[Before Rana Plaza collapsed, Bangladesh was already in turmoil, as opposition political parties were staging nationwide strikes, known as hartals, that paralyzed the country and placed huge pressure on factory owners to meet deadlines. Weeks earlier, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association warned that the hartals had cost Bangladesh as much as $500 million in business.]
By Jim Yardley
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Strdel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sohel Rana, owner of the collapsed garment building in Bangladesh, in police body armor
before a court appearance on Tuesday.
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And perhaps no one wielded power more brazenly than Sohel
Rana. He traveled by motorcycle, as untouchable as a mafia don, trailed by his
own biker gang. Local officials and the Bangladeshi news media say he was
involved in illegal drugs and guns, but he also had a building, Rana Plaza,
that housed five factories.
Upstairs, workers earned as little as $40 a month making
clothes for retailers like J. C. Penney. Downstairs, Mr. Rana hosted local
politicians, playing pool, drinking and, the officials say, indulging in drugs.
Now Mr. Rana, 35, is under arrest, the most reviled man in Bangladesh
after the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza last week left nearly 400 people
dead, with many others still missing. On Tuesday, a top Bangladeshi court
seized his assets, as the public bayed for his execution, especially as it
appears that the tragedy could have been averted if the frantic warnings of an
engineer who examined the building the day before had been heeded.
But if Mr. Rana has been vilified, he is partly a creation
of the garment era in Bangladesh, during which global businesses have arrived
in search of cheap labor to keep profits high and costs low. Directly or
indirectly, international brands are now sometimes interlinked with men like
Mr. Rana, and placed at risk by them.
Global apparel companies often depict their international
supply chains as tightly scrutinized systems to ensure that clothing sold to
American buyers is produced in safe, monitored factories. Yet their inspectors
usually check safety factors and working conditions, but not the soundness of
the buildings themselves, and the companies often have little control over the
subcontractors who do much of the work.
Criminality and politics have long intersected in
Bangladesh, especially at the local level. But the garment industry has
introduced what had mostly been the missing element: money. Savar land values
soared as new factories hurriedly opened to meet the new Western demand.
To build Rana Plaza, Mr. Rana and his father bullied
adjacent landowners, the landowners themselves say, and ultimately took their
property by force. His political allies gave him a construction permit, despite
his dubious claims of title to the land, and a second permit later to add upper
floors that may have destabilized the building.
Mr. Rana existed largely above scrutiny. Many local people
say his political clout was such that not even the police dared to confront
him. Television stations reported the cracks in the building the night before
it collapsed, but no local authority prevented Mr. Rana from opening the
building the next morning.
“Money is his power,” said Ashraf Uddin Khan, a former
mayor of Savar, who accused Mr. Rana of being deeply involved in the drug
trade. “Illegal money.”
Before Rana Plaza collapsed, Bangladesh was already in
turmoil, as opposition political parties were staging nationwide strikes, known
as hartals, that paralyzed the country and placed huge pressure on factory
owners to meet deadlines. Weeks earlier, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers
and Exporters Association warned that the hartals had cost Bangladesh as much
as $500 million in business.
Hartals were part of Mr. Rana’s résumé. He held what
appeared to be an innocuous position as secretary of the local student wing for
the Awami League, the country’s majority political party. But that position
translated into influence and helped him mobilize people. He developed a
following that local people say he used as political muscle, sometimes to
enforce strikes, sometimes to defy them.
“He had a criminal gang,” said Mohammed Khorshed Alam, an
elected councilman in Savar and a member of the opposition Bangladesh
Nationalist Party. He said Mr. Rana and his men carried weapons and were part
of a network involved in the local drug trade.
Politics are rough in Savar. Mr. Alam walks through the
city with an entourage of eight men, including a bodyguard with a sawed-off
shotgun. Local officials say drug sales are widespread, though the city’s
police chief says he has stamped out the problem. One of the busiest drug dens,
he said, used to exist behind Rana Plaza.
Land helped create Mr. Rana’s power. His father had been a
poor peasant who sold his plot in a village and bought a small parcel in Savar.
As prices began to rise, the father sold a portion of that land and used his
profits to start a small factory making mustard oil. He also became involved in
politics with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, then in power, and slowly grew
richer.
By 2000, land prices were rising, and Mr. Rana was helping
his father. They could see other hurriedly constructed buildings rising in
Savar, and they decided to build Rana Plaza — except they did not have clear
title to all the land.
Rabindranath Sarkar, who had bought land in partnership
with Mr. Rana’s father, said the family sent thugs to seize part of his share
of the land and then retaliated when he filed a complaint with the local
police.
“Rana chased me through Savar with weapons,” he said. “The
police wouldn’t even dare to protect me. The police were always scared of
them.”
Another adjacent family said Mr. Rana sent representatives
to try to persuade them to sell a plot, including a small pond, beside Mr.
Rana’s land. By 2005, a year before construction started on Rana Plaza, the
family said Mr. Rana simply falsified a land deed to take possession of the
pond.
Bangladesh initially sought to attract foreign investment
by creating special Export Processing Zones, which had higher quality buildings
and tighter regulations. But as demand from foreign buyers rose, factories
began sprouting across the country, including quickly built structures to
accommodate the small operators who did subcontract work on tight margins.
By 2011, Mr. Rana had rented out the existing five floors
and gotten a permit from the local mayor, a political ally, to build additional
floors. Mr. Khan, the former mayor, said this practice created serious risks,
since officials were handing out permits, often for bribes, without insisting
on the necessary safeguards.
“For the garment industry, Savar grew quickly, and in an
unplanned manner,” he said. “There are so many buildings like Rana Plaza in
Savar.”
Mr. Rana found factory owners to rent his new upper floors
and appeared to be gaining in influence. Then on April 23, a problem arose.
Workers on the third floor were stitching clothing when they were startled by a
noise that sounded like an explosion. Cracks had appeared in the building.
Workers rushed outside in terror.
By late morning, Mr. Rana’s representatives had brought in
Abdur Razzaque Khan, an engineer. Taken to the third floor, Mr. Khan examined
three support pillars, and became horrified at the cracks he found.
“I became scared,” Mr. Khan said. “It was not safe to stay
inside this building.”
He rushed downstairs and told one of Mr. Rana’s
administrators that the building needed to be closed immediately. But Mr. Rana
was apparently not impressed; he was holding court with about a dozen local
journalists.
“This is not a crack,” he said, according to Shamim
Hossain, a local newspaper reporter. “The plaster on the wall is broken,
nothing more. It is not a problem.”
But it was. The next morning, Rana Plaza collapsed. Mr.
Rana managed to escape from his basement office, but was eventually discovered
hiding near the Indian border. He was flown by helicopter to Dhaka and thrust
before the news media, looking dazed and disheveled.
Neither Mr. Rana nor a representative was available for
comment. He has previously said it was the factory owners who insisted on
opening for business the day of the collapse, and several of the owners have
been arrested, as was Mr. Rana’s father.
Even now, many people in Savar remained unconvinced that
Mr. Rana will be punished, or that his style of business will be cleaned up.
“Rana is not the only one,” said Mr. Sarkar, the man whose land was taken.
“Now, we have so many Ranas.”
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.