Shuprova Tasneem

On the occasion of Victory Day, Mofidul Hoque, war crimes researcher and trustee of the Liberation War Museum, speaks to Shuprova Tasneem of The Daily Star about the incredible journey that Bangladesh has gone through, and what must be done to preserve that history.

State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Murad Hassan has been made to resign from his post, at the specific instructions of the prime minister of Bangladesh, and women across the country who have been following the recent developments in this regard have breathed a collective sigh of relief.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the night in a district town’s Parjatan hotel.

The first displacement happened in the 1950s. The Pakistani government acquired about 1,842 acres in Gobindaganj, Gaibandha in northern Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan), promising both the local Santal and Bengali communities employment as labourers in the sugarcane farm that would be set up on that land.

Over the past few weeks, almost every day, we have read news reports on clashes in the lead-up to the November 11 union parishad (UP) elections.

What are the risks associated with workers’ protests in modern-day Bangladesh? When workers take to the streets, what sort of treatment should they expect to receive?

The Covid-19 pandemic has been hard for everyone, but it has been especially so on children.

Bangalee revolutionary, feminist and social reformer Leela Nag’s century-old ancestral home, in Panchgaon village of Moulvibazar’s Rajnagar upazila, has been destroyed.

After 543 days of school closure, one of the most protracted education gaps in the world that was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,

When you first read it, it may seem like something scripted for the silver screen: the story of a Bangladeshi woman who is struck by an awful tragedy—her 17-year-old daughter lured away by traffickers and forced to work in a brothel in India.

“Thousands of garment workers yesterday returned to work in industrial belts in Dhaka and elsewhere amid the nationwide shutdown, raising fears of a rapid spread of the novel coronavirus…”—this was the first sentence in a report in The Daily Star that was printed, not today, yesterday or the day before, but on April 30, 2020.

Bangla-desh is facing one of its worst weeks since the Covid-19 pandemic first hit the country in March last year. On Monday, we saw the highest daily death toll since the pandemic began (164 lives lost) and yesterday, we had the highest number of new Covid-19 infections detected over 24 hours (11,525 new cases).

I first met six-year-old Amina in the Kutupalong refugee camp in 2019. I couldn't help noticing the forlorn image of life in the camps she depicted—a child alone in a corner, playing with a pair of matchboxes instead of a toy.

Does the proposed budget make adequate provisions for the new poor that have been created by the Covid-19 pandemic, and do you think the expanded social protection measures will reach them?

The prolonged school closures in Bangladesh has put us at the top of yet another unpalatable list—according to UNICEF, we have had one of the world’s longest full closure of educational institutions due to the pandemic.

To be honest, I was not that conscious from a young age of the inequalities that exist in our society, or even of the unequal treatment that women receive within their families.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Together, We Can Restore Our Earth”, and at today’s global climate summit, there is a definite focus on

The news last week was dominated by the celebrations of the birth centenary of the Father of the Nation and the pride we felt at reaching the golden jubilee of independence, alongside the concerns over the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hitting Bangladesh in full force.

On March 2, the Prothom Alo shared a post that would move even the hardest of hearts—a photo of Dhaka South City Corporation cleaner Nurjahan Begum, pressing her hands together with tears in her eyes, begging the executive magistrate not to demolish her temporary homestead in Fulbaria, Dhaka.

How should a country treat its detainees/prisoners, especially in the middle of a global pandemic?