Minu Akhter has not slept properly for a year. Every time there is a noise, she wakes up fearing the roof will cave in. She cannot go to the upper floors of a building in case the staircase gives way.
Since the collapse of Rana Plaza garment factory complex just outside the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, the 23-year-old has struggled to control her emotions. Every time she thinks of her boyfriend, tears roll down her cheeks.
When the nine-story building failed almost 12 months ago, Akhter was cutting clothing to make trousers at the doomed Phantom Apparels factory, which had an order from an Italian retailer, she remembers.
Photo: Reuters
On that morning, April 24, her boyfriend of five years, Shahin, was on the other side of the aisle on the fourth floor of the complex. They smiled as they started the day’s grueling 11-hour shift.
“Suddenly there was a loud noise and smoke shrouded our floor. All my colleagues were running for safety. In that moment I saw Shahin waiting for me so that we would run for safety together,” she said.
Almost two weeks later, as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a fractured skull and a damaged ear, Akhter heard that Shahin’s body had been pulled from the twisted wreckage.
He was one of the 1,138 people killed. Another 2,000 people were injured.
“For days I could not believe he had died. We had so many plans. We had even gone to a marriage register’s office to get married, only to decide we should wait for our families’ consent,” she said.
She was lucky to survive. Rescuers dragged her out of the rubble by tying a rope to her legs. She spent about 50 hours lying among bodies under the pan-caked floors of the building.
As Bangladesh and the world marks one year since the country’s worst industrial disaster, some things have changed for the better in the industry, but the psychological wounds inflicted on survivors remain fresh.
In a community room meters from the flattened building site where Rana Plaza once stood, Akhter attends a counselling group run by therapists.
She is one among 20 victims being treated for grief and insecurity by the therapists hired by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and British charity ActionAid. “It’s the fourth batch of Rana Plaza victims we’re counselling. And almost every one we’ve talked to suffers from varying degree of trauma,” lead therapist Obaidul Islam Munna said.
“Most can’t sleep in the night. They can’t stand small noise. One girl even passed out the moment we used a loudspeaker. Many suffer from memory loss and smell bodies or see dead workers lying next to them. Some simply can’t enter a multi-storied building,” Munna said.
Outside in the garment factories, some of the cheapest and most productive in the world, the tragedy of Rana Plaza has led to a sustained focus on improving working conditions that campaigners had decried for years.
The government has hiked minimum wages for the 4 million mostly women workers in the sector by 77 percent to US$68 a month and eased laws enabling the formation of trade unions.
It has upgraded its moribund factory inspection agency and announced the hiring of at least 200 new inspectors to try to prevent another major collapse or deadly fires which regularly kill workers.
Trade union leader Baharine Sultan said the improvements were due to intense international pressure from labor groups, the global media and Western retailers that have long benefitted from Bangladesh’s cheap labor.
“But we have still a long way to go. Our workers are still paid some of the lowest wages on earth. They toil 10-12 hours a day... Union activists still face intimidation and sometimes physical assault,” he said.
Western retailers, fearing more bad publicity, have launched a massive inspection drive to weed out dangerous factories. More than a dozen plants have been shut and scores of others forced to upgrade.
They have also contributed US$15 million to a US$40 million Donor Trust Fund backed by the ILO to compensate the injured and the dependents of the deceased.
The first batch of 580 workers received their first checks last month and the remaining 3,100 are set to be paid from the first anniversary of the disaster.
“The injured will be paid between US$700 and US$25,000 depending on the gravity of their injury,” said Roy Ramesh, local head of global labor group IndustriALL. “All of them will be fully paid by end of this year.”
The government has also paid compensation to more than 900 families of the dead workers and scores of amputated laborers.
However, cases abound of victims excluded from the compensation package, others whose injuries mean they will never work again, and still more whose suffering cannot be computed in lost earnings.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of