Safety First
By Glenda Cooper
December 2003

Twenty two-year-old Shahahabul Haque's parents' view was clear. They didn't want him to become a journalist. They wanted him to become something that wouldn't get him killed - like a soldier, for example. Or failing that, a police officer.

In Bangladesh a country which has been described by Reporters Without Frontiers as "by far the world's most violent country for journalists" you can understand parental concern. This is a place where imprisonment and beatings of journalists by police and political activists are common - something that many people only realised a year ago after the imprisonment of two Channel Four freelancers.

Indeed as I write this CPU is recording that five journalists were targeted in a bomb attack and another has just been released on bail after being held for ten days for photographing a police checkpoint.

So with official national literacy rates running at around 43 per cent if you are lucky enough to have an education which will lift you out of the turmoil and abject poverty that strangles most of Bangladesh's 130 million population the question is: why jeopardise it for something as risky as reporting?

But Shahahabul and his colleagues weren't put off. I arrived in Dhaka at the end of October to teach him and seventeen other young news reporters the skills of feature writing on a course organised for the British Council by CPU. It was the first journalism course the BC had run there - and it was an unusual one. I was to teach the first week as a workshop, while for the next four weeks the delegates would meet to produce a series of articles that would chronicle Dhaka's architectural heritage.

But first, forget the past, Dhaka's present immediately assaults the first time visitor: the sour yoghurt smell of pollution that hits you as soon as you exit the airport, around 600,000 rickshaws veering crazily through the city streets, a hotel that sees no irony in calling itself Paradise Garden when views are over high-rise buildings and a shanty town. Everywhere there are child beggars shouting "okaymadam okaymadam" in order to make you buy pieces of grass, rattles or simply give out some baksheesh - whatever change you have to hand. Come late afternoon (it was Ramadan and most people were fasting until sundown) the streets were swarming with traders selling titbits - jellapee (teeth rotting sweetmeats) and sola (pulses) for the traditional Iftar meal. The spiralling price of onions (an staple ingredient of Iftar) had become a national obsession, denounced on the front pages of the newspapers.

Amidst all this the course took place in the hushed environs of the British Council campus, jostling for space between a senior management training course and O Level examinations. The course - to try to teach delegates to move from the directness of news to develop the skills needed for the lateral thinking of features - was taken no less seriously than either of these.

While my main memories of journalism training are long discussion about how to get out of shorthand lessons, here - despite the fasting and the 88F heat - there was rarely less than 100 percent attention. And for those doommongers who talk about the inevitable dumbing down of journalism there was a huge respect for the intellectual. No conversation about style and language was allowed to pass without references to Derrida ( don't even think about getting away with no references to post-modernism). I was cross-examined on a casual remark that I had studied T S Eliot at university. (Young Journalist: "Of course. 'Let us go then you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky'" Me: (rather feebly): Ummm . Absolutely.")

Not that I should give the impression I was teaching a set of priggish saints. Hot topic of the week was former royal butler Paul Burrell's book whose revelations were faithfully recounted in the Bangladesh papers. (Mr Burrell would do well to note that his decision to sell his story didn't go down well in Dhaka). And many were addicted to the reality television shows flooding Bangladesh (One of my favourites relied solely on the plot device of a whoopee cushion hidden in a furniture showroom).

But always at the back of everyone's mind was the fact that Bangladesh is still a country where someone might be listening... and drawing conclusions. During a talk on Dhaka's architectural heritage by a distinguished archaeologist who had worked for UNESCO, one of the journalists, an engaging bespectacled young man called Bashir Ahmed inquired "What must the Government do to protect historical sites from falling into disrepair?" Silence from the distinguished archaeologist. Then, regretfully. "I would prefer not to discuss the Government."

His reluctance was echoed by other speakers whenever anything could be seen as straying into dangerous territory - however innocent the question seemed to me. It was always done with smiles and charm but just as emphatically.

Yet the young journalists who as part of an educated elite could have chosen far more lucrative and less difficult careers refused to be put off by this - and kept on asking questions (this even spilled over to our last Iftar meal together when I was still answering questions on social policy and the Rough Sleepers Initiative)

But the week was a sobering reminder of how many journalists labour under difficult conditions. Particularly for me, as during this time it was likely that even I was not immune. One contact told me that all my emails were likely to have been read, my mobile phone calls monitored, even my British Council car followed - courtesy of the J for Journalist stamped on my visa. "Nothing works in Bangladesh except for one thing," he said to me. "And that's the secret service".