Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

About two weeks ago I wrote about allegations against a Bangladeshi military government Advisor’s husband and company. At the time I wrote about the odd silence of the Bangladeshi media in (not) reporting on the story.

Today, all that changed.

The New Age reports:

A landlady named Farhana Islam on Wednesday lodged a criminal case against Nazim Kamran Chowdhury, husband of the industries adviser, Geeteara Safiya Chowdhury, and eight others for reportedly beating her.

Metropolitan magistrate Hemayet Uddin heard the case and asked the Gulshan police officer-in-charge to register the complaint as a first information report if the allegation on investigation is found true.

Farhana alleged Nazim Kamran had rented her building at Gulshan Circle 2 on condition that he would vacate it by September 30. The petitioner in a notice asked Nazim, who used the house for business purposes, to vacate the building after the rental agreement had expired.

As Nazim kept staying in the house illegally without paying rent and other bills, payment, the Dhaka Electric Supply Authority severed the electric connection to the house on the complaint of the landlady.

‘As Nazim tried to run generator at my house without permission, I protested at his doing so. Nazim and his men then on October 23 beat me with iron rods and tore my sari,’ Farhana told the court.

Others accused in the case are Geteeara’s younger brother Abu Rushd Tarek, Shamsun Nahar Tarek, Mukim Choudhury, Shakhawat Hossain Shahadat, Adit Bhagat, Ripon, Bipul and Yaar Ali.

As the police did not register the complaint, she moved the court, Farhana said.

In addition to the New Age, the Daily Star, The New Nation, and BDNews24 carried the story. The Bengali language papers Ittefaq, Amader Shomoy, Shomokal and Daily Dinkal also carried the story.

The media in Bangladesh have suddenly discovered this story after ignoring it for nearly three weeks. There are many strange happenings taking place in Bangladesh lately, not the least of which is the sudden disappearance of the military ruler of Bangladesh.

So let me tell you a story.

Back in 2002 you signed a lease to rent out your building to a number of businesses all owned by the same family. You sign a 5 year lease with the tenants. The 5 year lease expired on September 30, 2007. You have given notice to your tenants that you will not renew the lease. September 30, 2007 arrives and passes, yet the tenants do not vacate your building.

Twenty-two days after the lease has expired, on October 22 2007, your tenants are seen installing a diesel generator on the roof of the building you own, without your permission. When you and your wife arrive to prevent the tenants from making modifications to the building you own, you are punched by the tenant and, on his orders, his goons set upon you with metal rods. You end up in the hospital. Your wife tries to intervene and is slapped by the tenant.

Three days after the incident, you hold a press conference trying to get some justice. Reporters attend your press conference but only one newspaper in the country decides to publish your story.

The story above represents the allegations made at a press conference in Dhaka on October 25, 2007 by Dr. Mahbub Islam and his wife, the landlords. The tenants are three companies - Adcom, Signage and Magnavision. Adcom is owned by Geeteara Safiya Choudhury, a current civilian Advisor of the military government of Bangladesh. The other two companies are owned by her husband, Nazim Kamran Choudhury, a former member of the Bangladeshi parliament. Dr. Islam and his wife allege that Nazim Kamran Choudhury and others assaulted them on October 22, 2007 at their own building, twenty-two days after the lease expired and after the three companies failed to vacate the premises.

Mrs. Geeteara Choudhury, who famously said back in April of this year that "I’m not thinking about human rights at this time, but my own", is one of the civilian faces of this military government - a government that claims as its mandate an "anti-corruption" drive. This government claims that it is doing away with abuse of power and corruption as it jails top politicians and hundreds of thousands of citizens under draconian laws. Yet, Geeteara Choudhury and her husband now face accusations of using their power to forcibly squat on someone else’s property. Mr. Choudhury also faces accusations of violent assault. This is a story of the powerful forcing their will on the powerless. This is a story of corruption and abuse of power.

Every day the Bangladeshi newspapers are filled with stories of corruption by the politicians that are being locked away by this military government. Every allegation is given prominent billing. Yet, the Bangladeshi media remains oddly silent about this story and these allegations.

Bangladesh now has an unelected unaccountable military government, with 11 unelected unaccountable civilian "advisors", leading the country on an "anti-corruption" crusade. Bangladesh now has a frightened and compliant media.

Now that I have told you the above story, do you think Bangladesh is headed toward more corruption or less corruption? Do you think under these circumstances the common citizen has recourse to the law vis-à-vis the unelected unaccountable "leaders"?

Today The Progressive Bangladesh, a magazine of progressive Bangladeshi thought, published an article co-authored by me and Umme Perveen Iftikhar on the recent Transparency International report on Bangladesh. The article expands on the post I wrote last week entitled "The Myth Of The Anti-Corruption Drive".

Excerpts:

The Corruption Surprise
By Mashuqur Rahman and Umme Perveen Iftikhar

When Transparency International published its Corruption Perceptions Index—or CPI—for 2007, the leading English daily in Bangladesh greeted the news with a deliberately positive headline: “Bangladesh improves on its graft image: Climbs up to 7th position from bottom of TI’s corruption index.” Indeed it is an improvement, considering that Bangladesh had tied for the third lowest spot last year.

What’s important, position or perception?

The perception that underlies Bangladesh’s gain in rank remains exactly the same as before. Both in 2006 and in 2007 Bangladesh received a CPI score of 2.0. In other words, Bangladesh showed no improvement in corruption between 2006 and 2007. The country’s ranking improved only because seven countries of the world became more corrupt this year: Cambodia, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea and Laos. In addition, four new countries (Afghanistan, Tonga, Uzbekistan and Somalia), also with worse corruption than Bangladesh, were added as new entrants to the list.

Policymakers and the media engaged in a hair-splitting exercise to figure out what’s more important, the rank or the score. But given the self-censorship in the country, few had the courage to say outright that the rank is an outcome of indexing. What is important is that the perception of corruption in Bangladesh remains as strongly negative as before.

That conclusion, not made forcefully in public, would be an embarrassment to the caretaker government, which has been fighting a “war on corruption.” Indeed, like authoritarian governments almost everywhere, it legitimizes its existence primarily to its anti-corruption drive. Cleaning up politics is the pretext on which it has stretched the limits of constitutional interpretation by delaying the election date till the end of 2008. But now the world’s leading corruption watchdog comes out to say essentially that the anti-corruption effort has had little or no effect so far. How can this be tackled?

[Read more]

[Cross posted at E-Bangladesh]

Today Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) released its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2007. The Daily Star newspaper in Bangladesh announced the news with the headline "Bangladesh improves on its graft image: Climbs up to 7th position from bottom of TI’s corruption index." Indeed Bangladesh this year tied for the 7th lowest spot on the index and in 2006 Bangladesh tied for the third lowest spot. However, both in 2006 and in 2007 Bangladesh received a CPI (Corruption Perceptions Index) score of 2.0. In other words, Bangladesh showed no improvement in corruption between 2006 and 2007. Bangladesh’s ranking improved only because seven countries of the world became more corrupt this year (Cambodia, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea and Laos all reported worse scores this year than in 2006) and four new countries with worse corruption than Bangladesh were added to the list of countries surveyed (Afghanistan, Tonga, Uzbekistan and Somalia all were new entrants at the bottom of the list).

The new Transparency International report must come as alarming news to Bangladesh’s "corruption" fighting military government. An "anti-corruption" drive launched in January by Bangladesh’s military rulers apparently has had no effect. So, today the TI representative in Bangladesh scrambled to give reasons for the lack of improvement. First he found the silver lining in the report:

"This also proves that at least corruption is not increasing in Bangladesh," said Muzaffer, referring to the country’s five-year stint in topping the index of corrupt countries.

He further explained:

Pressed on why the score remains the same despite the anti-corruption crackdown by the caretaker government, Muzaffer said Bangladesh could have fared worse if the positive results achieved between January and July this year did not offset the worsening corruption data of 2006.

Explaining why the score remains the same, TIB Executive Director Iftekharuzzaman said, "Included in this year’s index were data collected until the end of July 2007, which means CPI 2007 was relatively more influenced by the data from 2006."

He added that since business surveys provide the data, ‘it is quite likely that a perceived sense of insecurity and uncertainty that is widely believed to have prevailed among the business community in wake of the post 1/11 anti-corruption drive in Bangladesh, might have prevented the possibility of a better score’.

TIB also said it is too early to say how Bangladesh’s score will be affected by the ongoing institutional reforms undertaken by the current government in separating the judiciary, and in reforming the Election Commission, Anti-corruption Commission, and the Public Service Commission.

Referring to the arrest of those associated with corruption in the past and the signing of the UN Convention against Corruption, TIB said the effectiveness of these measures will determine Bangladesh’s score in 2008 and beyond.

"It might well be that only in the years to come the positive impact of such reforms would be more clearly discernible," Iftekhar added.

The TI representative argues that 2006’s corruption was so bad that the "anti-corruption" drive from 2007 has only so far overcome the negative data. He also blamed the perception of the business community in the wake of the "anti-corruption" drive for the low score. I am compelled to remind the TI representative in Bangladesh that the TI index tracks the perception of corruption, not corruption itself (hence the name Corruption Perceptions Index). Therefore the perception of the business community is not a mitigating factor to explain away the CPI score, it is the score.

The military government has used the "anti-corruption" drive as justification for its political purges. It has been repeatedly stated that corruption must be tackled before free and fair elections can be held. Chief Advisor Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed boasted to Time magazine earlier this year that because his government did not suffer from "political patronage" they were better corruption fighters:

A nonparty caretaker government doesn’t suffer from the burdens of political patronage. Whether or not the political parties could have done so, I do not know. But they certainly lacked the political will and the courage in the past.

The impression that has been created is that Bangladesh was becoming more and more corrupt under successive democratic governments, and therefore an intervention was in order. However, a look at how Bangladesh fared between 2001 and 2007 in Transparency International’s own numbers tells a startlingly different story [Click the graph below for an enlarged image]:

The graph includes data from 2001 when TI first started tracking the CPI score for Bangladesh. According to TI, the 2001 CPI score is an outlier and TI cautions that it is only based on a small number of surveys and should be viewed with caution (however, I have left the data in for completeness). You will notice that Bangladesh improved every year on the CPI score except in 2007. From 2001 to 2006 Bangladesh was under democratic rule, and contrary to the meme that has been nurtured by Bangladesh’s military government, Bangladesh improved steadily. If past trends had continued, 2007 should have shown an improved CPI score. However, the military government’s "anti-corruption" drive has instead stopped Bangladesh’s slow climb out of corruption.

The TI data for 2007, though surprising at first glance, is not wholly unexpected. In June of this year, I wrote a short article for Himal Southasian magazine about the fallacy of the military government’s "anti-corruption" drive. That issue of Himal magazine however was banned in Bangladesh. In the article I wrote:

While the reduction of corruption, rampant in Bangladesh, is a laudable and important goal, it is far from clear that an anti-corruption drive by an unaccountable government can indeed be successful. On the contrary, all the conditions exist today for the further corruption of the political system in Bangladesh. The World Bank often uses the following formula for parsing corruption: C = M + D – A, where corruption (C) equals monopoly power (M) combined with discretion by public officials (D) minus accountability (A). According to this formula, the current caretaker government’s monopoly over all instruments of state power; its powers of arbitrary arrest without warrant, and its detention of citizens without due-process rights; and the limitations it has placed on the press as the citizens’ watchdog, all conspire to undermine the government’s stated goal of reducing corruption.

The crucial element of fighting corruption – accountability – is conspicuously missing from the current framework. Though the leaders of the caretaker government may have good intentions, the government itself, operating under a state of emergency, is institutionally stacked against them.

What we are seeing today in the TI data is the result of an unaccountable government’s "anti-corruption" drive. As with all military government’s in the past, the results are predictable. It is no coincidence that at the bottom of TI’s list this year is Burma, one of the world’s longest ruling military dictatorships.

Bangladesh has been, and remains, a very corrupt nation. However, corruption in Bangladesh is systemic and cannot be solved by decapitating the political leadership, and it certainly cannot be done by an unaccountable military government. There is no question that individuals in past governments in Bangladesh have engaged in massive corruption. But that corruption has not been limited to democratic governments. Perhaps the most corrupt leader Bangladesh has had was the military dictator Hussain Mohammad Ershad. Until institutions in Bangladesh become more transparent, until governments in Bangladesh become more accountable, and until power in Bangladesh ceases to be concentrated amongst the few, Bangladesh will continue to struggle with rampant corruption. Rounding up politicians in the name of an "anti-corruption" drive may grab headlines, but the deeper damage caused by the application of draconian laws and the complete disregard for the rule of law by this government is breeding even more corruption.

One thing is certain. The longer an unaccountable military regime rules Bangladesh the more corrupt Bangladesh will become. Bangladeshis have been forced to give up their essential liberties with the promise of "free and fair elections" and a "corruption-free" future. As long as the military rules Bangladesh, the people are likely to get neither.