Habib Siddiqui

In a casual conversation with some friends in a popular café in the capital city Dhaka, I was told that Bangladeshi’s worst enemies are their own guys. They, of course, meant people in authority that matter. Upon inquiry, they mentioned the sad saga of the tea industry. Last year, Bangladesh imported more tea than it had exported. For someone like me, who is only a casual drinker of tea, and that too, only when I have a sore throat, I had no clue what had happened to this once-prosperous industry, which used to earn a major chunk of the foreign exchange for Bangladesh. Not anymore! The government, in spite of serious objections coming from the tea growers and exporters, had decided to move the tea auction house from Chittagong to Sreemangal, which is located at the heart of tea plantation areas of Bangladesh. It is worth noting here that an overwhelming majority of the tea gardens is in the Greater Sylhet area (Sylhet, Moulvibazar and Habiganj), the remainders are in Chittagong an...

Mr. Dilip Barua was the Industries Minister in Bangladesh in the last cabinet of Sheikh Hasina. He is from the Communist Party and a Buddhist by faith. He was a technocrat minister who did not (and surely could not) win any seat in the parliament. In his own constituency - in Haitkandi village, near Nizampur Government College, in the Mirsaria thana - north of Sitakund - he is almost unknown except that his neighboring villagers knew that he came from the nearby Magh Para whose vast majority of the dwellers had been fishermen supplying fish into the local market. So, when one of their very own, a Buddhist and communist, with a university degree in Physics from Dhaka University, was chosen as a powerful minister in the past cabinet there was lot of expectations within the locals that he would do something good for their region. One such major wish included repair of the road that goes in front of Dilip Barua's village from the nearby bazar. He did not do anything about it, and ...

Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of the state of West Bengal, has been a very polarizing figure in India, let alone in Bangladesh. Her irresponsible actions speak volumes and appear as if she has formed an alliance with communal and divisive forces within India to resist all attempts to normalizing good relationship with Bangladesh. Her predecessor, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee has criticized her innane stupidity. The CPI (M) politburo member appeared furious over Mamata Banerjee's opposition to the Teesta river water sharing that forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to back off from signing the agreement during his last visit to Dhaka in 2011. "We all want good relations with Bangladesh. We don’t want communal forces and anti-India forces to thrive there. We want a secular Bangladesh friendly to India but how do we ensure that if its bonafide demands are not met," said Bhattacharjee. “Was it really necessary to create an impasse on water sharing and enclaves? The...

T he Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations 65 years ago in December of 1948. The U.S. didn’t ratify the Genocide Convention for another 40 years. The late Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, took up the task in the 1960s of getting the convention ratified. He assumed it would be easy. But it was not. He ended up giving 3,211 speeches on the floor of the Senate, a different speech every day for 19 years, until it was ratified. It took two more years before President Ronald Reagan finally signed the measure into law on Nov. 5, 1988 — in a hangar at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. After the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, the world said “never again,” but the list of genocides since then is long and sorrowful: Cambodia in the 1970s, nearly 2 million dead; Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead; Bosnia in the 1990s, 250,000 dead; Chechnya between the years 1994 and 2000, nearly 250,000 dead, 200,000 missing and 500,000 –...

We seem never to run short of mass murderers. Bashar al-Assad of Syria is one such monster who has been killing the Sunni majority in his country and won't step down letting the Syrians to choose their leaders freely in a democratic election. As of last month, the death toll in Syria surpassed 130,000. You can read the report by clicking here .

You can read about the latest news about recent massacre of Rohingya Muslims by Rakhine Buddhists by clicking here .

At the Milwaukee International Conference last year it was noted with great concern that what was going on in the Arakan State was nothing short of genocide. The current events in Myanmar again confirm our fear. In a recently published article, journalist Dr. Ismail Salami of Press TV demonstrated how the 8-stages of genocide, first coined by Dr. Greg Stanton, are in play when it comes to the Rohingya people. He writes [extra phrases or sentences within the parentheses are mine]: 1) Classification: People are classified into “us” and “other”, the first stage towards sociocide and colonization. In Myanmar, Muslims are seen as the ‘other’ and therefore inferior.   2) Symbolizations: People are given names or symbols in order that others may tell them apart. This stage is not, per se, dangerous unless it turns into dehumanization. [The Rohingya people are called ‘Kala’ people, or Chittagonians or Bengalis - to symbolize that they are outsiders in the Buddhist majority ...