In early June, Bangladeshi police arrested more than 11,000 people it described as fundamentalist Muslims bent on destabilising the South Asian country. The arrests were a response to rising extremism, which has become strikingly visible since the recent spate of murders of secular bloggers, publishers, Hindu priests, Buddhist monks and a few foreigners, many of them brutally hacked to death.
Bangladesh is a secular country with Islam as its official religion; it also has a sizeable minority of Hindus, Buddhists Christians and others. The clash between fundamentalism and secularism is at the heart of Bangladesh’s current crisis. But that narrative is intertwined with two other clashes—over Bangladesh’s identity, whether it is a Bengali nation or a Muslim nation, and whether those responsible for war crimes during Bangladesh’s liberation war of 1971 should face justice or not. These three clashes now threaten the stability of the world’s eighth-most populous nation.
As the incidence of murders rose, foreign governments expressed concern that al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) had found a foothold in the country. But the Bangladesh government maintained that the threat was homegrown, blaming opposition parties and insisting that it was capable of handling the threat. When bloggers feeling threatened sought government protection, some were told to be careful, advising that in a conservative society nobody should offend religious sentiments. The lackadaisical approach of the government gave the extremists—some of whom had lived abroad and developed links with IS—a sense of impunity.
And then on 1st July Bangladeshi complacency was shattered. A group of terrorists went to Holey Artisan Bakery, a popular café in Banani, a stylish area of Dhaka. Banani is one of the three neighbourhoods in the capital collectively known as “Tri-state Area” (with neighbouring Baridhara and Gulshan); that Americanised reference shows how that area is like an island within this teeming megapolis. There are posher cars, quieter lanes, wealthier homes, expat-friendly restaurants, clubs, malls, embassies and supermarkets. The Holey Artisan Bakery has a lawn facing the lake where children play.
The terrorists who stormed the café were armed with grenades, guns, and machetes. They killed 20 people, including four Bangladeshis, and they singled out foreigners (nine Italians, seven Japanese, one Bangladeshi-American and one Indian). Several patrons escaped, and they spared Bangladeshi staff. Two police officers also died in the crossfire and several security personnel were injured.
"After killing the victims, the terrorists told the café’s staff to turn on the wi-fi network so they could upload photographs to the internet"One of the Bangladeshis killed was a chef shot, mistakenly, by security forces. One hero was Faraaz Hossain, a Bangladeshi studying in the United States but visiting home. The terrorists were willing to let him go, but eyewitnesses say he refused to leave his two friends (both young women, one Bangladeshi-American, the other Indian), who were also students in the US. So they killed all three. Another hero was Ishrat Akhond, a patron of the arts. The terrorists asked her to recite verses from the Koran, which she refused to do on principle. She was killed. Eventually, with the café in ruins, six of the terrorists were killed and one arrested.
Bangladeshi authorities have faced criticism for their inept response and failure to anticipate such an attack. Reports say that the terrorists had sent a warning that morning. The siege lasted several hours, and most accounts suggest that the killers were prepared to face death. Eyewitness reports in The New York Times indicate that after killing the victims, the terrorists told the café’s staff to turn on the wi-fi network so they could upload photographs to the internet.
As the images became visible, shocked Bangladeshis realised that the killers were not uneducated young men schooled in the many madrasas that have cropped up in many parts of Bangladesh, funded by, among others, Saudi Arabian donations. Instead three of them had studied at elite schools in Dhaka and gone to good universities; they were sons of wealthy families. One of the terrorists was the son of a ruling party politician. (Curiously, in the days following the attack, the local administration decided to clean up unauthorised restaurants and shops near the café, as though more terrorists were hiding there. Local analysts were quick to note the class dimension—the continued belief among some in the establishment that extremists only emerge out of poverty and deprivation).
The culprits were young men in their late teens or early twenties. IS promptly released photographs of them grinning with guns. They had all gone missing from their homes within the last year and had gone silent on social media. Their parents had alerted the police but they hadn’t been found. Their parents said they were ordinary, happy, well-adjusted children until their disappearance, and they were clueless about what could have gone wrong.
Their stories fit the pattern of other young, alienated and tech-savvy youth who have turned to al-Qaeda or IS in other parts of the world. Yet Bangladeshi leaders continue to blame local organisations; it seems they are still in denial about international networks penetrating the country. One minister said it has become “a fashion” to turn extremist, as if it were a lifestyle choice. Another official named Ansarul Bangla, a homegrown outfit linked with al-Qaeda, which has been blamed for the attacks on bloggers. Others have cited Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh and Jamaat-Shibir, the youth wing of the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami Party. Hizb-ut Tahrir, an organisation banned in several countries, has also been mentioned. A cable channel of a controversial Indian preacher was banned. Only mid-July did the authorities release the names of 10 suspects overseas, admitting that the attacks had an international dimension.
The ruling party Awami League asserts that terrorism is home-grown because it serves their domestic political purposes. For most of its young history, Bangladeshi politics has been paralysed by a feud between two parties. The Awami League, led by Prime Minister Hasina Wajed on the one side, carrying the legacy of her slain father and Bangladesh’s first elected prime minister and later president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; and on the other side, Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the widow of slain former President General Ziaur Rahman.
That feud is not likely to end soon. The BNP and its electoral ally the Jamaat-i-Islami Party boycotted the parliamentary elections in 2014, giving the Awami League a huge majority. Jamaat was out of the equation in any case, because it had refused to comply with the constitutional amendment in 2011 which made Bangladesh a secular republic again.
The relationship between Hasina and Khaleda is dysfunctional. In my new book, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy (Yale), I cite the recording of a conversation between the two leaders in which their conversation reeks of distrust that has grown out of old wounds and slights.
"The café attack brings into sharp focus the existential question that Bangladesh has had to confront since its birth"While that political dysfunction persists, IS has released a video in which young men who refer to Bangladesh as “Bengal” promise more mayhem not only in Bangladesh, but also in its neighbours, India and Burma. Bangladeshis have identified some of the young men—one of them was briefly a minor TV celebrity. Their threat to the wider region outside Bangladesh won’t go unnoticed in the neighbourhood. A Hindu nationalist government, whose ministers have often made statements critical of Muslims, rules India; Buddhist militants have terrorised Muslims, in particular Rohingyas, in the Rakhine (formerly known as Arakan) province of Burma, which borders Bangladesh.
The café attack changes the political dynamic dramatically. And it brings into sharp focus the existential question that Bangladesh has had to confront since its birth.
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Bangladesh left Pakistan after a violent civil war in 1971. It had been part of Pakistan, the Muslim state carved out of India when British rule ended in South Asia in 1947. Pakistan was divided into two halves, separated by hundreds of miles of Indian territory. Punjabi-speakers dominated west Pakistan; the main language in the east was Bengali. Pakistan’s raison d’etre was religion: the subcontinent’s Muslims wanted a separate state so that they would not get overwhelmed by the far more numerous Hindus. Religion was the glue to bind together the two halves—east and west Pakistan—with Urdu the national language. But those in the east spoke Bengali and had significant cultural differences with west Pakistan. They sought equal status for the Bengali language, but Pakistan’s leaders dismissed the plea. A movement to assert language rights was born in the east in 1952, and over time, east Pakistanis complained of economic, political, cultural and linguistic discrimination. In late 1970, a cyclone devastated east Pakistan, killing hundreds of thousands, and the slow response from the western half deepened alienation in the east.
In the first proper elections in Pakistan in late 1970, the east voted emphatically for the pro-autonomy Awami League, giving it a clear majority in the Pakistan national parliament, even though the Awami League had no presence in the west. Instead of inviting the Awami leader Mujibur Rahman to form the government, Pakistan’s then ruler General Yahya Khan offered talks. The negotiations kept stalling even as the government sent troops to the east. Demands for autonomy grew louder in east Pakistan, and in March 1971, Pakistan declared martial law. In the military crackdown that followed, hundreds of thousands of civilians died over nine months, some 10 million refugees left for India. India supported a guerrilla force called the Mukti Bahini, which fought for Bangladesh’s independence. In December that year, Pakistan attacked Indian airfields. India joined the war and defeated Pakistan in two weeks. The new nation of Bangladesh chose to be a secular republic.
The violence playing out today has its roots in that debate over whether Bangladesh was Muslim or Bengali. The answer was, of course, both. The Islam in Bangladesh was different from the Islam generally found in Pakistan—its culture was more syncretic, more open to other traditions, with a more liberal attitude towards the role of women, music and dance. To be sure there were Muslims Bangladesh who preferred stricter readings of Islam, and some had supported Pakistan during the Independence War—but they had lost the argument and the war.
In 1975, Mujibur Rahman and most of his family were assassinated. In the years that followed, there were several coups. Successive governments, including General Zia’s, began to tinker with the constitution, offering immunity to Mujibur Rahman’s killers, and allowing leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami to return to Bangladesh. Bangladesh even became an Islamic Republic. Zia was assassinated in 1981. One of the leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Mujibur Rahman ran for president in 1986; some others held prominent positions in the government. Later, the general’s widow Khaleda Zia revived the BNP and formed a government in an alliance with the Jamaat.
It was only after Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Sheikh Hasina Wajed was elected Prime Minister in 2009 that Bangladesh set up tribunals to prosecute the war crimes of 1971. During my travels in Bangladesh, I came across scores of people in each village or town that I visited who had lost loved ones, or knew someone who did, or knew of women who had been raped during the 1971 war. (I also interviewed 28 rape survivors). Their resentment at the lack of justice was palpable. They had seen individuals who had perpetrated crimes or benefited from those crimes. Many had escaped. They saw the tribunals as the means to secure justice.
Most of the men charged at the tribunals were leaders of the Jamaat. Four of its leaders (besides one BNP leader) have been convicted and executed; one died while in custody; and a few others have been sentenced to death or face life in jail. It is important to note that international human rights groups have criticised the tribunals for procedural flaws, and in several cases the flaws are serious. In one instance, a judge had to step aside after incriminating recordings emerged, in which he was heard consulting with activists who were campaigning for harsher punishment. In some instances witnesses have turned hostile, or there have been discrepancies in evidence. Fundamentalist Muslims are, not surprisingly, angry.
The issue reached a flashpoint in 2013 when Abdul Kader Mullah, a Jamaat leader who had been found guilty, was given life imprisonment. Thousands of Bangladeshis protested and laid siege to downtown Dhaka, demanding that the punishment should be increased to the death penalty. Fundamentalists from Hefazat-e-Islam responded with counter-demonstrations. (Prosecutors duly appealed the Mullah verdict, and later Mullah was executed). One of the young activists who campaigned for severe punishment for war crimes was Ahmed Rajib Haider, who was also known for his blogs critical of fundamentalist Islam. In February 2013 he was hacked to death.
"Unresolved arguments over the nature of justice, the role of religion, and the basis of national identity have all created this deadly confluence"In the years since, eight more writers and publishers have been murdered, and a few more injured severely in attacks. These include the rationalist author Avijit Roy who was murdered near the site of Bangladesh’s book fair (his wife Rafida Bonya Ahmed was severely injured); Roy’s publisher Faisal Abedin Deepan; and others who wrote for the rationalist blog, Mukto Mona (Free Mind). Most recently, Xulhaz Mannan, founder of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine, was murdered.
While pursuing the investigations, the government sent contradictory signals. Unwilling to alienate fundamentalist Muslims, senior Awami leaders chided the bloggers for writing that hurt others’ sentiments. Sajeeb Wajed, the prime minister’s son, said that the political situation in Bangladesh was too volatile for his mother to express public condolences for Avijit Roy’s murder. One blogger has stopped writing; another has been varying the route to work. At the annual book fair in Dhaka in February, the authorities cracked down on stalls set up by atheist publishers. In mid-July, three Baul singers were critically injured. Baul singers are Sufi Muslims whose music celebrates the region’s syncretic past, and their lyrics emphasise peace and harmony. Their alleged assailants were arrested on 18th July.
These attacks show how radically the situation has transformed. Dhaka has now joined Istanbul, Baghdad, Kabul, Paris, Brussels, Mumbai, London, New York, Bali, Bamako, and many other places around the world, which have been hit by terrorism. Unresolved arguments over the nature of justice, the role of religion, and the basis of national identity have all created this deadly confluence. The government has not been able to protect writers or cafe-goers, the textile trader or the troubadour, nor stop the machete or the machine gun.
Bangladesh needs to act. Its government needs to recognise that forces bigger than what domestic politics can unleash have now established themselves in the country, threatening to tear it apart. It needs to reassure its writers, bloggers, artists, musicians, religious and LGBT citizens, and all others fearing for their safety, that the government is on their side, and that it would protect their rights. It needs to rediscover the spirit of 1971, of a liberal, secular, democratic order, which wanted to build a nation with a dominant religion and a dominant language, but with a landscape vast enough for others to flourish. It is only then that Bangladesh will have an inspiring response to the poignant question posed by the poem inscribed at the martyrs’ memorial at Rayer Bazaar in Dhaka:
Tomader ja bolar chhilo bolchhey ki ta Bangladesh? (Does Bangladesh speak what you wanted to say?)
The answer is neither silence nor denial.
