Blow for British Coal Company’s Controversial Mining Plans

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:45:40 +0000

Press Release

The UK company, Global Coal Management (GCM) has suffered a severe blow following the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) decision to drop its financial backing for the controversial proposal to build an open cast coal mine in Phulbari, North West Bangladesh.

Tim Jones, policy officer at the World Development Movement, which spearheaded the UK campaign to stop the Phulbari mine project going ahead said:

“It is absolutely right that the ADB have pulled out of this project. The consequences of the scheme on the environment and the people living in the area would have been disastrous. The people of Bangladesh should not suffer at the hands of a British company. This is a blow for GCM but a victory for some of the poorest people of Bangladesh.”

The ADB was planning to grant a US$100 million loan to the project, as well as a US$200 million political risk guarantee. But the Bank came under fire from a range of NGOs, activists and individuals who claimed that the mine would lead to political unrest, reduced access to food and water for more than 100,000 people and the displacement of at least 50,000 people with minimal compensation.

Professor Anu Mohammed from Bangladesh said:

“The area around Phulbari is extremely fertile and densely populated. It is also one of the few regions in Bangladesh that are safe from flooding and other natural catastrophes and therefore plays a key role for the food security of the entire country. The proposed ‘development’ project is merely a scheme to loot natural resources from a poor country for the rich. We will not allow Global Coal Management to turn a land of food for the people into a black hole for corporate profit.”

Forty-two community leaders from Phulbari wrote to the Asian Development Bank in December 2007 asking them to pull out of the mining project, saying: “The ADB offers loans in the name of reducing poverty, but if realised, we believe that this project will increase the poverty of the local population as well as cause environmental disaster.”

Over 60 international NGOs, such as Oxfam Australia, ActionAid Pakistan, Greenpeace India, also wrote to the Asian Development Bank setting out the social, environmental and political risks of going forward with the loan.

Notes to editors

More than 50,000 people, including the local indigenous community, will be displaced in a country increasingly short of land. GCM claim they will compensate the legal holders of the land, but the majority of people living in the region are landless farmers, who will receive minimal compensation and for only two years. GCM have not said how they expect people to earn a living once the land they work on has gone. Bangladesh is one of the most populated countries in the world.

Campaigners fear that food and water security will be compromised by the mine, due to an increase in the levels of toxins, including arsenic, in the water supply, which could also affect agricultural land. The mine will also reduce access to water in the area which is likely to affect a further 100,000 people.

Three people were killed during protests in August 2006, when over 20,000 people demonstrated against the mine. Campaigners are concerned that if GCM does not pull out of Bangladesh there will be further unrest.

Financing the mine would have contradicted the ADB’s own energy policy, which states that coal mines should only be supported if the coal is for use in the local area, but most of the coal would have been exported from Bangladesh.

To find out more about the World Development Movement’s action for Phulbari, please see www.wdm.org.uk/bangaldeshmine

The prisoner of Dhaka

JamieSW — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:04:33 +0000

There is a decent, brave man sitting in a dungeon in a country where the British empire began – a country of poets, singers, artists, free thinkers and petty tyrants. I have known him since a moonless night in 1971 when he led me clandestinely into what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, past villages the Pakistani army had raped and razed. His name is Moudud Ahmed and he was then a young lawyer who had defended the Bengali independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

“Why have you come when even crows are afraid to fly over our house,” said Begum Mujib, the sheikh’s wife. This was typical of Moudud, whose tumultuous life carries more than a hint of Tom Paine.

As a schoolboy, Moudud wet his shirt with the blood of a young man killed demonstrating against the imposition of “Urdu and only Urdu” as the official language of Bangla-speaking East Pakistan. When the British attacked Egypt in 1956, he tried to haul down the union flag at the British consulate in Dhaka, and was bayoneted by police: a wound he still suffers.

When Bangladesh – free Bengal – was declared in 1971, Moudud brought a rally to its feet when he held up the front page of the Daily Mirror, which carried my report beneath the headline, BIRTH OF A NATION. “We are alive, but we are not yet free,” he said, prophetically.

Once in power, Sheikh Mujib turned on his own democrats and held show trials at which Moudud was their indefatigable defender until he himself was arrested.

Assassination, coup and counter coup eventually led to a parliamentary period headed by Zia ur-Rahman, a liberation general with whom Moudud agreed to serve as deputy prime minister on condition Zia resigned from the army. Together they formed a grassroots party, but when Moudud insisted that it must be democratic, he was sacked.

Whenever he came to London he would phone those of us who had reported the liberation of Bangladesh and we would meet for a curry. His pinstriped suit and inns-of-court manner belied his own enduring struggle and that of his homeland: recurring floods and the conflict between feudalists and democrats and, later, fundamentalists.

“I am the prime minister now,” he once said, as if we had not heard. Outspoken about his people’s “right to social and economic justice”, especially women, he was duly arrested again, then won his parliamentary seat from prison.

On April 12 last year, late at night, 25 soldiers smashed into Moudud’s house in Dhaka. They had no warrant. They stripped his home and “rendered” him, blindfolded, to a place known only as “the black hole”. There, he was interrogated and tortured and forced to sign a confession. He was finally charged with the possession of alcohol – a few bottles of wine and cans of beer had been found. The supreme court declared his prosecution and detention illegal. This was ignored by the government, which calls itself a “caretaker” administration, but is a front for a military dictatorship.

Moudud is suffering from a pituitary tumour and has been denied medication for six months. He is terribly ill, says his wife, the poet Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud. “Thousands of people have been detained for being activists, or just supporters,” she says. “The country is a prison, and the world must know.”

There are striking similarities between Moudud’s case and that of the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who this week all but overturned the old, autocratic regime. Both were framed in order to silence them. The difference is that Anwar Ibrahim’s case became an international cause celebre, whereas there is only silence for Moudud Ahmed, locked in his cell, ill, without charge or trial.

In the next few days, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed, the “chief adviser” to the caretaker government – in effect, the head of Bangladesh’s government – will visit London. He is said to have a meeting arranged at 10 Downing Street. I and others have written to Dr Fakhruddin, asking him to comply with the supreme court’s ruling and to release Moudud. He has not replied. If Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on liberty have a shred of meaning, it is the question he must ask.

Bangladesh | ukwatch.net

Blow for British Coal Company’s Controversial Mining Plans

The prisoner of Dhaka