Author: Sarbari Majumdar
Publication: Asia Times
Date: November 15, 2001
URL: http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CK15Dh02.html
It started as a trickle, developed
into a steady stream and is now threatening to turn into a tide spilling
over the borders of Bangladesh into India's northeastern states. Thousands
of Hindus and hundreds of Muslims who support the defeated Awami League
party have crossed over the border to India, carrying endless tales of
rape, torture and murder as well extortion and destruction of property.
It all started with the end of the
Awami League government's electoral rout in October 2000, in which it managed
to secure only 63 seats in the country's 300-member parliament. The Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP)-led ruling coalition won 202 seats. As former prime
minister Sheikh Hasina handed over power to a caretaker administration
last July, the first of the attacks against Hindus, who form 10 percent
of Bangaldesh's population, began. The caretaker chief, former Justice
Latifur Rehman, who has been accused of favoring the Muslim fundamentalist
anti-Awami League coalition, overlooked reports of the attacks by alleged
supporters of the now ruling coalition.
"They raped me and my nine-year-old
daughter. How can I stay in that country?" says Shefali Das, 40, of Bhola
in southern Bangladesh. Now a refugee in Bongaon, West Bengal, Shefali
lives in fear of being deported. "We have been threatened with death if
we go back. We have already lost our honor, now we will lose our lives,"
she says.
Leaders of Bangladesh's anti-fundamentalist
groups say the Hindus were targeted because they were seen as a huge Awami
League vote-bank. "But now they are attacked because our own bin Ladens
want to turn Bangladesh into a monolithic Islamic nation like Pakistan
or Afghanistan, in which Hindus have no place," declared Shahriyar Kabir,
acting chairman of a group called Committee Against the Killers of 1971,
in reference to the 1971 war with then West Pakistan.
Kabir said that the fundamentalists
were upset with the large number of Hindu voters in the October 1 parliamentary
election. "During previous military regimes, Hindus have been discouraged
from enrolling as voters. But the Awami League went about enrolling them
with great fairness," says Kabir. Consequently, the size of the Hindu electorate
jumped to a whopping 8.2 million this time around, almost one-sixth of
the total voters.
"If they had all voted, there was
no way the Awami League would have lost. But not more than 10 percent of
the Hindus could vote," says Kabir Choudhury of the South Asian Coalition
against Fundamentalism.
Recalls Jahar Saha of Bagerhat:
"Before the elections, we were taken to the local temple, made to prostrate
before the idol and to promise we will not vote. Those Hindus who went
to vote were told their votes had been cast and those who insisted were
beaten up."
Rubel Das of Barisal, now a refugee,
adds: "In my locality, we were told not to vote. When we went at the prodding
of the Awami League, we were forcibly thrown out. Men, women, everybody.
But we found some burqa-clad Muslim women going into the booth again and
again, casting their votes under the watchful eyes of armed Jamait-e-Islami
cadres."
More than 15,000 Hindus and another
2,000 Muslims who are supporters of the Awami League have entered West
Bengal in the past month, bringing stories of an orgy of attacks, rapes,
extortion and murders by supporters of the ruling coalition. More than
300 Awami League supporters and Hindus have been killed, according to a
compilation done by the South Asian Coalition against Fundamentalism. More
than 50 Hindu women and girls, some of them minors, have been gang-raped.
Hundreds of houses have been set on fire, it said.
"The opposition parties are exaggerating
these reports," Bangladesh's home minister, former Air Vice Marshal Altaf
Hussein Choudhury, said earlier. But this week, Prime Minister Begum Khaleda
Zia moved to set up a high-power inquiry and promised to protect the Hindus.
Meanwhile, Hindus claim they have
turned beggars overnight. Bidhu Das, 45, owned a merchandise store in Bhola
that employed 15 people until he fled. Now he cuts and sells grass in Swarupnagar,
north of Kolkata, to make only a few pennies a day. "We have been ruined
and destroyed," says Das.
Shamim Osman, the Awami League's
former member of parliament from Narayanganj, is also a refugee. The fundamentalists
bombed his office before the elections, killing 26 people. The army, which
was deployed to conduct elections, arrested his polling agents and did
not allow him to campaign. He lost the polls and immediately faced attacks.
Now sheltered with a Hindu friend
in Kolkata with more than 20 family members and as many political workers,
Osman says he is thinking of applying for asylum. "I will be killed if
I go back. The fundamentalist coalition is determined to break the political
support base of the Awami League and they will go to any extent to achieve
their aims. We have two options: launch an armed struggle against them
like we did against the Pakistanis in 1971 or escape with dear life," Osman
said.
Several former Awami League members
of parliament of and even district and village level leaders have been
forced to flee. Reporters Sans Frontieres says that many journalists are
being threatened for reporting the atrocities against the Hindus and opposition
party supporters.
The Awami League's Sheikh Hasina
has pleaded with the Hindus to "stay back and fight and not flee. This
is your land. Bangladesh belongs to Bengalis of all religions. We fought
the Pakistanis in 1971 to establish a liberal Bengali, and not an Islamic,
order in our beloved country. Hindus, please don't leave this land, your
departure will further weaken the secular forces here," Hasina told a mass
rally in Faridpur.
But the Bengali secular forces are
in a disarray and the Awami League says the attack is part of a diabolical
plan to "Talibanize" Bangladesh.
Former minister and freedom fighter
Abdur Razzaq says fundamentalist leaders such as the Jamait's Gholam Azam
have been saying that Bangladesh has to be taken back to the politics of
1947, to the two- nation principle that led to the partition of India.
"They want to undo the values of the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971.
They want to create a homogenous Muslim nation by driving out the Hindus.
But we will fight them with all we have. We will not allow Bangladesh to
become another Pakistan."
(Inter Press Service)
