Editorial
Stalemate at ZIA
We hope similar incidents would not occur in the future
The four-hour long stalemate at Zia International Airport on Wednesday bringing all its activities to a standstill can only be condemned, if nothing more. If the employees of Biman had any grievances against the police department, they should have dealt with it in a professional manner. Stopping work and not allowing any flights to either take off or land can't be an acceptable manner of protest. Apparently local police had detained four employees of Biman's engineering division in connection with a foreign currency recovery case from a toilet of a Biman aircraft last month. Learning of the arrest, their colleagues instantly stopped work bringing an international airport to a complete standstill, for almost four hours! The engineers were detained for questioning by the police to which the police had every right. They were neither accused nor charged with anything. So what was the need to react so angrily? If the agitated employees were so confident about their innocence, then why didn't they simply wait and see what the police was going to do next? Instead, in the name of protesting the 'harassment' of their colleagues, they put hundreds of passengers in suffering for no fault of theirs. According to reports, a Biman flight from Dhaka to London was delayed by at least ten hours, and another flight to Singapore took off three hours late. Now who would take the blame for such irresponsible and unprofessional behaviour? Who would pay the price for the harassment suffered by the passengers? Bangladesh Biman had been under pressure for a long time to maintain schedule of their flights. In fact many prefer to fly by other airlines because of the bad reputation Biman has 'earned' over the years. And incidents like Wednesday's would definitely not help to enhance Biman's image and that of the management of ZIA, in the future. We wonder what the airport authority was doing when the whole fiasco was taking place. Why did the intervention by the minister and high government officials that brought the situation under control take so long? The minister has reportedly assured them that action would be taken against those who had 'harassed' the Biman employees, but we demand action against those as well who instigated the stalemate at ZIA, bringing shame to the nation.
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