Where’s the justice in the West’s toleration of Bangladeshi politicians?

The EU’s decision to investigate the possibility of withdrawing Bangladesh’s duty free access to the world’s largest garment market is “utterly illogical, unjust and unfair,” claimed Abul Maath Muhith, Bangladesh’s Finance Minster on May 25.

Excuse me?

Two days earlier, the European Parliament had passed a resolution calling on the European Commission “to investigate Bangladesh’s compliance with [basic human rights] conventions and expects tariff preferences to be reviewed if Bangladesh is found to be in serious and systematic violation of the principles laid down in them”. And Muhith thinks that’s unjust?

Since 2000, nearly 2,000 Bangladeshi garment workers have been killed in explosions, fires or building collapses. No country on earth has such an appalling record: yet in every single one or the dozen or so garment industry disasters this century, there has been convincing evidence that the building had been constructed (and usually later extended) with inadequate safety inspection by Bangladesh’s hopelessly inadequate officials.

Out of 174 countries rated for corruption by Transparency International, Bangladesh is the 31^st most corrupt. The government Muhith is part of has brought no criminal charges against the management of Tazreen, where at least 115 people died on November 24. Or against management at Garib & Garib, That's It Sportswear, or Eurotex – other garment factories where there have been fatal incidents since Muhith joined the Bangladesh government in 2009.

Since Muhith became a minister, the Bangladesh government has consistently allowed businesses to obstruct the creation of trade unions – but has repeatedly lied about its behaviour.

So where’s the justice in the EU giving preferential access to Bangladeshi garments it refuses to extend to countries with honest minsters? Where’s the justice in Indonesian, Vietnamese, or Chinese, factories paying the price of building generally safe factories if the Bangladeshi government refuses to enforce its own safety laws? Where above all is the justice in British, French and Italian workers losing their jobs to people whose governments seek commercial advantage by refusing to enforce the laws that inflate the cost of European manufacture?  And then being expected to subsidise from their taxes the Bangladesh government by waiving over €1 billion a year in the import duties honestly governed countries are expected to pay on entry into Europe?

Faced with the near-certainty that any promise Bangladesh’s government makes will be dishonoured, the EU has only one ultimate option: to make it perfectly clear that unless there’s real evidence Europe’s taxpayers are no longer going to be exploited by Muhith and his cronies, the subsidies Europeans pour into his country will be removed.

Previous complaints have all been ignored: the death of around 1,200 people at Rana Plaza shows there’s just one language Bangladeshi minster understand: the certainty subsidies will go if the government doesn’t behave.

Naturally, Muhith’s response is to assert black’s white. While whining about the “injustice” of being told to behave, he claimed that the last accident before Tazreen and Rana Plaza had happened sometime in the 1990s.  “You check the statistics” he said of the country’s safety record. “It’s fantastically good”. Clearly he was otherwise engaged (it’s alleged in taking bribes from the defunct Hallmark group, whose billions of embezzled public money he dismissed as “a meagre amount”) during the deaths, when he was minister, at  Garib & Garib, That's It Sportswear, or Eurotex – never mind the dozen or so other fatal collapses and fires since 2000.

In fairness to Muhith, his grasp on facts is getting hazy. Not content with whining about the “injustice” of the EU requiring Bangladesh to obey ILO conventions, he managed during his May 25 whinge-fest to include the US, which he claims “charges from Bangladesh garments something like 24 percent in duty as against 5 percent they charge from garment and fabrics of France.”

Cobblers. With knobs on. 

The claim is one of the standard “poor us: look how victimised we are” rants that uninformed developing-country politicians get taught at victimisation school. But Muhith claims to have studied at Oxford and to have Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard. You’d have thought he’d have learned a bit about how trade rules work (or at least have the sense to read a plain language guide to them like the Clothesource Guide to Apparel Trade Rules) before churning out complete untruths about them. America’s rules about import duty on Bangladeshi clothing are exactly the same as the rules on French clothing: French manufacturers just choose to make those clothes that attract limited US duty. Nonetheless, Bangladesh exported three hundred times more clothes to the US in 2012, says Clothesource TradeTrak, than France.

Partly, of course, because French garment makers had to pay for safety standards Muhith thinks it’d be “unjust” for his government to make his chums in the Bangladesh garment industry obey.

Yes, there’s a great deal of injustice in how Bangladesh is treated. For too long, the West in general and the EU in particular has treated it with kid gloves, for fear its government might be replaced with something worse.

That judgement might be accurate. But unless the West uses its leverage to force people as capable of self-delusion as Muhith to face facts, the risk of a real popular revolt keeps getting worse. It’s time for Muhith to stop the emotional blackmail, and for the EU to stop subsidising people like him