National Monument of Bangladesh

The Real Source of Terror in Bangladesh

Source: NY Times

By William B. Milam, who is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Last weekend a Buddhist monk was hacked to death, presumably with a machete, in southeastern Bangladesh. The week before, it was a Sufi Muslim leader, up north. Less than two weeks earlier, it was an L.G.B.T. activist. Just days before that, an English professor.

Some of these attacks have not yet been claimed, but they follow a gruesome pattern: There have been at least 25 violent, sometimes public, killings of religious minorities, secularists and free-speech advocates in Bangladesh since February 2015. A dozen more people have been assaulted in similar ways and survived.

Of these attacks, more than 20 have been claimed by the Islamic State, about half a dozen by Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and one each by the indigenous Bangladeshi extremist groups Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Ansar al-Islam.

The surge is worrying Western governments, which fear that local Islamist terrorists may now be competing for the attention of international jihadist networks or cooperating with them. Several Western countries have responded with antiterrorism measures: Japan is providing aviation security; the United States has called for strengthening cooperation with the Bangladeshi authorities to counter terrorism and violent extremism.

This is a predictable reaction, but it is misguided, and dangerous, because it proceeds from the wrong diagnosis.

The recent string of vicious killings in Bangladesh is less a terrorism issue than a governance issue: It is the ruling Awami League’s onslaught against its political opponents, which began in earnest after the last election in January 2014, that has unleashed extremists in Bangladesh.

A zero-sum mentality has been the rule of Bangladeshi politics since the end of the military dictatorship in 1991. Between then and 2007, the country’s two main parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (B.N.P.), traded power every term. Whichever one was leading the government focused on enriching itself and weakening the other. That left the private sector largely alone to invest in economic expansion and NGOs to provide education, health care and other social services the government wasn’t delivering.

In some respects, the government’s failure to do its job served the country well: The economy has grown by an average of 5-6 percent annually over the last two decades; Bangladesh has outdone India and Pakistan on various social development indicators, such as health care and education. But the country’s political culture steadily deteriorated.

Read further

The Muslim Times’ solution: If Bangladesh Supreme Court could define free speech and its limitations; peace and order could be restored. Article 10 of European Convention of Human Rights tries to do that