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Bangladesh: Pinned back by politics

The Financial Times
More than three months after the Rana Plaza building near Dhaka collapsed in one the world's worst industrial accidents, a dozen relatives of the missing still stand forlornly on the roadside next to the site hoping for news.
"We want her, dead or alive," says Rashida, mother of 18-year-old Nasima Akter, who was working at New Wave Bottoms, a garment factory on the third floor, when the building crushed and entombed hundreds of workers.
"Since she went missing, we haven’t been compensated and we've seen no trace of her." The mother thrusts a plastic folder holding a picture of her daughter into the hands of a passer-by.
Nothing but rubble is left of the building, now demolished, that killed at least 1,129 people and briefly brought notoriety to Bangladesh and its fast-growing clothing industry. It is almost certain that the remains of Nasima Akter and dozens of her co-workers lie somewhere in the mud.
The Rana Plaza disaster, however, has neither stopped the apparently relentless expansion of the Bangladeshi economy nor greatly disrupted the international clothing trade. The country's total exports—four-fifths of which are clothing—rose to $2.7bn in June, up 16 per cent from the same month last year, in spite of Rana Plaza and a factory fire at Tazreen Fashions last year in which 112 workers died.
The biggest threat to the economic rise of one of the world's poorest and most populous nations, according to Bangladeshi and foreign analysts, is not the shocking state of some of its factories but the poisonous politics pitting Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister, against Khaleda Zia, who leads the opposition.
A general election due by January, predictions that a military government will take over to keep the peace between the two women and their parties, and recent violence on the streets involving the security forces and Islamist protesters, have served only to shift politicians' attention away from the vital garment industry.
"The irony is that the whole world is finally taking a look at Bangladesh as a potential economic success story," says Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher of The Daily Star. "We have fumbled, stumbled, bungled but we have arrived. [But] it's at risk from the foolhardiness of our political leadership."
The making of shirts, trousers and jackets remains the mainstay of the economy of Bangladesh and its more than 150m inhabitants. Clothing factories employ nearly 4m people; most of those are women whose jobs have given them social status and a steady income for the first time.
Factory owners, governments and western brands and retailers such as Hennes & Mauritz, Primark and Inditex, owner of the Zara brand, are all jostling to ensure improved safety and working conditions in Bangladesh so that buyers can continue sourcing clothes from one of the world's cheapest manufacturers without damage to their reputations.
Although doubts remain about the efficacy of the various foreign and local programmes to protect garment workers, senior Bangladeshi officials and industrialists are calling the Rana Plaza disaster a "wake-up call" and say they have heeded the warning.
"What this has taught us is that the garment industry is the goose that lays the golden egg, and you don’t want to kill it," says Prof Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to the prime minister with the rank of minister. "You have to behave as a global player."
In the west, Bangladesh was once a byword for misery and hunger. Its reputation was sealed by the famine of 1974 less than three years after the war of independence that separated the country from the rest of Pakistan.
Almost unnoticed by the outside world, it has since joined the ranks of Asia's fast-growing economies. On several measures of social wellbeing—such as child mortality—it has overtaken its richer neighbour India. The economy has been growing steadily at about 6 per cent a year, thanks partly to the expansion of the garment sector during the past two decades and the remittances of millions of migrant workers employed in the Gulf and elsewhere.
Bangladesh, where the minimum wage is just $38 a month and typical take-home pay is closer to $65, has rapidly become the third biggest clothing exporter in the world after China and Italy.
Factory owners say the business could double again in the next few years, provided the country improves its infrastructure, prevents any more factory fires or accidents that result in mass fatalities, and avoids disruptive political violence.
Nor does the manufacturing boom have to be confined to clothing. Shipbuilding, which complements the traditional industry of shipbreaking on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, has been expanding quickly. Another growing business is the making of accessories—buttons, for example—for the garment manufacturers.
"There's a huge untapped labour force that could be deployed. Bangladesh could become a mini-China in terms of manufacturing," says Khalid Quadir, managing partner of The Frontier Fund, a $100m private equity fund backed by Brummer of Sweden. "This is the perfect place to become a manufacturing hub*.*.*.* Bangladesh with all its problems is still a vibrant economy."
Quadir, who plans to open a second fund for Bangladesh, says the economy could easily grow at 8-9 per cent a year were it not for politics. Hasina's Awami League and Khaleda's Bangladesh Nationalist "believe pretty much the same damn thing," he says. “It's the issue of two families. There's no religious issues, ethnic issues, ideological issues, regional issues—it's purely personality, noteven political. T hateyou'— that's it
"As long as we have some level of sanity in the political system, this country can grow at double digits."
Unfortunately that sanity is sorely lacking, a failing lamented by Bangladeshis of all political hues, including supporters of both the Awami League and the BNP, and by both Islamists and atheists.
The phrase commonly used to describe Bangladesh's political disease is “winner takes all members of an incumbent government habitually persecute their opponents and engage in corruption and rent-seeking on a grand scale. Critics say this process is so pervasive in the current government that its popularity has collapsed and it now fears the outcome of a free election.
Anam says: "Our democracy now is under threat from this whole phenomenon of defeat becoming unacceptable. The party that lost was subjected to political oppression, jail terms, harassment. The businessmen who supported the party could not get business. Everybody [from the opposition] is in hibernation for four years while everybody who's on the buttered side of the bread is merrily going on rentseeking, using state resources."
Human rights groups, local and international, complain of extra-judicial killings and the jailing of political opponents on trumped-up charges. They say security forces have killed at least 150 protesters since February. Last week, the high court barred Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), an established opposition party, from elections by declaring its charter illegal under Bangladesh's secular constitution.
Corruption, meanwhile, has reached dizzying levels, with hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned out of everything from state banks to electricity-generating deals and road maintenance contracts, according to foreign aid officials and Bangladeshi business people. Last year the World Bank withdrew its support for a $2.9bn bridge across the Padma (Ganges) River that would have benefited 30m people in the southwest of the country, citing evidence of "a high-level corruption conspiracy”.
Even her sympathisers say that Hasina, daughter of the country's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, made bad political miscalculations in what is turning out to be a tumultuous year for Bangladesh. She was faced with two sets of protests over the International
Crimes Tribunal, a controversial domestic court established by her government to try war crimes committed by allies of Pakistan during the war for independence.
JI supporters demonstrated against death sentences meted out to two of its leaders, while young, liberal and secular residents of Dhaka took to the streets to demand the death penalty for JI convicts condemned only to life imprisonment
The Awami League government took sides, persecuting JI and smoothing the way for the liberals, but inadvertently exposed itself to attacks from an unexpected quarter.
When told that liberal bloggers had championed atheism and insulted Islam, tens of thousands of angry supporters of Hefajat-e-Islam, a hitherto rather obscure rural movement based in madrasas or Islamic schools, converged on the capital in early May to demonstrate. At least 58 people were killed and hundreds injured in the subsequent state crackdown.
The list of worries confronting Bangladeshis and those who might invest in the country therefore now includes the long-term threat of rising Islamist fundamentalism, fuelled partly by Gulf money and the presence of 2m Bangladeshi migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.
In the short term, especially after the Eid festival at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on about August 8, Bangladeshis predict a rise of pre-election violence and say it may herald an interim military government to keep the peace between followers of Hasina and Khaleda.
“Bangladesh suffered from day one in respect of extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances and custodial torture, and it's still going on," says Adilur Rahman Khan, a lawyer who heads Odikhar, a human rights group. "Bangladesh is still struggling to constitute itself as a democratic state. ”
For the clothing brands and western retailers that are sending construction engineers and fire safety experts to inspect factories from Chittagong to Dhaka, the repeated political hartals—strikes and stoppages that disrupt transport—are becoming as much of a concern as the rising cost of labour or the risk to their reputations from fatal accidents.
Political unrest, even factory disasters, might be seen as growing pains typical of emerging Asian economies. But the rising level of political violence and the sheer scale of the Rana Plaza tragedy have brutally exposed the weaknesses of Bangladesh to the outside world.
Omar Hamid Chowdhury, managing director of Pyramid, a conglomerate that counts garment making among its businesses, says Rana Plaza collapsed not because of a lack of adequate regulations but because of corruption and political failings.
"All the systems are in place for preventing this kind of thing from happening — but they were not enforced," he says. "So I blame Rana Plaza on the corruption of the political parties.
"As long as we have this confrontational politics going on, I don't see Bangladesh developing that fast. If we could cross that hurdle, we could be the next Malaysia or Thailand or Vietnam in a very short time."
The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh on April 24 this year was not only one of the world's worst industrial disasters. It was also one of the most easily avoidable.
Abul Kalam Azad, aged 43, was a complaints and safety officer for the New Wave Style Company when the eight-storey building fell down, killing more than 1,100 people, most of them garment workers, and sending shockwaves through the global clothing trade.
"The day before, there were cracks on the third floor, two to three feet long, in some of the pillars," says Azad, who survived with an injured foot. "Some of the cement fell off a pillar and on to a worker's head." He called his boss, who called Mohammad Sohel Rana, the building's owner, now in jail.
Rana came to look, as did a government official and a civil engineer. "I showed them the cracks. They told me it's not a major problem," Azad said. Nevertheless it was agreed that an expert from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology should make an inspection the next day, and in the meantime all the garment workers were told to take the day off.
The next day, however, they were back at work, many of them ordered to their sewing machines despite their protests that the building was unsafe. "For five minutes we quarrelled with the production manager," says Rozina, a 23-year-old machine operator who was in the rubble for three days and forced to cut off her own trapped forearm with a carpenter's saw to escape. The body of her younger sister, who was working with her at New Wave Bottoms on the third floor, was never found.
It later emerged that Rana, who had links to the ruling Awami League and was a local leader of its youth wing, had illegally built two extra floors on the building, that construction was poor and that the heavy electric generators used to provide standby electricity may also have contributed to the disaster. Then came the final act of folly by the garment companies—forcing their employees inside when some of the shops below had been abandoned.
"I came to the factory at 8.30am on the day," says Azad. "The power was out. I was on the seventh floor when it happened. I opened my computer and after they switched on the generator there was a loud noise. I told people not to panic. And then it collapsed."