My new blog on Bangladesh
.. .or, how long will it take for the Bangladesh government to block Substack
The current Bangladesh government has a penchant for blocking websites which publish material it considers too critical. After the government forced me to leave the Bangladesh in 2017, and as I continued to try and write about the country’s politics and human rights record, I found many of the media platforms I wrote for getting blocked temporarily or permanently.
This included the Indian news websites, The Wire and Scroll; the Qater based website, Al Jazeera; and the Swedish based Netra News. I used to write a blog on Google’s Blogspot, but this has also been blocked. (This is why so many people, living outside the country, use Facebook and Youtube, as the government can’t, yet, block individual social media accounts. However, if you live inside Bangladesh, writing too critically on these social media platforms risks arrests.)
So, living outside Bangladesh, I am now turning to Substack and am keeping my fingers crossed that right now the Bangladesh government has more important things on its mind, as in national “elections”. To understand why elections is in quote marks, you will need to read this blog.
From now on, I will publish here most of my new writing on Bangladesh politics. Now is a good time to start, as in a year of elections, Bangladesh will become in a few days times the first country in 2024 to go to the polls, even if these are being boycotted by the opposition. In an earlier life I ran the UK-based Centre for Corporate Accountability so I hope to expand my writing here beyond Bangladesh to wider issues of accountability.
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If you want to read some of my previous writing on Bangladesh
https://netra.news/authors/david-bergman/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/david-bergman/
https://www.aljazeera.com/author/david_bergman_2013521131712212104
https://scroll.in/author/10315
https://m.thewire.in/author/David-Bergman