Habib Siddiqui

For the last few months I have been pondering about the role of police in preventing and reacting to crimes in Bangladesh. It all began with my own experience in April 9 of 2005 when I got a call from my sister, a gynecologist, stating that a powerful BNP leader’s criminal cadre had broken into our family compound in the Khulshi area of Chittagong. I simply could not believe that such a horrendous crime could happen; surely not in ours when we had all the legal title, registration, deeds, documents, possession on those properties for nearly half a century, with all bills, taxes and revenues paid. All the calls from my family members to the local thana simply met deaf ears: no one would come to stop land-grabbing. Within hours of that fateful day, sixteen tenant families who had lived in eleven one-storied (bungalow-type) homes, built by my parents in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some for nearly 25 years were all evicted by the goons of a former Rajakar by the name of Jaker Hosain Ch...

Ref: http://australianetworknews.com/stories/200902/2481009.htm?desktop The news of Thailand's newly-found interest seeking a regional solution to the Rohingya problem is probably one of the best news heard in years. Truly, without a regional solution that aims at removing the causes behind the Rohingya people's flight from the Arakan state of Burma, the mere imagination that a neighboring country like Thailand can afford to be nonchalant one way or another is simply foolish. But that is how the Buddhist Kingdom had behaved all these years. The Rohingya problem is an old one. The Thai government had all the reliable sources to know quite well about the criminal activities of its Buddhist neighbor to the west and come up with a solution that did not further victimize the fleeing refugees. Instead, it chose to take a wait and see attitude with the fleeing non-Muslim (mostly Buddhist and Christian) refugees. But when it came to the fleeing Muslim refugees from Burma, its attitude ...