Author: Bertil Lintner
Publication: Asia Times
Date: September 21, 2002
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/DI21Df06.html
Among the more than 60 videotapes
that the American cable television network CNN obtained from al-Qaeda's
archives in Afghanistan in August this year, one marked "Burma" (Myanmar)
purports to show Muslim "allies" training in that country. While the group
shown, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), was founded by Rohingya
Muslims from Myanmar's Rakhine State and claims to be fighting for autonomy
or independence for its people, the tape was, in fact, shot in Bangladesh.
The RSO, and other Rohingya factions,
have never had any camps inside Myanmar, only across the border in Bangladesh.
The camp in the video is located near the town of Ukhia, southeast of Cox's
Bazaar, and not all of the RSO's "fighters" are Rohingyas from Myanmar.
The Rohingyas, who are Muslims and
speak the same language as the population in the Chittagong area of Bangladesh,
are not regarded by the government in Yangon as an indigenous race. Hundreds
of thousands of them fled across the border to Bangladesh during a crackdown
in 1978, and militant groups soon emerged among the refugees. The UN eventually
intervened, and most of the Rohingyas were repatriated to Myanmar. However,
in 1991 and 1992, another wave of 250,000 refugees came across the border,
and while most of them have also been repatriated, more than 20,000 remain
in United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) supervised camps
southeast of Cox's Bazaar. An estimated 100,000 Rohingyas live outside
the UNHCR's camps, and it is among these destitute and stateless people
that various Islamist militant groups have found fertile ground for recruitment.
The RSO was set up in the early
1980s when radical elements among the Rohingyas broke away from the more
moderate main grouping, the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF). Led by a medical
doctor from Arakan, Muhammad Yunus, it soon became the main and most militant
faction among the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and on the border. Given its
more rigid religious stand, the RSO soon secured the support of like-minded
groups in the Muslim world. These included the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh
and Pakistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan, Hizb-ul-
Mujahideen (HM) in Jammu and Kashmir, and Angkatan Belia Islam sa-Malaysia
(ABIM) - the Islamic Youth Organization of Malaysia. Afghan instructors
have been seen in some of the RSO camps along the Bangladesh-Burma border,
while nearly 100 RSO rebels were reported to have undergone training in
the Afghan province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen.
The RSO's main military camp was
located near the hospital that the Rabitat-al-Aalam-al-Islami had built
at Ukhia. At this stage, the RSO acquired a substantial number of Chinese-made
RPG-2 rocket launchers, light machine-guns, AK-47 assault rifles, claymore
mines and explosives from private arms dealers in the Thai town of Aranyaprathet
near the border with Cambodia, which in the 1980s emerged as a major arms
bazaar for guerrilla movements in the region. These weapons were siphoned
off from Chinese arms shipments to the resistance battling the Vietnamese
army in Cambodia, and sold to any one who wanted, and could afford, to
buy them.
The Bangladeshi media gave extensive
coverage to the RSO buildup along the border, but it soon became clear
that it was not only Rohingyas who were undergoing training in its camps.
Many, it turned out, were members of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the
youth organization of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami, and came from the University
of Chittagong, where a "campus war" was being fought between Islamist militants
and more moderate student groups. The RSO was, in fact, engaged in little
or no fighting inside Myanmar.
It is unclear when the now-famous
videotape was shot, but it presumably dates from the early 1990s, since
by the late 1990s the RSO's training camps southeast of Cox's Bazaar were
taken over by Bangladeshi Islamist militants. Bangladesh's main militant
outfit, the Hakrat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), was formed in 1992, allegedly
with financial support from Osama bin Laden himself. HuJI now has an estimated
strength of 15,000 followers and is led by Shawkat Osman aka Maulana or
Sheikh Farid in Chittagong. Its members were recruited mainly from students
of Bangladesh's more than 60,000 madrassas (religious schools) and called
themselves the Bangladeshi Taliban. The group has become notorious for
masterminding violent attacks on Bangladesh's Hindu minority, as well as
on moderate Bangladeshi Muslims. In a statement released by the US State
Department on May 21, 2002, HuJI was described as a terrorist organization
with ties to Islamist militants in Pakistan.
The existence of firm links between
the new Bangladeshi militants and al-Qaeda is established through Fazlul
Rahman, leader of the "Jihad Movement in Bangladesh" (to which the HuJI
belongs), when he signed the official declaration of jihad against the
United States on February 23, 1998. Other signatories included bin Laden,
Ayman al-Zawahiri (leader of the Jihad Group in Egypt), Rifa'i Ahmad Taha
aka Abu-Yasir (Egyptian Islamic Group) and Sheikh Mir Hamzah (secretary
of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan).
HuJI sent its own people, as well
as Rohingya recruits, to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The Rohingyas, especially, were given the most dangerous tasks in the battlefield,
clearing mines and portering. According to intelligence sources, Rohingya
recruits were paid 30,000 Bangladeshi taka (US$525) on joining and then
10,000 taka per month. The families of recruits killed in action were offered
100,000 taka. (While these appear to be small sums in dollar terms, they
are princely amounts in a country where the annual per capita income works
out to a bare $380.) Recruits were taken mostly via Nepal to Pakistan,
where they were trained and sent on to military camps in Afghanistan. It
is not known how many people from this part of Bangladesh - Rohingyas and
others - fought in Afghanistan, but the number is believed to be quite
substantial. Others have gone to Kashmir and even Chechnya to join forces
with Islamist militants there.
In an interview with the CNN in
December 2001, American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh relates that
the al-Qaeda-directed Ansar (Companions of the Prophet) Brigades, to which
he had belonged in Afghanistan, were divided along linguistic lines: Bengali,
Pakistani (Urdu) and Arabic, which suggests that the Bengali-speaking component
- Bangladeshi and Rohingya - must have been significant. It is now also
becoming clear that some militants fleeing the American strikes in Afghanistan
in late 2001 have ended up in Bangladesh. With the heavy American presence
in Pakistan, many militants who fled Afghanistan in October and November
2001 have found it safer to hide in third countries. In early 2002, a ship
reportedly sailed from Karachi to Chittagong carrying assorted militants
from Afghanistan.
On May 10-11 2002, nine Islamist
fundamentalist groups, including HuJI, met at a camp near Ukhia South and
formed the Bangladesh Islamic Manch (association). The new umbrella organization
includes groups purporting to represent the Rohingyas and the Muslim Liberation
Tigers of Assam (MULTA), a small group operating in India's northeast.
By June, Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan were
reported to be training members of the new alliance in at least two camps
in southern Bangladesh.
An internal document from HuJI lists
no less than 19 "training establishments" all over Bangladesh, but it is
uncertain how many of them actually offer military training. What is certain,
however, is that since a new coalition government led by the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP) took over in October 2001, Bangladesh's Islamist
militants have become more vocal and active. The coalition includes, for
the first time, two ministers from the Jamaat. The four- party electoral
alliance that brought the new coalition government to power also includes
a smaller Islamic party, the Islamic Oikya Jote, whose chairman, Azizul
Huq, is a member of HuJI's advisory council.
The Bangladeshi authorities have
shown no sign of being willing to crack down on these groups and their
activities. On the contrary, after some adverse international publicity
about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in Bangladesh earlier this year,
the government cracked down on the most moderate of the Rohingya factions,
the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO), in Chittagong and Cox's
Bazaar. ARNO has no known links to al-Qaeda or any of Bangladesh's groups
of Islamist militants. It issued a strong statement condemning the crackdown
and disassociating itself from the militants. The RSO, on the other hand,
was not targeted by the Bangladeshi authorities.
For many years, Bangladesh was seen
as a moderate, even liberal, Muslim country. This is evidently changing,
and the formation of the Bangladesh Islamic Manch in May this year clearly
indicates that cooperation between the country's Islamist militants is
becoming closer. The presence of trainers from Afghanistan and the arrival
of more militants with al-Qaeda connections, demonstrate their participation
in an international terrorist network.
(Bertil Lintner is a senior writer,
Far Eastern Economic Review)
