[Now is undeniably the
test. The Tazreen Fashions fire was followed by the April collapse of the Rana Plaza factory
building, in which 1,129 people were killed in the deadliest disaster in the
history of the garment industry. A global supply chain that delivers low-cost
clothes from Bangladeshi factories to stores in the West was suddenly redefined
by images of mutilated bodies pulled from the rubble. The Obama administration
responded last week by rescinding a special trade privilege for Bangladesh over
concerns about safety problems and labor rights violations in its garment
industry.]
By Jim Yardley
 |
Associated Press
Bangladeshi officials at the Tazreen Fashions
garment factory near Dhaka last year.
A fire at the factory killed 112 workers.
|
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Inside Courtroom 21, the two judges peered down from high wooden
chairs as lawyers in formal black robes presented their motions. Activists and
victims watched from the back. And a few steps away, a portly man with a thick
black beard remained silent. He was the suspect. He did not seem especially
nervous.
Perhaps that is because
the man, Delowar Hossain, has not yet been charged with anything — and may
never be. He has been a vilified figure since his garment factory, Tazreen
Fashions, caught fire last November, killing 112 workers
who were making clothes for retailers like Walmart and Sears. A high-level
government investigation found fire safety violations and accused Mr. Hossain
of “unpardonable negligence.”
“How do you sleep at
night?” a woman screamed as Mr. Hossain left the courtroom after the hearing on
June 19. The more pertinent question might be this: In Bangladesh, where the
garment industry powers the economy and wields enormous political clout, is it
possible to hold factory owners like Mr. Hossain accountable?
Now is undeniably the
test. The Tazreen Fashions fire was followed by the April collapse of the Rana Plaza factory
building, in which 1,129 people were killed in the deadliest disaster in the
history of the garment industry. A global supply chain that delivers low-cost
clothes from Bangladeshi factories to stores in the West was suddenly redefined
by images of mutilated bodies pulled from the rubble. The Obama administration
responded last week by rescinding a special trade privilege for Bangladesh over
concerns about safety problems and labor rights violations in its garment
industry.
But Bangladeshi
factories have always suffered fires and accidents, usually without attracting
international attention. One study estimated that more than 1,000 workers died
in hundreds of factory fires or accidents from 1990 to 2012. Not once was a
factory owner charged with any crime, activists say.
“We want to set a legal
precedent that factory owners can’t get away with this,” said Saydia Gulrukh,
an anthropologist and social activist.
One way to interpret the
hearing for Mr. Hossain was as an act of exasperation. It was not a criminal
trial. Instead, Ms. Gulrukh and a handful of other activists and lawyers had
become so frustrated that they petitioned the Bangladesh High Court to overstep
the stalled police investigation and decide whether criminal charges should be
filed. The proceeding is already bogged down and could take months, or longer.
“They are just delaying
the process,” said Jyotirmoy Barua, the lawyer handling the petition, speaking
of Mr. Hossain’s defense team. “They think we will lose the spirit of fighting.
But they have miscalculated.”
Bangladesh’s legal
system has rarely favored anyone confronting the power structure. Much of the
legal code has remained intact since the British imperial era, when laws were
devised to control the population and protect the colonialist power structure.
Legal reformers continue to push to modernize the criminal code, but the pace
of change has been slow. Moreover, the police and other security forces are
deeply politicized, with a bloody legacy of carrying out extrajudicial
killings.
Many garment factory
owners are now entrenched in the nation’s power elite, some as members of
Parliament. Garments represent 80 percent of the country’s manufacturing
exports, giving the industry vast economic power, while
factory owners also finance campaigns during national elections, giving them
broad political influence.
The April 24 collapse of
Rana Plaza, located in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka, seemed to shock a
system often inured to factory accidents. On the morning of the collapse,
factory workers had been ordered into the building, even though cracks had
appeared a day earlier and an engineer had warned that the structure was
unsafe. The building’s owner, Sohel Rana, disappeared amid speculation that
he would avoid prosecution because he was affiliated with the governing
political coalition, the Awami League.
But incensed High Court
judges ordered the police to arrest Mr. Rana, as well as the owners of the
garment factories inside the building. Mr. Rana was hauled into the courthouse,
along with the factory bosses, surprising some legal activists who could not
remember a single case in which judges had taken such action against members of
the garment industry.
“That was very unusual,”
said Sara Hossain, a Supreme Court lawyer and legal activist, who is not
related to Delowar Hossain. “I think it was only possible because of the level
of national and international outrage.”
Ms. Hossain has fought
the garment industry for years over the 2005 collapse of the Spectrum sweater
factory in Savar, in which at least 64 workers died. Soon after the collapse,
she and other lawyers petitioned the court and pressed for affidavits from
different agencies to determine who was to blame, in hopes of stirring a
prosecution.
But years passed without
any action until, in 2009, government lawyers announced that the court file had
been lost. Hearings kept getting postponed, she said, as court officials kept
saying the file was lost. Then, after the Rana Plaza collapse, Ms. Hossain won
another hearing. The judges suddenly seemed animated as she asked for a formal
investigation into the missing file.
“The next day, we went
to court and the file reappeared,” she said.
Inside the file were
dusty affidavits, including one from the agency that regulated construction
projects in Savar. It warned that Savar and other areas had many hazardous
buildings and recommended forming a task force to investigate. It was dated
2006, the year construction began on Rana Plaza. “If that report had been acted
upon and seen the light of day,” she said, “surely you could have avoided Rana
Plaza.”
Now, the lawyers trying
to bring charges against Mr. Hossain, the owner of Tazreen Fashions, are facing
their own obstacles. First, they sought a copy of the government investigation
that had blamed Mr. Hossain for negligence. Though reporters were briefed on the main findings last December, the
investigation report was never publicly released. But at one hearing,
government lawyers said the Home Ministry had not yet provided them with a
copy.
On June 19, the
two-judge panel seemed annoyed when the government lawyers again failed to
properly file the report with the court. (They did so later in the day.) When
one of the judges, Quazi Reza-ul Hoque, expressed interest in broadening the
case, the main defense lawyer stepped to the lectern, agreeing that the
failings of the government should also be explored, but also adding a reminder
about the garment industry.
“This is a very
important economic factor in our country,” said the lawyer, Fida M. Kamal. When
he raised the same point a few moments later, one of the judges agreed.
“We have to keep that
always in mind,” Judge Hoque said.
In the days after the
Tazreen Fashions fire, evidence of negligence mounted: the factory did not have
a current fire safety license; the blaze had started in an illegal ground floor
storage area filled with flammable fabric; some managers had ordered workers to
ignore a fire alarm while others had locked metal gates, blocking some of the
staircases.
The police arrested a
few factory managers but took no action against Mr. Hossain, even as families
of victims called for murder charges. Investigators initially questioned
whether the fire was caused by sabotage, though the country’s home minister
later discounted that claim, but he also said that arresting Mr. Hossain was
not necessary.
In court this month, Mr.
Hossain and his lawyer refused to comment. A few men stood silently near the
owner in the rear of the small room. One of them, Motiqul Islam Matin, had lost
his sister in the Tazreen Fashions fire. She had called him from the fourth
floor, shrieking, saying she was trapped because her managers had locked the
metal gates.
Last month, Mr. Matin
filed a court petition, seeking murder charges against Mr. Hossain. Soon after,
he said he began getting telephone calls. “They wanted to know where I lived,”
he said. “I was scared. I did not tell them. I went into hiding.”
Another man in the
courtroom, Mohammad Abdul Jabbar, carried a photograph of his wife and infant
son. His wife had died on the fourth floor. He had tried in vain to seek
compensation or government help and now said he only wanted to see Mr. Hossain
convicted.
“I want justice,” he
said after the hearing. “The whole system favors men like Delowar. He is a rich
man. He is getting protection from the people who are supposed to listen to our
voices.”
He added, “Wherever I
go, officials tell me to go somewhere else.”
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.
