Survivor of Bangladesh"s Tazreen Factory Fire Urges U.S. Retailers to Stop Blocking Worker Safety

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue to look at worker conditions in Bangladesh, as we turn to new revelations about the fire that killed 112 workers in a garment factory near the capital of Dhaka last November. Investigators confirmed workers’ descriptions of locked emergency exits. Until Wednesday’s building collapse, that fire was the worst industrial accident in the country’s history. These are some of the young seamstresses who escaped the inferno.

PARUL BEGUM: [translated] How the factory fire caught, I don’t know that. But when we heard “Fire!” we all rushed and were trying to get out of the factory. The factory worker broke a window, and one of the workers pulled me through the window. Immediately after the fire broke, we tried to run out, but the door was locked. When the floor became dark because of smoke, the boys rescued me.

NILMA: [translated] When the building caught fire, I didn’t know, and many of us didn’t know, because soon after the fire, the total floor was full of smoke, and we couldn’t see anything then. And there was a chamber. We ran there, and all the workers broke the windows of the chamber, and we all could get out through that window.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined again by Kalpona Akter, still with us in San Francisco, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. We are also joined—sitting next to her is Sumi Abedin, a worker who survived the fire at the Tazreen factory. She jumped from the factory’s third story, breaking both her arm and foot in the process. They’re on tour in the United States calling on retailers like Wal-Mart, The Gap and Disney to take the lead on improving working conditions in Bangladesh. Kalpona will translate for Sumi. Charlie Kernaghan is still with us in Pittsburgh.

Sumi, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us how you survived the factory fire that made clothes for Wal-Mart and other companies in November?

SUMI ABEDIN: [translated] Like other day, on November 24th, I came into the factory in the morning, and I worked up to lunch. And I went outside to take lunch and came back, and work continued to 6:30. After 6:30, one worker came into my production floor in fourth floor and screamed, “There’s a fire in the factory!” He smelled a smoke when he was in toilet. So, by hearing this, we were rushed to the doors to escape, but the factory manager, line chief and supervisors, they shouted at us and said, “There is no fire! It is a lie!” And they locked the door.

OK, so, after working five to seven minutes, I smelled a smoke, and that was coming from downstairs. And I got panicky, and I understood there is a fire in the factory. And I ran to the doors, the stairs, and found that it’s padlocked. And then I was running here and there to escape from the factory, but couldn’t find anything. And the smoke was coming from the downstairs. And then I ran to the other stairs, which using by the man workers, and found that it’s open, and I was able to go to the second floor. But as all workers using same stairs, many of them I saw stampeded, and they were falling in the stairs. When I was on the second floor, I saw the downstair is blocked by the fire, and I understood I couldn’t escape from these areas then.

Meanwhile, the power gone, I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even breathe. Then, some of my co-workers have cellphone, and following them, I was able to come in—following their cellphone light, I was able to come in the third production floor, on the third floor, where I saw many workers suffocated, many of my co-workers, and falling on the stairs. And I was just crying and screaming and asking for help, and I’m looking how I can escape.

Then I saw some of my co-workers trying to remove the window bar from the windows. And one of the mechanic, he’s trying to remove the adjustment bar from ventilation hole. And after hard try, he could able to do that. And then he jumped from that adjustment hole. And after he and one of my—I saw one of my co-workers jumped. And then I jumped. I never thought that I will survive. I didn’t jump to save my life; I did jump to save my body, because if I would be in the factory, I would be burned to ash, and my family even couldn’t identify my body. So I jumped—at least my parents can identify my body.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Kalpona, if you could ask her, how old is Sumi Abedin? How long had she been working in the factory? And what she was getting paid?

SUMI ABEDIN: [translated] I’m 24 years old, and I worked at Tazreen one year and eight months. And I was making $ 55 per month as a senior sewing machine operator. And including overtime, I was making $ 60 to $ 65, being working 11 to 13 hours per day and six days in a week, sometimes seven days.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Sumi Abedin, why are you in the United States? What do you want people in the United States to do?

SUMI ABEDIN: [translated] In my factory, I made clothes for Wal-Mart, Sean Combs, Disney, along with others. Once upon a time, we also made clothes for Gap. And I’m here to ask to them to pay the full and fair compensation to us and, in the same time, to ensure the factory fire safety in Bangladesh.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Kalpona, I’d like to ask you about this compensation issue. There was a recent attempt in a meeting in Europe to create a compensation fund, and all of the major American companies that were producing there at Tazreen—Wal-Mart, Gap, Disney—all boycotted and refused to get involved in any compensation fund. Is that accurate?

KALPONA AKTER: This is totally accurate. The meeting has happened in Geneva April 15th, where four of the European brands, they participated. One of them was over phone. But all the U.S. retailers—like Wal-Mart; Sean Combs; Soffe, who was one of the sourcing companies from Tazreen; Dickies; Disney; Sears—all of them, they denied to, you know, participate in this meeting. So, in this meeting, there was a—you know, discussion was to pay the compensation to the workers. But none of the U.S. brands has been participated, it is accurate.

AMY GOODMAN: Workers at the factory made clothes for several Wal-Mart suppliers. After the fire, Wal-Mart President and CEO Mike Duke said the company is working with factories to improve standards and has offered training sessions throughout Bangladesh.

MIKE DUKE: I believe over 3,000 factories went through the training that was developed, including fire safety and the standards even for the associates to know, and then, in 2012, even raising the bar more with even additional audits and additional focus. You know, and unfortunately, you know, this particular factory was one of the ones that had been decertified and was one that Wal-Mart did not use as an authorized—you know, I will tell you that the particular supplier, when we found out had used an unauthorized factory, we took swift action. We terminated our relationship with that supplier, would no longer purchase any product. But with all of that, we’re still stepping back again and saying, “What else can we do?”

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Kernaghan, that’s the CEO of Wal-Mart asking, “What else can we do?” From the Tazreen fire to today’s horrific tragedy, over 200 people dead at the building collapse and a thousand wounded, Duke asks, “What else can we do?”

CHARLES KERNAGHAN: Well, it’s a situation—excuse me—where the bottom has fallen out. The workers themselves, the unions are talking about a general strike, talking about going after the U.S. government generalized system of preferences, because we need to establish some laws so that the workers are not trapped in these factories. As far as I know, Wal-Mart has done nothing to improve factory conditions. They go for the lowest price. They said there weren’t in the Tazreen factory, but of course they were in the Tazreen factory. This is happening repeatedly. And now Wal-Mart is saying, “Well, we may have been also in the Rana Plaza collapse.” So, they really don’t know where their garments are going. There’s tremendous corruption and graft. This has to—this has to stop.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Charlie, I wanted to ask you—you’ve been a veteran advocate about this situation of exploitation of workers in the Third World. I’ve interviewed you over 30 years now, from Haiti to Honduras, Salvador, China, and now increasingly Bangladesh. Yet we have here an administration in the White House right now that benefits from enormous American union support. What is this administration doing to assure some basic decent conditions with these morally bankrupt companies that continue to find ways to exploit labor in the Third World?

CHARLES KERNAGHAN: Honestly, I can’t say anything positive. I know we’ve tried, and like other people, to work with the U.S. trade representative’s office. But all we see are disasters. Whether it’s in Guatemala, whether it’s in Honduras, workers are being fired right and left when they try to organize a union—Bangladesh. In other words, they say that they have this—these laws to protect the rights of workers, and they always talk about the ILO, the International Labor Organization’s standards—no child labor, no forced labor, freedom of association, right to organize a union, right to bargain collectively. All it is is words. They never implement anything. So, if the workers are being killed in Guatemala and fired and cheated of their wages, it all goes on. There’s no changes.

And so, we have to get serious. This collapse of this factory—by the way, the person from Tazreen, as far as I know, Delwar Hossain, is walking away scot-free. And the owner of the Rana Plaza, Sohel Rana, apparently has disappeared. And they’re going to go away scot-free. They’re not going to do any jail time. We have to, you know, stop this, and we have to demand more of our own government. We have to demand that the United States trade representative’s office will actually try to implement the laws, and if not, there’s going to be penalties for these companies.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this boycotting of the European meeting where safety issues would be discussed, that Juan and Kalpona were just talking about, Charlie Kernaghan?

CHARLES KERNAGHAN: Yeah, I mean, the starkness of these killings, whether it’s the 112 who were burned to death in Tazreen or whether it’s the collapse of the Rana Plaza where the death toll is going to vastly exceed the 210 that are already known to be dead, 600, 700, 800 people still trapped, this isn’t a game. We need to do something that’s very, very concrete. We don’t exist to take care of the labels, and we don’t exist to take care of Wal-Mart’s profits. What we need are worker rights. And we don’t get those from Wal-Mart. We get those from unions and from union organizing. And Bangladesh is going to have to allow workers to organize independent unions. Every time a union has tried to organize, the thugs come in, the gangsters come in, the gangs come in. They beat the workers up. We have to say, as a country, if we’re the United States and we’re one of the largest importers of these goods from Bangladesh, we have a voice. And we need the workers in Bangladesh to have their right to organize a union. They have a right to have freedom and democracy. They have a right to speak out. And they have a right to demand change. And, I mean, if we keep talking to Wal-Mart, we’re going nowhere. It’s the workers need their rights. That’s what we really need.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to end it there. We thank you all for being with us, Charlie Kernaghan, joining us from Pittsburgh, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, and speaking to us from San Francisco, Kalpona Akter with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity and Sumi Abedin, who is a survivor of the fire in Bangladesh that killed at least 112 garment workers last November. Together they’re touring the U.S. to talk about unsafe working conditions in Bangladesh and to demand workers be compensated. Thanks so much for joining us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials
Democracy Now!

Survivor of Bangladesh"s Tazreen Factory Fire Urges U.S. Retailers to Stop Blocking Worker Safety

Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the U.S. drone war in Yemen. On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate held its first-ever historic public hearing on President Obama’s secret drone and targeted killing program. The most moving testimony came from Farea al-Muslimi, a U.S.-educated youth activist from Yemen who offered a rare first-hand account of the suffering that drone warfare wreaks on ordinary people’s lives. His family’s village of Wessab was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week.

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: What Wessab’s villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful experiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America in Wessab.

This is not an isolated incident. The drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis. I have spoken to many victims of U.S. drone strikes, like a mother in Jaar who had to identify her innocent 18-year-old son’s body through a video in a stranger’s cellphone, or the father in Shaqra who held his four- and six-year-old children as they died in his arms. Recently in Aden, I spoke with one of the tribal leaders present in 2009 at the place where the U.S. cruise missiles targeted the village of al-Majalah in Lawdar, Abyan. More than 40 civilians were killed, including four pregnant women. The tribal leader and others tried to rescue the victims, but the bodies were so decimated that it was impossible to differentiate between those of children, women and their animals. Some of these innocent people were buried in the same grave as their animals.

AMY GOODMAN: Farea al-Muslimi. The strike on his family’s village marked a resumption of U.S. drone attacks in Yemen after several months of quiet. Video of his testimony has gone viral.

For more, we’re joined by Farea al-Muslimi himself in studio in Washington, D.C. He is a youth activist. He is a freelance journalist. And he went to school here in the United States for a year.

Farea, welcome to Democracy Now! How many people died in your family’s village last week in this drone strike?

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: Good morning. How many—how many people died, do you mean?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Do you know?

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: I know of five people. But the issue of that is more than numbers. It’s—what it has brought, I think, in the long strategic term, is more than just how many people died or how many people did not—were civilians or were not civilians. There is other cases in Yemen where, for example, in an area like al-Majalah, in Abyan, 46 people were killed in a U.S. cruise missile strike, and four of these were pregnant women. These innocent civilians, for example, in 2009, they were all—there was no militants around that village when it was killed—when it was targeted. And that has—some of these bodies of these innocent people were actually buried in the same grave with their animals, as they were so decimated that it was impossible to separate their bodies. The issue of this is more than numbers, in the sense that it speaks—it’s raging people, it’s making a lot of people angry, and it’s becoming America’s main and only face in Yemen, very unfortunately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Farea, could you tell us what you know of what the U.S. government is saying was the target of this attack? Did you know the person? And were there—was there any other way, if the United States government wanted to apprehend this—the target of this attack, that they could have done it without a drone strike?

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: I don’t know exactly what was—why was this person as a target and what is the basis on this attack and how—what was the methodology of the process, and I’m not familiar with that. All I’m familiar with is I knew who is the man. I never met him, though, but I knew that it was 100 percent—and I can confidently say that—it was easier to capture him than to capture any regular gang member in New York City. And that was—that would have been, even security-wise, much better and more strategic, in the sense that now you killed this man—and there was other people who didn’t know he was wanted, and they were killed with him—but in the sense that you killed this man, and a lot of information actually went with him. And that is, security-wise, a lot of loss, in the sense that if you captured him, you could have actually investigated with him and made—and know what is happening and who’s behind him and probably who’s with him in the village. Right now, you killed him, and probably if he has already made another cells, they can one day move again. But more than that is you have raged thousands of poor farmers, whom were—whom were very easily could have handed this man to you themselves if you asked them—if you told them that this man was a target. But instead, a lot of people now are angry.

AMY GOODMAN: Farea, you testified yesterday, unlike the Obama administration, who refused to send someone. And let’s remember, the Senate is from the same party. The Senate committee is run by the same party, Dick Durbin, the head of this committee. The Obama administration refused to send a representative to explain the drone attacks in this first-ever hearing. But you described coming to school here in the United States. Describe that experience for us now, your feelings about the United States, the family you stayed with, and when you returned, the stories you told in your family’s village.

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: I mean, I continue to think that was the epic year of my life, the very best year. I can’t think of, so far, at least, another year that has been more rich and more diverse and more rewarding, in the sense that I was supposed to never probably leave my village. And actually, I was awarded that scholarship, studied English, and I came to the U.S. And it was an eye-opening, I think, in every sense. And it was—I tend to think of it as much as equal as to the power of studying English, and especially when your school does not teach you that. It’s—you look—you don’t anymore read or write from right to left only, but you also look to the world from your eyes from also left to right. And that, I think, is—it makes me person in the middle of between the two places, or I—if I may say, the bridge that connects the two places. And therefore, when such unfortunate incidents, like terrifying a farmer or very sad story like what happened also in Boston, I equally get the misery feeling of both—of both incidents. And that–and to be, I think, put in a unique position is a place—is something that, while it’s rich and it’s rewarding, it’s also a lot of obligation to connect what you might call the unconnected.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! this week, we spoke to journalist Jeremy Scahill, whose new book has just come out this week. It’s called Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. He spoke about U.S. counterterrorism policy in Yemen.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Because the United States doesn’t have any actual intelligence on the ground in Yemen, they’ve taken to doing these signature strikes where they develop a pattern of life, and they say, if people are in a certain region of Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia—if people are in a certain region and they’re of military age—they could be anywhere from 15 to 70 years old—and they fit some kind of a pattern of other people we believe to be terrorists, then they become legitimate targets. So it’s the most horrific form of pre-crime. They don’t know the identities of the people that they’re killing. They don’t know whether they’ve been involved with any activity. They’re killed for who they might be or they might one day become.

AMY GOODMAN: Farea al-Muslimi, can you respond to Jeremy’s description? And the response in Yemen to these drone strikes, in your family’s village and other places?

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: I mean, as always, Jeremy is an excellent, one of the very rare people. When you look to Yemen in D.C. and in the United States, it’s not a place that is not understood; it’s highly misunderstood. And one of the rare people who really understand Yemen, I think, is Jeremy. And what he described is absolutely true.

But, in a sense, if I want to push it to more than that, I would say, one, it helps actually AQAP, in the sense it distracts people from being afraid of AQAP, and rather than that, afraid from the air. And in addition to that, if someone like, you know, like the former target in my village—people didn’t know he was in AQAP. He was someone who was a social figure, and therefore, to many people, because you didn’t, you know, capture him and arrested him, you killed a social figure who was solving their problems, and not actually a terrorist, because they didn’t know that he was that. But if you, rather, captured him, that would have made a change. And therefore, even when you kill, probably—or, even when you target and you don’t leak any information of who is this, why is this, what is the methodology, why did you do that, you are actually highly counterproductive, especially in a place where, you know, sometimes the government does not really exist in some areas of Yemen. And therefore, this man, for example, to many people, was their government. This man was a person whom, if you simply would have captured, that you would have a lot—solved a lot of problems, but in—yours and the people’s problems.

But in the sense that you’re also terrifying them, you’re not making any sense to it. And regardless, this policy might look excellent, awesome on paper. It might—you know, you shoot, you don’t actually look—see the blood on your hands, so you don’t feel it. But on the ground, it’s a lot of—it’s a huge—it’s a problematic, in the sense—you can say it’s like the McNamara policy in Vietnam, in the sense that it counts the number of the dead bodies of the other enemy without really counting the new numbers that it is actually—of enemies that it’s actually making, or without thinking about it from any other scope other than a statistical number scope.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thirty seconds, but just the issue of compensation or apologies from the U.S. government for the innocents who were killed in these strikes, or any compensation, what do know of the policy there?

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: I think this is the worst part about it, is not a single apology, not a single compensation, not any act or even talking to those who lost their civilians, or even just admitting that this was done based—as a mistake. Unfortunately, this has been something that is—the U.S. has never done and something that raged people more. And at the same time, that’s—and AQAP sometimes have paid. I know of some cases where AQAP have paid some compensation for harms it did, while the Yemeni government or the U.S. never did such a thing. And that is very scary, when you make the very bad group do the very right thing, and you don’t do it, or you don’t even apologize or admit it.

AMY GOODMAN: Farea, we have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, Farea al-Muslimi, Yemeni youth activist and journalist, testified at the Senate’s first-ever drone hearing.

That does it for the show. I’ll be moderating a discussion between Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky at Harvard Science Center B on Saturday.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials
Democracy Now!

Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country

Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country

Yemeni activist and journalist Farea al-Muslimi delivered a moving plea before a Senate hearing this week for an end to U.S. drone strikes inside his country. Speaking at the first-ever public congressional hearing on Obama’s secret drone and targeted killing program, al-Muslimi offered a rare first-hand account of the suffering that drone warfare wreaks on ordinary people’s lives. His family’s village of Wessab was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week, leaving five people dead. Educated in the United States as a teenager, al-Muslimi says the drone attacks are turning Yemenis against the country that embraced him.

Please check back later for full transcript.

---

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials
Democracy Now!

Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country