The Sheikh Hasina Government has largely been successful in bringing the culprits to book but the threats of violence are far from over
The Sylhet Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal sentenced four persons to death for killing writer-blogger Ananta Bijoy Das, in Sylhet, Bangladesh, on May 12, 2015. Of the four — Abul Khaer Rashid Ahmed, Abul Hossain alias Abul Hussain, Haranur Rashid and Faisal Ahmed — Abul Khaer is in custody. The rest are absconding. The judgment is significant. It focuses on the violent challenge that extremist Islamist terrorist organisations pose to Bangladesh and its secular, democratic humanist civil society, including bloggers who are often atheists decrying religion.
Militant fundamentalist Islamist parties like the Jama’at-e-Islami Bangladesh (Jama’at) and associated organisations like Razakars, al-Badr and al-Shams, which collaborated with, and participated in, the horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War, crawled into the woodwork, as some of their leaders fled abroad, after Bangladesh’s liberation on December 16, 1971. They resurfaced following Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination on August 15, 1975, and were actively promoted by the regimes of the two military dictators, Generals-turned-President Zia-ur Rahman and HM Ershad, and the pseudo-civilian Governments which wielded power periodically, that followed. The support continued under the two Governments headed by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia (1991-96 and 2001-06) — the second in coalition with the Jama’at.
The elements clustered around the Jama’at and allied organisations received a boost from the Mujahideen’s victory over Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan (December 27, 1979 to February 15, 1989) and the victory of the Taliban, which was formed in 1994 and came to rule almost the whole of Afghanistan from September 1997. Organisations like the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami-Bangladesh (HUJIB), Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) unleashed violence on a massive scale that shook Bangladesh.
The United States and other western countries, which had become extremely uneasy since the late 1990s over the medieval, retrogressive polices of the Taliban Government in Afghanistan, and the al-Qaeda’s terrorist strikes against the US and other western countries, pressed hard on Begum Zia’s Government to act. More serious efforts followed the ascent to power of the second Awami League-led Government, with Sheikh Hasina as Prime Minister, in 2009. The resultant measures caused some subsidence in lawlessness, and the terrorist organisations to go underground.
Two terrorist organisations that rose to salience in their place and made their existence known are Ansar-al Islam, earlier known as Ansarullah Bangla Team, affiliated to Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), and Daesh affiliated to the parent Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They have played a major role in the murder of bloggers, which began with the killing of Ahmed Rajib Haider in Dhaka on February 15, 2013.
The attacks on bloggers followed a series of developments that began with an amendment of the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act of 1973 enacted for investigation into the activities — and prosecution of — persons guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes under international law, during the Liberation War. The Act was amended in 2009 and two International Crimes Tribunals were established in 2010 and 2012 respectively to try war criminals and collaborators. Jama’at and allied organisations, whose leaders had collaborated with the Pakistanis and perpetrated unspeakable atrocities themselves, sprang into violent opposition which grew in spread and intensity as sentences were announced.
Others, however, felt that the sentences were not harsh enough. Matters came to a head when Abdul Quader Mollah, assistant secretary, Jama’at, was sentenced to life imprisonment on February 5, 2013, on six counts of crimes against humanity. While the Jama’at reacted violently, large-scale protests broke out demanding the death sentence to Mollah and others convicted of war crimes. Raising these demands, thousands of people, a majority of them students and youth, began collecting at Dhaka’s Shahbag intersection. The gathering became massive and the movement spread to other parts of Bangladesh. Finally, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court overturned the verdict and sentenced Mollah to death. He was hanged in a Dhaka jail on December 12, 2013.
Opponents of the war crimes trials responded with murder. As seen above, machete-wielding activists of the Ansarullah Bangla Team (subsequently Ansar-al Islam), killed blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider, who had been active in the Shahbag gathering, in Dhaka on February 15, 2013. Other killings followed. Those murdered included not only bloggers but LGBT activists, Shias, Hindus academics — indeed, all opposed to religious bigotry and supportive of humanism, secularism and rationalism. Professor Ali Riaz wrote in ‘Bangladesh: Islamist Militancy, Democracy Deficit and Where to Next?’ in Al Jazeera (June 28, 2016), “At least 49 people have been killed in the last 17 months.” The objective was simple — to create a climate of terror in which nobody would speak out against the warped worldview of fundamentalist terrorists and allied organisations.
Resolute counter-terrorist operations, galvanised by the dastardly attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka on July 1, 2016, in which 20 persons, including 18 foreigners and women, were savagely killed along with five terrorists killed by Bangladeshi Army commandos, have caused the violence to ebb. Nevertheless, it continues — the anti-Hindu riots from October 13 to 19 last year, during which at least 11 persons, including seven Hindus, were killed, was clearly the work of Islamist terrorist organisations. Sheikh Hasina’s Government, which took stern action, needs to be vigilant.
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal.)