The New York Times Report-September 9th 2012 by The New York Times Report

SEPTEMBER 9TH 2012

CONTEN INSIDE THE WAR ON POACHING/PAGE 6

LIFE WITH SYRIA’S

WOMEN IN EGYPT/PAGE 4

LABOUR UNREST IN

NTS

S REBELS/PAGE 18

N BANGLADESH/PAGE 32

FILIAL DEVOTION IN CHINA/PAGE 16

Family Life According to the Brotherhood By MONA EL-NAGGAR Women are erratic and emotional, and they make good wives and mothers — but never leaders or rulers. That, at least, is what Osama Abou Salama, a professor of botany at Cairo University and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, told young men and women during a recent premarital counseling class.

environments, for most people — women included — those questions are largely academic.

or place them in a subordinate position believe that the political cost of doing so is very low.”

Mr. Abou Salama’s class makes that case. “Can you, as a woman, take a decision and handle the consequences of your decision?” he asked.

What was striking, though, was the absence of any reaction. None of the 30 people in the class so much as winced.

A number of women shook their heads even before Mr. Abou Salama provided his answer: “No. But men can. And God created us this way because a ship cannot have more than one captain.”

The lectures of Mr. Abou Salama, who has raised three daughters, are part of a four-week workshop called “Bride and Groom Against Satan” and sponsored by Family House, a charity financed by the Brotherhood. It is one of several Brotherhood efforts that have grown since the revolution, reflecting, as much as promoting, the religious values that define a large segment of society. Among its many activities, Family House offers financial support to struggling households, provides a matchmaking service and sponsors mass weddings for low-income couples.

“A woman,” Mr. Abou Salama said, “takes pleasure in being a follower and finds ease in obeying a husband who loves her.” Since the Brotherhood rose to power and one of its former leaders was elected president, much of the uncertainty over its social agenda has centered on its plans for women. Will the Brotherhood try to impose a conservative dress code? Will it try to bar women from certain fields of work? Will its leaders promote segregation at schools? But in a country where a vast majority of women already cover their hair and voluntarily separate from men in coed

More than any other political group in Egypt, the Brotherhood is fluent in the dialect of the masses. By upholding patriarchal and traditional values about a woman’s place in society, it garners popular support, builds political capital and reinforces social conservatism. “The woman is the symbol of a moral platform through which easy gains can be made,” said Hania Sholkamy, an anthropologist and an associate professor at the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo. “Those who deprive women of their rights, limit their freedom

“This is part of the reformist methodology of the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Walaa Abdel Halim, the Family House coordinator who organizes the youth counseling workshop. “Shaping a righteous individual leads to shaping a righteous family, and by shaping a righteous family, you get a righteous society that can choose a righteous leader.” Those broader efforts at shaping a conser-

vative religious society, played out over decades by the Brotherhood, were seen as partly responsible for helping elect Mohamed Morsi president in June. At the time, Mr. Morsi, who resigned from the Brotherhood after taking office, gave assurances that he would protect the rights of women and include them in decision making. Less than three months into his presidency, though, Mr. Morsi has not fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman as a vice president. Instead, he named a team of 21 senior aides and advisers last week that included three women.

within the framework of our religious restrictions.” Many analysts and critics of the Brotherhood see that kind of philosophy, one that gives women independence so long as they maintain their traditional obligations, as effectively constraining women to established gender roles.

One of those three, Omaima Kamel, a medical professor at Cairo University and a member of the Brotherhood since 1981, makes it clear that she is not about to press society to change attitudes about women.

“There is an absence of a well-defined vision, so they use words like ‘religious restrictions,’ ” said Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a researcher of Islamic movements and a former member of the Brotherhood. “O.K., sure, so what exactly are those restrictions, so we can know them and figure out how to deal with them? As long as we don’t define what those limits are, then we can expand them to the point where women, practically speaking, cannot work.”

“Let’s face it, if your work took you away from your fundamental duties at home and if your success came at the cost of your family life and the stability of your children, then you are the one who stands to lose,” she said by telephone. “A woman can work as much as she wants, but

In Mr. Morsi’s political program, called “The Renaissance,” there is an emphasis on a woman’s “authentic role as wife, mother and purveyor of generations.” The program then makes recommendations to safeguard family life; foremost among them are premarital classes for youths.

Free from the restrictions of the government of Hosni Mubarak, which outlawed the Brotherhood, the movement’s social outreach programs have mushroomed since Mr. Morsi’s election. In less than a year, Family House expanded from a single office to 18 branches around Egypt and is developing a plan to encourage all couples to attend. At the group’s headquarters, in the densely populated Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City, Mr. Abou Salama walked into a spacious room where the front seats were for men and the back seats were for women. He lectured on qualities to seek in a partner, getting acquainted under parental supervision, dealing with in-laws and consummating marriage. In his social paradigm, understanding that the woman was created to be an obedient wife and mother and that the man was created to fend for his family holds the secret to a happy marriage. “I want you to be the flower that attracts a bee to make honey, not the trash that attracts flies and dirt,” Mr. Abou Salama said as the women listened intently.

Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN In 30 years of fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this. Twenty-two dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open savanna, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head. There were no tracks leading away, no sign that the poachers had stalked their prey from the ground. The tusks had been hacked away, but none of the meat — and subsistence poachers almost always carve themselves a little meat for the long walk home. Several days later, in early April, the Garamba National Park guards spotted a Ugandan military helicopter flying very low over the park, on an unauthorized flight, but they said it abruptly turned around after being detected. Park officials, scientists and the Congolese authorities now believe that the Ugandan military — one of the Pentagon’s closest partners in Africa — killed the 22 elephants from

a helicopter and spirited away more than a million dollars’ worth of ivory. “They were good shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.” Africa is in the midst of an epic elephant slaughter. Conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly militarized. Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.

Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law enforcement officials say. But it is not just outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan’s military — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory. Congolese soldiers are often arrested for it. South Sudanese forces frequently battle wildlife rangers. Interpol, the international police network, is now helping to investigate the mass elephant killings in the Garamba park, trying to match DNA samples from the animals’ skulls to a large shipment of tusks, marked “household goods,” recently seized at a Ugandan airport. The vast majority of the illegal ivory — experts say as much as 70 percent — is flowing to China, and though the Chinese have coveted ivory for centuries, never before have so many of them been able to afford it. China’s economic boom has created a vast middle class, pushing the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing. High-ranking officers in the People’s Liberation Army have a fondness for ivory trinkets as gifts. Chinese online forums offer a thriving, and essentially unregulated, market for ivory chopsticks, bookmarks, rings, cups and combs, along with helpful tips on how to smuggle them (wrap the ivory in tinfoil, says one Web site, to throw off X-ray machines). Last year, more than 150 Chinese citizens were arrested across Africa, from Kenya to Nigeria, for smuggling ivory. And there is growing evidence that poaching increases in elephant-rich areas where Chinese construction workers are building roads.

“China is the epicenter of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior State Department official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.” He said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who condemned conflict minerals from Congo a few years ago, was pushing the ivory issue with the Chinese “at the highest levels” and that she was “going to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to address this, in a very bold way.” Foreigners have been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today. Ivory Coast got its name from the teeming elephant herds that used to frolic in its forests. Today, after decades of carnage, there is almost no ivory left. The demand for ivory has surged to the point that the tusks of a single adult elephant can be worth more than 10 times the average annual income in many African countries. In Tanzania, impoverished villagers are poisoning pumpkins and rolling them into the road for elephants to eat. In Gabon, subsistence hunters deep in the rain forest are being enlisted to kill elephants and hand over the tusks, sometimes for as little as a sack of salt. Last year, poaching levels in Africa were at their highest since international monitors began keeping detailed records in 2002. And 2011 broke the record for the amount of illegal ivory seized worldwide, at 38.8 tons (equaling the tusks from more than 4,000 dead elephants). Law enforcement officials say the sharp increase in large seizures is a clear sign that organized crime has slipped into the ivory underworld, because only a well-oiled criminal machine — with the help of corrupt officials — could move hundreds of pounds of tusks thousands of miles across the globe, often using specially made shipping containers with secret compartments.

The smugglers are “Africa-based, Asian-run crime syndicates,” said Tom Milliken, director of the Elephant Trade Information System, an international ivory monitoring project, and “highly adaptive to law enforcement interventions, constantly changing trade routes and modus operandi.” Conservationists say the mass kill-offs taking place across Africa may be as bad as, or worse than, those in the 1980s, when poachers killed more than half of Africa’s elephants before an international ban on the commercial ivory trade was put in place. “We’re experiencing what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of elephants in history,” said Richard G. Ruggiero, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Some experts say the survival of the species is at stake,

especially when many members of the African security services entrusted with protecting the animals are currently killing them. “The huge populations in West Africa have disappeared, and those in the center and east are going rapidly,” said Andrew Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton. “The question is: Do you want your children to grow up in a world without elephants?”

But today, it is a battlefield, with an arms race playing out across the savanna. Every morning, platoons of Garamba’s 140 wildlife rangers suit up with assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Luis Arranz, the park manager, wants to get surveillance drones, and the nonprofit organization that runs the park is considering buying night-vision goggles, flak jackets and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns. “We don’t negotiate, we don’t give any warning, we shoot first,” said Mr. Onyango, the chief ranger, who worked as a game warden in Kenya for more than 20 years. He rose to a high rank but lost his job after a poaching suspect died in his custody after being whipped. “Out here, it’s not michezo,” Mr. Onyango said, using the Swahili word for games.

In June, he heard a burst of gunfire. His rangers did a “leopard crawl” on their bellies for hours through the scratchy elephant grass until they spied poachers hacking several elephants. The instant his squad shot at the poachers, the whole bush came alive with crackling gunfire.

‘We Shoot First’

“They opened up on us with PKMs, AKs, G-3s, and FNs,” he said. “Most poachers are conservative with their ammo, but these guys were shooting like they were in Iraq. All of a sudden, we were outgunned and outnumbered.”

Garamba National Park is a big, beautiful sheet of green, 1,900 square miles, tucked in the northeastern corner of Congo. Picture a sea of chest-high elephant grass, swirling brown rivers, ribbons of papyrus and the occasional black-and-white secretary bird swooping elegantly through rose-colored skies. Founded in 1938, Garamba is widely considered one of Africa’s most stunning parks, a naturalist’s dream.

Both of the rangers’ old belt-fed machine guns jammed that day, and they narrowly escaped (11 have been killed since 2008 and some of the rangers’ children have even been kidnapped). Later investigation showed that the poachers were members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel outfit that circulates in central Africa, killing villagers and enslaving children. American Special Operations troops are helping several African armies hunt down the group’s phan-

tom of a leader, Joseph Kony, who is believed to be hiding in a remote corner of the Central African Republic. Ivory may be Mr. Kony’s new lifeline. Several recent escapees from the L.R.A. said that Mr. Kony had ordered his fighters to kill as many elephants as possible and send him the tusks. “Kony wants ivory,” said a young woman who was kidnapped earlier this year near Garamba and did not want to be identified because she was still terrified. “I heard the other rebels say it many times: ‘We need to get ivory and send it to Kony.’ ” She said that in her four months in captivity, before she ran away one night when the rebels got drunk, she saw them kill 10 elephants, wrap the tusks in cloth sacks and send

them to Mr. Kony at his hiding place. Other recent escapees said that the group had killed at least 29 elephants since May, buying guns, ammunition and radios with the proceeds. Mr. Kony may be working with Sudanese ivory traders. One ivory retailer in Omdurman, Sudan, who openly sells ivory bracelets, prayer beads and carved tusks, said the Lord’s Resistance Army was one source of the ivory he saw. “The L.R.A. works in this, too; that’s how they buy their weapons,” the shopkeeper said matter-of-factly. That made sense, American officials said, given Mr. Kony’s few sources of income. Several Sudanese ivory traders said the ivory from Congo and the Central African Republic moved overland across Sudan’s vast western desert region of Darfur and then up to Omdurman, all with the help of corrupt Sudanese officials. There is a well-worn practice in Sudan called “buying time,”

in which smugglers pay police officers and border guards for a specified amount of time to let a convoy of illegal goods slip through checkpoints. But there are many routes. On Africa’s east coast, Kenya’s port city of Mombasa is a major transshipment center. A relatively small percentage of containers in Mombasa is inspected, and ivory has been concealed in shipments of everything from avocados to anchovies. Sometimes it is wrapped in chili peppers, to throw off the sniffer dogs. On the west coast, in the Gulf of Guinea, “there is a relatively recent phenomenon of well-armed, sophisticated poachers who load their ivory onto Chinese fishing ships,” one senior American official said. Chinese officials declined to discuss any aspect of the ivory trade, with one representative of the Forestry Ministry,

which handles ivory issues, saying, “This is a very sensitive topic right now.” Several Sudanese ivory traders and Western officials said that the infamous janjaweed militias of Darfur were also major poachers. Large groups of janjaweed — the word means horseback raider — were blamed for killing thousands of civilians in the early 2000s, when Darfur erupted in ethnic conflict. International law enforcement officials say that horseback raiders from Darfur wiped out thousands of elephants in central Africa in the 1980s. Now they suspect that hundreds of janjaweed militiamen rode more than 600 miles from Sudan and were the ones who slaughtered at least 300 elephants in Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon this past January, one of the worst episodes of elephant slaughter recently discovered. In 2010, Ugandan soldiers, searching for Mr. Kony in the forests of the Central African Republic, ran into a janjaweed ivory caravan. “These guys had 400 men, pack mules, a

major camp, lots of weapons,” a Western official said. A battle erupted and more than 10 Ugandans were killed. “It just shows you the power of poaching, how much money you can make stacking up the game,” the official said. Businessmen are clearly bankrolling these enormous ivory expeditions, both feeding off and fueling conflict, Western officials and researchers say. “This is not just freelance stuff,” said Mr. Hormats, the State Department official. “This is organized crime.” Paul Elkan, a director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the janjaweed sweeping across central Africa on ambitious elephant hunts “goes much deeper than a bunch of guys coming in on horses. It has to do with insecurity and lawlessness.” Perhaps no country in Africa is as lawless as Somalia, which has languished for more than 20 years without a functioning central government, spawning Islamist militants, gunrunners, human traffickers and modern-day pirates. Ivory has entered this illicit mix. Several Somali elders said that the Shabab, the militant Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, recently began training fighters to infiltrate neighboring Kenya and kill elephants for ivory to raise money. One former Shabab associate said that the Shabab were promising to “facilitate the marketing” of ivory and have encouraged villagers along the Kenya-Somalia border to bring them tusks, which are then shipped out through the port of Kismayo, a notorious smuggling hub and the last major town the Shabab still control. “The business is a risk,” said Hassan Majengo, a Kismayo resident with knowledge of the ivory trade, “but it has an exceptional profit.” ‘Easy Money’ That profit is not lost on government soldiers in central Africa, who often get paid as little as $100 a month, if they get paid at all. In Garamba, the park rangers have arrested many

Congolese government soldiers, including some caught with tusks, slabs of elephant meat and the red berets often worn by the elite presidential guard. “An element of our army is involved,” acknowledged Maj. Jean-Pierrot Mulaku, a Congolese military prosecutor. “It’s easy money.” Congolese soldiers have a long history of raping and killing civilians and pilfering resources. According to a report written in 2010 by John Hart, an American scientist and one of the top elephant researchers in Congo, the “Congolese military are implicated in almost all elephant poaching,” making the military “the main perpetrator of illegal elephant killing in D.R.C.” The Garamba rangers and a Congolese government intelligence officer said that they also routinely battled soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the military of South Sudan. A South Sudanese military spokesman denied that, saying that the soldiers “didn’t have time” for poaching. The American government has provided $250 million in nonlethal military assistance to South Sudan during the past several years. In May, the Garamba rangers said they had opened fire on four South Sudanese soldiers who had poached six elephant tusks. The rangers said they killed one soldier, though they did not seem to think too much about it. “I’ve killed too many people to count,” said Alexi Tamoasi, a veteran ranger. But the suspected helicopter poaching is something new. Mr. Onyango said the strange way the elephant carcasses were found, clumped in circles, with the calves in the middle for protection, was yet another sign that a helicopter had corralled them together because elephants usually scatter at the first shot. African Parks, the South Africa-based conservation organization that manages Garamba, has photographs of an Mi-17 military transport helicopter flying low over the park in April and said it had traced the chopper’s registration number to the Ugandan military.

Col. Felix Kulayigye, a spokesman for the Ugandan military, acknowledged that the helicopter was one of its aircraft. But he said that the poaching allegation was a “baseless rumor” and that he knew “for sure” that Lord’s Resistance Army members were “well known” poachers in that area. John Sidle, an American from Nebraska who works as a pilot at Garamba, said, “What bothers me is that it’s probably American taxpayer money paying for the jet fuel for the helicopter.” The United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years for fuel and transport services for the Ugandan Army to hunt down Mr. Kony in central Africa, while training Congolese and South Sudanese to help. But the State Department said it had no evidence that the Ugandan military was responsible for the Garamba killings, nor knowledge that any of the African soldiers involved in the Kony hunt had engaged in poaching. It did not address the broader history of poaching by American-supported militaries. In June, 36 tusks were seized at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. Eighteen of the 22 elephants killed in Garamba in March were adults that had their ivory hacked out, which would usually mean 36 tusks. The little stubs of ivory on the dead calves had been left untouched. In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species passed a moratorium on the international commercial trade of African elephant ivory, except under a few rare circumstances. No one knows how many elephants are being poached each year, but many leading conservationists agree that “tens of thousands” is a safe number and that 2012 is likely to be worse than 2011. The total elephant population in Africa is a bit of a mystery, too. The International Union for Conser-

vation of Nature, a global conservation network, estimates from 472,269 to 689,671. But that is based on information from 2006. Poaching has dramatically increased since then, all across the continent. Some of the recently poached elephants had been sexually mutilated, with their genitals or nipples cut off, possibly for sale — something researchers said they had not encountered before. “It’s very disturbing,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, who recently testified at a Senate hearing on ivory and insecurity.

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Garamba Last year 2,400.

Every m ‘Like the Drug War’ above Ga alent of a Mr. Arranz, Garamba’s director, has an exhausted green sav look in his eyes. History is against him. Garamba was ing sight founded more than 70 years ago, in part to protect the rare northern white rhinoceros, which used to But the o number more than 1,000 here. But many people in his brow Asia believe that ground rhino horn is a cure for cancer and other ills, and it fetches nearly $30,000 The next a pound, more than gold. In the past few decades, stench gr as Congo has descended into chaos, rhino poachwith the ers have moved into Garamba. The park’s northern Arranz s white rhinos were among the last ones in the wild face cut o anywhere, but rangers have not seen any for the past five years. Nearby w Garamba faces a seemingly endless number of challenges, many connected to the utter state failure of Congo itself. Some of the rangers are poachers themselves, killing the animals they are entrusted to protect, saying their salaries are too low to live on. “I was hungry,” explained Anabuda Bakuli, a ranger jailed for killing a waterbuck. It does not help that many Garamba rangers are, by their own admission, alcoholics and run up debts at the bar not far from park headquarters. Mr. Onyan-

“These g they wer voice tra

“It’s like buying a it.”

Isma’il K durman, journalis

chief, is known to drink several liters of beer gle sitting. He talks about “the stress.”

g rates are now the highest here in central a belt of some of the most troubled countries orld. In Chad, heavily armed horsemen, who onservationists say were janjaweed, recently 000 elephants in just a few years.

a once had more than 20,000 elephants. r, there were around 2,800. This year, maybe

morning, if the skies are clear, Mr. Arranz flies aramba in a small two-seat plane, the equiva Mazda Miata with wings. The emerald vanna stretches out below him, a breathtakt at dawn.

other day, he saw something that furrowed w: vultures.

t day, after a hike through the tall grass, the rew unbearable and the air reverberated sizzle of thousands of flies. “Poached,” Mr. said, as he discovered a dead elephant, its off.

were the ashes of a small campfire.

guys were out here for a while,” he said. “If re willing to do this for one elephant. ...” His ailed off.

the drug war,” he said later. “If people keep and paying for ivory, it’s impossible to stop

Kushkush contributed reporting from Om, Sudan; Mia Li from Beijing; and a Somali st from Mogadishu, Somalia.

As China Ages, Beijing Turns to Morality Tales to Sp By ANDREW JACOBS and ADAM CENTURY Reading it now, six centuries after Guo Jujing wrote this paean to parental devotion, “The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety” comes off as a collection of scary bedtime stories. There is the woman who cut out her own liver to feed her sick mother, the boy who sat awake shirtless all night to draw mosquitoes away from his slumbering parents and the man who sold himself into servitude to pay for a father’s funeral. While the parables are even more familiar to most Chinese than Grimms’ Fairy Tales are to Americans — the text remains a mainstay of educational curriculum here — they have understandably lost much of their motivational punch. But when the government, in an effort to address the book’s glaring obsolescence, issued an updated version last month in the hope that the book would encourage more Chinese to turn away from their increasingly self-centered ways and perhaps phone home once in a while, it wasn’t quite prepared for the backlash. Compared with its predecessor, the new book brims with down-to-earth suggestions for keeping parents happy in their golden years. Readers are urged to teach them how to surf the Internet, take Mom to a classic film and buy health insurance for retired parents. “Family is the nucleus of society,” intoned Cui Shuhui, the director of the All-China Women’s Federation, which, along with the China National

Committee on Aging, published the new guidelines after two years of interviews with older Chinese. “We need family in order to advance Chinese society and improve our economic situation.” So far, those good intentions appear to have prompted mostly ridicule. But they have also unintentionally kicked up a debate on whether the government, not overextended children, should be looking after China’s ballooning population of retirees.

rarely stops working or has time to visit them in their hometown in Henan Province, roughly 400 miles south of the capital.

nests filled by old live alone while build their own r cities.

“One time I didn’t get to go home for four years,” he said sheepishly. “Business here is good, but I feel guilty for not being with my parents.”

According to the Civil Affairs, em account for mor cent of all Chine in some urban a has reached 70 p report by the offi news agency said half of the 185 m age 60 and older their children — unheard of a gen

In a fast-aging nation where hundreds of millions of people have left their former homes in the countryside in search of jobs, “The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety” strikes many as nearly as out of touch with the problems of modern China as the old parables.

Li Ji, a popular columnist at the state-run Legal Daily newspaper, lashed out at the new guidelines, arguing that they would not be necessary if the government provided better care for its citizens. “If the national health insurance was up to par, children wouldn’t have to worry so much about their parents’ health, and if companies were required to provide a certain number of vacation days, children would be able to go home more often,” he wrote.

Take, for example, the responsibility to “take one’s parents traveling frequently.” While feasible for successful professionals, the obligation is all but impossible for working people, especially the nation’s roughly 252 million migrant workers, few of whom have ever experienced the joys of leisure travel.

Despite the demands of an increasingly fast-paced society, the Confucian idea of filial devotion is deeply embedded in Chinese society. Tradition dictates that children live with their parents and care for them in their old age, a convention that historically provided a safety net.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, their numbers are rising 4.4 percent annually, meaning that nearly 11 million rural migrants arrived in Chinese cities last year alone — and most likely left their aging parents behind.

But the custom is rapidly fraying as children struggle with the logistical and financial burdens of caring for their aged parents.

Zhang Yang, a fruit vendor in Beijing, scoffed at the suggestion that he should take his parents on vacation, noting that he

This has proved particularly challenging in recent years to the huge numbers of only children born after the introduction of strict family-planning rules in the late 1970s. One result, demographers say, is a skyrocketing number of so-called empty

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Such figures help sense of urgency

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ginning to grip the governing Communist Party. Last year, in an attempt to ease the impact from so much atomized living, the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, proposed a law that obliges sons and daughters to “return home to visit their parents frequently.” The legislation would enable neglected parents to sue their children for infractions, though the vagueness of the law — it does not spell out the frequency of visits — has raised some doubts about its enforceability. “The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety,” despite its ham-handedness, tries to address the root causes of loneliness. It urges children to throw their parents a birthday party each year and listen attentively to their stories from the past. It even asks that children help widowed parents remarry, a task that some parents found objectionable. “I would be really embarrassed if my son tried to help me remarry,” said Xu Zhihao, a retiree who was sunning himself with friends in a Beijing park on Wednesday. “That’s not part of Chinese tradition.”

p explain the y that is be-

Life With Syria’s Rebels in a Cold and Cunning War By C. J. CHIVERS Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, lurched his pickup truck to a stop inside the captured residential compound he uses as his guerrilla base. His fighters had been waiting for orders for a predawn attack on an army checkpoint at the entrance to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. The men had been issued ammunition and had said their prayers. Their truck bomb was almost prepared. Now the commander had a surprise. Minutes earlier, his father, who had been arrested by the army at the same checkpoint in July, had called to say his jailers had released him. He needed a ride out of Aleppo, fast. “God is great!” the men shouted. They climbed onto trucks, loaded weapons and accelerated away, barreling through darkness on nearly deserted roads toward a city under siege, to reclaim one of their own.

Mr. Yasin was pensive as he drove, worried that the call was a ploy to lure him and his fighters into a trap. “Often the government does this,” he said. “Usually it is an ambush.” He had sent an empty freight truck ahead, he said, to check the way. But he never slowed down. During five days last week, Mr. Yasin and his group, the Lions of Tawhid, allowed two journalists from The New York Times to live and travel beside them as they fought their part in the war to unseat President Bashar al-Assad. This group falls under the command of Al Tawhid Brigade, a relatively new structure in Aleppo Province that has unified several groups and fights under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the loose coalition of armed rebels. While broad extrapolations are difficult to glean from one fighting group in a complex society, the

activities and personal stories of these men, a mix of civilians who took up arms and dozens of army defectors who joined them, offers a fine-grained look of the uprising, and the momentum and guerrilla energy it has attained.

attacks with other commanders, evading airstrikes, meeting with smugglers and bombmakers to gather more weapons, and rotating through front-line duties in a gritty street-by-street urban campaign. He prefers to sleep by day, and fight by night.

Mr. Yasin, 37, was a clean-shaven accountant before the war. He lived a quiet life with his wife and two young sons. Now thickly bearded and projecting a stoic calm under fire, he has been hardened by his war in ways he could not have foreseen.

His fighters are a cross section of a nation at war with itself. They include a real estate agent, several farmers, construction workers and a nurse who owned a short-order restaurant. These men fight side by side with a cadre of army defectors, who say the government they once served must fall.

He roams the Aleppo region with dozens of armed men in camouflage, plotting

The civilians started with stones and fire-

arms bought for hunting. Their powerful weapon was a huge sl for hurling Molotov cocktails an homemade bombs. As professio diers have joined them, they ha ally acquired assault rifles, mac and rocket-propelled and hand They now control a captured ar vehicle and two tanks.

As they have grown in numbers strength, they have organized in that mixes paramilitary discipli ian policing, Islamic law and th demands of necessity with battl coldness and outright cunning. informants and spies, and eaves

r first more lingshot nd small onal solave graduchine guns d grenades. rmored

s and nto a force ine, civilhe harsh lefield . They have sdrop on

the government’s military radios while trying to form a nascent government themselves in the territory under their control. But mostly they yearn to fight, seeking to destroy the Assad government and its better-equipped forces by most any means. Their collective confidence that they will prevail both bonds them together and informs their sense that this is their time. From Protests to Arms For the people of Tal Rifaat, a city of roughly 20,000 people on an agricultural plain, the uprising moved in stages from peaceful demonstrations to open war. It began with protests early in 2011, which the government tried to smash. By midsummer last year, Abdul Hakim Yasin had formed a guerrilla cell with fewer than 10 other residents. They began with four shotguns and hunting rifles against a government with an extensive internal police and intelligence apparatus and a military with hundreds of thousands of troops. Last September, security forces scattered a protest at the city’s rail yard with gunfire; 83 people were wounded. One man, Ahmed Mohammed Homed, 32, was killed. Mr. Yasin said he knew then that they were at war. “Everyone in Tal Rifaat formed into teams,” he said. As the gunmen organized ambushes, the city’s machinists and mechanics also went to work, learning to concoct explosives to pack into bombs. The government’s crackdown had spawned an insurgency, in Tal Rifaat as elsewhere. By this spring, as the army came to occupy Tal Rifaat, the now war-savvy city had all but emptied. The soldiers painted graffiti on the city’s walls. “Assad or nobody,” one scrawl read. A revolutionary painted a reply: “We will kneel only for God.” In a fashion as old as guerrilla war, as the ranks swelled, the original members agreed to divide, forming interconnected fighting groups that began to accept army defectors. It was then that Jamal Abu Houran, a Syrian infantry soldier who did not provide his surname, joined with Mr. Yasin. Jamal Abu Houran’s journey from proud Syrian

citizen and willing military conscript to antigovernment guerrilla followed the wrenching arc of a young patriot rediscovering his country as it erupted in violence around him. He had been a student of Arabic literature at Al-Baath University in Homs, where he studied Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, and was opposed to Israel’s and the West’s military activities in the Middle East. Two years ago, the army summoned him for compulsory military service. He willingly left behind his books, to be trained in tactics and infantry arms. As the revolution spread and the government resorted to more violence to blunt it, Jamal Abu Houran’s unease with his own army set in. His military conscription was scheduled to end early this year. Then the army extended his tour without his consent and assigned him to lead an infantry squad — part of an emergency policy intended to maintain manpower to fight the growing insurgency. It did not work. In early April, Jamal Abu Houran called a friend in Homs, who told him that soldiers had raped an 11-year-old girl. His disaffection became disgust. “I used to think the army was to defend the country and resist and fight the Western projects in the Middle East,” he said. “My conclusion, after that, was that we were serving in an army that does not protect its own people.” Using Skype, Jamal Abu Houran contacted an activist from Tal Rifaat who invited him to desert his post and head to a nearby village, where he would be picked up by a waiting car. Soon he was in a hidden guerrilla office. He told the activists there that he had studied weapons well, and asked to join the rebels’ fight. An activist phoned Mr. Yasin, who quickly appeared and stood before him. Jamal recalled his new commander’s first words. “You are my brother,” he said. “And your blood is more precious than mine.” Jamal Abu Houran’s reply set his life on its new course. “I hope God will give me the strength to defend people like you,” he said. This was his oath. He had switched sides.

It was mid-April. Mr. Yasin, who had recently started his own armed group, had nine fighters, while the army had almost free rein of the Aleppo countryside. One of Jamal Abu Houran’s earliest tasks was to recruit. Persuasion too was a means of waging war: the more soldiers the rebels could lead to desertion, the more they would weaken the army and strengthen their own ranks. “I started calling people I knew from the army,” he said. “I convinced 12 people to defect.” As the fighting group grew, Jamal Abu Houran’s role and standing rose.

He became one of Mr. Yasin’s trusted sergeants — leading small teams in attacks and managing the fighting group’s armory, where he issued and collected weapons with the discipline and a carefully kept ledger that resembled life in the army that had trained him.

The main fight had shifted to the city, where many fighting groups, including Mr. Yasin’s, had coalesced under the black flag of Al Tawhid, a relatively new brigade that sought to organize and unify the province’s disparate rebel units. With this new structure came more coordination. Mr. Yasin’s group began taking turns on the city’s front lines. In mid-August the fighters were rotated back to Tal Rifaat, to prepare for an attack, assigned by the province’s revolutionary military council, to destroy an army checkpoint on the northern

road out of the city.

Sights on a Checkpoint

Al Tawhid had gathered intelligence for the operation. The checkpoint had two B.M.P.s, Russian-made armored fighting vehicles that supported about 30 soldiers in small buildings. These soldiers were protected by dirt barriers that forced approaching vehicles to slow down and weave.

By summer, with defections rising and the rebels fighting more effectively, the army’s grip had been loosened. The province’s myriad fighting groups had pushed most of the government’s forces from the countryside. Military units maintained a presence on Minakh air base near Tal Rifaat and at an artillery school near Aleppo.

All of this was watched over by 50 more soldiers in a hospital nearby. Many Palestinians lived in the neighborhood near the checkpoint. The rebels considered these families loyal to the Assad government, which had hosted them for decades. The rebels had been unable to infiltrate the Palestinian turf.

Moreover, the checkpoint was supported by the air force, which could muster helicopters and ground-attack jets. The impending attack would be difficult, and perhaps cost many rebel lives. Still, the rebels deemed destroying the checkpoint essential. As long as the government controlled it, their routes to and from the city were limited, and the soldiers could screen all the civilians traveling on the road, detaining whomever they pleased. Mr. Yasin knew of this personally. In July, his father, Jamal, had been arrest-

ed by the soldiers at that very spot. He suspected it was because the government knew his son led an armed group; he said he expected his father would be killed. This checkpoint, he said, had to be destroyed. Early last week, Mr. Yasin left his fighters in their compound to attend a commanders’ meeting. He ordered them to be ready for the attack when he came back. He returned before midnight and said the attack had been postponed. The fighters were dejected. The next evening a pickup truck pulled in with a young prisoner. The fighters said the man, whom they called Abu Hilal, was a member of a loyalist shabiha militia, who had been cap-

tured and held by rebels in Maara, a small city a few miles away. Abu Hilal was a lanky man with a shaved head; he flinched and cowered as the fighters crowded around him. He showed signs of extensive beatings. His left arm was swollen with bruises. He limped to the stone steps and sat down, physically and psychologically overwhelmed. The rebels’ hatred for the shabiha militiamen borders on electric. One fighter, Antar, stepped between Abu Hilal and the jeering fighters, to protect him. He led the prisoner inside to the kitchen, where Deeb Meldaoun, the

trained nurse who serves as the fighters’ cook and medic, had him undress so he could examine his wounds. Purple bruises covered Abu Hilal’s back and left leg. Mr. Yasin stood in the doorway and invited the prisoner to relax. “Do you want to take a shower?” he said. “No, thank you,” Abu Hilal said softly. “You will sleep well if you do,” Mr. Yasin said. The fighters provided Abu Hilal with bread and jam, then cigarettes, and

said they would find him an identification card, so that he could travel once they set him free. Gradually they lost interest in him. He crouched alone on the kitchen floor, smoking. In his office next door, Mr. Yasin seemed thoughtful. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. Abu Hilal had been an inmate in a government prison before the revolution, he said, and was let out of jail to provide muscle to the shabiha militias. He had confessed in the revolutionaries’ provisional court to committing a rape and six murders recently, the rebels said. The court had sentenced him to death.

ing his truck’s horn. He shouted that his father had called and said he had been unexpectedly let out from prison. They needed to rush to retrieve him. The men cheered, climbed onto their trucks and sped south toward Aleppo. In the lead truck, Mr. Yasin repeatedly tried to call a friend he had sent ahead in civilian clothes in an empty freight truck. He was expecting a trick, and wanted the lead driver to ensure that his father actually was free and there was no trap. Then the fighters could drive in. At the outskirts of the city, he reached the other man, who reported that he

Mr. Yasin said he had opposed executing the man. He had asked the revolutionaries, he said, to release Abu Hilal into his custody so that he might arrange a trade, perhaps a prisoner exchange or a ransom to be paid in weapons.

was with Jamal Yasin, driving north.

“He is a bad man,” he said. “But let’s use him to benefit the revolution.”

In the darkness of the abandoned road, the other truck approached and stopped. Jamal Yasin climbed out. He was a straight-backed and squarely built man with a shaved head. He looked unhurt.

An Unexpected Amnesty That night Abdul Hakim Yasin left for another meeting about the checkpoint attack. Jamal Abu Houran issued weapons and ammunition. The fighters prayed. Mr. Yasin returned in a rush, honk-

For a moment, Mr. Yasin seemed less the guerrilla commander than a son. He ended the call. He drove in silence, letting the news sink in. Then he spoke. “God is great,” he said.

The fighters hurried him to the front seat of the first pickup truck, where he sat beside his son for the drive to Tal Rifaat.

Jamal Yasin said he had not been tortured. But the prison cell was tiny and so overcrowded that he almost could not sleep. Abdul Hakim Yasin admitted to his worry. “I was 99 percent sure it was an ambush,” he said. His father listened, then gently admonished his son. “You really think if it was an ambush I would call you?” he said. “Even if they were slitting my throat?” “Daddy, I swear to God I am under big pressure,”

Abdul Hakim said.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Take it easy, my son, there is no stress,” the father answered.

There was still a ch Yasin wanted to ce gave his fighters ic their treat, praisin surprised them all

A Long-Planned Attack Abdul Hakim Yasin dropped off his father at his brother’s home in Tal Rifaat. The fighters stood outside, exhilarated at the reunion, shouting thanks to God. Mr. Yasin drew his pistol and emptied it into the night sky. He was grinning.

“I thought I might Mr. Yasin told the

He excused himse meet a fellow com

heckpoint to attack. First Mr. elebrate. Back at the base, he ce cream. The gunmen savored ng the good fortune that had l.

t never see my father again,â&#x20AC;? em.

elf and returned to his office to mmander to discuss the last de-

tails of the impending attack. The two men huddled over a hand-drawn map. The attack would begin shortly, Mr. Yasin said, timed to begin about an hour before dawn, when he expected most of the government soldiers to be asleep. The fighters returned to prayers, or snatching bits of rest. Abu Hilal, the prisoner, huddled against the wall, watching. Just before leaving, he was led outside blindfolded and put into the back seat of one of the pickup trucks. “Tonight we will do the exchange,” Mr. Yasin said. He quickly walked through a large hole cut in the compound’s back wall and approached a flatbed truck. The bed held a stack of thick pipes packed with homemade explosives. Electrical wires protruded from their back ends, all of them joined in a trunk line. This was a truck bomb, wired to detonate remotely. “Three hundred kilograms,” Mr. Yasin said. He revealed more of his plan. The rebels lacked the heavy weapons to take the checkpoint in a head-on fight. So several of them would dress as civilians, move the truck bomb near the checkpoint and set it off. This would be the signal for an assault over the ground. There was one problem. The Lions of Tawhid said they did not believe in using their fighters as suicide bombers.

Two fighters poured fuel into the truck’s gas tank while Mr. Meldaoun, the nurse, snipped branches from shrubs and stacked them on the bomb, hiding it from view. The real plan was beginning to emerge. It involved the prisoner, Abu Hilal. The assurances that he would be released had been a deception. The fighters intended to put him behind the wheel of the truck bomb near the checkpoint and tell him to drive forward in a prisoner exchange. Adel Meldaoun, a cement worker who serves as one of Mr. Yasin’s deputies and is the nurse’s brother, started the flatbed truck and swung it off the dirt path onto the main road; the pickup trucks had already driven away, packed with gunmen. “Halab,” Mr. Meldaoun said, using Aleppo’s ancient Arabic name. He stepped on the gas to catch up with his commander. The convoy was gone, with Abu Hilal in one of the seats, blindfolded, rushing toward an almost certain death. The Game of Fate Shortly after sunrise, the fighters returned. They trickled back in, clean and unbloodied. They did not look as if they had fought. A few shook their heads, grimaced and made their way inside to return their weapons to Jamal Abu Houran. Their commander pulled up and stepped out of the truck. His face was long, his eyes

tired. The waiting fighters did not approach him. At last he explained. “We failed,” he said. They had arrived near the checkpoint, he said. All appeared perfect for the attack. Most of the soldiers were asleep. A few sat outside at a table, playing cards. His fighters took their positions and the final act ran its course. “We told Abu Hilal, ‘Go, drive that way, your father is waiting for you there, don’t do any bad things in the future,’ ” Hakim said. “And he was so happy, and he drove.” Abu Hilal stopped the truck at the checkpoint. Abdul Hakim Yasin pushed the button on the remote detonator, ready for the flash and thunderclap of more than 650 pounds of explosives. It would be the signal for his fighters to move forward and mop up. Nothing happened. He pushed the button again. The truck did not explode. Mr. Yasin suspected that the checkpoint was equipped with a jammer that blocked the signal. Now he sat in his office, disappointed at the failure, amazed that his own family remained intact. He was exhausted. Everyone he had expected to die — his father, his prisoner, the soldiers at the checkpoint — was alive. “It is,” he said, “the game of fate.” The Urban Standoff A few hours later, back in camouflage, Abdul Hakim Yasin led his fighters to Aleppo. Their assignment at the check-

point had ended; they were due back at the front lines. The commander steered wide of the checkpoint. He chose another, longer route, driving with the trucks spread out and at headlong speeds, to limit exposure to attack helicopters and jets. Once within the city, the trucks weaved through neighborhoods until reaching a cluster of buildings under rebel control. They hid the vehicles in the shade of trees and walked briskly inside, moving into an apartment abandoned by a fleeing police captain. It was a place to stay until dark. There they watched the government’s televised news; the presenter told of a bomb attack in Damascus, the capital. Reclining on the police captain’s couch, barefoot and drowsy after a night without sleep, Mr. Yasin was amused. His humor had returned. He chuckled. “Maybe Abu Hilal drove all the way to Damascus,” he said. His fighters were rummaging through the apartment. One found the remote control for the air-conditioner, and turned it on. Others rummaged through the family’s collection of bootleg DVDs. More packed up books to take home. Another cooked a meal on the captain’s stove, and served his commander tea in the captain’s cups. A fighter came to Mr. Yasin. He had found the captain’s wedding album. Mr. Yasin flipped through it slowly, page by page, stopping when he saw women in the bridal party wearing clothes that clashed with his traditional rural tastes. “That dress is too short for me,” he said. Soon he was asleep on his enemy’s couch, resting for his next mission from Al Tawhid.

Outside, as the fighters dozed, waiting to move to the front lines that night, a government helicopter and light-attack jet strafed and fired rockets into the city. Mortar and tank shells exploded intermittently. The men paid it all little mind. Then the cycle started anew. Mr. Yasin woke before sunset. He was not fasting during Ramadan, so he ate quickly and left for a meeting with other commanders. He returned by darkness with orders and organized his fighters into teams. His fighters in turn distributed ammunition and formed a convoy that soon snaked through Aleppo, toward a city block ablaze. There, they said, another rebel unit had ambushed a government convoy, disabling vehicles and trapping many soldiers. Mr. Yasinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fighters were to relieve the other rebels and cut off one possible avenue of the soldiersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; escape. As they approached, gunfire ripped by. The convoy turned into an industrial compound, and the fighters hopped off the trucks, parking them against the warehouses, and fanned out.

dispiriting, lopsided encounter. The rebels could not see the aircraft. Even if they could, they had nothing with which to fire back effectively. The pilot attacked them at will, aided by the orange flow of the inferno across the street, which illuminated the contours of the compound where the fighters were hiding. But as the rockets struck, the Tawhid fighters were barely distracted. They were waiting for the government soldiers nearby to show themselves, certain that night by night their foes were growing weaker, and their uprising was gaining strength. After each explosion, Mr. Yasin, an accountant leading a life and a role delivered to him by war, keyed his twoway radio, and checked on his men. All around him they crouched in the smoky darkness, weapons ready, waiting for orders or for more action against a government they consider already dead.

Mr. Yasin watched, silhouetted by the orange blaze. His enemies, trapped nearby, lobbed mortar rounds at the compound. Each exploded with crunching blasts. He did not flinch. Another jet showed up and circled overhead. It was invisible in the almost moonless night sky; only its engine could be heard. Soon it attacked, too, diving toward the compound and firing air-to-ground rockets in pairs. It pulled out, circled, returned, dived and released rockets again. They slammed to earth at the compoundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge. In the climate of many conflicts, this might be read as a

Export Powerhouse Feels Pangs of Labor Strife By JIM YARDLEY The air thickened with tear gas as police and paramilitary officers jogged into the Ishwardi Export Processing Zone firing rubber bullets and swinging cane poles. Panicked factory workers tried to flee. A seamstress crumpled to the ground, knocked unconscious by a shot in the head. Dozens of people were bloodied and hospitalized. The officers were cracking down on protests at two garment factories inside this industrial area in

western Bangladesh. But they were also protecting two ingredients of a manufacturing formula that has quietly made Bangladesh a leading apparel exporter to the United States and Europe: cheap labor and foreign investment. Both were at stake on that March morning. Workers earning as little as $50 a month, less than the cost of one of the knit sweaters they stitched for European stores, were furious over a

cut in wages. Their anger was directed at the Hong Kong and Chinese bosses of the two factories, turning a labor dispute into something potentially much larger. “If any foreigner got injured or killed, it would damage the country’s image around the globe,” said a police supervisor, Akbar Hossein, who participated in the crackdown. “We all know the importance of these factories and this industry for Ban-

gladesh.” Bangladesh, once poor and irrelevant to the global economy, is now an export powerhouse, second only to China in global apparel exports, as factories churn out clothing for brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Calvin Klein and H&M. Global retailers like Target and Walmart now operate sourcing offices in Dhaka, the capital. Garments are critical to Bangladesh’s economy, accounting for

80 percent of manufacturing exports and more than three million jobs. But with “Made in Bangladesh” labels now commonplace in American stores, Bangladesh’s manufacturing formula depends on its having the lowest labor costs in the world, with the minimum wage for garment workers set at roughly $37 a month. During the past two years, as workers have seen their meager earnings eroded by double-digit inflation,

protests and violent clashes with the police have become increasingly common. In response, Bangladeshi leaders have deployed the security tools of the state to keep factories humming. A high-level government committee monitors the garment sector and includes ranking officers from the military, the police and intelligence agencies. A new special police force patrols many industrial areas. Do-

mestic intelligence agencies keep an eye on some labor organizers. One organizer who had been closely watched, Aminul Islam, was found tortured and killed in April in a case that is unsolved. “The garment industry is No. 1 for exports and dollars for the country,” said Alonzo Suson, who runs the Solidarity Center in Dhaka, an A.F.L.-C.I.O.-affiliated labor rights group. “Any slowdown of that development is a national security issue.”

garment factory owners that any perception of a rollback on labor rights could scare off multinational brands and damage the garment industry. “These developments could coalesce into a perfect storm that could threaten the Bangladesh brand in America,” he said.

For global brands, which are forever chasing the cheapest labor costs from country to country, Bangladesh has been a hot spot, especially as wages have risen in China. McKinsey, the consulting giant, has called BanglaFor the Obama administration, which desh the “next China” and predicted has cultivated Bangladesh as a region- that Bangladeshi garment exports, now about $18 billion a year, could al ally in southern Asia, labor unrest has become a matter of growing con- triple by 2020. cern. In a May visit to Dhaka, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton But in late July, representatives from 12 major brands and retailers, raised labor issues and the Islam alarmed by the rising labor unrest, murder case. In June, Ambassador Dan W. Mozena warned Bangladeshi prodded the Bangladeshi government

to address wage demands, a suggestion rejected by the labor minister. “No reason to be worried,” Khandker Mosharraf Hossain, the minister, told reporters, noting that brands were not canceling orders. Bangladesh was born in bloodshed during a 1971 war of independence from Pakistan and has since gyrated between military rule and fragile democracy. It has about 150 million people and is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Derided by Henry A. Kissinger as the world’s “basket case,” Bangladesh has since made considerable progress on fronts like women’s literacy, juvenile and maternal mortality, per capita income, and life expectancy. This upward arc is often credited to Bangladesh’s vibrant civil society, but the garment sector, in which about 80

percent of the workers are women, has also played a critical role, providing socially acceptable jobs to women in a conservative Muslim country. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in lobbying the United States for favorable trade preferences, has argued that such policies would improve the lives of millions of poor women. Bangladesh’s Home Ministry, in a written response to questions, said the government does not favor factory owners over workers but acts as a “referee/umpire” while maintaining an “investment friendly” environment for foreign and domestic investors. Yet Ms. Hasina’s government has resisted expanding labor rights in a country where the owners of about 5,000 garment factories wield enormous influence. Factory owners are major political donors and have moved into news media, buying newspapers and television stations. In Parliament, roughly two-thirds of the members belong to the country’s three biggest business associations. At least 30 factory owners or their family members hold seats in Parliament, about 10 percent of the total. “Politics and business is so enmeshed that one is kin to the other,” said Iftekharuzzaman, director of Transparency International Bangladesh.“There is a coalition between the sector and people in positions of power. The negotiating position of the workers is very, very limited.” A Country Within a Country Mohammad Helal Uddin joined Rosita Knitwear in May 2010 and was thrilled to have the job. Rosita was inside the new Ishwardi Export Processing Zone, not far

from his home village, meaning he could live with his wife and two young daughters and not have to toil in the fields. “I feel I have a kind of dignity in this job,” he said. Mr. Uddin, 28, worked in the knitting department and after six months was promoted, with a base salary of $55 a month. He soon began to notice irregularities. Workers were not getting promised annual raises, monthly attendance bonuses or the 17 paid holidays a year, beyond their usual one day off a week. Employees also said they worked four hours of overtime a day but were paid for only two. Three decades ago, Bangladesh created a network of export zones to attract foreign investment with tax incentives and other benefits. Today, a large majority of Bangladesh’s garment factories lie outside these zones, but the zones are favored by foreign investors. Rosita and its sister factory, Megatex, both owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate South Ocean, were the first plants in the Ishwardi zone. Zones like Ishwardi operate like countries within a country. They are governed by a separate agency, the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority, and by separate laws. By tradition, the authority has been run by a military officer, active duty or retired, and many factories have hired retired soldiers to oversee security. For workers, wages were higher in the zones and conditions were better. But unions were initially banned, and workers had no right to organize until 2004 when Parliament, facing international pressure, approved worker associations at individual factories.

At the Rosita factory, workers elected a 15-member association last December, with Mr. Uddin as president. In January, a female employee complained that a Bangladeshi middle manager was pressuring her to have sex with one of the Chinese bosses. Enraged, workers demanded that the management address her complaint as well as the discrepancies over annual raises and earned leave. Six weeks of confrontation and chaos followed. In February, equipment in the Rosita factory was damaged during a rampage. Nearly 300 workers were accused of vandalism and fired, with their names posted on a blacklist at the gate of the Ishwardi zone. Mr. Uddin, who denied any wrongdoing, was fired and temporarily jailed. When he tried to return to work on Feb. 20, Mr. Uddin said two black-clad officers hustled him into the tiny guardhouse. The officers were members of the Rapid Action Battalion, a government paramilitary force infamous for vigilante attacks known as “cross fire” killings. He said one of the officers ordered him to sign a resignation letter. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Uddin said he told them. He said one of the officers pushed a gun against his shoulder. “If you don’t sign,” the officer told him, according to Mr. Uddin, “we will take you in the car and you will have to face the crossfire.” Mr. Uddin signed. Inside the factories, according to several workers, police and paramilitary officers walked through the workrooms, holding termination letters. The message was clear:

work or leave.

The Power Equation

By March, an American labor rights group, the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights, was advocating for the workers. A South Ocean executive arrived at Ishwardi and promised to address worker complaints over wages and unpaid leave. Then on March 20, workers discovered that managers had cut the piece rate, a type of production bonus, meaning a loss of wages. Another standoff ensued as managers closed the factories. But when workers returned March 25, the wage cut had not been fully restored.

Bangladesh’s two major political parties, the governing Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, often seem engaged in a blood feud. Yet, many analysts say, the two parties agree on one thing: safeguarding the garment industry.

Hundreds of workers gathered outside the front door of the factory in an impromptu sit-down strike. Eight workers, interviewed in June, said all the managers had left the factories. A small contingent of police officers soon arrived and

ordered everyone back to work. A seamstress said a police officer knocked her to the ground, beating her unconscious with a stick and shredding her clothes. “I kept asking them to stop,” said the seamstress, who asked not to be identified, fearing reprisals. “But even after I fell to the ground, they kept beating me and pulled my hair.” Workers began throwing stones and chanting slogans against the police, who fled. Hours later, after officials in Dhaka were notified, officers from the Rapid Action Battalion as well as surrounding police stations arrived. Officer Hossein, the police supervisor, denied that the police were aggressors, saying officers were told that foreign managers were trapped inside the factories and that angry workers were vandalizing equipment. “They attacked the police,” Officer Hossein said. “They started the violence.” Cellphone videos show police officers firing rubber bullets and pummeling workers with cane poles. “They treated workers as if they were not human beings,” one worker said.

Three months after the clash at Ishwardi, tens of thousands of angry workers protested near Dhaka, demanding higher wages and crippling one of the country’s most important industrial zones for more than a week. Riot police officers dispersed the protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, as scores of people were injured. Following huge protests in 2010, Ms. Hasina raised the

minimum wage for garment workers to $37 a month from about $20. But her government has resisted the renewed worker demands, even as executives at some leading brands have voiced support for adjusting wages and expressed concerns about labor unrest. In June, top executives at the Swedish retailer H&M fretted that recurring labor protests were disrupting production and called on Bangladeshi factories to rectify the situation. Major brands have been stung by bad publicity. This year, War on Want, a nonprofit group, found that workers in five factories making products for Nike, Puma and Adidas were paid less than the minimum wage and complained of workplace abuse and sexual harassment. In March, the parent company of the Tommy Hilfiger brand, PVH Corp., hurriedly donated $1 million toward a factory safety initiative as ABC News was preparing to broadcast a report on a fire that killed 29 workers in a Bangladeshi factory making clothes for Tommy Hilfiger. “They want to see better standards and conditions in

factories in Bangladesh,” said Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, a trade group in Washington. “No company is arguing that wages should not rise in Bangladesh. They are not saying what the wage should be, but absolutely wages should go up.” But many factory owners are skeptical that buyers are truly willing to pay higher prices. One owner, Shawkat Ali Bhuiyan, said he had stopped working with companies like Walmart and Target because his profit margin was almost nonexistent, while some Bangladeshi labor leaders blame the foreign brands for exploiting workers. “We need to clean up the whole supply chain,” said Roy Ramesh Chandra, a powerful public sector union leader. “The

brands need to fulfill their responsibility. The manufacturers need to fulfill their responsibility. And the government should comply with international obligations and respect international labor standards.” Bangladesh has responded to international pressure in the past, sharply curtailing child labor and improving safety conditions in the 1990s. Now, though, the pressure points are the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for wages, issues that require action by a political system dominated by business interests, including the garment sector. A. K. Azad, president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, played down the garment sector’s political clout. “We are not powerful,” he said, adding: “Power lies with the politicians. Power lies with the media.”

the country’s biggest garment factories, also owns a Bengali-language newspaper and a television station. Several Western diplomats privately noted that news coverage often emphasizes the disruptions caused by protests above the concerns of workers. At the Rosita and Megatex factories, South Ocean management hired a labor oversight firm, Verité, which detailed a host of problems, including humiliation of workers, summary firings and deliberate interference with the ability of workers to organize. New management teams are now running the factories, and Verité is helping put in place changes to increase wages and protect worker rights. “South Ocean have taken labor issues at the two factories extremely seriously and have taken swift actions to address those issues,” the company’s law firm, Winston & Strawn of

Hong Kong, said in a statement. Many of the workers involved in the March 25 clash are back on the job, despite their anger over how they have been treated. The seamstress who was knocked unconscious, her clothes shredded, said she had little choice, since she was the family’s sole breadwinner. “I am helpless,” she said. “We have to get food.” South Ocean dropped charges against Mr. Uddin but the police are still pursuing separate charges. Meanwhile, officials at the export zone authority have blacklisted him from being hired at factories inside the zones. “We spoke up,” he said. “And we became criminals in the eyes of all authorities.”

But many apparel tycoons have also gone into politics or begun media careers, purchasing newspapers or starting independent news channels. Mr. Azad, who owns one of