Shakhawat Liton

Forty-five years ago, our constitution announced emphatically that the state shall ensure the separation of the judiciary from the executive "as soon as practicable".

Year 2017 may go down in our political history for unusual calm. We never witnessed such a situation in politics since restoration of democracy in 1990.

The resolution passed by UN General Assembly on Sunday asking Myanmar to end a military campaign against Rohingyas and ensure the return of all refugees and grant full citizenship rights to them offered afresh some flowery words for the world's most persecuted community.

Nine years ago when a former judge and two prosecutors at the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia were examining the documents on human rights abuses in Myanmar, they were astonished by the UN inaction even though the global body knew for years the severe, widespread, and systematic violations of human rights there.

As women narrate their stories of shame– of how they were raped repeatedly by Myanmar army to the media, the case becomes even more convincing for UN special representative of secretary general to put soldiers on dock at the ICC in Hague, as she promised. Only one problem, and not a small one at that, may throw the spanner in the wheel – that Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute to the ICC.

The latest agreement on repatriation of the Rohingyas may not be as effective as the two previous deals signed between Bangladesh and Myanmar in 1978 and 1992 respectively.

The Chinese recipe for resolving the Rohingya crisis is not working. Yet, Beijing is insisting on it.

Myanmar's promise to take back the Rohingyas, who fled to Bangladesh to escape a brutal military crackdown, looks hollow, as it is still showing an unbending attitude towards them.

When Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said during her Dhaka visit that Bangladesh-India relation “goes far beyond a strategic partnership”, that certainly created a ripple across many fronts – from global politics, to the Myanmar generals to the hapless Rohingyas.

Rohingyas have been telling the world numerous stories of horror, loss, murder, rape and villages burned to the ground over the last two months. The world's media have been flooded with their harrowing tales.

The Myanmar army has now accused the world media of “exaggerating” the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing its brutal crackdown

After the shame of Bosnia, there should not have been a Myanmar. Yet, Myanmar happened because the big nations on both sides of the East-West divide have rendered the UN an ineffective organisation, a platform to talk and not to take actions.

1994 should have been a watershed year in human history; a year to feel ashamed of humanity's failure to stop a genocide that resulted in the deaths of 800,000 mostly Tutsis in Rwanda; a year to mend the mistakes that allowed the atrocities to happen, and to build solid defence against such atrocities in the future; it should have been truly a year of re-learning the lessons from death and destruction.

Myanmar's promise to take back the Rohingyas, who have taken refuge in Bangladesh, looks empty and seems to be a tactic to ease international pressure. This is reflected in the contents of a hasty statement put on the official website of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi hours after Myanmar Union Minister U Kyaw Zeya concluded his Dhaka visit.

China and Russia has once again prevented the UN Security Council from making any decision on Myanmar to protect Rohingyas from atrocities, just three years after demonstrating a strong anti-genocide stance.

Three years down the line of UN Security Council's 20th commemoration of Rwanda genocide which saw the adoption of a unanimous resolution to fight genocide, China and Russia have changed their stance to take action against "a textbook case of ethnic cleansing" in Myanmar.

It has been over three weeks that the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had issued a letter, unprecedented in the last 28 years since the 1989 Lebanon conflict, to the Security Council for its action on the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.

Two years ago, Bangladesh felt a “strengthened bond” with India that “would benefit people of the two countries as well as of the

This is inconceivable in modern democracy that the parliament passes a resolution to nullify a supreme court verdict. But our Parliament unanimously did it on Wednesday, setting a unique example.

Although it came quite late in the series of events, the UN Security Council statement Wednesday just reminded the world how terrible