Author: Selig S. Harrison
Publication: Washington Post
Date: August 2, 2006
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101118.html
In Bangladesh, an Islamic Movement With Al-Qaeda
Ties Is on the Rise
While the United States dithers, a growing
Islamic fundamentalist movement linked to al-Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence
agencies is steadily converting the strategically located nation of Bangladesh
into a new regional hub for terrorist operations that reach into India and
Southeast Asia.
With 147 million people, largely Muslim Bangladesh
has substantial Hindu and Christian minorities and is nominally a secular
democracy. But the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) struck a Faustian
bargain with the fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami five years ago in order
to win power.
In return for the votes in Parliament needed
to form a coalition government, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has looked the
other way as the Jamaat has systematically filled sensitive civil service,
police, intelligence and military posts with its sympathizers, who have in
turn looked the other way as Jamaat-sponsored guerrilla squads patterned after
the Taliban have operated with increasing impunity in many rural and urban
areas.
To the dismay of her business supporters,
the prime minister gave the coveted post of industries minister to Matiur
Rahman Nizami, a high-ranking Jamaat official who has helped promote the growth
of a Jamaat economic empire that embraces banking, insurance, trucking, pharmaceutical
manufacturing, department stores, newspapers and TV stations. A study last
year by a leading Bangladeshi economist showed that the "fundamentalist
sector of the economy" earns annual profits of some $1.2 billion.
Now the BNP-Jamaat alliance is rigging the
next national elections, scheduled for January, to prevent the return of the
opposition Awami League to power. Voter lists are being manipulated, and the
supposedly neutral caretaker government and the commission that will run the
election are being turned into puppets.
The BNP argues that coalition rule helps moderates
in the Jamaat to combat Islamic extremist factions. But the reality is that
Jamaat inroads in the government security machinery at all levels, starting
with Home Secretary Muhammad Omar Farooq, widely regarded as close to the
Jamaat, have opened the way for suicide bombings, political assassinations,
harassment of the Hindu minority, and an unchecked influx of funds from Islamic
charities in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to Jamaat-oriented madrassas
(religious schools) that in some cases are fronts for terrorist activity.
With some 15,000 hard-core fighters operating
out of 19 known base camps, guerrilla groups sponsored by the Jamaat and its
allies were able to paralyze the country last Aug. 17 by staging 459 closely
synchronized explosions in all but one of the country's administrative districts.
When the key leaders of these groups were captured, they were kept by the
police in a comfortable apartment, where they were free to receive visitors.
A cartoon in the Daily Star of Dhaka on July 24 showed them lounging on a
rug, conducting classes in bombmaking. Their fate and present place of confinement
is uncertain, and all of the major guerrilla groups are back to business as
usual.
The bitterness of Bangladeshi politics is
often attributed to a personal vendetta between two strong women, Prime Minister
Zia and the Awami League leader, Sheikh Hasina Wajed. But the roots of the
current struggle go back to 1971, when Bengali East Pakistan, led by the Awami
League, broke away from Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan to form the nation
of Bangladesh. The Jamaat, which originated in the western wing, opposed the
independence movement and fought side by side with Pakistani forces against
both fellow Bengalis and the Indian troops who intervened in the decisive
final phase of the conflict.
For Pakistan's intelligence agencies, especially
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the legacy of the independence war has
been a built-in network of agents within the Jamaat and its affiliates who
can be utilized to harass India along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh.
In addition to supporting tribal separatist groups in northeast India, the
ISI uses Bangladesh as a base for helping Islamic extremists inside India.
After the July 11 train bombings in Bombay, a top Indian police official,
K.P. Raghuvanshi, said that his key suspects "have connections with groups
in Nepal and Bangladesh, which are directly or indirectly connected to Pakistan."
A State Department report cited evidence that
one of the Jamaat's main allies, the Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, also headquartered
in Pakistan, "maintains contact with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan." Bangladesh
Harakat leader Fazlul Rahman was one of the six signatories of Osama bin Laden's
first declaration of holy war against the United States, on Feb. 23, 1998.
Since the October 2002 Bali bombings led to repression of al-Qaeda, some of
its Indonesian and Malaysian cells have shifted their operations to Bangladesh.
What makes future prospects in Bangladesh
especially alarming is that the Jamaat and its allies appear to be penetrating
the higher ranks of the armed forces. Among many examples, informed journalists
in Dhaka attribute Jamaat sympathies to Maj. Gen. Mohammed Aminul Karim, recently
appointed as military secretary to President Iajuddin Ahmed, and to Brig.
Gen. A.T.M. Amin, director of the Armed Forces Intelligence anti-terrorism
bureau.
The respected journalists in question cannot
write freely about the Jamaat without facing death threats or assassination
attempts. The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists has published extensive
dossiers documenting 68 death threats and dozens of bombing attacks that have
injured at least eight journalists. "We are alarmed by the growing pattern
of intimidation of journalists by Islamic groups in Bangladesh," the
committee said recently. "As a result of its alliance with the Jamaat-Islamiyah,
the government appears to lack the ability or will to protect journalists
from this new and grave threat."
The Bush administration has yet to speak with
comparable candor. The latest State Department annual report on terrorism
mentioned only one of the three Jamaat militias as a terrorist group and avoided
direct criticism of the BNP for its coalition with the Jamaat, referring only
to the "serious political constraints" that explain the government's
"limited success" in countering "escalating" terrorist
violence. On July 13 the U.S. ambassador called Bangladesh "an exceptional
moderate Muslim state."
The United States and other donors gave Bangladesh
$1.4 billion in aid last year. There is still time for the administration
to use aid leverage and trade concessions to promote a fair election by calling
openly and forcefully for nonpartisan control of the Election Commission and
the caretaker government. In addition to implicitly threatening an aid cutoff
if it is rebuffed, the administration should offer the powerful incentive
of duty-free textile imports from Bangladesh if Prime Minister Zia cooperates.
In Pakistan, the United States has been gingerly
pushing Gen. Pervez Musharraf for democratic elections because it needs the
limited but significant support he is giving against al-Qaeda and fears what
might come after him. But what is the excuse for inaction in Bangladesh, where
the incumbent government coddles Islamic extremists and a strong secular party
is ready to govern?
The writer, a former South Asia bureau chief
of The Post and the author of five books on South Asia, has covered Bangladesh
since 1951. He is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International
Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars.
