As if it weren’t enough for Myanmar to engage in the ethnic cleansing of a subset of their own citizenry, to cement its steady transformation into a clandestine, cartoonish group of moustache-twirling evil-doers, the country has now sentenced two Reuters journalists to seven years of jailtime with hard labour for reporting on said ethnic cleansing operations.

As anyone even remotely associated with the field would attest, being a journalist is a thankless job, as the threat of incarceration always looms large over our heads.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a sub-editor just trying to make sense of a jumbled collection of words and epithets sent in by a reporter or someone whose sole contribution to making sure the news reaches people is to make a copious amount of printouts, nothing can save you from the ire and scorn of friends and family projecting their own conspiratorial thoughts and ideas on to you and everything your profession stands for.

I have previously aired my own frustrations with how the mainstream media has, seemingly now more than ever, devolved into little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, with the sources themselves playing judge, jury, and executioner regarding any bit of news.
But most of the time, such biases are seldom the fault of the reporter on the ground, the individuals risking life and limb so that we can wake up in the morning and start the day dwelling over other people’s miseries for a change.

News, just like any other industry, follows the top-down business model.

However, regardless of your opinion on the role of the media, there is no argument that it is an essential arm for not only ensuring a workable democracy but a workable governance in general. Which is why the recent attacks on journalists, worryingly becoming a trend worldwide, sets such a dangerous precedent.

What’s interesting with the case of the Reuters reporters is the nature of the litigation. Journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested under the country’s Official Secrets Act, whereby defendants are charged with obtaining state secrets.

I’m certain there are a million different reasons for any government to keep secrets from its own people, but incarcerating journalists in the process speaks to the sort of shamelessness that has thus far defined the Myanmar government — deflecting worldwide accusations of ethnic cleansing, bordering on genocide, of the Rohingya minority, like an unwashed stray cat lazily swatting at flies gathering around it.

Of course, as a Bangladeshi, one does not have to look far when discussing freedom of the press being choked to death. The now-sure-to-be-historic student-driven movement for road safety from earlier last month witnessed journalists getting attacked in the most literal of ways by BCL cadres.

Somewhere in between the mass hysteria over misinformation and students dying out on the streets, very few seemed to have noticed stories of journalists from The Daily Star being sexually harassed and beaten to a pulp by BCL dogs let loose by a state that is becoming ever more paranoid about its relevance to the nation as it currently stands.

And no more is that evident than in the incarceration of Shahidul Alam — a photojournalist known for promoting Bangladesh to the world through his work, which he had acquired a great deal of success in from what I understand.

For all the admonition that Myanmar has received over its flagrant abuse of human rights with the Rohingya crisis, and all the plaudits that Bangladesh has received for coming to their rescue when no other nation would, what has, disturbingly, united both governments is their contempt for journalists and the media at large, making enemies out of those who speak of serving the people and truly mean it.

We are certainly not the enemy, and we hope that those who are trying to make us appear as such are not either. 

Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune. He can be followed on Twitter @moreanik.

First published on Dhaka Tribune

I try and maintain a good demeanour with others in my day-to-day interactions, and I try and remain calm while debating my friends and peers over any given subject — all in my (mostly) futile quest to gather some sort of reciprocity from other parties.

Now, unless you’re some sort of sadomasochistic psycho killer with a penchant for snooping into other people’s texts and emails when they aren’t noticing, I’m certain that you, like most, want to be treated with some level of decency.

Which is, unfortunately, something of an alien notion to most anyone living in the city of Dhaka, where a man on a motorcycle doesn’t even think twice before plying his two-wheeled death-trap over a heavily occupied sidewalk — of course, having a law enforcer set the precedent for such behaviour all but encourages citizens to follow suit.

So, yes, the average citizen has a fundamental problem with respecting the wishes of anyone that is not him. Or “her,” for that matter — the ladies don’t get a pass.

An assault on common sense
One of the ugliest, and sadly, most common manifestations of this flagrant disregard for the Golden Rule is sexual harassment. It’s everywhere in our society. From the remote villages in the fringes of Bangladesh to a cocktail party in Gulshan, it feels almost as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with how boys are being brought up in our society.

Of course I’m being facetious.

The level of entitlement crammed into the heads of Bangladeshi men during their formative years, mostly by their mothers, all but ensures that their first experience with romantic rejection almost always ends up with the obvious outcome.
While sexual assault and rape are disgustingly common in our society, we witnessed something of a breakthrough with the Raintree case last year, the details of which I have no intention of repeating. Needless to say, the incident really opened the floodgates to discussions over rape being taken seriously and then … nothing.

What happened to all that outrage and discourse?

Domestic rape is still a time-honoured tradition in Bangladesh, and most women are still hesitant to report their experiences to the authorities in fear of the associated stigma. This is not a problem which is going to fix itself.

Kingdom of Bawdy Arabia
In the distant land of our spiritually kindred brothers and sisters, Saudi Arabia, a woman was recently arrested because of her abrupt act of endearment towards a male singer on-stage — where she broke free from the crowd and unexpectedly hugged the performer.
The most incredible bit was that the woman was charged with harassment.

Not by the singer, mind you, but the state, as her act is considered harassment by default due to the nation’s laws against women mixing in public with men they are not related to.

Now, I understand just how much of a bubble Saudi Arabia is — it is one of the greatest inadvertent social experiments in our history — and it’s definitely not the best example when talking about issues related to women (the entire country is basically a women’s rights issue). 

But I can’t help but be curious just how justified the harassment claims are in this case, even going by the country’s rather myopic views towards women and sexuality.

I mean, she did grab the guy out of the clear blue without his apparent consent.

Knock on Hollywood
Moving from one bubble to another, thespian extraordinaire Henry Cavill recently lit something of a fire under the posteriors of culture commentators all across Hollywood with his recent statement regarding what it’s like being an A-list actor in the dating scene.
While his use of the word “rape” perhaps errs a bit too much on the side of misinformed conflation, I believe his apprehensions beg for some genuine discourse.

Hollywood is in an uncomfortable period right now — its grossly exploitative and just plain gross innards now lay exposed in the aftermath of the Weinstein revelations. And while it’s great to know that the industry is finally acknowledging its problems when it comes to exploitation, there is also fear that all the progress from movements such as #metoo and #timesup are on the cusp of falling under their own weight.

No matter how many times you polish a turd it will still remain just that, unfortunately.

As an industry that is almost exclusively run by opportunists, it perhaps won’t be long before Hollywood sees an influx of enterprising young men and women trying to coast in on these movements to try and get their 15 minutes of fame.

And we’ve witnessed instances of this already, with the misplaced accusations towards comedian Aziz Ansari earlier this year by someone who experienced a bad date with him signalling something close to that. Not to mention the sordid affair which led to Anthony Bourdain committing suicide (for more information, please refer to Leah McSweeney’s Penthouse article “Can we talk about toxic femininity?”).

Harassment is never one-size-fits-all, it depends on the prevailing culture, and — given the already murky nature of human interaction — depends upon innumerable other factors.

But, at the end of the day, it all boils down to one thing: Don’t be a jerk.

Treat others as you would have them treat you — with decency and a modicum of respect for their rights as individuals.

Unless, of course, you are someone who wants to be treated like garbage, in which case, please refrain from doing so. 

Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune. He can be followed on Twitter @moreanik.

First Published on Dhaka Tribune

Is the irony of this lost on our leaders? DHAKA TRIBUNE
 

It has been two years since the horrible act of terror that was the Holey Artisan incident — an eye-opening atrocity that led to a lot of discussion over how, despite our nation’s best efforts to keep up a small-town facade, we are not safe from the clutches of organized, ideology-driven, international terror outfits.

The carnage witnessed was brutal, with at least 20 people losing their lives because of the misguided actions of a handful of disenfranchised young men belonging to various, distinct rungs of the Bangladeshi socio-economic ladder. 

And after two years worth of contemplation, commentary, and a multitude of successful anti-terror operations, Bangladesh can finally claim to have jumped into Dubya’s War on Terror bandwagon … for what it’s worth.

Terror level: Blue
Despite all the justified incredulity that the Holey Artisan incident entailed, Bangladeshis are not alien to the concept of terror, even though it has nothing to do with religion, or even any form of ideology for that matter.

I am, of course, referring to the current state of student political parties.

Groups such as the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) and Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chhatra Dal have been raising hell on the streets of our towns and cities long before Nibras Islam decided that the best way to express his pent up frustrations would be to pick up a gun and lay waste to a group of expats and teenagers in an upmarket restaurant.

News of BCL’s thuggery and sudden acts of public chaos is normal to the point where it’s almost treated as background noise; their rampant bouts of violence and vandalism performed under the thin veneer of “conducting student politics.”

Last Monday’s incident at the University of Dhaka, where a group of protesters — calling for a reform to the existing quota system for administrative government jobs — was suddenly and viciously attacked by the BCL “student politicians” can be called nothing short of an act of terror.

Take away the assault rifles and explosives, remove the false air of religiosity, and you can hardly tell the difference between a self-styled Bangladeshi member of IS and a member of BCL. 
They are both products of a culture that instills some of the worst values that a young man can translate into characteristic traits, except one of them enjoys the kind of impunity that can only be sponsored by the state itself.

And, indeed, the state has a large part to play here.

Mutually-assured destruction
I have heard an argument being made that each party’s student wing acts as something akin to nuclear deterrence against (ideally) each other. 

While this analogy holds some weight in making sure that the brunt of the fallout is almost always felt by the ordinary citizen, where it crumbles is the fact that there is almost next to no chance of a nuclear warhead targetting its own soil and launching itself.

But how did we even get here? How have we normalized the idea of political parties requiring miniature armies of their own? 

How did the idea of student politics go from actual students (I refuse to believe that the average 52-year-old-looking BCL member has anything to do with academia) protesting Section 144 during the Language Movement of 1952, to rank-and-file thugs beating up peaceful protesters in the same university grounds?

Is the irony lost on our leaders?

As citizens of a third-world nation, we have always existed in that murky realm that lies between development and authoritarianism. But that is a realm of contradictions.

Just as the promise of a Digital Bangladesh is broken by the formulation of the Digital Security Act, so is the promise of a secure and terror-free Bangladesh broken by letting violent groups such as BCL enjoy the level of impunity that they do.

IS, BCL, IRS, no matter what acronym you slap onto an organization that perpetuates violence and wreaks havoc, at the end of the day, terror by any other name is still terror. 

Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune. He can be followed on Twitter @moreanik.

First Published on Dhaka Tribune

Picture this: You’re on your social network of choice, mindlessly scrolling past nigh endless photographic evidence of your friends and close ones’ narcissism and faux happiness, when something controversial catches your eye — it’s a story on the Israel-Palestine conflict detailing the harrowing plight of the hapless Palestinians caught in the literal geo-politcal crossfire, shared by one of your bleeding-heart Muslim friends.

You click on it and brood over the violent photographs the article proudly displays.

You resume your scrolling and stumble upon another article shared by that one token foreigner girl you know and proudly tout as being a friend of yours to your slack-jawed local friends, but this time the script gets flipped and the article is about how the Hamas’s ceaseless rocket and missile assault on Israel could potentially deal a lot of damage to the promised land of the Jewish people.

You click on it and maybe skim over the words a bit to try and see things from a different angle.

Of course, the reality of the situation dictates that you would let your (expectedly Islamic) bias against Israel and Judaism decide on which bit of literature to believe and side with.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing.

Despite my own best efforts to try and remain as neutral as possible when reading the news or just trying to be kept abreast of the world at large, it’s hard not to err on the side of my own biases to some degree.

For every needlessly sensational Guardian screed on how Donald Trump is signalling the end of the world as we know it and how the alt-right and the incels will inherit what’s left after the fact, I will try and watch a Fox News clip of Tucker Carlson barely avoiding being a misogynist when debating a woman on a topic such as the wage gap in Western nations.

But therein lies the rub.
When the news itself is presented through incredibly opaque lenses of political bias (in the example above being of the left-leaning and right-leaning variety, respectively), how can anyone expect the people to remain neutral?

I realize that the above example I’ve presented is grossly reductive, and I know that there are publications out there which try and remain neutral and objective in how the news is presented — but can anyone honestly expect the average Joe to do his research over which publication caters to which agenda? 

Especially the sort of people who would vote for a buffoon such as Donald Trump just because they like how “he says it like it is” or think that voting for Hillary Clinton represents some kind of “win” for all of womankind?
Of course not.

Which brings us to Bangladesh — land of the independent, home of the brave-ish.

As a citizen of this country, if you’ve ever espoused a political opinion of any colour, you’re probably well aware of just how much it pays to look over your shoulder every now and then. 

For every laudatory editorial on our leaders’ unabated efforts to propel the nation into further development, we have an article on the opposition … errm … wait, I lost my train of thought.

Pardon my glibness — the lack of any concrete political opposition is no laughing matter, but I have hopefully gotten my point across.

If democracy gives way to division, and division gives way to political bias, and that bias in turn means the murky burial of truth, does it mean that truth — at least a close facsimile of it — perhaps lies in the death of democracy?

I have not a clue.

What I do know is that there is very little of what the talking heads on TV or the written word on newspapers have left to say, which can be believed with any modicum of assurance. 

And while I don’t usually endorse nihilism, I am genuinely doubting my decision to get out of bed this afternoon.

Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune. Follow him on Twitter @moreanik.