Cry, my beloved Chittagong Port

Before that when the spice trade became the dominant feature in the functions of the Arab merchants, the Chittagong Port was looked upon as providing a most vantage point both for docking and repairing, and for recruiting crew on a cheap bargain.

'Sareng' was the word used for local sailors who worked in the big merchant ships that commanded the trade from Borneo in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, touching Chittagong as the mid-point outpost.

Amitabh Ghose's internationally famed novel, "The Glass Palace," contains a section describing the stirring activities of the Chittagong Port in the British period.

Moulavi Nasihuddin , writer of "Mofizon,"and father of Mahbub Ul Alam, worked as a sareng for sometime. He sailed up to Iraq. In the meantime, Mahbub joined the First World War and was posted in Iraq, they had a chance meeting at Basra, the father not knowing that his son had joined the war, and the son not knowing either that his father's ship was just anchoring around.

Many ancient families of Chittagong (like the Dobash family at Patharghata) just became phenomenally rich by having trade linkages with the Chittagong Port, which was developed as a modern port in the fag end of the nineteenth century.

The spiritual legend of the Port is also long, though rather unconvincing. It is said that Saint Badar Shah and his nephew Pir Mohsin Awlia came to Chittagong riding on stone on the sea. The strength of the myth lies in the fact that Chittagong had attracted religious missionaries from the early Middle Ages, and so the place traditionally has remained a strong haunt of lucre and piety. In Chittagong, God has stipulated it in such a way that the more religion you have the more money you command.

However, this history apart, Chittagong Port has come to stand as almost a failed port now.

A lead report recently published in a vernacular Bengali daily ( The Ittefaq, January 17) discloses very unnerving facts that seem to choke the development of this mother port of the country. The facts relate to the inefficiency of the Chittagong Port Authority management, but the thrust of the blame, however, has been put, and I think rightly so, on the workers' associations (35 of them, just imagine) whose activities more often than not paralyse the Port and keep it inoperative for most of the financial year.

Of the 30 odd associations, only 7 are duly registered, and through an election the winning party works as CBA, which is the main bargaining agency.

For Bangladesh being an over-populated country and unpardonably illiterate at that, workers associations have become a safe harbour for those labourers who are lazy, unfit and quarrelsome, or who are firebrand but good for nothing, and those leaders who believe in nothing but self-aggrandisement.

We are a teeming population suffering from a sickening poverty, but cite me one example of a workers association whose activities have helped redress the poverty of the poor labourers.

The very existence of thirty-odd associations in the Port is a flagrant example of what kind of exploitation of the national properties is going on at the Port.

Let Chittagong Port be not a feeding centre for unwarranted people.