American Buddhist Net

8 July 2008

Bangalore, India (ENI). A joint forum of Buddhist, Christian and Hindu minorities in Bangladesh is lobbying quietly for the restoration of a secular constitution that was abolished 20 years ago making Islam the state religion in the Muslim-majority nation.

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How Bangladesh’s generals get away with it

IN TERMS of foreign press coverage per head of population, probably no country in the world gets as raw a deal as Bangladesh. It has some 150m people. Yet if it features in the international media it tends to be either as the scene of an appalling natural disaster—flood or cyclone—or as the crucible for one of the great experiments in microcredit.

Its politics tend to be ignored. This is surprising, since it is a bastion of moderate Islam, which, like other moderate Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia, has been prey to an extremist fringe.

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The rise and fall of Bhddhism in South Asia
Author: M. Abdul Mu'min Chowdhury
Publisher: London Institute of South Asia
Pages 358, Price: Taka 500/- US$ 15

Before the rise of Brahmanism the subcontinent was overwhelmingly Buddhist. South Asian monks and merchants had introduced Buddhism to other countries. Although in those Asian countries it continues to prosper, in South Asia it survives only as a jumbled memory. The human agency, the Aryan-Brahmans, behind the unusual fate of Buddhism in the subcontinent also became its modern day historiographers.

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A little-known indigenous group in Bangladesh has for decades been persecuted. Will international pressure ensure its survival?

* Duncan Campbell
* The Guardian,
* Wednesday June 25, 2008

Members of one of the least-known groups of indigenous people in the world are facing what they see as a struggle for survival in Bangladesh. They claim that their way of life is being increasingly threatened by the Bangladeshi government and military while the world's back is turned.

There are around 600,000 Jumma living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in south-east Bangladesh, where they can trace their history back to the 12th century. For many years, they lived a remote existence in the jungle area above Chittagong. A treaty with the British in 1900 appeared to offer them protection "to help preserve the tribal culture" and to leave them to their own devices, in exchange for taxation. They continued this existence, largely untroubled, as part of East Pakistan - after the partition that followed India's independence in 1947 - until the 1970s.

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June 5, 2008
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI — The army-backed caretaker government in Bangladesh that has netted hundreds of politicians and businesspeople in a yearlong anticorruption drive has now rounded up nearly 12,000 people in what it calls a crusade against crime.

Political parties have denounced the roundup, carried out in recent days, as a ploy to clamp down on political activity as Bangladesh prepares for national elections in December.

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By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 24, 2008; Page A01

DHAKA, Bangladesh -- As a seamstress, Abida Dulalmia makes $1.25 a day embroidering cartoon characters on Disney T-shirts and stitching pockets on jeans for Target. In this jumbled, hazy metropolis, her salary was once coveted. Now it hardly seems enough.

With inflation starting to climb into the double digits in Bangladesh and food prices soaring around the world, Dulalmia spends as much as 80 percent of what she makes solely to put food on the dinner table.

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18/05/2008 19:03 - (SA)

Dhaka - The UN's World Food Programme began distributing emergency food aid on Sunday to 120 000 people facing famine in south eastern Bangladesh, where an invasion of rats led to widespread crop destruction.

People from the affected areas in the Chittagong hill tracks were struggling to feed themselves and had been eating wild roots from the jungle ever since the area was overrun by millions of rats, the WFP said.

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May 11, 2008

Bangladesh's ethnic minority communities, mainly Buddhist tribals, continue to be thrown out of their ancestral land, allegedly by government agencies, influential people and private organisations, a survey revealed.

Researchers and experts say that the fate of over 1.5 million indigenous people, who represent 58 small and large groups living in hilly and plain land across the country, is almost same.

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May 3, 2008
Asghar Ali Engineer

...We find so much violence in Buddhist countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand. Thus it would be seen that all religions talk of love and peace and all religions permit use of violence in defense. But the followers often misuse the concept of defensive violence for aggressive purposes.

Media may have its own compulsions, politicians may have their own needs, but scholars should not buy their formulations. They must fight their own prejudices and go for in depth understanding of issues. Intellectuals and scholars should be committed to quest for truth as peace and non-violence is not possible without truth. Gandhiji insisted on truth and even said truth is God in order to promote peace and no-violence.

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Huge cheering crowds lined railway tracks on the border between India and Bangladesh on Monday as passenger train services resumed between the two countries after a gap of more than 40 years.

Trains, named the Maitree (Friendship) Express, travelled in both directions for the first time since the service was suspended after a 1965 war between India and Pakistan, when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan.

The reopening caps years of negotiations on restoring links between the two parts of the Bengal region.

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By JULHAS ALAM – 35 minutes ago

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — For a 13-year-old boy in this impoverished, teeming city, some things are more important than classes — rice, for one.

"I need to eat first, then school," said Mohammad Hasan, standing at the back of a line of hundreds of people waiting to pick up government-subsidized rice.

With the price of food skyrocketing around the world, desperately poor and overpopulated Bangladesh is considered one of the world's most vulnerable nations.

An adviser to the country's Ministry of Food, A.M.M. Shawkat Ali, warned of a "hidden hunger" in Bangladesh and economists estimate 30 million of the country's 150 million people could go hungry — a crisis that could become a serious political problem for the military-backed government.

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An infestation of rats is creating severe food shortages in the impoverished Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh, close to the borders of India and Burma.

Saturday, 22 March 2008
By Mark Dummett

Sangram, a rat catcher in the remote Bangladeshi village of Theihkyong, has never been busier and nor has his work been as important as it is now.

That is because the fields surrounding the village have been stripped by an invading army of rodents, which villagers say crossed over the nearby border with India three months ago.

It has become more than a job. Sangram now needs the rats to keep his family members alive.

They eat two bowls of smoked rat a day, accompanied by the wild roots he finds in the forest.

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By Daniel Pimlott in New York
Published: February 16 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 16 2008 02:00

Bangladesh's Grameen Bank has made its first loans in New York in an attempt to bring its pioneering microfinance techniques to the tens of millions of people in the world's richest country who have no bank account.

The bank's entry into the US, its first in a developed market, comes as mainstream banks' credibility has been hit by the mortgage meltdown and many people are turning to fringe financial institutions offering loans at exorbitant interest rates.

"Now is a good time because of ... the subprime crisis and that highlights the issue that the financial system is not perfect," Muhammad Yunus, the bank's Nobel Prize winning founder, told the Financial Times.

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Thursday, January 31, 2008
Report by KAMAL RAJAPAKSE

THE ARMY (the de facto government) is actively involved in the ongoing settlement policy. There is no protection under the law: the rule of law in Bangladesh is subverted to political interference, weak institutions and an indifference to human rights.

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Wednesday, 30 January, 2008, 01:37 AM Doha Time

COX’S BAZAR: Bangladesh has tightened security along its border with Myanmar to try to halt an influx of Muslim refugees from its mainly Buddhist neighbour, officials said yesterday.

They said the newcomers, who have sneaked into Bangladesh’s southeastern Cox’s Bazar district from military-ruled Myanmar over the last year, now numbered more than 17,000 and were still arriving.

Bangladesh officially shelters about 21,000 Myanmar Muslims, knows as Rohingyas, in two increasingly dilapidated border camps – at Kutupalong and
Nayapara – and is building a third camp at Leda, 500km (310 miles) southeast of the capital Dhaka.

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On 25 January 2008, indigenous Jumma peoples are scheduled to hold a large religious gathering at Sarnath Arannyo Kuthir, a Buddhist temple at Karallyachari in Khagrachari Hill district of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs). The Bangladeshi authorities have banned the meeting. It is unclear if the meeting will go ahead. As we upload this Weekly Review, the Deputy Commissioner of Khagrachari district is holding a meeting with the local Jumma elders of Karallyachari to decide the fate of the religious gathering while the Bangladesh army personnel have been seizing the bikes and other vehicles. But if the meeting takes place it is likely that the government will use violence to suppress it.

The government’s actions at the temple are a microcosm of an ongoing and long established State policy to establish a homogenous Bengali Muslim society; a policy that implies the destruction of the identity of the indigenous Jumma peoples through a process of illegal and often violent settlement of the Bengali Muslim settlers.

With international community's attention focused on Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections the care-taker government is free to execute the ethnic cleansing policy in the CHTs without external interference.

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As part of a broader conspiracy to grab the lands of Sarnath Arannyo Kuthir , a Buddhist meditation centre cum temple run by a disciple of Vev. Bana Bhante, a fictitious case has been filed against 500 Jumma men and women including the chief priest of the meditation centre and a dead person.

12/26/2007

Maungdaw: Burma border security forces, Nasaka, handed over four Bangladeshi monks and eleven prisoners to Bangladesh border security forces on Saturday, according to an official report.

The report stated that four Bangladeshi monks who were studying religious scriptures at monasteries in Burma were handed over to Bangladesh authorities at the Maungdaw-Teknaf border point.

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Dhaka, Dec 2 - Major problems confronting Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh, home to the country's Buddhist tribals, remain unresolved ten years after a peace treaty led to their surrender.

Ethnic minority leaders in general have blamed it on lack of political will by successive governments, who have shied away from granting autonomy to councils, envisaged and formed under the treaty.

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DHAKA (AFP) — The final toll from cyclone Sidr was likely to be more than 4,000 as hundreds of fishermen are still missing in Bangladesh, the army said Thursday.

Armed forces spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Faruque Hussain, giving updated figures, said 3,256 bodies had been found and that 880 people were missing and feared dead.

Officials had earlier confirmed over 3,400 deaths with 1,700 missing.

"Most of the missing persons are fishermen. We fear that most of them are dead as we did not receive any information of them taking shelter," he said.

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22 Nov 2007

New Delhi - Controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen left India's eastern city of Kolkata on Thursday, a day after protests against her stay in the West Bengal capital escalated into widespread violence and riots, police and media reports said. Nasreen had taken an evening flight to Jaipur, capital of India's western Rajasthan state, a Kolkata police official said. He said Nasreen had been provided with a police escort but gave no further details.

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By Anis Ahmed

DHAKA, Nov 15 (Reuters) - A super cyclone was bearing down rapidly on Bangladesh's southwest coastline, ripping off tin roofs from houses and uprooting trees, as hundreds of thousands were evacuated to safer ground.

London-based Tropical Storm Risk said Cyclone Sidr was a Category 4 storm, packing winds of 135 knots, and was heading due north on a course that would take it over the heavily populated southern coast and then towards the capital, Dhaka.

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Any discourse of “rights” presupposes an autonomous and egocentric subject. In contrast, Nayakrishi Andolon is concerned not with “persons” or fictitious subjects endowed with “rights”, who exist outside society or the community, but with “relations”. A social formation, including its political structure, is composed of the totality of concrete relations – ecological, economic, cultural, political, and so on – upon which the community is organised. Given the present as it is, Nayakrishi explores the possibility of creating the conditions for joyful relations. Strategically, it would like to engage in tasks that may reveal a particular but determining relation in a historically specific context that in turn determines all other relations or edifices of a society and state.

...There were also other powerful trends that could be classified as a “political discourse of responsibility”, which can be traced back to the past, mainly to the Buddhist phase of Bengal...

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DHAKA (AFP) — At least 25,000 textile workers defied a ban on protests in emergency-ruled Bangladesh on Saturday to demand back-pay and bonuses in one of the country's biggest industrial zones, police said.

The workers walked off the job in the Tejgaon Industrial Area in Dhaka and held protests in the streets, forcing the shutdown of most factories in the area, assistant police commissioner Moshiur Rahman said.

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September 13, 2007

Bangladesh Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka yesterday called on the Sri Lankan Government to put pressure on the Bangladesh Government to protect Jumma Buddhists and their lands in that country. They also called on the attention of the international community to their plight.

They appealed to human rights organizations to send a fact-finding mission to the Chittagong Hill Tracts to assess the human rights situation in that area.

The Buddhist monks also requested the Bangladesh Government to renounce violence, to stop its harmful policy towards the indigenous Jumma people, to stop its repression of human rights activists and indigenous Jumma peoples.

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