The syndicate of owners of 20 yard, known as 'the 13 players' is so powerful that they enjoy 'undeclared immunity' from official actions in cases of negligent homicide, flouting labour and maritime laws and polluting the land and sea.

The ship-breaking sector in Sitakunda, that meets 80 per cent of the country's demand for steel, earning the exchequer annual revenue of over Tk 800 crore, has not been recognised by the government as an industry. The government does not want to commit itself to a sector riddled with so many anomalies, according to an official source in Chittagong.

There is a strict unofficial embargo on information regarding accidents and human casualties in the ship breaking yards. But it is estimated that over the last three decades, over 1,000 workers have died and over 10,000 others were injured and suffered partial or permanent disabilities in accidents in the yards.

The death toll rises every week due to increasingly hazardous ships arriving to be scrapped without going through proper detoxification, as required by the international maritime laws. Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), the only NGO working for the rights of the workers in the ship-breaking yards, in a survey revealed that on an average, one worker dies every week and another is injured every day at the scrap yards.

According to official sources, almost all the hazardous vessels, particularly oil tankers arriving at Chittagong port, contain highly hazardous substances and hidden gas chambers. It is very common to find the dying vessels laden with asbestos, oil sludge, lead, cadmium, arsenic, biocides and even radioactive substances.

It is the duty of the Department of Explosives inspectors to examine each ship and issue a certificate called 'Safe for Man Entry'. But sources in Chittagong said the owners have their own way of obtaining these certificates through 'package deals'.

Shamsul Alam, inspector of explosives Chittagong circle, denied allegations of package deals and said there was no way of overlooking deadly gases. When asked how two workers, Foreman Jahangir and Cutter Kalam, were asphyxiated to death on July 12 after entering a compartment of the MT Liano, certified and beached for scrapping at the yard of Intraport Marine Limited, the inspector showed the certificate, which clearly said that the particular compartment where the two workers died was 'not safe for heat work'. The certificate was only valid until the ship was beached.

"We issued the beaching permission but it was the responsibility of the owners to have the vessel inspected again by us. They simply ignored our certificate and let the workers inside," said Shamsul Alam.

Zafar Alam, president of the Bangladesh Ship Breakers Association, blamed the government for the 'undesirable situation' in the ship-scrapping sector and said they have to operate under extreme odds.

"We have now and again asked the government to help us build infrastructure but nothing has happened, we have no recognition or guarantee of labour, even we had to buy the land for the access roads into our yards, we enjoy no tax-holidays or any other support from the state," Zafar Alam said.

Alam alleged the International Labour Organisation and the Ministry of Labour and Employment were recently given Tk 8 crore by UNDP to train labourers and to create awareness among them.

"We wanted them to spend the money on training, development of sanitation, building a hospital, buying ambulances and installation of tube-wells but they never bothered to listen to us. Instead, they spent more than Tk 4 crore on consultancy, foreign trips, well-furnished offices, vehicles and conferences in expensive hotels," Alam added.

According to sources close to the ship-scrapping trade, the 'industry' has grown 'without any policy or monitoring' simply as per the wishes of the owners. Annually, over 150 ocean-going vessels, weighing between 10,000 to 500,000 tons are brought to Chittagong for scrapping.

In addition to a vast array of other items, up to 1.8 million tons of steel are retrieved from these ships annually, providing instant raw materials for re-rolling industries, small ship building and for the booming construction sector.

In the most painstaking process of dismantling a huge ship piece by piece, around 35,000 mostly unskilled labourers toil day and night with bare hands in the most rudimentary way, where safety measures for them are virtually non-existent.

The most blatant defiance of the law in the 20 ship-breaking yards over an area of 10 kilometres along the Bay of Bengal, takes place with these labourers. None of the yards maintain any registration of labour and owners decline to accept liabilities over their injuries or deaths.

Labourers from Barisal, Bogra, Rangpur, Magura, Jamalpur, Gaibandha and other impoverished districts of the country work in the yards, sharing crammed accommodations in the neighbourhood. In most cases, they have no access to potable water, sanitations or medical facilities.

Interestingly, the yard owners never have any formal contracts with the labourers. Any attempt to form a Trade Union is dealt with harshly. For instance, in 1998 some workers went on a strike after forming a Trade Union under the banner of Bangladesh Samajtantrik Dal. But the owners and middlemen in the area ruthlessly quelled the movement by beating up the leaders and filing false cases against them. According to sources, the owners are happy to readily find influential local middlemen known as contractors controlling the labour markets.

"The yard manager calls up one of the contractors and tells him what has to be done. The contractor, in turn, fixes a price with the manager and gets the required number of labourers to do the job for about Tk 10 an hour," said a clerk at a yard, requesting anonymity. He added that in the whole process of labour recruitment there are no liabilities whatsoever on the part of the owners.

According to insiders, when a fatal accident occurs, the first job for the officials is to take all measures to suppress the information. The local police station files an unnatural death (UD) case, as in the case of other accidental deaths or suicides. The thana nirbahi officer (TNO), who also enjoys magistracy power by right of his position, readily issues a certificate exempting the body from post mortem. The body is then sent to the family somewhere in the north of the country on a rooftop of a bus accompanied by one or two fellow labourers living in the same region. The family receives a meagre handout of cash ranging between Tk 5,000 and Tk 10,000 and the body of their loved one.

The yards remain totally off limits to journalists or NGO workers and thus information on accidents inside the compounds is never made available to the outside world. For instance, this correspondent was denied entrance to six ship-scrapping yards before he was allowed in by one of the yards.

According to a local journalist, news of a fatal accident that involves one or two workers' death hardly ever reaches the outside world.

The owners of the ship scrapping yards are in trouble when news of accidents is leaked to the press. Public pressure compels the owner to compensate the victims properly. The president of the Bangladesh Ship Breakers Association claimed ship breakers always paid the victim's family more than anyone else did.

"The labour law requires the owners to pay the victim's family Tk 30,000 but we pay Tk 100,000," said the president.

Zhantu Kumar Mazumder, field organiser of the YPSA, said the most difficult part of his work is to get information from the yards.

Faced with such difficult situation YPSA has formed three watch forums in Sitakunda area. In the three forums local journalists, students and selected members of the society have been incorporated separately. Some ship-breaking workers were also included in the forums.

"We are already benefiting from the forums, the members are actively helping us in getting information on accidents and also building pressure on the employers for medical facilities and compensation," Zhantu said.

But the members of the forums and journalists in Chittagong were baffled recently when a worker at the Harun Steel reported to the forum he had witnessed two charred bodies inside a ship around midnight on July 6.

Since July 6, members of the watch forums, journalists and YPSA officials frantically tried to find out the identities of the two ill-fated workers. It was not until July 15 that a local Bangla daily, Dainik Azadi, reported about the alleged deaths of the two men on July 6. The two workers were identified as Mohammad Malek, 32, and Mohammad Mizan, 28, but none could say where the bodies were sent.