, To be the colour of precious gems, And my clothes will smell of incense, To make my dog sneeze as it passes,

I’ll spritz myself with coconut juice, The breath of god shall grace my wrists.

I’ll remember that lipstick I had, Shadow over my eyes not under, Underwear made of the prettiest laces, The colour of spring rain, Fingernails varnished only in dried mouth water, From when I chew them.

Elizabeth Jordan is a writer, she blogs at lilyrosedreamer. blogspot.com

DT

18 HERITAGE

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Remember Tiger Jatin

n Tim Steel

C ‘Had Jatin Mukherjee been an Englishman, the English would have erected his statue at Trafalgar Square, by the side of Nelson’s,’ Tegart is reported as telling his colleagues

lose to the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata stands the equestrian statue of Bangladesh born Jatindranath Mukherjee. The classic stance of the noble mount, with one hoof off the ground, in the tradition of equestrian statuary, symbolises the rider’s death from battle wounds. Wounds received in a fight from which he emerged, fatally wounded, but with the admiration and respect of his opponents. A fight that was yet another on the road that was, eventually, to achieve the independence for the people of the sub-continent from their British colonial masters.

Few of those engaged in that, arguably, near century of struggle, both political and in arms, have emerged with the expressed regard of both allies and enemies alike, but Mukherjee was, perhaps, the most respected of all his contemporaries, as the noble statue suggests.

He was, certainly, also one of the most feared, by his enemies, of the freedom fighters who led that early 20th century struggle for Indian independence. That he was also one of the most admired, by friend and foe alike, is evidenced in the respect paid to him

by Sir Charles Tegart, at the time of Jatin’s death in 1915, deputy commissioner of police in Kolkata. “Had Jatin Mukherjee been an Englishman, the English would have erected

his statue at Trafalgar Square, by the side of Nelson’s,” Tegart is reported as telling his colleagues. In 1925, Mahatma Gandhi, described Jatin to Tegart as, “a divine man.”

He was born in the village of Kayagram, now in Kushtia district, in December 1879. After the death, at the age of five, of his father, in Jhenaidah, his mother took him back to her father’s home in Kayagram, where he was to be brought up under the influence of his grandfather, and his very talented mother, Sharatshashi. She was a talented poet, whose brother, Basantakumar Chatterjee was a practising lawyer and teacher, counting Rabindranath Tagore amongst his clients. With such a well connected family, and with a mother aware of and involved in the social and political changes of the time, well-versed in the writings of such as the literary lions, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and Yogendra Vidyabhushan, it was not surprising that, when he entered Kolkata Central College in 1895 to study fine arts, and also taking time to study stenographics, he was quickly caught up in the swirling currents of demands for independence.

The younger Jatin had already built something of a reputation for both his religious interests, such as any Brahmanic household would have certainly encouraged, but also for his lack of communal fervour. Indeed, on one occasion he came across an elderly Muslim widow struggling with a heavy bundle of fodder, of which he quickly relieved her, carrying it to her home, where he shared with her the only plate of rice she had, and, on leaving her, commenced what was to become a regular practice of sending to her a monthly sum of money.

There is no doubting that Kolkata was already writhing in the coils of, not so much a demand for independence itself, as a desire for the educational and cultural attainments of its many students to be respected by the colonialists, many of whom, of somewhat lower middle-class origins in Britain, and probably lower levels of educational attainment, were of the school that manifested itself in such

It was on his return from that journey that he earned the soubriquet, “Tiger,” by seeking out, and killing in a bare hands conflict, a leopard that was troubling his home community notices outside their clubs as “No dogs and Indians admitted.”

Falling under the influence of the great Swami Vivekanda, who is widely credited, not only with the great late 19th century revival of Hindu religion, but also bringing to a wider world such practices as yoga, he rapidly reached the same view as his guru, that a politically independent India was an essential prerequisite to the spiritual advance of humanity … especially, if not only, in India.

Already embraced by the social, political and religious communities who shared the certainty that only independence could advance the cause of the native people, in 1900 he married, his wife, also from lands that are now Bangladesh, the village of Kumarkhali, in Kushtia district, his first born son, Atindra, being born in 1903. In 1906, however, the death of his first-born, first of four children, devastated both him and his wife, and they made a pilgrimage together.

It was on his return from that journey that he earned the soubriquet, “Tiger,” by seeking out, and killing in a bare hands conflict, a leopard that was troubling his home community.

His involvement in the movement for independence has already seen him, in 1900, as a founding member of the Dhaka and Kolkata-based Anushilan Amity, an association, op-

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HERITAGE 19

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

erating under the guise of a suburban fitness club that was, in fact, an armed, anti-British organisation.

It was probably the apparent respectability of such a fitness club, that enabled him, in 1905, to meet and draw to the attention of the Prince of Wales, later to become King George V, the exclusion of highly educated Indians from any real participation in their own governance. Sadly, it is well-known that Prince George lacked the kind of independence of spirit which was, later, to characterise his eldest son and heir, King Edward, the 1937 successor and abdicator; it is evident that that the future king and emperor, took no notice of Jatin’s suggestion. Perhaps, had he been inclined to do so, history might have taken a different course.

Equally, although, by the time of the visit of the crown prince of Germany in 1911, Jatin had already been identified as participating in a less peaceful attempt to “right the many wrongs,” his rising profile enabled him to meet with the crown prince and receive assurance of arms supply to support insurrection against the British. As a cousin of King George, the crown prince, no doubt, received a royal reception in India, but was, equally, already obviously preparing for a war against the realms of his royal and imperial relative.

That promise of German support, however, underlines the extent of Jatin’s, evidently reluctant, conviction that armed insurrection was the only way to forward the social and cultural interests of Indians. It was, also, to prove a fatal promise.

In 1915, arrangements were already signalled by Germany that arms would be supplied, somewhere along the coast between Noakhali and Chittagong.

Jatin’s association with the rising resistance to the 1905 partition of Bengal, a resistance that morphed into armed independence movements, including assassination, had already embroiled him as a suspect in the

unsuccessful attempt to kill a magistrate renowned for his severity of sentencing nationalists; the attempt resulted only in the death of two women.

By 1911, he had lost his job in Kolkata, and under home arrest, he, nevertheless, managed to set up a contracting job in the building of the Jessore-Jhenaidah railway, which gave him more freedom, by the onset of the World War, to pursue his own attempts at armed resistance, with an organisation named Jugantar. Finally, early in 1915, it became clear that arrival of the German arms was imminent.

The plot, however, had already been betrayed, by Czech patriots in USA. As soon as the British authorities were apprised of the plot, which also identified Balasore, in Orissa, as the location finally decided for the landing of weapons (interestingly, the site of the first East India Company trading centre in the region, set up about 1620), and police despatched to arrest Jatin and his associates.

Flight proved abortive; Jatin and his people possessed merely handguns with which they had to combat rifle armed police in far greater numbers. An injured Bagha Jatin was arrested, and taken to hospital in Balasore, where he passed away on September 10.

“We shall die to awaken the nation,” promised Jatin. It may have taken another 30 years, but there are not a few who believe that, had Jatin’s desperate, German venture succeeded, as the American publicist, Ross Hedvicek put it, “had E.V. Voska (the Czech spy who betrayed the plot) not interfered in this history, today nobody would have heard about Mahatma Gandhi and the father of the Indian nation would have been Bagha Jatin.”

Tiger Jatin, was another great Bangladeshi born hero, who so nearly changed the course of history, now largely forgotten in the lands of his birth. l Tim Steel is a communications, marketing and tourism consultant.

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20 LONG FORM

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

BIGSTOCK

It doesn’t have to be a race n Mahmudul Islam

T

here is little scope for brushing aside the fact that the education system in Bangladesh is overly characterised by competition. Such competition has been revered for long in our society, and has been vigorously promoted as a catalyst that positively affects learning and dramatically increases student performance.

The recent years saw a marked rise in the number of students who scored GPA 5 in the SSC and HSC examinations. The explanation, especially by politicians, has been that students are learning well and are increasingly performing better every year.

The results have been viewed as outstanding achievements of the government, educational institutions, and also pupils.

But while we rejoiced at the students’ report cards, we have failed miserably to consider the academic and emotional price students pay to be competitive, especially in their formative years, and remain so.

From a very early age, children are taught that what they will learn will mostly be used to put their abilities to the test in order to determine how they have performed against their peers in assessments, primarily standardised tests in each grade, as well as the national board exams.

Instead of systematic efforts made to familiarise children with formal schooling in ways that will help them develop inquisitive minds and a natural passion for learning, the parents apparently consider it their rightful duty to drill the idea of competition into these youngsters.

Children as young as five or six are told that it is about how good or bad they are in producing test scores in relation to their fellow classmates. It is like telling them that they are here in the world only to be the best among all other students in the class when compared academically.

Going to school and attending lessons with other children while engaging in games is a substantial part of how children learn to socialise. They make friends and interact with their peers in academic settings. This is

the time when they need to be in a playful, fun environment as they cope with the scholastic world.

What they are offered instead are carefully crafted messages of rivalry that are aimed at preparing them for competition. This is how the tendency to contend for academic triumph is firmly established in children’s minds.

In every step of learning, you are working towards the goal to do well in tests even if it means you do not enjoy lessons or have difficulties in comprehending the topic -- this is the harsh message children receive after they enroll in school.

Intense pressure to compete with others keeps growing as children are promoted to the next grade each year. When still in their teens, they take SSC and HSC exams. Parents only want to see that their children have achieved GPA 5.

Teresa Amabile, who is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, in a study, asked children to make silly collages. Some did it to compete for prizes and some did not.

Seven artists then independently rated all the works, and it was found that those who worked with the aim to win produced collages that were much less creative -- less spontaneous, complex, and varied -- than the others.

Many researchers have concluded that pupils do not learn better when education is turned into a competitive struggle. The struggle to be the “Number One” has been found to be a distraction.

Children at the early stages of life should learn and study in order to acquire knowledge that will later help them develop critical thinking skills. The ultimate goal of educa-

The over-emphasis on competition in our society hinders real learning, because children begin zeroing in on the quest to outdo others and become accustomed to disregarding the true significance of education

Not being able to outperform peers, even if the child has passed the subjects by getting acceptable marks, is deemed a defeat, with consequences such as lowered chances of getting accepted at public universities or being hired for jobs.

Does this recipe for stiff academic competition produce any laudable outcomes? David Johnson, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, reviewed all the studies they could find on the subject of competition from 1924 to 1980. 65 of the studies found that children learn better when they work cooperatively as opposed to competitively, eight found the reverse, and 36 found no significant difference.

tion is getting pupils to learn. Where is the place for education if there is no learning taking place?

But the over-emphasis on competition in our society hinders real learning, because children begin zeroing in on the quest to outdo others and become accustomed to disregarding the true significance of education -- something more alarming than not being able to land a good job.

Competition has another major drawback: Rote learning. In Bangladesh, the sole criterion to measure student attainment is scores in the standardised tests. Thus the goal to compete against peers with the only aim of becoming the best, in effect, forces pupils

to aggressively make rote learning their best friend. They know if they can learn the lessons only by heart, they can reach their target without fretting about the depth of the contents.

Rote learning is outright dangerous because it puts an end to creative thoughts, destroys natural curiosity to learn, and also kills the ability to apply the knowledge to analyse real-life situations.

So, what can parents do to prevent this problem from getting worse? An effective step for reducing competitive attitudes at home is to consciously avoid using words that promote direct competition, and instead construct messages that inspire a personal pursuit of excellence among children without the worry over what others are doing or trying to achieve.

“You are not doing better/must do better than X” can be replaced with statements like “You did quite fine, and more efforts on your part could reward you with a performance boost” or “I am happy that you are making progress, and I also believe there is more to explore in your studies that will take you to the next level of understanding and achievement.”

This seemingly negligible change in conversation can actually make a world of difference in the minds of children regarding how they view school and how they perform there. Such a push for getting better also helps them grow their confidence, and increases their thirst for knowledge.

But children can still feel competitive if they see that they have fared badly in exams in proportion to their peers. In such cases, parents, instead of reprimanding them, should tell them that there is always a second chance for betterment. Positive feedback can work wonders for young children.

Considering the extent of damage done to children already, it is high time that we stopped the madness about academic competition and worked to build a society free from this unhealthy component. l Mahmudul Islam is a journalist at the Dhaka Tribune.

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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

PHOTO: BIGSTOCK

T-JUNCTION

A little nature

INSIDE

22

letters to Mars

Competitive arguements

23 hobby

Size does matter

24

written in the stars

Backed with logic

DT

22 T-JUNCTION

Tell

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

letters to Mars

letters to Venus

Competitive arguements n T-Junction desk I got married quite recently and our marriage was arranged. We’ve been married for quite some time now and have gotten to know each other quite well. My wife and I decided to sit for the GRE exams together a few months after the wedding; we’d been studying together and got very close to each other during this time. She’s very bright and intelligent and we’re both known for being accomplished and successful students.

However the problem that I’m facing now is that, we both took the exam together but when the results came out she didn’t do as well as I did. She didn’t fail, her grades were not bad, they were good grades but they were not as good as mine were. I just did slightly better than her and now she’s getting all hysterical about it, trying to get into arguments every chance she gets. How do I explain to her that this is not a big deal?

Your wife could have been the golden child of her family and therefore this little incident may have somehow given her the idea that in a new family she is just another person, not someone who’s constantly pampered. Perhaps she thought that her grades and accomplishments have always defined her and will continue to define her

throughout her life. This could also be an equality issue with your wife as she may now think because of your higher grades you are superior to her. Try explaining to her with your actions like making her a cup of tea or a meal that this is not an issue between the two of you and that it can be fixed. Also in our culture it may often be a big deal when it really isn’t and if she wants to she can re-sit the exam and go for even more challenging courses in the future and excel with flying colours.

Make sure she knows and believes that you have complete faith in her and believe in her abilities to succeed. Perhaps you in the mean time you can encourage her to take up a short course on something interesting and adventurous. l

Clothing chaos nT-Junction desk I am struggling with a delicate and perhaps even a trivial issue to some in our society regarding my mother- inlaw. She is a wonderful woman, she is incredibly nice to me and treats me like her own daughter and makes me feel at home. I feel very safe around her and couldn’t have hoped for a better family to come into. I’m a lucky girl. The problem however is, since my wedding, my mother- in- law has been chosing all my clothes! I didn’t even get

to have a say in what I would wear on my wedding day, she chose the dress, the shoes, the jewellery and all the rest of it. She’s a woman of great taste and I admire her sense of style, but sometimes I’d like to buy and choose things for myself too. I know she does it all out of love, maybe she could turn it down a notch? How do I get her to stop ruling my wardrobe?

Dear Darling, Sounds like your mother-in-law doesn’t have a daughter of her own or her own daughter has already grown up and moved on with her life, so she’s trying to relive the heyday of being a mother.

Try looking at the prices of the clothes she’s chosen for you. If the one’s you had in mind were higher, may be she was trying to save some money. The solution to this problem is gradual, take baby steps. When out shopping with her, try not to let her dominate you or blackmail you emotionally. Please learn to stand up for yourself darling, be polite, let your opinions be heard and justified.

Remember to plead your case with the right amount of emotion, flattery and respect. You should be fine. l

news

Fourth Bangladesh Fashion Carnival begins on June 3 Redcarpet365 Ltd, in association with Freelancerz, is organizing the fourth edition of their international exhibition on branded clothing & fashion products - Bangladesh Fashion Carnival 2015, to be held on June 3, at Emmanuelle’s Banquet Hall, Gulshan 1, Dhaka.

Over 45 companies from home and abroad will participate in this exhibition targeted for Eid Ul Fitr shopping, carrying a slogan, “Do your EID Shopping with us.”

Ahmed Imtiaz, CEO of Redcarpet365, said the exhibition would create an opportunity for both local and foreign participants to display their latest products and their quality before potential buyers, resulting in business transactions worth millions.

He said this exhibition will also

encourage local manufacturers and producers to export their goods in foreign markets, giving a big boost to the country’s export earnings.

GulAhmed is the global brand of this expo, with their exclusive collection of original Lawn.

The expo will be open for general & trade visitors from June 3 to 7, 2015 10.00am to 9.30pm. l

Phoenix Finance and Investments Limited declares 20% cash dividend

The 20th Annual General Meeting of Phoenix Finance & Investments Limited was held on May 21 2015 at “Muktijuddho Sity Milonayaton, Institution of Diploma Engineers, Kakrail. At the AGM, the company declared cash dividend of 20% to its shareholders for the year ended December 31, 2014.

Vice Chairman Mohammed Shoeb;

Directors Rafiqul Islam Khan, Mobarak Ali, Abdur Rahman, Selina Akhter; Independent Director, M Maniruzzaman Khandaker, and Managing Director, S M Intekhab Alam; Deputy Managing Director Dr M Shah Alam, and FCA, FCS, EVP, Head of Investment & Company Secretary Mohammad Sayduzzaman, along with other executives of the company were present. l

T-JUNCTION 23

DT

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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

hobby

Size does matter The novice’s guide to Bonsai

n Afsana Zarin Why Bonsai?

Bonsai as many of us know is the art of growing and maintaining miniature trees.

If we literally translate the word Bonsai in Japanese, it would mean “Planted in a container.” If however, you are under the impression that Bonsai means dwarfed trees, thinking the idea of growing dwarfed trees to be unattractive, now would be a good time to let go of that idea. Bonsai is actually a well maintained miniature form of a tree, following several techniques which involves regular pruning and wiring.

Although the word Bonsai is Japanese, the art form (penjing) originated in the Chinese empire over 2,000 years ago. Then another thousand years later, the Japanese copied the Chinese art form and adapted it to their own cultural context. But it only started gaining popularity after the West became familiar with, in the 19th century. In Bangladesh, there has been a recent surge of Bonsai enthusiasts who practise the art on their own as a hobby. If you have an inclination for such a hobby and would like to develop it, there is no time like the present to get started.

Bonsais are usually designed to reflect a number of common situations of a tree.

However, each Bonsai tree is unique in its own right and the care required for each is distinctly different as well. Thankfully there are some basic steps which any beginner should follow.

The ready-made approach Most people start growing Bonsais after buying a tree. This, without a doubt is a nice way to start, although a more exciting and inexpensive course of action would be to grow and style a tree from the ground up. A word of caution for beginners, it is crucial to select a tree species which matches your circumstance. You have to figure out if you

want an indoor Bonsai tree or an outdoor one. A safe bet is to choose an indigenous tree species.

Once you have selected your species, the next step is to acquire the tree you have decided on. You can visit online stores to choose from a large variety of Bonsai trees on offer. However, as a cost effective solution you can get a Bonsai starter kit which will enable you to create your own tree and simultaneously learn the basics of Bonsai.

Getting down and dirty Another inexpensive but slower method is to cultivate a tree yourself; using seeds or cuttings. It would generally take around three to five years before the tree can be trained, so you might want to do this as a side project.

Now that the tree has been either acquired or cultivated, the next step is to shaping and styling it by pruning and wiring. The main goal will be to keep the shape and style of the Bonsai as natural as possible.

The maintenance cheat sheet A crucial part of growing a Bonsai tree is the proper maintenance and care of the tree which is unique for each species. However there are a few basic rules that apply to all.

Since Bonsais are planted in small pots, paying attention to the appropriate amount and timing of watering is crucial. The soil should neither be submerged under water nor be left too dry. It is suggested to check regularly and repeat watering whenever it is found to be dried up. Every two years, the Bonsai should be repotted carefully and in a different pot. Besides regular watering and repotting, Bonsai trees would also require fertilising. However, the frequency of fertilising would depend on what species of Bonsais you have chosen.

If you have a tree and you need a little assistance you can even get your hands on books that provide guidance so long as you

ARIES (MAR 21-APR 19)

Time for you to get groovy and in touch with your chakras, do some yoga, get some exercise whilst keeping an organised schedule.

TAURUS (APR 20-MAY 20)

HOROSCOPE

Seems like you’ve got “money on your mind’’ but don’t let pressures of that make you feel like you have to give up on current plans or make major changes.

GEMINI (MAY 21-JUN 20)

Take your steps gently in the coming week, my friend, as you seem to be walking in murky waters. Remember some people are a bit too judgmental and not as free spirited as you are.

CANCER (JUN 21-JUL 22)

You will be less focused on current projects this week as thoughts of a possible career

know where to look. So it’s time to make a choice, whether to walk the path where a dream forever remains a dream, or to step onto a path which will lead to the fruition

of life and art taking birth through your very hands. Given what technolgy and information can do for us these days, I’d say it’s an easy enough choice.l

change may point you towards a new direction in life.

see you, are their stares of friends’ or foes’?

LEO (JUL 23-AUG 22)

SAGITTARIUS (NOV 22-DEC 21)

VIRGO (AUG 23-SEP 22)

CAPRICORN (DEC 22-JAN 19)

This is a very lucky week for you to invest as whatever you touch will eventually turn into gold.

Stop hiding and let the world marvel at your many talents, it’s your time to shine!

LIBRA (SEP 23-OCT 22)

Listen to your friends as their advice can help you make the right decision when it comes to choosing outcomes.

You’ve been extensively busy for a while now and overthinking things, it’s about time you take a break ‘cause your neck hangs in the balance.

Your week will consist of cleansing yourself from a bond or behaviour that will take up most of your time to find the emotional courage to let go.

You never let people tell you what to do so why start now?

SCORPIO (OCT 23-NOV 21)

PISCES (FEB 20-MAR 20)

You’ve always been the one that stands out from the crowd, the one that controls the crowd. But try to get a sense of how strangers

AQUARIUS (JAN 20-FEB 19)

Change is constant even though it may seem like somethings haven’t changed in decades for you. l

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24 T-JUNCTION

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Written in the Stars

Backed with logic Of the debaters, by the debaters, for the debaters

PHOTO: BIGSTOCK

n Saudia Afrin

W

e all can think; however, a very small portion of our brain can actually win a battle in terms of organising multiple social thoughts, norms or issues through appropriate logic and presentation. We refer to all the young enthusiastic debaters, who deliberately devoted their time and mind along with their mountain-high education and work pressure.

BUET Debating Club is a true example of this. Besides performing and training, these BUETians’ are on board to unify and provide a big platform for upcoming Bangladeshi debaters. T-Junction had a conversation on a sunny afternoon with a bunch of students from BUET Debating Club, to discuss more on contemporary state of debate in Bangladesh.

Lovers of debate must’ve been passing a thrilling time as BUET Debating Club’s seventh BUET DC National Debate Championship is going to be ending today.

Among three segments, the Inter-School Bangla Debate Championship and InterSchool English Debate Championship already got its champions few days back. The names of winners are being kept under shield till this evening. Also, Inter-Club Bangla Debate Championship’s finale is going to be held today.

From its origin, the club is organising these tournaments on a continuous basis as to encourage and unite the debaters through this platform, with aim to prepare them for a broader arena. Mehdi Hasan, organising secretary, said, “Unless thay are participating in different competitions, it’s beyond impossible for the debaters to understand where they should excel, where they should

focus, and how to break the existing stigma about debates in our country.”

Alike previous year, this year National Debate Championship has a theme and this time it is mostly influenced by the contemporary unstable situation called, “Bichurno Shomoy, Oparajito Jukti.” All of the organisers are quiet happy about the performance of this season. Mehdi said, “At present, participation in debate is increasing. Whereas, a few years back the participation was limited among a few schools but now the scenario has changed.

Surprisingly, we had to increase the participant number from 32 teams to 48 for Inter-Club Bangla Debate Championship as more people registered.”

Mehdi also mentioned about the rising number of English language oriented debaters. At this point Raihan Mahmood, president, said with emphatic dramatics,

“Once upon a time there were a culture that Bengali medium schools would debate in Bangla on the other hand English medium schools students would debate in English.

However, students from Bangla medium are now participating in English debates, and even exceeding in it.”

“The fact is, it’s like a chain process when one gets on board others start to follow them,” added Mehdi.

According to the club members, current debaters does have problems in debating styles and manners, which is a positive side. Even with the Internet available, the school level students suffer in factual areas, which are more fundamental.

Raihan recommended, “There is no other alternatives apart from reading newspapers, attending workshops to load oneself with viable information to this sector.”

Apart from growing inside the country,

the debating community of Bangladesh is improving internationally as well.

Many consider that Aaqib and Ratib of BRAC University, who had successfully achieved recognition through the world’s biggest debate tournament, World Debate Championship. It is a turning point that has brought a huge impact on the importance placed on the subject in universities and schools.

Many students from BUET, so far, has participated in international debating competitions such as Asian British Parliamentary (ABP), World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC) etc. Every year, at least one international competition, if not more, are attended by them. Mehdi Hasan, Organising Secretary, and Imran Raja, Joint Secretary of BUET Debating Club, as a group, made their positions among the top twenty in Asian British Parliamentary. l

England’s leading Test wicket taker James Anderson claimed his 400th Test wicket when he had New Zealand’s Martin Guptill caught at slip

by Ian Bell for nought in the second Test at Headlingley yesterday

Sport 26

BANGLADESH BRACE FOR SINGAPORE TEST

27

BLATTER CALLS FOR UNITY AHEAD OF FIFA VOTE

29

25

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400-CLUB

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

FEDERER, IVANOVIC THROUGH TO 4TH ROUND

Mamat increases lead in Bangladesh Open n Tribune Desk

LEADERBOARD, DAY 3 #

Name (NAT)

1 (1) Mardan Mamat (SIN) 2 (7) Khalin Joshi (IND) 3 (9) Soomin Lee (KOR) 4 (3) Janne Kaske (FIN) 5 (3) Panuphol Pittayarat (THA) 5 (2) Carlos Pigem (ESP) 7 (25) Om Prakash Chouhan (IND) 7 (14) Hyungjoon Lee (KOR) 7 (5) Dulal Hossain (BAN) 10 (25) Lee Sung (KOR) 10 (14) Amardip Malik (IND) 25 (55) Shakhawat Sohel (BAN) 48 (55) Dil Mohammad (BAN) 54 (43) Nur Jamal (BAN) 64 (35) Sajib Ali (BAN) 64 (43) Siddikur Rahman (BAN)

R1 R2 R3 To Par 66 71 70 68 69 67 69 72 73 72 67 74 72 73 72 72

67 68 70 67 66 67 73 69 63 70 74 71 73 71 71 72

68 65 65 71 72 73 66 67 72 67 68 68 71 73 76 75

-12 -9 -8 -7 -6 -6 -5 -5 -5 -4 -4 Par +3 +4 +6 +6

Singaporean golfer Mardan Mamat swings hard during the third round of the Bashundhara Bangladesh Open at Kurmitola Golf Club, Dhaka yesterday SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN

Mardan Mamat birdied the last hole to pull three shots clear at the top after shooting a three-under-par 68 in the third round of the inaugural Bangladesh Open at Kurmitola Golf Club in Dhaka yesterday.

The 47-year old Singapore veteran, a winner of four Asian Tour titles, continued his dominant form with a combined score of 12-under-par 201 in the $300,000 event.

Khalin Joshi of India, who shot a 65 on the third day, goes into today’s final round in second place at 204, with Lee Soon-min of South Korea on 205 and Janne Kaske of Finland on 206.

Mamat, who started the round with two birdies, seemed visibly affected by the heat and high humidity, but still managed to find a 10-foot birdie on the last hole.

“I lost my concentration on the back nine because of the heat,” he said. “I drank a lot of water to regain my focus. It was a long day and I was exhausted in the last three holes.”

Mamat however, refused to take victory for granted today despite the three-shot advantage.

“I feel I’m getting closer to another win, but I will not take whatever lead I have for granted,” he said. “I have an advantage but I must focus and make sure I do what I’m supposed to do.”

Joshi, 22, had an eagle on the 14th hole and closed with two birdies to bring himself into contention for a maiden Asian Tour title.

“I am really excited because I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he said. “I had put myself in position to win an Asian Tour title before, but was unable to close. Hope my putter holds up.”

Dulal Hossain was the most impressive among the 31 Bangladesh golfers in action as the 25-year old ended the penultimate round at seventh, tied with two others. Dulal carded one-over-par 72, made the cut easily and was one of six Bangladesh golfers - Shakhawat Sohel (joint 25th), Dil Mohammad (joint 48th), Mohammad Nur Jamal (joint 54th), Mohammad Sajib Ali (joint 64th) and Siddikur Rahman (joint 64th) – who survived the second round.

Dulal, who hit two double bogeys and as many bogeys against five birdies, overshadowed Bangladesh’s best hope, Siddikur, who continued to disappoint the home fans. Siddikur shot four-over-par 75 and has very little chance of upsetting the established order as the 30-year old golfer from Madaripur is trailing leader Mamat by 18 shots.l

DT

26 Sport

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Bangladesh brace for Singapore test n Shishir Hoque Bangladesh will host the Singapore football team for the very first time in history when the Asian nations lock horns against each other today in a Fifa international friendly at Bangabandhu National Stadium. The friendly will kick off at 4pm.

Twenty-nine years have elapsed since the two sides last faced each other. On that occasion in Kathmandu, the match ended in a 1-1 draw. Bangladesh and Singapore’s only other competitive meeting, in the 1973 Merde-

Bangladesh assistant coach Saiful Bari Titu We are mainly focussing on the World Cup qualifiers against Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Ahead of the qualifiers, we want to rehearse our style of play in the friendly matches. We have to be precise with our plans.

Singapore’s German coach Bernd Stange It’s always difficult to play away. We want to bring our games and want to play attacking football. And, we want to show that we are able to deliver. We will use this friendly to test some options for our next World Cup qualification match.

Bangladesh captain Mamunul Islam These two friendlies are important for us. We could gain match-fitness ahead of the World Cup qualifiers. Singapore are a good team and they are also ahead of us in the rankings. If we can beat them, it will enable us to move up in the Fifa rankings.

Singapore captain Shahril bin Ishak I believe in my team. We want to go out there, give our hundred percent and give our best commitment on the field. We want to play good attacking football and entertain the crowd and hopefully the result will go on our side.

Suarez victim of FIFA ‘corruption’: union n AFP, Montevideo Luis Suarez was “a victim” of the alleged widespread corruption roiling FIFA so his international suspension for biting should be lifted, Uruguay’s football players’ union said Thursday.

“If Luis Suarez agrees, we will request the end of his suspension on grounds that he was suspended by an organization suspected of corruption,” the Uruguayan Professional Footballers’ Mutual Association said on its official Twitter account.

“He was without a doubt the victim of this ALLEGED corruption,” it said, after nine former and current top football officials were charged in a sweeping investigation involving more than $150 million in bribes for World Cup hosting rights, broadcast contracts and other lucrative football decisions.

Barcelona forward Suarez, a hero in Uruguay, was suspended by FIFA during the World Cup in Brazil last year for biting Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini.l

ka Cup in Malaysia, also ended in the same scoreline.

The football world might have changed drastically in the last three decades but the Tigers and the Lions will contest the friendly with the same intensity. And ahead of the 2018 Fifa World Cup second round qualifiers, a new dimension has been added to the friendly.

Bangladesh will begin their World Cup Group B qualifying campaign at home to Kyrgyzstan on June 11 before facing Tajikistan five days later while Singapore, placed in Group E, will start theirs away to Cambodia before facing Japan. Today’s friendly, therefore, has taken on extra significance ahead of both the sides’ World Cup qualifiers.

On the eve of the friendly, Bangladesh assistant coach Saiful Bari Titu confirmed that nearly ninety percent of the players who had taken part in the 2015 Bangabandhu Gold Cup will feature in the friendly. Titu added that in-form Muktijoddha striker Enamul Haque, Mohammedan forward Towhidul Alam Sabuj and Sheikh Jamal DC goalkeeper Mazharul Islam Hemel have a bright chance of taking the field today. Titu however, expressed concerns with regards to the participation of pacey Sheikh Russel KC winger Zahid Hossain, who might miss out due to sickness. Captain and talismanic midfielder Mamunul Islam though has recovered from injury.

Singapore’s German head coach Bernd Stange on the other hand said today’s friendly will test his charges ahead of the upcoming challenges of the World Cup qualifiers. Stange informed that his players’ match-fitness is in peak condition as most of them played as soon as last Saturday in the Malaysian FA Cup final. The 67-year old German however, admitted that they have very little knowledge of the opposition.

Singapore, ranked 162nd according to the latest Fifa rankings, are seven places ahead of Bangladesh.l

Bangladesh captain Mamunul Islam and his Singapore counterpart Shahril bin Ishak shakes hands at the BFF House yesterday ahead of their Fifa international friendly today MAINOOR ISLAM MANIK

Taijul stresses upon spin factor n Mazhar Uddin Bangladesh left-arm spinner Taijul Islam believes the familiarity of the Khan Shaheb Osman Ali Stadium in Fatullah will stand the Tigers in good stead when they face India in the solitary Test, starting June 10.

Taijul, who picked up 10 wickets in two Bangladesh Cricket League longer-version matches recently, also thinks there is a good chance that the Fatullah track might be spin-friendly.

“We played a lot of National Cricket League and BCL matches in Fatullah. Sometimes, the wicket is spin-friendly. The ground is a lucky one for me. Hopefully, I will be able to give my very best for the team if I get the opportunity,” Taijul told the media following a gym session at Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium yesterday.

The 23-year old spinner from Natore however, was under no illusions with the tough task awaiting the Tigers against an Indian side which is usually comfortable while countering slow bowling.

“There will be challenges for the spinners against India as they play spin very well. We have to take up the challenge. Actually, when you play against big teams, you have to take risks. I bowled against Pakistan, who were also strong against spin,” added Taijul, who scalped six wickets against Pakistan in the

We played a lot of National Cricket League and BCL matches in Fatullah. Sometimes, the wicket is spin-friendly first Test in Khulna and four in the second and deciding five-dayer in Dhaka.

Bangladesh are heading into the lone Test against India on the back of a 1-0 series defeat against Pakistan recently. Taijul though expressed his confidence that the Tigers would be able to bounce back against their subcontinent rival.

“We played well against Pakistan in the first

Test but were unable to give our best in the second Test in Dhaka. And, the only Test against India will be played in Fatullah where the pitch will be different. I hope we can display much better cricket against them,” he said.

Bangladesh’s bowling attack will depend heavily on Taijul, who has made a great start to his international career. In seven Tests, he has taken 35 wickets, including three fivefors, and bagged his maiden five-wicket haul in his very first five-dayer against the West Indies in the Caribbean last year.

The left-arm spinner had a decent turnout in his previous outing in the BCL where he notched seven wickets for Bangladesh Cricket Board North Zone against Walton Central Zone. Taijul concluded by saying his recent good form will aid his prospects of playing well against the Indians.

A full-strength India are scheduled to arrive on June 7, three days before the Test match. They will also encounter the hosts in three one-day internationals, slated for June 18, 21 and 24 at SBNS. l

DT

Sport 27

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Hamburg come back to draw play-off first leg

QUICK BYTES Abolish penalty shootouts, Cameron jokes FIFA should not only do away with Sepp Blatter but put an end to penalty shootouts as well, British Prime Minister David Cameron joked on Friday at a news conference in Berlin with Germany’s Angela Merkel . After telling a news conference that the FIFA president should step aside over allegations of corruption in soccer’s world governing body, Cameron offered a self-deprecating joke about England’s penalty shoot-out trauma in big tournaments, where they almost always lose -- and often to Germany.

–Reuters

n AFP, Berlin

Lavillenie set for 2015 Diamond League debut

France’s pole vault world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie will make his 2015 Diamond League debut on Saturday as he returns from a bruised shoulder at the Prefontaine Classic. Lavillenie, who won the European indoor title in Prague in March, opted out of the season-opening Diamond League meeting this month in Doha, and will be eager to resume an outdoor campaign pointed at the World Championships in Beijing in August.

–AFP

Sherwood reveals Benteke has buy-out clause

Tim Sherwood admits Aston Villa can’t stop Christian Benteke leaving because the Belgium striker has a buy-out clause in his contract. Benteke has been strongly linked with a transfer to Liverpool and Villa manager Sherwood confirmed for the first time on Thursday that he has a substantial release clause in his contract which would trigger a move if met. The 24-year-old has scored 12 goals in his last 12 games ahead of Saturday’s FA Cup final with Arsenal after regaining form and fitness under Sherwood.

–AFP

Spurs sign Austrian international Wimmer

Tottenham Hotspur have signed Austrian defender Kevin Wimmer from FC Cologne, the Premier League club said on Friday. The 22-year-old, who moved to Cologne in 2012 from Austrian club LASK Linz, joined Tottenham for a fee of six million euros, British media reported.

–Reuters

Stoke release Sorensen and Palacios

Danish international goalkeeper Thomas Sorensen and Honduras midfielder Wilson Palacios are among the senior players being released by Stoke City, the club announced on Friday. Sorensen, 38, who has more than 100 caps for Denmark, played 129 times for Stoke after signing from Aston Villa in 2008.

Palacios, 30, joined from Tottenham in 2011 and played 53 times. Stoke have also released defender Andy Wilkinson.

–Reuters

Hamburger SV’s Ivo Ilicevic celebrates after scoring a goal against Karlsruhe SC during their German Bundesliga first leg relegation playoff in Hamburg, Germany on Thursday REUTERS

Hamburg still have work to do if they are to maintain their Bundesliga status after coming from behind to draw 1-1 with Karlsruhe in the first leg of their relegation/promotion play-off on Thursday.

Karlsruhe, who finished third in the second tier and are looking to return to the top flight for the first time since 2009, took an early lead at the Imtech Arena when Rouwen Hennings drove a low shot past Rene Adler.

It was an 18th goal of the season for Hennings, who was on the books at Hamburg at the start of his career and also played for their city rivals St Pauli.

Manuel Torres and Dimitrij Nazarov both hit the woodwork for the visitors before Bruno Labbadia’s side came back to equalise in the 73rd minute courtesy of Ivo Ilicevic.

That gives HSV a fighting chance ahead of Monday’s return, although the away goal could yet prove crucial for Karlsruhe.

Hamburg are the only club to have been in the top flight in every season since the Bundesliga began in 1963, although they needed to beat Greuther Fuerth on away goals in a playoff to stay up last season.l

Blatter calls for unity ahead of FIFA vote n AFP, Zurich FIFA leader Sepp Blatter on Friday defended his actions battling corruption ahead of a vote to decide on whether he remains as president of football’s beleaguered world body.

But Blatter expressed doubts about timing of the arrests of seven top football officials just two days ahead of the election he has been strong favourite to win.

“People say it was a coincidence. But I have a small question mark,” the Swiss official told the start of FIFA’s annual congress.

Blatter, 79, is being challenged by Prince Ali bin al Hussein, a FIFA vice president. The prince, strongly backed by Europe’s football powers, has campaigned on the need for change at the top of the scandal-tainted body.

FIFA was rocked on Wednesday by the arrest of seven officials in a dawn raid on their Zurich hotel. They now face extradition to the United States where they are accused of accepting tens of millions of dollars.

Separately, Swiss investigators are looking into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. The votes have also been at the centre of corruption allegations.

- Corruption ‘storm’ Blatter said the arrest of the seven at FIFA’s Zurich hotel had unleashed a “storm” and that the congress has “vital decisions” to take. But he added: “Today I appeal for a team spirit, unity, so we can advance together. It may not be easy but that is why we are here today.”

Blatter, who rejected a call to quit from UEFA president Michel Platini, repeated his case that he cannot “monitor” football affairs alone and cannot be blamed for the scandals.

“The guilty ones are individuals, not the whole organisation,” he insisted, calling for greater action by regional confederations and national associations “to put FIFA on the right track.”

Blatter scored one victory when the Palestinian Football Association withdrew a

motion to expel Israel from FIFA because of restrictions on Palestinian teams.

And he was favourite to win a fifth fouryear term with the solid support from the key African and Asian confederations which account for 100 votes among the 209 member federations.

Platini has said a “very large majority” of the 53 European federations who take part will back Prince Ali. Blatter needs a two thirds majority to win in the first round. If it goes to a second round, a simple majority will do.

The boss of football’s governing organisation remained defiant as governments joined leading figures of the global game and sponsors in crying foul over FIFA’s corruption scandal.

While Russia’s President Vladimir Putin condemned the US action in asking for the extradition of the seven officials, British Prime Minister David Cameron backed calls for Blatter to resign.l

Sports journalist Shamim Chowdhury (2L), former Bangladesh captain Shafiqul Haque Heera (3L), former cricketer Yousuf Rahman Babu (4L), outgoing Asian Cricket Council CEO Syed Ashraful Haque (3R) and former cricketer ASM Faruque (R) attend the book-unveiling programme of ‘Cricket er Nirman’ (the rising of cricket), written by former Bangladesh Cricket Board general secretary and president KZ Islam, yesterday at the Bangladesh Olympic Bhaban auditorium COURTESY

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28 Sport

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Wenger, Arsenal eye FA Cup history n AFP, London Arsene Wenger would love to silence his critics by making history when holders Arsenal take on Aston Villa in the FA Cup final on Saturday.

Wenger heads to Wembley on the cusp of an historic double achievement that would go some way to answering the doubters who claim he has lost his touch in recent years.

Frustrated by Arsenal’s failure to win the Premier League since 2004 and their inability to make an impact in the Champions League, even some Gunners fans have turned on Wenger over the last two years.

Verbally abused at a railway station following defeat at Stoke and forced to endure the indignity of supporters holding banners calling for his sacking, the Arsenal manager has maintained a dignified stance in the face of extreme provocation this term.

But that isn’t to say the jibes don’t sting Wenger and, after a strong second half of the season saw Arsenal climb to a third place finish in the Premier League, the 65-year-old has an opportunity to further reassert his credentials by retaining the FA Cup. A victory over Villa would make Wenger the first post-war manager to win the FA Cup six times, taking him ahead of Alex Ferguson and level with George Ramsay -- the only manager to have won six FA Cups, with his last coming in charge of Villa in 1920.

There would also be a significant slice of history for Wenger’s club if they lift the famous old trophy as it would make them the most successful team in the history of the competition with 12 Cup-winning campaigns.

Wenger acknowledged the achievements would be well worth celebrating, but he was keen to keep the focus on ensuring his players don’t waste the opportunity to claim only Arsenal’s second piece of silverware in 10 years.

“It’s not easy. I would love to do it but I’m not honestly focused on that,” Wenger said “I’m more focused on the fact that we have fought so hard to get there. Now we want to finish the job.

“Personally I am always the same when I go into a big game like this. I have always the same pressure. I just want to do it. It’s not easy to get to the FA Cup final and it’s not easy to finish in the top three in England. We have been remarkably consistent since January and that’s why I think we have a good chance next season.”l

Barcelona goalkeeper Claudio Bravo (R) listens to teammate Lionel Messi near goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen (L) during a training session at the Barcelona training ground Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper in Sant Joan Despi near Barcelona yesterday REUTERS

Barcelona target second leg of treble in home Cup final n AFP, Madrid Barcelona can move another step closer to just the second treble in the club’s storied 115year history when they host Athletic Bilbao at the Camp Nou in the Copa del Rey final on Saturday.

It is the third meeting between the two sides in the final in the past seven years with Barca emerging victorious on their way to their first treble in 2009 and in Pep Guardiola’s final match as Barca coach in 2012.

Saturday will also see the Camp Nou say

goodbye to another club legend as Xavi Hernandez plays his final game on home soil before his farewell in the Champions League final against Juventus on June 6.

Pique’s return to his best form over the past six months has been key to Barca’s run of 29 wins in 33 games that has left them on the brink of glory in all competitions this season.

Barca conceded just 21 goals in 38 La Liga matches and have improved markedly on set-pieces under Luis Enrique this campaign.

However, he understands why his displays have been overshadowed by the stunning

form of Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez, who have combined for 117 goals between them.

In contrast to Barca’s treble chase, Athletic are searching for their first major trophy in 21 years since doing the league and Cup double in 1983/84. The Basques have already suffered at the hands of Messi this season as he played a part in all five of Barca’s goals in a 5-2 thrashing at San Mames in February.

Barca received a huge boost with the news that Suarez will be fit to start having not featured since the second leg of their Champions League semi-final against Bayern. l

Dortmund hope to send off Klopp with Cup win n AFP, Berlin

Sevilla team celebrate with their Europa League trophy after landing in the Andalusian capital of Seville.

Sevilla further underlined their European pedigree with a record fourth Europa League title REUTERS

Borussia Dortmund hope to bring down the curtain on Jurgen Klopp’s seven years as head coach by lifting the German Cup on his swansong in Saturday’s final against VfL Wolfsburg.

The 47-year-old announced in April he would be leaving at the end of the season with Thomas Tuchel set to replace him as head coach next season by following the same path from Mainz.

All that remains is the cup final at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium as Dortmund hunt their fourth major trophy under Klopp after win-

ning the 2011 league title and the Bundesliga and Cup double of 2012.

Klopp has made it no secret that he wants one more open-top bus tour through Dortmund, just like in 2011 and 2012.

Wolfsburg have never won the German Cup, but Dortmund need little extra motivation.

A victory in Berlin would also give Dortmund a direct Europa League place next season, but defeat means they would have to go through qualifying round with arch-rivals Schalke, who finished sixth in the table, going straight through to the group stage.l

DT

Sport 29

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Federer, Ivanovic through to 4th round n AP, Paris Stepping on center court to take on 88th-ranked Damir Dzumhur, Roger Federer was on his guard.

The 17-time Grand Slam champion had been caught cold at a previous French Open by a player ranked as low as the 23-year-old Bosnian, and he made sure that did not happen again.

Federer advanced to the fourth round for the 11th straight year with a clinical 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 win Friday.

“I’d never played him before, he moves well, he’s very quick. I didn’t know him and I didn’t know how he’d play on the key points,” said Federer, who lost in the first round in Paris to the 88th-ranked Luis Horna 12 years ago.

“Mentally I’m not always as relaxed as people might think, there is so much at stake,” Federer said.

The 33-year-old Swiss, who is seeded second at the tournament, won his only French Open title in 2009. After winning his first two matches in straight sets, Federer put on another aggressive and solid display, saving four of the five break points he faced.

Federer hit a superb forehand passing shot to earn a match point and sealed it when Dzumhur sent a backhand into the net. Federer will next be up against either 13th-seeded Gael Monfils or No. 21 seed Pablo Cuevas.

After struggling in her first two matches at the French Open, Ana Ivanovic eased past Donna Vekic 6-0, 6-3 in the women’s side of the draw to book a spot in the second week.

On a cold morning in the French capital, it took the former champion just 53 minutes to return to a fourth round at a major tournament for the first time in more than a year.

Ivanovic, who won the French Open in 2008 after losing in the final a year before, wrapped up the first set in 23 minutes and finished with 19 winners.

DAY’S WATCH Star Sports 1 10:00 PM Italian Serie A Verona v Juventus 12:40 AM Atalanta v AC Milan

Star Sports 2 4:00PM New Zealand Tour of England 2nd Test Day 2

Star Sports 4 10:30PM FA Cup Final Arsenal v Aston Villa

Ten Action 12:00 AM German Cup: Final VfL Wolfsburg v Borussia Dortmund

Neo Prime 4:00PM French Open 3rd Round Day 2

“After the first two matches, I really started to get a little bit of feeling and groove,” said the Serb, who was pushed to deciders in the first and second rounds after twice losing the opening set. The last time Ivanovic made the fourth round of a major was at the Australian Open in 2014. She was eliminated by 142ndranked Lucie Hradecka in Melbourne earlier this year after playing with a broken toe.

Since winning the title seven years ago, Ivanovic has never progressed past the fourth round in Roland Garros. Her next opponent on the Parisian red clay will be No. 9 seed Ekaterina Makarova, who defeated Elena Vesnina 6-2, 6-4. Also advancing were No. 13 Lucie Safarova and No. 19 Elina Svitolina.

Playing on Court Suzanne Lenglen, Ivanovic was broken in the third game of the second set. She recovered quickly though, winning five of the next six games.

Also, local favorite Alize Cornet advanced to her maiden fourth-round match in 11 attempts at her home tournament with a 4-6, 6-3, 7-5 hard-fought win over Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, who finished with 59 unforced errors after her all-risk approach backfired.

Cornet celebrated her victory as if she had won the tournament, falling onto her back, letting out a scream and then bursting into tears. In the men’s event, 20th-seeded Richard Gasquet needed 32 minutes to complete a 3-6, 6-3, 6-1, 4-6, 6-1 win over Carlos Berlocq and advance to the third round after an encounter that spanned over two days. The players were locked at two sets apiece when their match was stopped Thursday evening.

“My preparation will be shortened, but everything’s fine for me, I’m physically well,” said Gasquet, who will face 15th-seeded Kevin Anderson in his next match and has just one day to recover.

Also, 74th-ranked Teymuraz Gabashvili equaled his best Grand Slam result, reaching the fourth round with a 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 defeat of Lukas Rosol.l

Switzerland’s Roger Federer in action during his third round men’s singles match at the French Open in Roland Garros, Paris yesterday REUTERS

PSG aim to complete clean sweep of domestic prizes

Pele expected to join Cosmos for Cuba trip n AFP, New York

n AFP, Paris

Brazilian legend Pele is expected to join the New York Cosmos, his former club, in Havana for a match Tuesday, the first by any US professional team in Cuba since 1999.

The Cosmos announced details of the historic trip Thursday for a match that will be shown on US television between the Cosmos, a North American Soccer League side one level below Major League Soccer, and Cuba’s national squad.

Pele is expected to accompany the Cosmos on the flight to Cuba and attend the match, according to the club.

It was the arrival of Pele with the earlier version of the Cosmos in 1975 that sparked the first major interest in football

by American sports fans and the team evolved into an all-star squad with Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia before Pele retired in 1977 and the league folded in 1984.l

Paris Saint-Germain are overwhelming favourites to become the first French club ever to complete a clean sweep of the domestic honours as they take on second-tier Auxerre in the French Cup final on Saturday.

The capital giants head to the Stade de France having already won a third consecutive Ligue 1 title as well as retaining the League Cup and also securing the season-opening Champions Trophy back in August.

Laurent Blanc’s side have shown themselves to be a step ahead of all their rivals at home in 2014-15 and it would be one of the all-time great shocks in the history of the French Cup if they failed to get the better of an Auxerre side who are nothing like the force they once were.

“The goal at the start of the season was to win every competition. This game can be a

beautiful end to the season for us. We have the possibility to make history, which we are all eager to do,” said goalkeeper Nicolas Douchez, who has got the nod ahead of Salvatore Sirigu in the domestic cups this season for Paris.

PSG, one of the richest clubs in world football, are bidding to win the French Cup for the ninth time and the first since 2010. Auxerre, meanwhile, have just finished ninth in their third successive season in Ligue 2. They won the French Cup four times from 1994 to 2005 but those glory days seem a long way off now.

While the club from the small city in Burgundy knocked out holders Guingamp in the semi-finals, they failed to win any of their last seven league games of the campaign.

In contrast, PSG ended the season by registering nine successive top-flight wins for the first time in their history and inspired by the goals of Edinson Cavani, who has scored 12 in his last eight domestic appearances.l

DT

30 DOWNTIME

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Exhibit (4) 3 Dissolves (5) 8 Scoff (4) 9 Copied (4) 11 Very salty water (5) 12 Govern (4) 14 Cereal (3) 15 Cosy retreats (5) 18 Cut off (5) 19 Period of time (3) 21 Superior English college (4) 24 Whole sum (5) 26 Incline (4) 27 Level (4) 28 Reposes (5) 29 Catch sight of (4)

DOWN 1 Former Iranian leader (4) 2 Above (4) 4 Do wrong (3) 5 Dens (5) 6 Very small (4) 7 Frozen shower (5) 10 Low sand hill (4) 11 Assail (5) 13 Uniform (5) 16 Easy pace (4) 17 Discourage (5) 18 Satisfied fully (5) 20 Wander (4) 22 Pinches (4) 23 Remain (4) 25 Insect (3)

CODE-CRACKER How to solve: Each number in our CODECRACKER grid represents a different letter of the alphabet. For example, today 1 represents B so fill B every time the figure 1 appears.

You have two letters in the control grid to start you off. Enter them in the appropriate squares in the main grid, then use your knowledge of words to work out which letters go in the missing squares.

Some letters of the alphabet may not be used.

As you get the letters, fill in the other squares with the same number in the main grid, and the control grid. Check off the list of alphabetical letters as you identify them.

A B C D E FG H I J K L M N O P Q RST UVWXYZ

CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU How to solve: Fill in the blank spaces with the numbers 1 – 9. Every row, column and 3 x 3 box must contain all nine digits with no number repeating.

PEANUTS

YESTERDAY’S SOLUTIONS CODE-CRACKER

CROSSWORD

DILBERT

SUDOKU

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SHOWTIME 31

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

Big B handed One crore rupee notice over social media controversy n Showtime Desk Veteran Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan faces social media controversies over a post made on Twitter and Facebook.

This too, only months after his controversial post on late cartoonist RK Laxman on Twitter.

This time around, Big B was caught offguarded while sharing a poem. A man named Dr Jagbir Rathee claimed that the poem in question was written by him, back in 2006.

Whereas the actor credited someone else on the sites.

The claimant sent a legal notice worth Rs 1 crore to Bachchan which is to be responded to within fifteen days, after his vain attempts to contact the star through the social media sites.

It was learnt that the poem was shared on Bachchan’s Twitter account by a follower named, Vikas Dubey, which was later shared

by Big B crediting Dubey and not Rathee. l

Birthdays of the famous

WHAT TO WATCH Rise of the Planet of the Apes Star Movies 9:25pm A substance, designed to help the brain repair itself, gives rise to a super-intelligent chimp who leads an ape uprising.

Cast: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto The Terminal Zee Studio 4:25pm An eastern immigrant finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.

Cast: Tom Hanks, Catherine ZetaJones, Chi McBride The Exorcism of Emily Rose WB 11:49pm A lawyer takes on a negligent homicide case involving a priest who performed an exorcism on a young girl.

Cast: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Shohreh Aghdashloo

If the Shoe Fits

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DT

32 BACK PAGE

SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015

LOOKING BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER PAGE 15

BACKED WITH LOGIC PAGE 24

MAMAT INCREASES LEAD IN BANGLADESH OPEN PAGE 25

Tobacco farming injurious to farm health

Door-to-door campaigns by tobacco company agents convince farmers to grow the lucrative crop tobacco farming improves the rice crop. “Ton Mohammad Al-Masum Molla bacco grains are like natural fertilisers.” back from Lalmonirhat

While the government does not promote tobacco cultivation, Lalmonirhat farmers can scarcely resist growing the cash crop because it is so profitable.

They said tobacco farming provides them with additional income because it fetches high prices and requires less time to cultivate than other crops.

But government officials and agricultural experts say farmers are doing irreparable damage to their land for short-term gains.

Pavel Partha, ecology and bio-diversity researcher, said: “Tobacco cultivation is entirely contract farming. Farmers may get immediate rewards but the true cost is environmental degradation.

“Heavy herbicide use required in tobacco farming destroys micro-organisms, other plants and the soil itself. The use of wood to process tobacco further causes other plants to be destroyed.

“This is a severe loss for the land. Farmers are making short-term gains but will suffer losses in the long term.”

Abdur Rouf, a farmer from Benkanda village in Patgram, said: “We used to farm potatoes but it requires a lot of labour and there is a shortage of cold storage facilities in this region.

“Moreover water is scarce, so tobacco is a safe bet for us.”

Decreasing water flows might be encouraging farmers to cultivate crops like tobacco that

Farmers put dried tobacco leaves on display for sale at a market in Patgram, Lalmonirhat. The photo was taken recently SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN require less watering, Indo-Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) member Mir Sajjad Hossain said.

But the allure of profits also drives the growing preference for the crop.

“Tobacco fetches twice the price that rice does,” said tobacco wholesaler Hasinur Rahman who said he pays Tk3,000 per maund (1 maund = 37.3242 kilograms) for the crop.

Company agent Lablu Mia purchases tobacco from farmers from April until the end of May. “I have bought 14,000 maunds just from Patgram upazila so far this year.”

Md Moksedul Mia, a farmer from Khatiar Bhita of Patgram, said: “We can bring in the tobacco crop in just 90-95 days. We cultivate tobacco in the gap between rice seasons so our land does not remain idle.”

Kachem Ali Kachu, another farmer, claimed

Factory worker gang-raped on boat in Gazipur n Tribune Report A worker of Pran RFL Company was gangraped on a company boat by four boatmen on Wednesday in Kaliganj upazila in Gazipur.

The victim, 18, is employed at an RFL factory in Narsingdi and was going home in Kaliganj when she was taken hostage and raped, Assistant Sub-Inspector Arif of Kaliganj police station told our Gazipur correspondent.

“She got on the boat, provided by the company for its workers, around 8pm on Wednesday in Polash area in Narsingdi along with her colleagues. When the boat reached Nargana in Kaliganj via the Shitalakkhya River, all the other workers got off the boat and boatmen Al Amin and Fahim of Moktarpur village grabbed the victim, gagged her with a towel and took her to a remote place. They repeatedly raped her until around midnight,” the police officer quoted the victim.

“After they were done, they called two other boatmen named Faruk and Sharif, from the same village, and left the victim to them, who raped her for the rest of the night.

Later, locals realised what was happening

and informed the police, who went and arrested Faruk and Sharif, taking the victim in their custody, the ASI said.

Locals claimed that for unknown reasons police kept the victim in their custody at the police station all through Thursday instead of sending her to a hospital for medical examination.

Since yesterday was a weekly holiday, the victim has to wait until today to get examined, which raises the chances of inaccurate results, a number of locals said, also mentioning that keeping a rape victim at a police station for two days was inhumane.

When asked about the delay in medical examination, ASI Arif admitted that it was true.

Kaliganj OC Mostafizur Rahman said a case had been filed with the police station regarding the rape.

8-yr-old raped in Joypurhat; rapist arrested in Habiganj

An eight-year-old girl was raped in Kalai upazila of Joypurhat on Thursday. Police arrested the culprit, Shakil, 18, on the same day and a court sent him to prison yesterday.

Kalai police station OC Sirajul Islam told

our Joypurhat correspondent that Shakil lured the child to an abandoned poultry farm in Thupsara village around 3pm on Thursday, where he raped her and fled.

The victim’s father filed a case under the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act with Kalai police, following which police arrested Shakil around 8:30pm.

The child was sent to hospital for medical examination, police said.

Meanwhile, police in Habiganj has arrested Zakaria, the prime suspect in the rape of a school student at Shikarpur Haor in the district.

Sources said Zakaria took the primary school student to the haor in Baniachong upazila and raped her on Thursday. The victim was admitted to Habiganj Sadar Hospital in a severe condition.

Police arrested Zakaria in Satchhari, an area near the Bangladesh-India border in Chunarughat upazila, yesterday afternoon following a tip-off.

Masudur Rahman, assistant superintendent of police in Habiganj, confirmed the matter to the Dhaka Tribune and said Zakaria was being interrogated at Baniachong police station. l

Kachu said rice farming was becoming increasingly expensive. “Would you sit back and count losses in your business? No! So why should we?

“Tobacco gives us the maximum profit in the minimum period of time.”

Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) officials said 12,141 hectares of land were under tobacco cultivation in five upazilas in Lalmonirhat district this year. In 2014 tobacco was farmed on 10,522 hectares in the district, they said.

Farmers provided different figures, saying tobacco was being grown on 24,281 hectares in the district this year, while the corresponding number last year was 18,211 hectares.

Tobacco was cultivated on just 1,619 hectares of land in 2008.

Aggressive outreach by the six tobacco companies working in the district have caused a sea change for the cultivation of the crop.

Safayet Hossain, DAE deputy director in Lalmonirhat, said: “It is alarming. We never promote the crop but tobacco company agents run very strong door-to-door campaigns.

They distribute seed, provide free fertiliser and offer cash incentives to growers.”

Tobacco is planted from late November to mid-December and harvested from the last week of February to the first week of March, producing yields of 45 to 70 maunds per hectare that sell for between Tk3,000 and Tk4,000 per maund. l

Four of a family killed in Bandarban n Our Correspondent, Bandarban Four members of a family, including two children, were killed at a farmhouse in Bandarban on Thursday night.

Md Amin, 45, his son Junayed, 12, sister Samira Begum, 30, and her son Syed Nur, 4, died as their throats had been slit.

Amin worked at the farmhouse located at Kamlang area in Kuhalang union and police said the four had been living there for long.

It was not clear who killed them but Imtiaz Ahmed, officer-in-charge of Bandarban Sadar police station, said family rows could be a motive for the murders.

Amin had a longstanding dispute with his first wife and police said they were searching for her as her involvement was suspected in the crime.

The four were described by police as suspected Rohingya nationals who came to Bangladesh from Myanmar illegally.

The bodies were sent to Bandarban Sadar Hospital morgue for autopsy. l

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