Two things come easy in Bangladesh -- getting big bank loans and blissfully failing to repay. The money in the vaults seems to be the easiest prey today.
Many private banks and influential individuals are illegally employing armed guards in violation of the firearms law.
Janata was almost a sound bank, the best among its state-owned peers until last year. It saw a dramatic fall in just six months since January this year.
It was the cabinet's oath-taking night after the 2001 parliamentary elections. The phone rang in the newsroom of The Daily Star. On the other end of the phone was the quivering voice of a man who, in his Dhaka University student days, was an infamous “armed cadre” of a political party.
He was hardly known to outsiders until his father, General Ziaur Rahman who became Bangladesh's president in the process of several coups and counter-coups, died in another military putsch in May 1981. Through a Bangladesh Television programme, the countrymen, eventually came to know of Tarique Rahman. And today, he is facing life term as the court verdict goes. From the crux of political power he now lives the life of a fugitive.
It is a piece of paper full of lies and yet it is the legal government document that allows a person to drink alcohol in Bangladesh.
Devoid of the whims, high-handedness and the Cold War propositions of the bilateral and multilateral donors, smaller countries had found a new source of financing in China. Its funds could be easily tapped without being imposed with the harsh conditions like those of the World Bank and the IMF
“Oh my God! Incredulous!” was the expression of a banking expert as he leafed through the Bangladesh Bank probe report. Page after page of it explains in painstaking details how a Bangladeshi business entity allegedly skimmed at least Tk 765 crore in the name of exports from the state-owned Janata Bank and the BB from January 2017 to February this year.
It's called crazy medicine. Produced in Myanmar, the dangerous drug very easily crosses the border and reaches cities, towns and villages of Bangladesh through various channels -- sometimes in full knowledge of law enforcers. It now seems unstoppable and is poised to cripple the country's biggest hope -- the youth.
For months and years, George Bush and Tony Blair built the case with certainty that Iraq is an evil power that possessed Weapons
It has been exactly six months when the Rohingyas started streaming into Bangladesh to escape the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and it took exactly the same many months for the world to forget them, to make them truly nobody's children.
As women narrate their stories of shame– of how they were raped repeatedly by Myanmar army to the media, the case becomes even more convincing for UN special representative of secretary general to put soldiers on dock at the ICC in Hague, as she promised. Only one problem, and not a small one at that, may throw the spanner in the wheel – that Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute to the ICC.
When Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said during her Dhaka visit that Bangladesh-India relation “goes far beyond a strategic partnership”, that certainly created a ripple across many fronts – from global politics, to the Myanmar generals to the hapless Rohingyas.
After the shame of Bosnia, there should not have been a Myanmar. Yet, Myanmar happened because the big nations on both sides of the East-West divide have rendered the UN an ineffective organisation, a platform to talk and not to take actions.
1994 should have been a watershed year in human history; a year to feel ashamed of humanity's failure to stop a genocide that resulted in the deaths of 800,000 mostly Tutsis in Rwanda; a year to mend the mistakes that allowed the atrocities to happen, and to build solid defence against such atrocities in the future; it should have been truly a year of re-learning the lessons from death and destruction.
Myanmar's promise to take back the Rohingyas, who have taken refuge in Bangladesh, looks empty and seems to be a tactic to ease international pressure. This is reflected in the contents of a hasty statement put on the official website of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi hours after Myanmar Union Minister U Kyaw Zeya concluded his Dhaka visit.
It has been over three weeks that the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had issued a letter, unprecedented in the last 28 years since the 1989 Lebanon conflict, to the Security Council for its action on the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
Bangladesh boasts as being the world's number two garment exporter. Every third European has a T-shirt made in Bangladesh on his back. Every fifth American wears jeans manufactured in Bangladesh.