A thread for the Sixth Anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory building collapse: #RanaPlazaNeverAgain

I've attempted to convey the story of Rana Plaza hundreds of times. I talk about it at every public event that I do and it informs every aspect of my writing.

It is not, however, my story to tell and it never will be.
What I have is what I saw and heard and felt as an outsider in the aftermath - the experiences I was entrusted with by people who needed to be heard.

These people include the mothers who never found the bodies of their daughters, the small children who were unable to bear school and spent their days shadowing, and clinging to, their remaining parent. The people who had limbs that had been crushed and amputated.

The story of Rana Plaza belongs to the people whose scars are not visible or physical.
What I remember most, more than seeing the rubble with its twisted metal and scraps of clothing, is the eyes of a woman who walked out of her home accompanied by her husband and small son.

Even in the daylight she had eyes like a hunted creature. She could not sleep from the nightmares, and was weighed down with the pain.
I often wonder what happened to her, did she find rest or peace?
There was no chance she could ever work in a factory ever again.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex sent a spiderweb of cracks out of Savar, along roads to a thousand villages who now had dead or traumatised family members.

It is forever lodged in the minds of the students, shopkeepers, and rickshaw drivers who rushed to the collapse and worked alongside rescue workers for days and days, pulling bodies out of rubble.

For the world outside of Dhaka, when the TV screens lit up, the death of 1,138 people and the brutal injury of thousands more, exposed a truth: the world has been twisted to value objects more than human life and dignity.

There was absolutely nothing accidental about the collapse. Nothing at all. Aside from the knowledge locally that the building was a death trap, Rana Plaza was an act of industrial homicide by an industry with a deliberate strategy of sourcing cheaply.

That rubble still holds the truth that some of the most powerful multinational corporations in the world sought out those spindly factories in order to evade the standards that keep people safe.

The resulting deaths showed another horrible truth - those picked to be made so unbearably unsafe, those whose lives were weighed and found to be worth less than profit, were women. In particular women in the poorest part of the Global South.

The story has not ended.
It goes on with the fight for fair & just conditions, it goes on every time trade unionists & workers are attacked and even killed.
Above all, for the Sixth Anniversary, it goes on with the protection of the @banglaccord to ensure #RanaPlazaNeverAgain