DHAKA: Tipu Sultan’s hands are a patchwork of scars: thin tidy scars where surgeons have inserted metal pins to rebuild every bone in his hands and fingers. An ugly purple scar remains where half his forearm seems to have been butchered.

Sultan is a journalist, his hands the tools of his trade.

They were crushed, and he was left for dead, because he dared to write about the links between politics, organised crime and corruption in Bangladesh.

Sultan said he’d written several reports about how one member of parliament would persecute his opponents, as well as stories on illegal drug dealing.

“I received many threats,” he said.

One night Sultan was strolling home in a south-eastern town when he says he was spotted by the MP and a crowd of his bodyguards.

He was surrounded and dragged down a dark street.

“There were 13 or 14 of them. They beat me with iron bars and hockey sticks for at least half an hour. They broke my knee, crushed my hands and only stopped when they thought I was dead.”

Somehow, with the help of his friends, Sultan made it to hospital — but his life was still in danger. Instead of protecting him, he says, the police were working hand-in-hand with the gangs, and refused to file a case on his behalf.

Two days later he fled to Dhaka and spent three months in hospital there, four more in hospital in Thailand. Today, he holds a pen gingerly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He types with just one finger.

Outside Iraq, Bangladesh is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist, especially outside the relative safety of Dhaka, according to global press watchdogs. At least nine reporters have been killed since 2000, hundreds more beaten or intimidated into silence.

The threats come from Maoist rebels, religious terrorists, organised crime and even the political establishment. What’s worse, journalists say, they have almost no recourse to the law.

Reporters Without Borders says there was a physical attack on a journalist every two days on average in Bangladesh last year, and ranks Bangladesh 151 out of 167 countries for press freedom.

The Paris-based watchdog accuses Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia’s government of displaying “criminal ill will” in refusing to acknowledge violations of press freedom and other human rights.

“Violence against journalists, especially in the provinces, has continued to limit the possibility of freely covering key issues such as corruption, human rights violations and collusion between politicians and organised crime,” it said this year.

“The police and courts were unable to put an end to the impunity enjoyed by the activists of the ruling parties, especially the BNP youth, who attack journalists.”

Sultan was attacked in January 2001, before Zia’s Bangladesh National Party (BNP) won power. But little has changed, press groups say.

Nazmul Imam used to write about the links between drugs, crime and politicians in the western Kushtia region.

One report in February 2002 exposed the link between the emergence of militant groups in the area and the local administration, he said. That’s when the death threats started. Three months later, he was jumped by half a dozen thugs who cut him with knives and crushed his fingers with clubs.

“They were shouting ‘We are going to make sure you’re never able to write anything with these hands again’,” he said.

Imam, like Sultan, says the police were not interested in taking up his case until Amnesty International intervened.

Although a case has now been opened, he says the people who beat him are not being charged, and colleagues and friends listed as prosecution witnesses have been threatened not to testify.

Bangladesh’s government says the problem is grossly exaggerated and many of the journalists who are killed themselves have links with criminal groups, or are victims of local feuds.

The press, it says, enjoys complete freedom, but often abuses that freedom by writing articles criticising the government which are based on untrue or unsubstantiated information.

“The freedom of the press is maybe the best in the world,” Law Minister Moudud Ahmed told Reuters. “Print media and electronic media — you don’t know what they write about us, how they twist things and still we don’t interfere.”

Journalists in Bangladesh admit their profession is not always practised for the right reasons. Businessmen often start newspapers simply to gain access to the corridors of power; there are around 130 dailies published in Dhaka alone. Corruption is everywhere — Transparency International ranked Bangladesh bottom of its global corruption index in each of the past five years — and journalism is no exception.

Many senior journalists enjoy political patronage as a shortcut to wealth, reporters here claim.

But the bigger problem, analysts say, is Bangladesh’s deeply confrontational political culture and a lack of any middle ground. Some reporters shun the Press Club in Dhaka these days because to sit at any table is to immediately identify yourself with the government or with the opposition.

“The situation for journalists is miserable here,” said Joergen Lissner, the UN resident coordinator. “It is a very polarised society and it cannot live with any shade of grey.”

Reporters such as Sultan and Iman scorn the government’s claim that journalists are themselves to blame.

“Like any other profession there may be some bad people in journalism,” Sultan said. “But the really bad ones, they are not the targets, they compromise.

“Only good journalists, who do not compromise, who keep writing against bad people, they’re the ones who are targeted.”—Reuters