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    Volume 9 Issue 15| April 9, 2010|

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Letters

About "Bodle jao, bodle dao”
Bodle jao, bodle dao (Change yourself, change others) is a very influential slogan recently being propagated by the daily Prothom Alo. The core idea of this campaign is shaping and controlling the attitude and behaviour of individuals in order to change them, and they in turn can influence others to be changed. The daily Prothom Alo has expressed this concept in different dimensions. The advertisement shows that taking seats reserved for females by the male passengers on a bus, spitting on the road, being cruel to children cannot be the actions of a sensible and humane person. This campaign is truly consistent with the concept of social marketing because besides performing the promotional functions of the newspaper it encourages members of society to behave according to moral and ethical values that will enrich the society as a whole. So heartiest thanks to Prothom Alo for its unique initiative that can contribute to bringing about positive change in the society!
Rezwan Tanvir
Dept. of Business Administration
Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet

Sticks in School

My heart aches to learn from one of the leading newspapers of the country that about 20 students were physically assaulted by their class teacher in Feni district. The misdeeds of these young students were that they did not bring colour pencil to class. Not only in Feni, it is a common scenario in many schools, especially in rural areas. It is well known that young children go to school to become well-rounded human beings. If they are treated brutally in their educational institution, is it possible to develop into a humane person? According to modern teaching methods, using sticks to hit students in the classroom is a harmful practice. For this, the beaten or maltreated students lose their inquisitiveness and talent. The conditions of government primary school, Qawmi Madrashah, etc are really frustrating in this respect. The concerned authorities should look to this matter seriously. Canes have no place in school!
Md.Zahidul Islam Zibon
Dept. of English
International Islamic University Chittagong

Please Solve Rohingya Crisis!

We know 'Rohingya Refugee' has been a controversial issue between Bangladesh and Myanmar for a long time. Rohingya exodus occurred first in 1978 when a total of 167,000 stateless Rohingyas were pushed to Bangladesh by the military authority of Myanmar. The international concern forced Myanmar to sign an agreement with Bangladesh in July 1978 to repatriate all refugees. In 1991 again, the exodus took place from Myanmar to Bangladesh. In 1992, Bangladesh and Myanmar again reached an agreement of repatriation, but the Rohingyas after repatriation, again returned to Bangladesh. Hence, there are documented and undocumented refugees living in the Cox's Bazar and Teknaf areas of Bangladesh. The then government of Bangladesh had established two camps in collaboration with UNHCR named Kutupalong and Nayapa in Cox's Bazar and Teknaf region.
The Rohingyas are an ethnic group from the Northern Rakhine State (formerly Arakan State) of Myanmar. They are persecuted in their home country owing to ethnic conflict. Out of about 2.5 million Rohingyas, two million are reportedly now out of the country of their origin. They are in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, and the USA and in different Middle Eastern and European countries.
Twice in 1978 and 1991 Myanmar signed accords to repatriate her citizens. For unknown reasons she took back very few of the refugees. Bangladesh can take the help of important regional players such as China, ASEAN member states or even the international community to pursue the military government of Myanmar. This crisis isn't only a problem for Bangladesh but also for the region as a whole.
Mohammad Khademul Islam
BSS (Hons) 3rd year
Dept. of International Relations
University of Chittagong

Correction
In the Perspective piece "The Invisible Heroines" of the March 26 issue of The Star, it was said that Dr Nayanika Mookherjee, who has done her doctoral thesis on the sexual violence of 1971, attributed the victim's 'socio-economic status, Islamic gender doctrine, feminine codes of honour and sexuality, and the phenomenon of "public secrecy"' as factors which contributed to the silence of the Birangona of 1971. In fact, while Dr. Mookherjee sees socio-economic status and the phenomenon of public secrecy as the cause of the problem of the women who came to the Gano Adalat, she does not see Islamic gender doctrine as such; rather, she considers it an orientalised way of understanding wartime rape in Bangladesh and argues in her thesis and in all subsequent publications against such a stereotypical, limited and orientalised way of attributing to 'Islam' the reason for the scorn the war heroines face. We regret the inadvertent misrepresentation of Dr. Mookherjee's work.

 


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