Bangladesh building collapse: How many still missing? Who knows?

Photo: Relatives search for names of missing garments worker

Photo: Still missing

SABIR MUSTAFA

Numbers have always been a tricky issue in Bangladesh, so much so that there is disagreement over even the total population of the country.

There is always someone ready to raise questions about any "official figure" , whether it is the voter list or death figures from a road accident.

Not surprisingly then, when the eight-storey Rana Plaza collapsed on 24 April with thousands of people working in five garment factories, numbers became a hotly contested issue.

Two sets of figures are now accepted as accurate. Firstly, the number of people rescued alive, which stands at 2,438 and secondly, the number of bodies recovered from the rubble, which stands at more than 1,000 and keeps rising every day.

Calculating in the dark

But there is disagreement over how many are still missing - and hence, the total number likely to have died.

Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble”

More than two weeks after collapse, there is still no agreement on exactly how many workers and staff were present in the building. This has left officials calculating in darkness.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), initially said that 3,200 people may have been employed by the five factories located on the upper floors of the building.

But that figure now looks unrealistic. Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble.

Distrust

Five days after the collapse a woman named Shahina was found alive.

But Shahina could not be rescued, as a fire sparked by metal cutting machines killed her on 28 April. One of the rescuers later died in hospital from burns sustained during the abortive rescue.

It was not expected that more survivors would be found, and rescuers switched their focus to recovering bodies.

Then another round of distrust about numbers was kicked off by none other than Maj Gen Hasan Suhrawardy, the man in charge of the recovery operation at the site.

On 1 May, he told journalists that only 149 people were missing, raising heckles across the social landscape. Even senior government officials expressed doubts about the figure.

Fake names?

Workers rescued from the site said many people had tried to escape down a stairway at the back of the building. They insisted that many bodies lay in that part of the building.

It appeared the general had used a list which local administration officials had stopped using. The police had their own, much larger list, based on people registering names of their missing relatives.

Officials worried that many names were appearing several times in different lists. They also worried that fraudsters might be at work, registering fake names to get compensation.

As a result of the confusion, all lists were taken down and officials stopped talking about the number missing.

'Disappearing' bodies

But more fuel was added to the fire by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Addressing a big rally in Dhaka on 4 May, Mrs Zia accused the government of ''disappearing'' 900 bodies.

The opposition leader did not quote any source, but it reflected a sense of frustration and distrust among relatives of those missing.

Hundreds of relatives of the missing waited at the site everyday, desperate to ensure they at least got the body of their loved one so they could be buried properly.

But rumours soon spread that the army was about to bulldoze the site. Rumours were also spread that trucks removing debris from the site were being used to take away dead bodies.

Anger and frustration spilled over on one or two occasions and relatives, aided by locals, blocked army vehicles carrying debris.

Painstaking work by officials finally calmed the situation. The army made it clear there would be no bulldozing and that every effort would be made to recover any remaining bodies.

The military and fire brigade decided to use heavy equipment sparingly, only after ensuring that no body was left to be recovered.

It is perhaps this painstaking, time-consuming, brick-by-brick search for bodies that has allowed the rescuers to find a woman alive in the rubble on Friday, 12 days after the last survivor was found and 17 days after the building went down.

First appeared in BBC online, 10 May 2013

Sabir Mustafa, Editor, BBC Bengali service

In First Interview Since Bangladesh Factory Collapse, Benetton CEO Confirms Company's Tie To Tragedy

KIM BHASIN

In his first interview since the deadly collapse of a garment factory complex in Bangladesh, the chief executive officer of Benetton told The Huffington Post that his company had purchased small quantities of shirts from a manufacturer that operated inside the plant.

Chief executive Biagio Chiarolanza said Benetton bought the shirts from a company called New Wave Style, which operated one of the several garment factories inside the Rana Plaza building. The collapse of the building in an industrial suburb of Dhaka last month took the lives of more than 800 people.

“The New Wave company, at the time of the tragic disaster, was not one of our suppliers, but one of our direct Indian suppliers had subcontracted two orders,” said Chiarolanza, speaking via phone from Italy, where Benetton is based.

One of Benetton’s suppliers in India had issues fulfilling orders, and offered the option to relocate a portion of its work to several manufacturers located in Bangladesh, according to a Benetton executive who spoke on condition he not be named. New Wave was one of those manufacturers.

Benetton decided to stop production with New Wave one month before the deadly collapse occurred, due to the manufacturer's inability to meet “strict” quality and efficiency standards, Chiarolanza said.

Chiarolanza, a 20-year Benetton veteran who became CEO in 2010 after spending seven years as head of operations, said his company plans to continue to use factories in Bangladesh to manufacture its wares, asserting that the welfare of workers in poor countries is best served by providing jobs.

"It's not the solution to go outside from Bangladesh or to think in the future we can leave Bangladesh," said Chiarolanza. "I spent some period of my life in this part of the world, and I believe -- I really believe -- Benetton and other international brands can help these countries improve their condition. But we need a safe and happy working environment and we need to have better conditions."

He emphasized that Benetton’s orders from New Wave were relatively small, totaling around 200,000 shirts, and were issued in December 2012 and January 2013. Chiarolanza's account confirmed documents previously obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The shirts were made inside the Rana Plaza building, shipped to the supplier in India and then distributed through Benetton’s "entire distribution network," Chiarolanza said, though he didn't disclose the locations of retail outlets where the clothing eventually landed on shelves.

His explanation came as an attempt to clarify Benetton’s connection to the Rana Plaza disaster in the face of confusion and considerable criticism from labor groups, who have accused the brand of profiting at the expense of low-wage workers in poor countries. For a company that has marketed itself with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” -- a seeming nod to multiculturalism -- the association of its brand with unsafe sweatshops has been particularly uncomfortable.

In its first statement following the collapse, the company claimed that "none of the companies involved are suppliers to Benetton Group or any of its brands." On April 29, as photos from the Associated Press revealed Benetton labels amid the rubble, Benetton acknowledged it had placed a "one-time order" from a manufacturer in the building. The following day, the company said one of its suppliers had "occasionally subcontracted" orders from a shirt-maker at Rana Plaza.

Benetton blamed the confusion on the complexity of its supply chain. The company operates in 120 countries across the globe and works with 700 manufacturers, and suppliers often subcontract work when necessary. It took time to go through all the records and come across the orders made from the Rana Plaza factory, the company claimed.

Chiarolanza's account effectively enhances the image of an enterprise so huge that no one could possibly keep tabs on all of the hands that touch its product -- some of them operating in unsafe conditions beyond the scrutiny of regulators.

According to the Benetton executive, the company commissioned an assessment of New Wave prior to placing its order. That assessment included checks on the manufacturer's ability to meet quality standards and fulfill the order on time, and it looked at issues related to working conditions and safety. Benetton requires that all of its manufacturers sign a code of conduct addressing myriad issues of concern, from child labor to discrimination in hiring and firing practices, he said.

However, the Benetton executive added that the company never conducted a so-called social audit of New Wave -- essentially, a deeper look at the manufacturer's labor conditions and workplace safety -- because Benetton had worked with the supplier for a very short period of time.

The Rana Plaza disaster has renewed the focus of labor groups on the process of social audits, with critics portraying the measures as little more than public relations devices: Companies effectively check off a box that such audits have been conducted without mounting genuine probes aimed at turning up trouble.

Spanish apparel retailer Mango, which had planned to buy samples from one of the contractors at Rana Plaza, confirmed in a statement to The Huffington Post that it had not conducted a social audit either, because it did not yet have a "commercial relationship" with the factory. The company noted that it wouldn't have been able to identify the building's structural problems regardless.

Benetton claims it didn't know the factory building was constructed without appropriate safety permits. According to the company, documentation provided by local government agencies showed no signs of foul play or incorrect building permits there. All the information given to Benetton was completely "in line," the company said.

Chiarolanza said the tragedy has prompted Benetton to add "additional items" to its assessment process: Going forward assessments will more intently examine the structural integrity of the buildings where its products are made.

Between 2 and 4 percent of Benetton’s products are made in factories in Bangladesh, according to the company. Benetton directly manages about half of this production, while relying on outside suppliers -- mostly in China -- for the rest.

Among the reasons Chiarolanza cited for opting to remain in Bangladesh is a need to maintain operations in multiple regions, giving Benetton the capability to quickly produce and deliver products to retail outlets worldwide.

Other countries, such as Laos and Egypt, offer very cheap labor, Chiarolanza said. But Bangladesh presents the best place to make T-shirts and other simple items that are shipped off to large Asian markets nearby, such as China.

"In Tunisia, where we have a direct company-owned factory, we can produce more or less at the same cost," Chiarolanza said. "It's better to divide the production in some countries and factories, so we're nearer to, for example, Asian markets, so we can deliver directly."

Benetton is in talks with the International Labour Organization, which brings together producers, trade unions and NGOs in an attempt to get all stakeholders on board with change in the apparel manufacturing industry, including in Bangladesh. "I can assure everyone that Benetton has always paid special attention to the workers condition, and the environment in which they operate. I believe our long-standing commitment to social issues speaks for itself," said Chiarolanza.

But labor activists remain skeptical of Benetton's commitment to aiding the workers of Bangladesh. Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent organization that monitors labor rights, demanded more than promises.

"If Benetton is serious about preventing future accidents, they will sign a binding, enforceable agreement that requires them to pay for the repairs and renovations needed to make their factories safe," said Nova. "They have made no such commitment and given their track record of public dissembling since the collapse, people can be forgiven for not taking them at their word."

Benetton affirmed its stance on wages in Bangladesh: a low wage is better than no wage at all. Chiarolanza argued the wages provide an opportunity for advancement, particularly for women, since the vast majority of workers in garment factories are female. Nova, though, doesn't accept the status quo in the poverty-stricken nation.

"The wages in Bangladesh are an act of cruelty," he said. "Women cannot support their families on $40 a month. Yes, unemployment is worse, but that is no justification for paying sub-poverty wages that are half of the wages in the next lowest-cost country."

First posted in The Huffington Post, May 09, 2013

Kim Bhasin is a Senior Retail Reporter at The Huffington Post. He previously worked at Business Insider. Kim.Bhasin@huffingtonpost.com

Backlash against Bangladeshi bloggers

GITA SAHGAL

The bloggers of Shahbagh are facing a backlash – hunted by fundamentalists, denounced in mosques as atheists, arrested by the government. Those abroad are under threat. Meanwhile activists are still demanding justice and cyber movements are using their mobilising power to deal with disasters

This has been a troubling week for those who care about Bangladesh. The April 26 collapse of Rana Plaza, the garment factory building owned by a prominent member of the ruling party, the Awami League, shows the economic costs of the country’s “economic miracle.”  Bangladeshi cyber-activists threw themselves into raising funds and helping to buy medicines for hospitals running out of supplies. If lives are being saved, one told me, it is because ordinary people are helping to mobilise relief.

The movement for accountability for war crimes, consists of several generations of activists - from those who feel strongly about the war because they witnessed its atrocities, to the children of victims demanding justice, to younger generations born since the mass movements of the 1990s first demanded war crimes trials. Each generation has experienced a backlash against it from both fundamentalists and the state.

And this is true of the most recent of these movements. The mass populist uprising occupying Shahbag in Dhaka, calling for ‘maximum punishment’ (the death penalty) for war criminals, was sparked by the triumphant V sign made by a convicted man. He saw his life sentence as a victory.  At first, the political parties courted the Shahbag movement, with the government promising to rush through legislation that reflected its main demands – allowing the prosecution to challenge the sentence to make it harsher, and amending the law to enable  the Jamaat e Islami  to be put on trial as an organisation. The Jamaat-e-Islami,the largest Islamist political party in Bangladesh, responded to the conviction and death sentence of the Deputy leader of the party, Delawar Hussein Sayeedi, with a country-wide campaign of violence, with particularly vicious attacks on religious minorities, including killing Hindus and destroying temples and homes. Christian Bangladeshis also reported attacks, but in some cases people were too afraid to make an official report.

Abroad, the conviction was referred to as ‘judicial murder’, to capitalise on the revulsion against the death penalty. But Western criticism of the Tribunal process failed to note also that peaceful opposition to religious fundamentalism was met by death threats, assault and murder. All  opposition to them was labelled ‘atheists’, and a label that seemed intended to provoke mass revulsion, promote extra-judicial killings as well as create a climate for  laws criminalising blasphemy.

Rajib, a young blogger, activist and professed atheist who was targeted online and then murdered,  has become an iconic figure in the movement. The fundamentalists have gone after a number of individual bloggers, beating people up and issuing death threats online or on mobiles. Labelling people as atheists, whether they are or not, puts them at risk of attack, and the bloggers have been targeted as atheists by both Muslim fundamentalists and the government.

In their defense, atheists, humanists and secularists  and declared April 25 an International Day to Defend Bangladesh's Bloggers. With some more protests planned on 4th May in deference to the tragedy currently gripping Bangladesh. The young bloggers need all the support they can get, for another fundamentalist group has arisen out of nowhere with a familiar list of fundamentalist demands. On April 7 this group, Hefazat e Islam, staged a mammonth “long march” of half a million people to protest against the mixed sex, peaceful, candlelit gatherings in Shahbagh. They made 13 demands,which contain many of familiar obsessions of fundamentalists. Apart from demanding a defamation law with the highest punishment (in other words making blasphemy punishable by death), Hefazat wants to declare Ahmadiyas to be non-Muslim, attacks practices such as candle lighting and putting up sculptures, opposes sexual mixing and “promotion of Islamophobia among the youth,” wants compulsory Islamic education at all levels and an end to “ungodly education, inheritance laws and unIslamic laws generally.” Christian and other NGOs are attacked for proselytizing and “an immediate and unconditional release of all detained Islamic scholars” is demanded.

Rather than defend the Shahbagh bloggers against fundamentalists, the government has found it expedient to crack down on them. When Hefazat e Islam prepared a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers, the government responded with its own list of those who had “hurt religious sentiments.” Four bloggers have been taken into custody and more arrests are threatened.  In order to humiliate and terrify dissenters, the police paraded the bloggers and had them photographed with their computers as if they found a cache of stolen goods. One blogger wrote, “it broke our hearts but it will not break our spirits.” Their accounts have been hacked, whether by non-state or state-backed people it is hard to say. Some bloggers have noticed that their arrested colleagues’ accounts remained active even after they were arrested, and have speculated that “evidence” may have been planted in them.

These demands are nothing new to Bangladesh, where Islamists have been trying to get a blasphemy law passed since the early nineties, when they went after the writer Taslima Nasrin. By labelling all bloggers as atheists, the fundamentalists hope turn the tide of public opinion against them. Throughout the war crimes trials, Jamaat’s strategy has been to say that they are being attacked as Muslims and as an opposition party, and to evade addressing the grave crimes  of which they are accused. Their lobbying campaign has been very persuasive for many MPs in Britain, who  demanded an invitation to monitor the Tribunal while also instructing the government of Bangladesh that they should not have ‘a retributive process’ but adopt a reconciliation model.

That is why it was heartening to see support for the principle of accountability from MPs from a range of parties. Two British MEPs, Charles Taylor, Conservative, and Jean Lambert of the Green Party, addressed a rally on war crimes in London on 28th April, which passed off peacefully. Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General, who has recently travelled in Bangladesh, acknowledged the strong democratic mandate for the trials and the immense strength of feeling on the issue. She said that if people were assured that life actually meant life, rather than a sentence that could be reversed by a change in government, the issue of the death penalty may not have arisen at all.

Writing in 2002 about the campaign by Jamaat e Islami and other fundamentalist organisations to make blasphemy a criminal offence, Bangladeshi Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain described a three-pronged strategy, “invoking criminal laws to curtail speech by targeted individuals and groups, fomenting a climate of intolerance against them, and mobilising public sentiment for the enactment of draconian new laws – as key tools in their project of silencing expressions of difference, and asserting their vision of a monolithic Islam.” All these elements are present in today’s battles.

The conflict between Bangladeshi secularists and fundamentalists has spread to London’s East End where, on Feb. 8th, at Altab Ali Park, young demonstrators supporting Shahbagh clashed with men from the Jamaat-dominated East London mosque.  For older anti-racists, the scenes were remniscent of decades old battles where the police simply protected the aggressors ‘freedom of speech’ and right to threaten and intimidate. Fundamentalist demonstrations from the Jamaat associated East London Mosque have been taking place regularly after Friday prayers, according to activists. Secular Bangladeshis of all religious backgrounds and none were finally able to rally and march outwards from Altab Ali park through Brick Lane and the surrounding streets. It was a suitable demonstration that the secular activists who have been receiving regular death threats have not been cowed into retreat.

Thousands of leaflets have been distributed from the East London Mosque and across the world labelling prominent bloggers as atheists. Sermons have been read attacking atheists, Hindus and suggestive statements made regarding sexual assault. In Bangladesh, fundamentalists  paraded a banner which said, ‘we demand the death penalty for atheist bloggers because they use obscene language to criticise Allah, Mohammed and the Quran.’  Statements such as these, along with murderous attacks on atheist and free thinking bloggers, need to be considered alongside the leaflets identifying named individuals as atheists and accusing them of insulting religion, to see whether they amount to incitement to  murder. Fundamentalists consider it an obligation for believers to kill apostates; a recent Moroccan fatwa  makes this very clear, as does the experience of an atheist from Bangladesh, applying for asylum in Canada.

It is clear that free-thinking activists will be actively targeted first by fundamentalists, and then by the state, so can expect no protection anywhere.

As Asif Mohiuddin, one of the Bangladeshi bloggers said just before his arrest, “To drag religion into politics and playing with it like a football is the real offence towards religion.”  Authorities in both London and Dhaka are playing with fire if they think protecting hate campaigns is the same as defending freedom of religion.

First appeared in the openDemocracy.net,  29 April 2013

Gita Sahgal, is a film maker and writer, formerly worked with the Amnesty International. She is founder of the Centre for Secular Space, which opposes fundamentalism, amplifies secular voices and promotes universality in human rights.

From Boston to Bangladesh: 'My heart hasn't stopped breaking'

MONI BASU, CNN iReport, CNN's Saeed Ahmed contributed to this article

Somewhere high above the clouds over Africa, in seat number 17K, Laura Sherburne learned the awful news of the Boston bombings.

She was supposed to have been there, right at the finish line, captain of a team of volunteer nurses who triage exhausted runners in medical tents. She'd done it last year and signed up again.

But shortly before the race, Sherburne learned she had won an international fellowship and would have to be on a plane the day of the marathon. She cajoled her friend Jane Keefe Chiang to take over the nurses team.

Panic set in on that never-ending Emirates flight from New York after she caught a news flash on an in-flight channel. "Deadly explosion at Boston Marathon finish line."

There was so little information at first. She imagined the worst.

The ache turned to guilt that she wasn't there to help -- guilt squared because she was a nurse.

As her plane landed, Sherburne's head was an emotional cocktail: grief, anger and anxiety, mixed with excitement of being in a foreign land.

It was all about to magnify.

She'd arrived in Bangladesh, one week before that nation's worst industrial tragedy. She did not have to witness the horror in her hometown. But 8,653 miles away, she would not be spared.

A medical mission half a world away

Sherburne, 25, made the journey to Bangladesh with Maryanne Meadows, a neurosurgery nurse she'd befriended at Simmons College in Boston. After nursing school, the two women went to work at Massachusetts General Hospital, where many of the bombing victims were treated.

The pair were part of a rotating team the hospital has been sending to Dhaka to help set up the first bone marrow transplant unit in Bangladesh. Massachusetts General has 60 health projects in 40 countries. The Bangladesh government had approached the hospital to help set up the facility, scheduled to open around August.

Sherburne had never traveled to South Asia before. She experienced the shock that almost every Westerner does after leaving the airport. The assault of hot, heavy, damp air. The unsightly piles of garbage tossed in heaps in open lots, their stench mingling with the heady smells of mustard oil and onion from cooking on the streets.

At her apartment, palmetto bugs scurried across the living room floor and geckos shuttled along the walls.

She might have been reeling from it all had Boston not filled her mind.

After she saw the news on the plane, she'd woken up Meadows, and the two immediately purchased in-flight Wi-Fi so they could get on e-mail and Facebook and check on their friends and family.

Luckily, everyone seemed to be fine.

"It was really hard. I was just trying to focus, but it just kept getting worse," she said. Her brother lives in Watertown, where police finally caught up with bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Through it all, Sherburne was so immersed in the news that she almost forgot she was not actually in Boston. That she hadn't just had a Dunkin' Donuts coffee or gone for a jog along the River.

In her first post on her new blog, "What Would Flo Do?" (named after Florence Nightingale), Sherburne wrote this:

"Given the horrific scenes of Monday, followed by the conclusive events on Friday, my head and heart are still somewhere lost over the Atlantic," she wrote. "I hope, however, to slowly drift back to the Bay of Bengal shores and the work at hand."

Welcome to Bangladesh

She and Meadows settled into their apartment in the neighborhood of Baridhara, which Sherburne described as the Beacon Hill of Bangladesh. It lacks the swank of blue-blood Boston but for Dhaka, it is a luxury. She even has remote-controlled air conditioning and a maid, Shilipi, who cleans and cooks for the two Americans.

Her father had worried so much about his daughter traveling to Bangladesh. The worries heightened after deadly riots erupted over a war crimes tribunal trying Islamist leaders for crimes committed during the nation's 1971 war for independence, when it was known as East Pakistan. Still, he'd been glad to hear his daughter's voice from the other side of the world. Thank God she wasn't on the finish line that day in Boston.

On some days, Sherburne and Meadows found themselves in lockdown in their new home because of security concerns. The opposition party, allied with Islamists, has been calling for nationwide strikes, and tensions have led to violent clashes on the streets. But the nurses were eager to get started with the work at hand.

The challenge of launching a bone marrow transplant unit seemed even greater when Bangladesh decided to put it in a public institution: Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

Sherburne had signed up to do this because she wanted to be out of her comfort zone and to be able to remember always how lucky she was to be at Massachusetts General.

She was reminded the moment she walked into Dhaka Medical.

The hospital has 1,700 beds but on any given day, there could be as many as 4,000 patients sharing beds and spilling into hallways and stairwells. That's not uncommon for public hospitals in this part of the world. They are the only places where desperately poor people can afford medical care.

Sherburne's skills might even make her a doctor at the Dhaka hospital. Some nurses are barely one step above a maid. That's what a doctor told Sherburne upon her arrival.

She'd never been in a hospital so ill-equipped to treat severe cases. In Boston, she changed her latex gloves after seeing each patient. In Dhaka, the hospital could not afford so many gloves, so the nurses used one pair on several patients.

She was appalled by the workload of the nurses; each averaged 25 to 30 patients. In America, that number would likely be somewhere between four and eight.

Sherburne and Meadows began their lectures and their clinical training of 10 nurses.

A horrific industrial accident

On the morning of April 24, the two American women were advised to stay at home. A hartal, the Bengali word for a strike, had been called for that day, and there was potential for more strife.

But the employees at the garment factories housed in Rana Plaza in suburban Savar were exempt from the strike. They were ordered to work, even after an inspection the previous day found cracks in the nine-story building and the structure was deemed dangerous.

Shortly after thousands of men, women, boys and girls showed up that day, the building came tumbling down. They were trapped under a crush of mangled concrete and steel.

Sherburne received a U.S. State Department alert about the building collapse.

"When Boston happened, it was so hard not to be at the scene," she said Thursday from Dhaka. "When this happened, I said, 'Take me to the hospital.' "

But she couldn't leave because of the security risks. Stuck in her home, she watched tragedy unfold again on television.

"My heart hasn't stopped breaking," she said.

She watched as rescue workers pulled out survivors, as time grew short. She knew that after 72 hours, there was little chance of a person surviving without food and water. The death toll would eventually rise to more than 500.

She watched as the plight of the workers became public again; how so many worked under terrible conditions for paltry salaries.

And she watched as a 17-year-old girl was interviewed on a TV station. Rescuers had to amputate her arm to slide her out of the rubble.

When Sherburne was 17, she dreaded Saturdays when she worked a four-hour shift at a dry cleaning shop and made $40. Now, it was difficult to watch the teenage survivor.

"The station called her lucky, and I went numb thinking how at age 17, I would have defined lucky," Sherburne wrote.

"It would have incorporated more than a minimum wage of $38 a month, it would have indicated that if a building was deemed unsafe on a Tuesday, I would not have been forced to return on a Wednesday, and without question it would have included two hands."

Later she questioned why tragedy in her hometown was incessantly on the news but the headlines from Bangladesh had already started to fade even before the rescue operation was over.

"I could tell you more about how much the Boston Marathon bombers' mother shoplifted from a Natick, Massachusetts, mall than how many factory workers were still missing."

Finally released to help

Five days after the catastrophe, Sherburne was allowed out of her house. She went to Dhaka Medical, which had taken in so many of the injured, some now without limbs, some still in life-threatening situations.

She was about to see what she didn't have to in Boston.

She walked into a ward with 53 female patients, their beds pressed together to make room for them all. It was 101 degrees that day, and the electricity was off because of a national grid problem. Some parts of the vast hospital were dark; others parts were dimly lit by emergency generators.

Sherburne wanted to change the patients' dressings, but there wasn't enough bandaging material to do that. So she did what nurses are trained to do. She sat on their beds and comforted them, speaking through a translator.

"How's your pain?" she asked.

"No pain," one said. "Nice to meet you."

For Sherburne, it was another reminder of human resilience.

Each patient mumbled a number. Three. Five. Eight. At first Sherburne didn't understand why.

Then it hit her. They were telling her which floor they had been on when the building hurtled toward the earth.

She reached out and held a woman's hand and noticed they were both wearing the same shade of pink on their nails. They even had identical chips in the polish.

"That's when it stopped seeming American to Bangladeshi and (it) was just a young woman to (another) young woman," Sherburne wrote.

She walked out with the realization that the clothes she was wearing might have been made in one of those factories that collapsed.

She remembers someone asking her if she wanted to see the dead -- the ones who had been brought to hospital but did not survive.

Sherburne declined, politely, but caught a glimpse of a lifeless body being wheeled away. She figured the woman was around her own age.

First appeared in CNN.com, May 3, 2013

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Made in Bangladesh, Not in Bangladeshi Blood

ANUSHAY HOSSAIN

For me, nothing captures the human tragedy of the recent building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh more poignantly than the image of the man cradling a woman in his arms, her broken body balancing upon slabs of broken factory rubble. As their dead bodies lay in an embrace evocative of a Renaissance period sculpture, the one thing that is glaringly clear is the cost of cheap labor: real human lives.

As a child in Dhaka in the 1980′s, I grew up during the beginning of the Ready Made Garment (RMG) era. As the sector quickly expanded and developed, it thrust thousands of young women into the workforce. On our way to school every morning, we would always see throngs of young Bangladeshi women flood the roads in their neon colored traditional salwaar-kameezes, bright ribbon strings tied in their hair. They were all headed to work in the factories.

I did not know it at the time, but what was happening in Bangladesh was a social revolution, instantly empowering women by making them financially independent, many for the first time in their lives. Today, approximately 3 million women currently work in the sector, and while the extent to which they are exploited within the industry can be debated, few can argue that employment in a garment factory puts food in the mouth of workers, and their families.

Vidiya Amrit Khan, Director of Desh Garments Limited and Director of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Exporters Association (BGMEA), says that the Savar tragedy unfairly casts blame on the garments industry just because of a “few bad apples.” Khan’s late father, M. Noorul Quader, pioneered the 100% export oriented Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry. Today, she runs her family business in Bangladesh, and states that we cannot scapegoat a sector we owe so much to:

I feel so sad and angry that people who are generally not employers of large numbers of people, or involved in mass production, have been making such harmful, and often vicious comments about an industry which has built Bangladesh, and has given so much independence to our women. This sector has grown into a $20 billion industry in about three decades, with 90% of its workforce being women. This is something to be very proud of. 

Verane Muyeed, LR Paris‘s Washington, DC Office Manager, worked in the Dhaka garment industry for over a decade, and says that while the sector is not perfect, the role the garment industry has played in empowering Bangladeshi women should not be overlooked:

The fact remains that though micro-finance is heralded as a triumph for helping Bangladesh alleviate poverty, factory work for young women across the country gives families the income, health, and independence that they need to get out of poverty.  In my 17 years of experience working with Bangladeshi garments factories, I have seen the evolution of the industry, as the making of garments, the compliances, the working conditions have improved, and are still improving, and empowering a new generation of workers.

Over the last thirty years, Bangladesh’s garment industry created a new burgeoning middle class in a country with one of the world’s largest economic gaps. The wealth generated from textiles is the single greatest source of economic growth in Bangladesh. While initially tea and jute were the most profitable sectors, that all changed in the 1980′s when the garment industry in Bangladesh became the main export sector, and a major source of foreign exchange.

Over the years, the list of global retailers who manufactured their clothes with cheap labor in Bangladesh grew endless, from JC Penny to Mango to Zara to Walmart to H&M to Tommy Hilfiger to Bennetton. Whenever I went abroad as a Bangladeshi, roaming through large Western department stores, and I would come across clothing with the “Made in Bangladesh” label, I would feel my heart swell with pride.

But for all these years, us Bangladeshis have kept a secret. We all have been compliant in covering up the dark underbelly of our country’s booming garment sector. Even though the string of garment fires caused international outcry last year, Bangladeshis knew this was nothing new. Fires had been breaking out in overcrowded factories for decades, long before social media and the Internet let the world know about the deaths.

Savar is different, not only because it is the worst industrial tragedy in Bangladesh’s history, but because it exposes how rampant and deep corruption run in a  country where a bribe can buy you what you want, and laws are generally not implemented. What does it say that today Bangladesh is at a point where we cannot even guarantee the workers, who are the backbone of our economy, that they won’t die at their job site from completely preventable causes?

We can point fingers at Western buying companies as much as we want, and of course they have a huge responsibility in all of this. The greed exists on both ends. But the fact of the matter is the responsibility lies with us, with Bangladesh & with Bangladeshis. Garments is the bloodline of our country, and blaming the sector along with its Western buyers is economic suicide Bangladesh cannot afford.

The truth is, we all have blood on our hands. From the Western brands to the Bangladeshis factory owners to the consumer hungry for cheap clothes, we are all guilty. But pointing the finger at the Western buyers is not the solution. If they cannot get their products made in Bangladesh, they will just go somewhere else, like the textile factories have done all through history.

The solution has to come from us. The change has to come from Bangladeshis because the Savar tragedy can happen again, and not just in the garment sector. It can happen anywhere in Bangladesh. Experts estimate currently there are over 6,500 vulnerable buildings in the country, and warn that Dhaka can become unlivable.

Ultimately, the responsibility, with outside help and pressure, must come from Bangladesh because only we the people can bring about genuine, real change. Boycotting products manufactured in Bangladesh is not an option, or the solution, and we all know it. As Sir Fazle Hasan Abed states in his recent editorial, ”Made in Bangladesh should be a mark of pride, not shame.”

But the label on our clothing must also ensure that “Made in Bangladesh” is not made in Bangladeshi blood. No piece of clothing will ever be worth that.

First appeared in Forbes.com, May 02, 2013 

Anushay Hossain is a Bangladeshi born-Washington based policy analyst & journalist. She writes the blog, Anushay’s Point