Author: Inam Ahmed
Publication: Daily Star
Date: February 25, 2004
URL: http://www.thedailystar.net
Nyt's Celia Dugger tailed by NSI
in Bangladesh
It was already dark when our microbus
reached Netrakona town. About an hour ago, we watched the sun softened
like the yolk of an egg slowly going down over the horizon.
The town was new to me. So, we were
driving slowly. With me was Celia Dugger, a correspondent of The New York
Times, and Amit Bhargava, a photographer who once worked for the Associate
Press in Delhi.
Celia had come here to write a report
on the intricacies of microcredit. Her theme was global poverty and obviously
Bangladesh is her natural choice. A week ago she sent me this e-mail asking
me if I was free to help her. I agreed as I did on previous visits by other
NYT correspondents. There is always something to learn from the way these
professionals work.
And so, we were in this northeastern
town trying to locate BRAC office. In the dark, we saw two men on motorcycles
waiting by the road, peering at our microbus. We thought them to be BRAC
officials who must have got information from their head office that we
were coming.
We pressed the brake and waved at
them. Strangely, the men bothered not to come to us. With an unusual somber
mood, they slowly kick started their bikes and vanished into the darkness.
I got down and asked the tea stall
owner by the road who they were.
"They are the DB people," the old
man said. "They have been waiting here for your microbus since afternoon."
They were not DB people, rather from the National Security Intelligence
(NSI) as I came to know later.
I came back baffled. How could they
know we were coming here? Slowly it got into me that these detectives have
been following us since Celia came to Dhaka. And when I rented the microbus,
they might have known our destination from the rent-a-car company.
When I told Celia about the whole
thing, she was even more baffled and then disgusted.
We approached the BRAC office and
all the way along, found those two plainclothesmen following us. We reached
the office and bunked for the night.
We started our day early the next
morning. As we were about to get inside the microbus, we saw them again
-- the two detectives standing in front of the fire station.
They started tailing us all the
way to the villages in Barhatta union. There we had to interview some microcredit
borrowers of BRAC. As we walked to the house of one of the borrowers, the
detectives started walking side by side.
Celia suddenly got irritated. She
stopped and yelled at the men: "Why are you here? Who allowed you to follow
us?"
The detectives stood under a tree
without much of a twitch. We left them behind and entered the courtyard
of the house. As the interview started, suddenly those two men were there.
They wanted to know what we were talking about.
This time, Celia was real mad. She
waved at them madly, asking them to go away. She almost threw them out.
But they stuck at our back all through the day.
Later in the evening, as we returned
to the BRAC office, the staff told us that the detectives had already visited
the office. They interrogated the officials about us, about our purpose
to visit this place etc. The staff also told us that the local administrator
had asked them to see him the next day, obviously because of our presence.
Celia got depressed. So were we.
"I don't understand why these people
are doing it?" said Celia. "I am here to do a completely innocent story
and I told the visa officer the reason of my visit. This is worse than
a police state. I have been to many places. Not even in China or Iran did
I face this kind of spying. It is strange."
Next day, I had an idea. I visited
a few villagers we interviewed the previous day and asked them what the
detectives were up to.
"They asked if you wanted to know
anything about Hindu repression," said one villager. "Or whether you are
doing any anti-state activities."
We were stunned, Celia more than
me.
"I came here with an open mind.
And now the way your government has been spying on me, I guess it has something
to hide. Something awful," said Celia.
That day we worked till noon with
the spies, not the same set but new faces, following us through. As we
were coming back, we found the first day's detective duo sitting on chairs
by the roadside. Watching us go.
"You know the strange thing. Even
in Kashmir, the Indian intelligence does not follow the foreign journalists,"
said Celia. "I feel more insecure in this country than in India."
Our photographer Amit on a sudden
impulse aimed his camera and took a snap of the spies trying to check leak
on Hindu repression and anti-state activities.
Inam Ahmed is News Editor of The
Daily Star
