Bangladesh has no final say

It appears the UPA government has finally succeeded in convincing Bangladesh on the multi-purpose Tipaimukh dam. Despite protests from the opposition and environmental activists, Bangladesh has recently expressed its intention to support the proposed Tipaimukh Dam through its High Commissioner in New Delhi Tariq Ahmad Karim. It is the result of the recent visit of Gowher Rizvi, Foreign Affairs Advisor to the Bangladesh Prime Minister Shiekh Hasina to New Delhi. Gowher Rizvi alongwith his colleague Dr. Mashiur Rahman and Bangladesh High Commissioner Karim had met with a number of Indian leaders including the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and ministers for home, finance, power, rural development, and water resources and the national security advisor. With the assurances given by India, the Awami League government in Bangladesh seem convinced that there will be no diminution in the flow of waters in Surma and Kushiyara rivers and that the high dam would have no adverse environmental or ecological impact, no aggravation of the floods during the monsoon. Yet, the government of Bangladesh is proposing to send an expert team to the Dam area to examine the features and likely impact of the dam on the flow of water into the Surma and the Kushiara. Here, we need to remember that, extending support to the Tipaimukh dam is not the unanimous opinion of Bangladesh. Bangladeshi experts have said the massive dam will disrupt the seasonal rhythm of the river and have an adverse effect on downstream agriculture and fisheries. Also, the Khaleda Zia led opposition BNP is dead against it. The Awami League government has dismissed the opposition to the dam as mere demagogy, stridency, devoid of substance and playing to the gallery. It also said, partisan politics and propaganda has replaced the pursuit of truth amongst many commentators. An interesting point to be noted here is that the Indian Prime Minister had invited Bangladesh to become an equity partner in the Tipaimukh project and take a share of the power that will be generated. Bangladesh believes this would guarantee them a place at the decision-making table and the ability to oversight the project at all stages. Here lies the cream icing.

Tipaimukh Dam is a proposed embankment dam on the river Barak in Manipur. The stated purpose of the dam is flood control and hydroelectric power generation. The project has led to controversy between India and Bangladesh over water rights as well as controversy with Manipuri people to be relocated by the reservoir. The dam will be 390m long and 162.8m high, across the Barak River. The dam`s crest elevation will be at an altitude of about 180 m. above mean sea level with a maximum reservoir level of 178 m. The dam was originally designed to contain flood waters in the lower Barak valley but hydro power generation was later incorporated into the project. The project will have an installation capacity of 1500 MW, supplied by six 250 MW Francis turbine-generators. Here we have to be very clear in our mind, that the support of Bangladesh in the matter of the proposed Tipaimukh Dam does not necessarily mean that all the roadblocks have been cleared. They must remember that, it is not only activists but the general public of Manipur is against the dam also. Besides being an earthquake zone, the water reservoir for the proposed dam would lead to massive loss of precious flora and fauna. It will also uproot many villages who they say would be relocated in various locations. But this is entirely against human logic. We have to take into account the man-land relationship and the attachment that people have with the land on which they were born. One cannot simply relocate living people. Yes, Manipur needs power. But it should not be at the cost of precious flora and fauna and of the man-land relationship. 

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Interview with BBC : Durrani denies funding BNP for '91 polls

General Asad Durrani, former chief of Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, has outright denied funding BNP before the 1991 parliamentary polls of Bangladesh. 

In an exclusive interview with BBC Bangla Service on Saturday, the former ISI boss termed the allegation totally baseless and fabricated. 

Durrani also told the BBC that he never spoke about ISI's providing money to BNP, the main opposition party in Bangladesh, in his statement to the Pakistan Supreme Court.

“To my knowledge there was no reference to Bangladesh during the Supreme Court hearing and whatever I had said before the court is available there,” he said. 

“I, therefore, can say that nobody in the court spoke on providing such money [to BNP].”

Some local newspaper reports recently quoted the Dubai-based daily Khaleej Times as saying Asad Durrani in a court statement said BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia received 50 million rupees from the Inter-Services Intelligence before the 1991 elections. 

The ruling Awami League and BNP have locked horns over the issue since publishing of the reports. 

Ruling party leaders, including Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, opened a barrage of attacks against Khaleda Zia for the reported ISI link. The opposition at the very beginning rejected the claim. 

Threatening legal action, senior BNP leader Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir on Friday asked Hasina to apologise to the people for bringing “false” accusation against BNP of receiving money from the ISI.

Asked over the phone whether ISI had funded any other leaders of BNP other than Khaleda Zia, Durrani said “I don't remember. I believe none has done that.”

The former spy boss of Pakistan also said the ISI does not maintain any links with any Bangladeshi political party. “There is also no approach from their part [Bangladesh] to communicate with us.”

Durrani termed the media reports on the issue false, saying those were against the ethics of journalism. 

He, however, refused to comment as to what motivated the newspapers to publish such “false news”. 

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James Cameron back on surface after deepest ocean dive

Hollywood director James Cameron has returned to the surface after plunging nearly 11km (seven miles) down to the deepest place in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.

He made the solo descent in a submarine called Deepsea Challenger, taking over two hours to reach the bottom.

He spent more than four hours exploring the ocean floor, before a speedy ascent back to the surface.

His craft was kitted out with cameras so he could film the deep in 3D.

"It was absolutely the most remote, isolated place on the planet," Mr Cameron told BBC News.

"I really feel like in one day I've been to another planet and come back."

This is only the second manned expedition to the ocean's deepest depths - the first took place in 1960 when US Navy Lt Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard spent about 20 minutes on the ocean floor in a bathyscaphe called the Trieste.

Lt Walsh, who is now in his 80s, joined Mr Cameron and his team of engineers out at sea for the dive.

"It did bring back a lot of memories, just being out there and remembering what we did there," he told BBC News. "It was really grand."

Mr Cameron has spent the past few years working in secret with his team of engineers to design and build the craft, which weighs 11 tonnes and is more than 7m (23ft) long.

He describes it as a "vertical torpedo" that slices through the water allowing him a speedy descent.

The extraordinary attention to detail prevented him from suffering from too much nervousness.

"I can't say that I wasn't apprehensive in the last few days and even the weeks leading up to this, but there's another part of my mind that really understands the engineering and knows why we did everything the way we did," he said.

"Any apprehension I had I left at the hatch. When I went into the sub, I was all pilot at that point."

The tiny compartment that the film-maker sits in is made from thick steel, which is able to resist the 1,000 atmospheres of pressure he experienced at full ocean depth.

The rest of the vertical column is made from a material called syntactic foam - a solid made mostly of hollow "microballoons" - giving it enough buoyancy to float back up.

The sub has so many lights and cameras that it is like an underwater TV studio - with Mr Cameron able to direct and film the action from within. He intends to release a documentary.

It also has robotic arms, allowing him to collect samples of rocks and soils, and a team of researchers are working alongside the director to identify any new species. He says that science is key to his mission.

But the first task was to get to the inky depths - which despite untold hours of training, still surprised Mr Cameron.

"My reference frame was going to the Titanic 10 or 12 years ago, and thinking that was the deepest place I could ever imagine," he recalled.

"On this dive I blazed past Titanic depth at 12,000 ft and was only a third of the way down, and the numbers keep going up and up and up on the depth gauge.

"You just kind of look at them with a sense of disbelief, and you wonder if the bottom is ever going to be there."

At the bottom, Mr Cameron encountered incredibly fine silt, which he had to be careful not to disturb. He said he spotted a few small, as-yet unidentified life forms but found the depths to be a "sterile, almost desert-like place".

While manned exploration had until now seen a 52-year hiatus, scientists have used two robotic unmanned vehicles to explore the Mariana Trench: Japan's Kaiko made a dive there in 1995 and the US-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's vessel Nereus explored the deep in 2008.

Other teams, such as Scotland's Oceanlab, have also been dropping simple landers loaded with bait and cameras into the deepest ocean.

While places like the Mariana Trench were once thought to be of little interest, there has been a recent resurgence of scientific interest in the deep.

Scientists are finding life that can resist the colossal pressures, from deep-sea fish to shrimp-like scavengers called amphipods, some of which can reach 30cm (1ft) long. 

They are also trying to understand the role that deep seas trenches play in earthquakes - these cracks in the sea floor are formed at the boundary of two tectonic plates and some believe the push and pull taking place deep underwater could be the cause of major earthquakes, such as the 2011 quake that resulted in such devastation in Japan.

But some scientists question whether manned exploration provides the best platform for scientific research.

Dr Alan Jamieson, from Oceanlab, said: "I think what James Cameron has done is a really good achievement in terms of human endeavour and technology. 

"But my feeling is that manned submersibles like this are limited in scientific capabilities when compared to other systems, mostly due to the fact there is someone in it. Remote or autonomous systems can collect a far greater volume of useful scientific data for far less money."

Mr Cameron says he does not want this dive to the deep to be a one-off, and wants to use it as a platform for ocean exploration.

His craft may also soon be joined by other manned submersibles vying to reach the ocean's deepest depths.

One of these crafts, the DeepFlight Challenger, belongs to former real estate investor Chris Welsh, and is backed by Virgin's Richard Branson. It is about to begin its water trials.

Its design is based on a plane, and Mr Welsh says he will be "flying" down to the deepest ocean.

Google's Eric Schmidt has helped to finance another sub being built by a US marine technology company called Doer Marine. They want this sub to carry two to three people, and are placing a heavy emphasis on science.

And Triton submarines, a Florida-based submersible company, intends to build a sub with a giant glass sphere at its centrepiece to take tourists down to the deepest ocean for $250,000 a ticket.

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Operation Searchlight: Planning And Execution Of The 25 March Massacre

The massacre of 25 March, 1971 in Dhaka and the then other East Pakistani major cities, was a regular military operation by Pakistan Armed Forces, officially named Operation Searchlight. The idea of this operation came to some of senior Generals after massive demonstration of East Pakistanis on 21 February 1971.

It was the operation of a country's regular army, regarded as one of the finest of the time, to kill its own people, unarmed and from all walks of the society. Peddlers, rickshaw-pullers, homeless, police and paramilitary personnel in their barracks, resident students in their halls, both male and female, military servicemen of Bengali origin, university teachers in their residential quarters, all were targets, and were taken down with utmost sincerity. Operation Searchlight!

Operation Searchlight is one of the few post-WWII military operations which ultimately had been planned fully against the civilians, just to kill a smart percentage of them and scare the rest, the survivors. And none of the victims was anyone from an enemy nation. The army and the genocide-victims all belonged to the very one country, had very one national identity.

The plan was drawn up in early March 1971 by Maj-Gen Khadim Hussain Raza and Maj-Gen Rao Farman Ali, as a result of a meeting between Pakistani army staff on the 22 February.

Senior Pakistani officers in East Pakistan who were unwilling to support heavy offensive on civilians, Lt-Gen Shahabzada Yakub Khan and Vice Adm Ahsan, were relieved of their duties and flown back to West Pakistan. As replacement of the both came Lt-Gen Tikka Khan to take over as chief marshal law administrator of East Pakistan (military zone B) and the state's governor.

Planning

On 17 March, Gen Khadim Hussain Raza was given the go ahead to plan for the crackdown via telephone by Gen Hamid, the then Pakistan Army chief. In the morning of 18 March, Gen Raza and Maj-Gen Rao Farman Ali put the details to paper at the GOC's office at Dhaka cantonment. The plan was written on a light blue office pad with a lead pencil by Gen Farman containing sixteen paragraphs spread over five pages.

Gen Farman wrote out the operational premises and conditions for success, while Gen Khadim dealt with the distribution of forces and particular tasks of the individual brigades and other units.

Planners took this to consideration that the Bengali officers and other military or paramilitary units will revolt at the onset of operations. To minimize that risk, it was suggested that all Bengali armed units like Police, Riffles (EPR) should be disarmed and the political leadership arrested during their meeting with the President, Gen. Yahya Khan. No operational reserves were earmarked.

Though the draft asked to disarm Police, EPR units, thousands of unarmed Police men and EPR troops were massacred inside Dhaka's Police lines at Rajarbag and EPR Headquarters at Pilkhana, in Dhaka.

The handwritten plan was read out to Gen Hamid and Lt-Gen Tikka Khan on the 20 March at the flag staff house. Gen Hamid objected to the immediate disarming of regular army Bengali units but approved the disarming of riffles, armed police and other paramilitary formations.

In the initial draft of the massacre plan, Gen Rao Farman suggested that Awami League leaders should be arrested amid the ongoing dialogue with Gen Yahya. But the President refused it for some reason.

After frequent verification and scrutiny, the amended plan was approved and the operational plan was distributed to various area commanders on the 24 and the 25 March daytime, when a group of Pakistani Generals, accompanied by Gen Hamid, Maj-Gen Mittha, the SSG mastermind and mentor, and Col. Saadullah, the principal staff officer, visited the major garrisons via helicopter and personally briefed the various garrison commanders or senior West Pakistani officers on the operation.

Maj-Gen Aboobaker Osman Mittha, as the chief of the elite Special Services Group (SSG), was tasked with the most dramatic chapter of entire plan, the arrest of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Maj-Gen Qamar Ali Mirza and Brig-Gen. Harrison were later flown to Dhaka from West Pakistan to assist Maj-Gen Mittha, who was also tasked with arranging the logistical details. The responsibility seemed difficult because the Sheikh Mujib's non-cooperation programme was affecting the spontaneity of the military supplies.

Secrecy and Deception

Secrecy was kept at extreme strictness. Only a few junior commissioned officers (JCOs), definitely West Pakistanis, had knowledge about the plan beforehand though fully on a need to know basis.

Some Bengali officers had become suspicious of the 'all West Pakistani' officer briefings. Later it showed that some of Bengali officers initiated revolts as a confused advance from their suspicions.

It appeared after the deadly war that followed, that many Bengali officers tactically disobeyed the decoy orders by their West Pakistani superiors and survived apparent assassination plots.

'Zero Hour'

The Operation started on the night of 25 March, 1971, technically from zero hours of 26 March. Dhaka and other garrisons were to be alerted via phone about their zero hour to start their operations.

Gen Farman Ali commanded the forces in Dhaka, while the rest of the province was commanded by Gen Khadim himself. Lt-Gen Tikka Khan and his staff were present in the 31st field command centre to supervise and support the command staff of the 14th division inside Dhaka Cantonment.

To the time of leaving Dhaka for Karachi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto accompanied Gen Tikka Khan inside the cantonment. It is said that Bhutto's request to inspect a bloodied provincial capital on a military vehicle was turned down by Gen Tikka Khan at that night.

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Malaysia okays Padma bridge proposal

Malaysian High Commission in Dhaka Jamaluddin Bin Sabeh on Sunday officially informed that the Malaysian cabinet has approved the Padma Bridge investment proposal.

The envoy made this official communication when he paid a farewell call on Foreign Minister Dipu Moni at her office.

“I hope the agreement will be signed immediately after approval of the Bangladesh cabinet,” Sabeh told reporters emerging from the meeting with the foreign minister.

He, however, declined to make any comment about the World Bank, which has suspended financing for the project over corruption allegation. Other financiers of the US$ 2.9 billion project, including ADB, JICA and IDB have also suspended releasing the fund.

A press release of the foreign ministry said, “The high commissioner informed the foreign minister that the Malaysian cabinet has already approved the proposed MoU regarding Padma multipurpose bridge project.” 

The government signed agreements with WB for $1.2 billion loan, Asian Development Bank (ADB) for $615 million, JICA for $400 million and IDB for $140 million to construct the 6.15 kilometer bridge. But the bridge project stalled in October last year following WB’s allegation of corruption in bidding process. 

During the meeting, the envoy congratulated the foreign minister for the recent maritime verdict. He also expressed his cordial gratitude to Bangladesh government for all sorts of support accorded to him during his tour of duty in Dhaka. 

The foreign minister thanked Malaysian government for its support in providing with Machine Readable Passport (MRP) machines, carrying out dredging work by Malaysian Maritime and Dredging Corporation (MMDC) in Chittagong port and showing interest in Padma multipurpose bridge. 

The outgoing high commissioner also informed the foreign minister that Malaysia is going to arrange a showcase programme in Dhaka to commemorate the 40 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. 

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