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Not a tragedy: Returning to 'crime scene' Rana Plaza

Desdemona Khan
O, how this spring of love resemble th The uncertain glory of an April day Which noiv shows all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away.
-Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona
FROM a very early age," George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said, "I've had to interrupt my education to go to school." Even if GBS didn't say so, I would perhaps, especially in view of the real life lessons I got in the wake of the events now known as the 'Rana Plaza tragedy.' It was hardly two or three months inside my job working for a non-governmental voluntary organisation which specialised in, among other, things helping disaster victims. I learnt what may be called 'the real,' which no college would, or probably could, teach.
On the morning of April 24, 2013 an estimated 4,000 workers, female and male, had just begun to run their machines and sundry equipments in four RMG factories located on the upper floors of a nine-storey building named Rana Plaza in Savar, Dhaka. By about 9 am electricity supply had been sapped and a stand-by generator jump-started. All of a sudden the whole structure, with its human load, collapsed.
The previous day, a wide crack had appeared and workers were evacuated. Next day, the owners forced workers to join work in order to meet what they called their export shipment schedule in time. Rescue work followed close on the heels of the catastrophe. The actual number of casualties has not been determined precisely to this day. Death toll is estimated to be 1,135, and the figure for the wounded and injured, as reckoned by rescue workers, is around 3,000. Perhaps there had been more or less, but as I read in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale, "people raise the number according to their own grief."
Not too many days later, I happened to visit victims under treatment in various city hospitals -Dhaka Medical Gollege Hospital, National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedic Rehabilitation and Centre for Paralyzed Rehabilitation in Savar. It was a hellhole of a new world! I never thought 1 would see such a 'divine hell' in life. All inmates were severely injured and screaming as if they were 'souls contesting with their God.' On my first visit, to NITOR, I met some 70 survivors struggling for their lives in two wards (male and female). As I entered the hall I was shocked and almost paralysed. I thought perhaps I had been carried to the hell described in Dante's Divine Gomedy.
But 1 had to interview them. I had a questionnaire prepared beforehand, but the condition of every inmate there was so self-explanatory that it made me think it was ridiculous to use it. I just talked to them as it came along. I could not sleep for the first two nights. The hospital wards were all over in my dreams. They traumatised, shocked, denied sleep and when nature intervened I woke up frequently. However, I had to return there several times and became used to the heartbreaking scenarios. Eventually we all do. I am still in touch with them.
Each victim I met had a different story to tell. All were moving. Most survivors were invalids, either completely or partially, from injuries sustained. For instance, Abdus Subhan (40) had his spinal cord completely broken, Shahabuddin (42) had his hip and loins dislocated. Ashraful Sujan (35) developed infections from blistering wounds that wouldn't heal for long. Among the worst were Karuna (20), Rozina (25), and Sapna (20). Sapna had damaged brain-cells and lost her speech, Rozina lost a hand, and Karuna became paralyzed from the waist downwards. Almost all of them were sole bread-earners of their families. They didn't know what awaited their families in the days to come! Despite all the misery, the power of their 'human spirit' didn't decay at all and they are still keen to get back on their feet.
Sufferings of many female workers were doubled. Some women, on account of becoming invalid,
were abandoned by their husbands. They are young and with a whole life-time ahead! Many got help, but it was hardly enough to meet their basic needs.
Newly married Ariful (18) is missing and his wife Asha (15) was four and a half months pregnant. Adding insult to her suffering, Asha was denied the human comfort of family recognition. Her mother-in-law wouldn't even recognise the child in Asha's womb as a legitimate offspring. She claimed that she didn't even know that her son had put his wife in the family way. When I met Asha, who may herself be taken for a child, she was worried about both the upcoming trial of a first childbirth and the tribulations of rearing him/her up in an uncertain world.
Rana Plaza disaster has often been referred to as a tragedy. But on close reflection, however, it seems inappropriate to think of it as a tragedy in the classical sense. For tragedy implies something ineluctable or inevitable in course of things. The April 24, 2013 disaster was nothing of the sort. It was foreseeable, and already foreseen. It was a chronicle foretold, forewarned well ahead. A manmade disaster such as this is better called a crime. Is it due to its tragic proportions, that it destroyed thousands of lives, that we call it a tragedy?
Labour conditions, including work-place security, here are appalling. Rana Plaza, sadly, is only a demonstration that thousands can be pushed to meet their deaths in foreseeable, hellish conditions. Labour laws are no pro-worker dissertations in Bangladesh. Right to trade unions in the RMG sector is still in dreams. In Bangladesh, according to authentic sources, no more than 3.88% of the employed workforce is under aegis of some kind of union. RMG workers, being the worst paid industrial workers in the country, provide one good reason for foreign capital being drawn to Bangladesh. Givil society, factory owners (BGMEA included), government and international buyers - all of them - owe it to the workers, don't they? It is after all their unpaid labour which provides for all our profits and taxes.
The writer is a researcher.