Your dream lacks the teeth, Professor Yunus by Mozammel H. Khan

Your dream lacks the teeth, Professor Yunus

Mozammel H. Khan

Published on February 13, 2007

Dear Prof. Yunus,

I read the abridged version of your address, entitled �If I could be the chairman of the Anti-corruption commission�, through the courtesy of an English language Daily. I am attributing the content of your address a �Dream�, not a Utopia. At the outset, I must apologize for not sharing your happiness and, according to your own claim, the happiness of the citizens of the country at the formation of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC). We have seen many such commissions, one even headed by Justice Sultan Hossain Khan himself, over the years. However, the report of any such commissions never saw the light of the day. It is a widely conceived perception that the core of our corruption is situated at the nucleus of the government, regardless of the party in power. Does one have to be a graduate of the Kennedy school of government to apprehend that a government, in its good sense, would create a commission to expose of and punish for its own mischief? Nevertheless, I am giving you the complete benefit of doubt that the ACC was formed with a noble intention to annihilate corruption and you would be given the absolute authority to choose your own human resources, including its Secretary, and you would have the full authority to draw your required financial resources from the national exchequer.

Your whole wish-list is based on a scenario that sounds very much foreign to Bangladesh. While reading through it, I thought for a while you must be dreaming yourself to be working in Helsinki or Singapore, a much closer destination from geo-cultural consideration. It seems you are very much indifferent (not ignorant) to unique position Bangladesh holds among the community of un(failed) states. If you have the statistics under your hold, you will discover that the lawmakers of Bangladesh spent the highest amount of money, only next to US, to get elected to the parliament, while a lawmaker in Finland (the least corrupt nation according to TI) or Singapore (the least corrupt country in Asia) spends, on an average, a meagre ten thousand dollars to get elected to serve the nation as a lawmaker. Is there any country on the globe, which itself claims to be a democracy, a person convicted for corruption and was guilty of aiding an extra-constitutional usurpation of the state power through unconstitutional dissolution of the parliament, appointed as the minister to the important portfolio no less than the law and parliamentary affairs itself? This is a country where the partisan zeal is so naked that a law professor, who supposedly teaches law, writes columns supporting killing by so-called �crossfire�, a flagrant disregard for the rule of law. This is the country where we find dearth of judges to try even the self-confessed killers of a man whose voice, in your own words, �was strong enough to quell the sophisticated fire power of the Pakistanis�. The people of this country are so much forgivable (may be forgetful) that even the alleged war criminals are voted to run the helm of the State within a short span of thirty years. The list will never be an exhaustive one.

In your model dream you have made a very flawed assumption. Yes, every citizen supports the ACC as long as he himself is outside the loop. Our people seldom cherish the concept of self-criticisms. The most horrendous truth is that corruption is not a social stigma in our society. The dignity and power of an individual is decided by the amount of money he holds. If one has the money, he can acquire dignity and power; people hardly care how the money was earned. A former dictator, who was overthrown from power through a mass movement and was subsequently convicted of corruption of multiple counts, a rare occurrence in our system, is still a very worthy person and both the government and the opposition are trying hard to court him. Recent inhuman and utterly uncivilized acts of the government involving his wife only shows how much the government values his presence in its fold. In any other society, where even the faintest civility exists, he would be a man of oblivion.

In your dream plan you want to bring people back to the fold of honesty through reward, an imaginative proposition indeed! In no other society the proverb, �chora na sone dharmer kahini� (�black will take no other hue�) is more appropriately applicable than in our beloved Bangladesh. So that recourse of yours would be doomed only to elude ridicules. Between two persons working in the same job, the one with honesty (naturally poor) is considered a worthless �idiot� even by his close family members, let alone by the rest of the society. I am scared to death with your idea to form �Sufferers Association�, you expect whose members to come to ACC with evidence. Did you not know the fate the poor Nuruzzaman had to endure by bringing a simple allegation of bribery demand by the son of a minister? As a citizen, let alone an illustrious one, I did not read any words of sympathy or protest from you to rescues Nuruzzanan from the torturous arms of the State Machinery. It was no other than Irene Khan, the chief of the Amnesty International, who had to issue statement of condemnation in favour of the poor sufferer. How many of your citizens, who you believe are your �human resources�, came out with any words of sympathy or empathy, let alone coming down to the street to protest against the torture? Do you still remember the name of a now obscured man, who as the Secretary to the PM issued merely a memo ordering an investigation into an allegation of irregularities, in which among others, the PM�s son was allegedly involved? Did you or any other member of the so-called civil society came out supporting his noble initiative or provide him any moral support in his effort to rescue himself from the wrath of the government? As a highly informed person about the affairs around the globe, you surely remember how Mark Thatcher�s business deal was investigated without any fear or fervour by the British government officials when his mother, the iron lady, was the all powerful PM of the British Isles?

If there would be a mean to conduct any gall up poll in Bangladesh, as it exists in any other democracies, and if there would be such a poll to find the most corrupt individual in the country, there is hardly any disagreement among the observers who that person would be. Did the perceived notion among the people about his monumental corruption create any dent in the �popularity� of the party that he virtually leads? If the answer is a nay, that by itself negates your statement that �all the people of Bangladesh sincerely support ACC�. This obvious paradox once again attests that the people of Bangladesh are your worst weakness, not the �biggest strength�.

The most notable and encouraging exception to our all pervasive society is our fourth estate, the media. They have kept our hope alive by publishing stories compared to which the �Tahelka.com� sounds like a Robin Hood story, albeit these are only the tips of the iceberg of corruption that has engulfed our nation. In the process Bangladesh has become the most dangerous place for the journalists to work in the last three years. But what difference does it make to any one, Professor Yunus? After the publications of the stories of corruption of a senior minister of hundred of crores of taka, a parliamentary committee, comprising the members of his own party was formed to investigate the allegation. However, people of the country have never known the fate of that committee or its findings, if there are any. As if that was enough, only last year the same minister donated thirty crores worth of a state property to an NGO headed by his wife and publicly defended his �generous� action in the face of severe criticisms from many quarters. Only on the other day, an opposition MP was enticed to join the main component of the ruling alliance in return for paying of his invoice amounting to a staggering fourteen crores, which the government owed him. If such a story would be published in the news media of any other democracies, what would be the fate of the government, Professor Yunus? In Singapore, a finance minister of the then PM Lee Kwan Yew�s cabinet committed suicide when some financial irregularities involving the minister appeared in the news media.

I fully identify myself with your determination when you say, �I would terrorise those areas so ferociously that people would have to think twice before getting engaged in corruption� or �my big job will be creating fear in the minds of the corrupt people, not for the time being but permanently�. How would you do that, Prof Yunus? You have only jaws, but not the teeth. Your mandate is limited to investigation and framing charges; you have no power to prosecute any one. You must admit that an impartial (independence is a frightening authority without impartiality) judiciary is the minimum pre-requisite to dispense proper justice, since it could be hardly overemphasized that the unflinching execution of law is the most effective deterrent against potential defiance of it. Over the years the anti corruption bureau has framed charges against hundreds of individuals, but the people of the country have seen not many convictions. Many of the cases have been withdrawn by executive orders while the rest of them have been outright quashed by the higher court, apparently due to the absence of merit, in the judgements of the judges, in the charges. Discounting the complexities of evidences in many such cases, it is beyond the comprehension of any ordinary citizen how a simple case in which the present PM allegedly spent 8.6 million from the national exchequer to repair her private residence was outright quashed by the High court as soon the PM regained the state power. Another former PM (of the fallen dictator), who was convicted in a corruption case in the lower court, is enjoying an eternal bail from the high court. During his time in freedom, he took shelter in Australia and collected welfare cheques from the Australian government, a great image building exercise by a former PM for his motherland indeed! Over the last few weeks, as a trusted friend of the current government, he has been seen to be working as the king makers of the future government. With the highly politicized judiciary on your side, you may be able to obtain, at best, a conviction of a poor loan defaulter from some remote village of the country. Unfortunately, the age-old saying that �justice delayed is justice denied� is not more vividly applicable to any other place than Bangladesh. To the contrary, during the long years of rule by oxford educated Lee Kwan Yew or during the current Premiership of his worthy son Harvard educated Lee Hsien Loong, it would be to rare to discover even a single case in the archive which has been quashed by the court of law in Singapore. If we were fortunate to have executive and judicial organs that could emulate those of Singapore even to a little extent, you would have good reasons to feel �jealous of Justice Sultan Hossain Khan�.

Notwithstanding, if you would still go ahead to materialize your plan and persist with your mission to investigate the corruption of the rich and powerful, I apprehend two dreadful situations waiting for you. In the more palatable of the two, you may meet the fate no better than the President of the Republic, once a faithful party loyalist, whose only fault was to obey the constitution of the Republic. In the other scenario, God forbids, you could be the victim of some lethal grenade attack, a very common phenomenon in today�s Bangladesh. If that misfortune happens, leaders around the globe, including the UN chief, would send messages of condolence and condemnation to the PM and would demand an independent enquiry, even by FBI. If there would be a judicial enquiry, we would know from the leaked information in the media that some unknown foreign power was involved; the power which got envied with the respect that Professor Yunus brought in the international arena for Bangladesh. However, if there would be a police enquiry, a charge sheet would be submitted that would probably involve an accused like Qayum of some obscured Upazilla, who as aggrieved, planned to annihilate this internationally reputed son of the soil, since as the Chairman of the ACC he ordered for an investigation of his improper business deals. For Heaven�s sake we do not want that dreadful tragedy to happen, Professor Yunus.

Dr. Mozammel H. Khan is the Convenor of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh. He writes from Toronto, Canada.