Freiheit für Moshrefa Mishu!

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URGENT. Release Garment Workers Leader Moshrefa Mishu immediately, arrested on fabricated charges

Please circulate this message as widely as possible, and do everything you can think of. Rahnuma Ahmed.

Officers of the Detective Branch of police picked up labour leader Moshrefa Mishu, president of Garments Workers Unity Forum, from her home in Dhaka a little after midnight.

According to news reports, her sister Jebunnesa Jebu who lives with Mishu, said she was was taken away to the Detective Branch Headquarters for interrogation around 12:45am, 14 December 2010.

About a dozen police officers, in plain clothes except one, carried out the raid on the labour leader’s Bhuter Gali home in Kalabagan. The officers did not show any arrest warrant, said Jebunnesa, nor did they explain why she was being led away. After having initially denied her arrest, she has now been charged by the police with having instigated garment workers to go `berserk’ at Kuril.

The arrest occurred three days after thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers picketed factories in Dhaka demanding the implementation of a new minimum wage that should have come into effect last month. Demonstrations and picketing spread to the Chittagong EPZ, three people were killed and 225 injured in police clashes in Chittagong on Sunday. Police have arrested 33 people and lodged three separate cases against about 30,000 unknown people for Sunday’s deadly violence in the port city.

More than three million people, most of them women, work in Bangladesh’s garment factories, which make clothes for major Western brands, this includes Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer and Carrefour.

State repression (killing, baton charges, firing tear gas, filing cases) upon workers who are fighting for implementation of wages officially agreed upon, makes a mockery of the democratic principles that Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government claims to uphold. It is a matter of urgent concern that the police should release Moshrefa Mishu immmediately. The government should also release all garment workers who have been arrested, lift the cases against large numbers of people which is aimed at intimidating workers who are fighting for their rights, and should force factory owners to pay wages agreed upon earlier.