Home >> South Asia >> India, Pakistan & Bangladesh

     Email   Print 

The Rise of Islamist Extremism in Bangladesh

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury - 4/22/2008

Many will raise one question whenever someone would meet a journalist willing to know about rise of radical Islam in Asia – is Islamist extremism on rise in Bangladesh? Over recent years, Islamist schools have proliferated and extremist groups have become more vocal in Bangladesh, the world's third most populous Muslim country. Internationally acclaimed writer Bertil Lintner says.

In the general election in October 2001, the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as Bangladesh's third largest party, capturing 17 seats in the 300-strong parliament. The staunchly secular and mildly leftist Awami League (AL), which had been in power since 1996, was ousted. It was replaced by a new coalition led by the rightist Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and including the Jamaat, which was allotted two cabinet posts.

The Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), a well-respected local non-governmental organization (NGO), quotes a local report that says non Muslim minorities have suffered as a result: "The intimidation of the minorities, which had begun before the election, became worse afterwards." Amnesty International reported in December 2001 that Hindus - who make up less than 10% of Bangladesh's population of 130m - in particular have come under attack. Hindu places of worship have been ransacked; villages destroyed and more than 100 Hindu women are reported to have been raped.

While Jamaat is not directly behind these attacks, its inclusion in government has meant that more radical groups feel they now enjoy protection from the authorities and can act with impunity. The most militant group, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), is reported to have 15,000 members. Hindus and moderate Bangladeshi Muslims hold them responsible for many of the attacks against religious minorities, secular intellectuals and journalists.

Jamaat's stand on the 'war against terrorism', however, contrasts sharply to that of the more established parties. Shortly after the US attacks on Afghanistan began in October 2001, Jamaat created a fund for "helping the innocent victims of America's war". According to Jamaat, TK 12 million (US$210,000) was raised before the effort was discontinued in March. Remaining funds, Jamaat says, will go to Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan.

Anti-US rhetoric has continued. In December 2001, Maulana Ubaidul Haq, the then khatib (grand cleric), of Bangladesh's national mosque, Baitul Mukarram, and a Jamaat associate, publicly condemned the US war on terror and urged followers to wage holy war against the USA. "President Bush and America is the most heinous terrorist in the world. Both America and Bush must be destroyed. The Americans will be washed away if Bangladesh's 120 million Muslims spit on them," the cleric told a gathering of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims which included several high-ranking government officials.

According to sources, HUJI was formed in 1992 with the aid of Osama bin Laden. Originally, it consisted of Bangladeshis who had fought as volunteers in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The existence of firm links between Bangladeshi militants and Al-Qaeda was proven when Fazlur Rahman, leader of 'the jihad Movement in Bangladesh', signed the official declaration of 'holy war' against the USA on February 23, 1998. Other signatories included Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri leader of the Jihad Group in Egypt, Rifa'i Ahmad Taha aka AbuYasir (Egyptian Islamic Group), and Sheikh Mir Hamzah, (secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan).

Cadres for the militant organizations have been recruited from the thousands of Madrassas (Islamic schools), that have mushroomed throughout the country. Many are located along the Indian border in the west and north, where young radicals from both countries are taught the virtues of orthodox Islam. Funding for the Madrassas comes from donations from local communities and international Islamic charities, such as the Saudi Arabia based and immensely wealthy Rabitat Al Alam Al Islami.

The Madrassas fill an important function in a country where basic education is available only to a few, especially in the impoverished countryside, but, as Bangladeshi journalist Salahuddin Babar said: "Once the students graduate from the Madrassas, they either join mosques as imams or similar religious-related jobs. There are hundreds of thousands of mosques, so there is employment in that field. But they find it difficult to get employment in secular institutions. Certain quarters grab this opportunity to brainwash them, make them into religious fanatics rather than modern Muslims."

A retired civil servant has called the Madrassas a "potential political time bomb". According to latest estimates, there are at least 64,000 in Bangladesh, most of which are beyond any form of governmental control or supervision. Moderate Muslims note that the Taliban was born in similar Madrassas in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and in Afghan refugee camps, where they promoted a new radical and extremely militant model for 'Islamic revolutions'.

Another breeding ground for religious extremism is the lawless southeast, including the border with Myanmar. With its fluid population and weak law enforcement, the region has long been a haven for smugglers, gun runners, pirates, and ethnic insurgents from across the Myanmar border. It is also a traditional stronghold for Jamaat and, in particular, its militant youth organization, Islami Chhatra Shibir. The past decade has seen a massive influx of weapons, especially small arms, through the fishing port of Cox's Bazar, which has made the situation in the southeast even more dangerous and volatile.

In one of the most recent high-profile attacks, Gopal Krishna Muhuri, the 60-year-old principal of Nazirhat College in Chittagong and a leading secular humanist, was gunned down in November 2001 in his home by four hired assassins, who belonged to a gang patronized by the Jamaat, according to local sources.

Much of the violence in the Chittagong-Cox's Bazar area has been blamed on the Rohingyas, a refugee community of Muslims from Myanmar's Arakan State. In 1991, over 250,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh, claiming religious persecution in Myanmar. They were sheltered in more than 20 camps near the border south and east of Cox's Bazar. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) managed to repatriate most of them, but an estimated 20,000 destitute refugees remain in two camps between Cox's Bazar and the border, which is heavily mined in some areas on the Myanmar side to prevent smuggling and cross border guerrilla activities. There is also an undisclosed number of Rohingyas living in villages outside the UNHCR supervised camps. In one village, Gumdrum, located only a few hundred meters from the Myanmar border, virtually everyone is of Rohingya descent. Some are recent arrivals, while others have settled here over the past three or four decades. According to officials, new refugees arrive daily.

In January 2001, Bangladesh clamped down on Rohingya activists and offices in Chittagong and Cox's Bazar. Hundreds were rounded up, and the local press was full of reports of their alleged involvement in gun- and drug-running. Local Rohingya leaders vehemently deny such accusations, and refute claims that they are connected with Islamic fundamentalist groups in and outside Bangladesh: "These are pure fabrications to discredit us," said Nurul Islam, president of the Arakan Rohingya National Organization, a moderate Rohingya group active in the border areas. Another Rohingya spokesman blamed local Bangladeshi gangs with high-level connections for the violence, smuggling and lawlessness in the area. The paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles have also been accused of involvement in smuggling activities around Cox's Bazar.

There is little doubt that extremist groups have taken advantage of the disenfranchised Rohingyas, including recruiting them as cannon fodder for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In an interview with the Karachi-based newspaper, Ummat on 28 September 2001, Bin Laden said: "There are areas in all parts of the world where strong Jihadist forces are present, from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan, and from Myanmar to Kashmir." He was most probably referring to a small group of Rohingyas on the Bangladesh-Myamnar border.

Many of the recruits were given the most dangerous tasks in the battlefield, clearing mines and portering. According to Asian intelligence sources, recruits were paid TK 30,OOO ($525) on joining and then Tk10,OOO ($175) per month. The families of recruits killed in action were offered TK 100,000 ($1,750). 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.

According to Asian intelligence reports, many of HUJI's members may also have been recruited from Rohingya settlements in the southeastern corner of the country HUJI is headed by an extremist cleric from Chittagong, Maulana Sheikh Farid, who also maintains links with like-minded groups in Pakistan.

How extremism penetrated in Bangladesh:

For years, they gathered in hidden training camps, mosques, and madrassahs, learning how to use weapons and build bombs. In their diaries they scrawled slogans of political alienation. On Aug. 17, their ideology culminated in a series of nearly 500 bomb blasts that shook the nation and killed three people.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Bangladesh is confronting a realization long suspected but consistently overlooked: Islamist militant groups have taken firm root here, demonstrating a widespread, highly coordinated, and well-funded network. The government, after consistently denying the threat, recently blamed Jama'atul Mujahedin Bangladesh (JMB), for the attack.

Bangladesh is not supposed to be a breeding ground of extremism. Although one of the world's poorest countries, it is often lauded as a development success story. Poverty rates have declined, life expectancy is up, and the economy has consistently grown by 5 percent annually for years - above average for most developing nations.

But remarkable development and extremism are not mutually exclusive. The rise of JMB, observers say, shows how homegrown militancy, invigorated by foreign funds and leadership radicalized in Afghanistan, has flourished here because of growing economic inequalities and acrimonious politics that have crippled the functioning of democracy.

"Because [Bangladesh] is seen as this development success story, it's fallen under the radar," says Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the US Institute of Peace in Washington. "There's too much at stake here. Until now, we could say this is a really good example of Islam and democracy coexisting."

Since the Aug. 17 attacks, police have arrested more than 300 people and begun to understand more about the JMB. The group was banned in February after members confessed to bombing 'un-Islamic' targets, including theater shows and the offices of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Shykh Abdur Rahman, the spiritual head of the organization, who had been executed by hanging by Bangladesh government in 2007, told the press few years back that he admired the Taliban and had traveled to Afghanistan. He claimed his organization had been operating underground since 1998, with the aim of founding an Islamic state. His network was active across the country, he said, with 10,000 trained full-time operatives, and 100,000 part-time activists, funded with a payroll of more than $10,000 a month, a huge sum by Bangladeshi standards.

The government has been following the money trail and working with the country's banks to identify suspicious accounts and transactions, some possibly originating abroad. "They've received monetary help from Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Pakistan," says a retired police investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They first started in 1989 during the Afghan war."

Another JMB leader, Muhammad Asadullah Al-Galib, who was arrested after the February crackdown, is alleged by intelligence agencies to have received large funding from the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based organization. In 2002, the US State Department blacklisted some RIHS offices, citing their support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. RIHS and Galib's organization have reportedly constructed over 1,000 mosques across Bangladesh and 10 Madrassas.

But analysts say foreign support is only part of the equation, arguing that extremism has found room to flourish because Islamist politics are gaining ground here. The ruling BNP party, they point out, came to power in 2001 by forming a coalition with two Islamist parties, Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikye Jote, which together hold 20 seats in parliament.

"The rise of Islamist parties creates a permissive environment, making it difficult to crackdown on militants when the people in power are aligned with Islamist politics," says Ms. Fair.

There is no proof linking terrorist activities to the Jamaat Party, but militants arrested over the past two years have claimed links to local-level Jamaat members, while police have described others as former members of Jamaat's student wing.

The Jamaat Party, however, denies these allegations. "The number is very low. It's not proof that Jamaat-e-Islami was involved in terrorist activities," says Kamaruzzaman.

Critics of Jamaat are not convinced. Abul Barakat, an economist at Dhaka University, says he's spent the past seven years tracing Jamaat's growing financial power. What he discovered frightened him. "Their central vision is to capture state power," he says, adding the party generates almost $200 million in annual profit, according to his analysis of Jamaat-owned businesses, which he says runs the gamut from banks and insurance companies to technology and media concerns. "They are an economy within the economy - a state within a state," he says, with some profits used to fund militant organizations like JMB.

Kamaruzzaman denies that Jamaat sponsors or patronizes any violent activities: "We have no secret agenda."

Critics like Professor Barakat see the rise of Islamism as a failure of the democratic process here. Democratic institutions, they say, have been paralyzed by corruption and the enmity between the ruling BNP and the opposition Awami League. Both parties, when not in power, boycott parliamentary sessions and implement nationwide strikes.

"Democracy has gone far downhill since it came in 1991," says William Milam, a former US ambassador to Bangladesh. "Bangladesh is really not a democracy because the government which is elected freely and fairly cannot govern - and that applies to both parties."

Bangladeshi political observers agree, noting that the two parties immediately accused each other after the Aug. 17 attacks, instead of uniting to condemn it, as many had hoped.

Economic inequalities are rising against the backdrop of declining governance, adding fuel to the extremist fire. "Although we have reduced poverty over the last few years by about a percentage a year, inequality is still increasing," said Mustafizur Rahman, research director of the Center for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka. He points out that many of the militants arrested in the wake of Aug. 17 have been from the lowest class of society.

Arresting the culprits, say security experts, now requires the cooperation of the mainstream parties. "This blaming game always demoralizes the investigators," says A.S.M. Shahjahan, a former Inspector General of Bangladesh Police. "Consensus is a must for the people to come together as a bulwark against this. That is the need of the hour."

Degree of Islamist extremism:

Some analysts believe the as yet unscheduled 2007 election in Bangladesh will at least in part be a referendum on the Bangladesh National Party’s (BNP) government and the opposition Awami League’s (AL) competing visions for Bangladesh. The roughly even political split between the BNP and the AL has given small Islamist parties a political voice disproportionate with their overall electoral support in the country. The BNP, by ruling in coalition with Islamist parties, has demonstrated its willingness to work with radical Islamists, while the AL has traditionally been critical of their activities. The Islamists’ position within the government has also given them a new source of legitimacy. The AL’s signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the fundamentalist Khelaphat-e-Majlis party in December 2006 further indicates the rising power of small Islamist parties.

The United States and Britain are concerned over the rise of Islamist influence and militancy in Bangladesh. The U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism released in April 2006 observed that Bangladesh experienced an increase in terrorist activity. This included the emergence of the Jamaat ul-Mujahideen (JMB), a group that promotes a fundamentalist vision for Bangladesh. While pointing to “limited success” by the government, the report explained that “endemic corruption ... porous borders,” and “the government’s serious institutional, resource, and political constraints” all “undermine the government’s broader counter terrorism posture.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Bangladesh William Milam is reported to have stated, “I fear that Bangladesh might revert to its pre-1991 condition in which even the peaceful transfer of power after credible elections was not possible,” adding, “This impasse has serious implications not only for Bangladesh but also for the South Asian region and the Islamic world.” Britain’s High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury, who was himself almost assassinated by extremists in 2004, is reported to have stated that there is “serous potential” for radical Islam to take hold in Bangladesh and that this would “change the geopolitics of our engagement with Islam and our efforts in countering terrorism.”

In recent years, notorious Islamist groups like Hizb Ut Tahrir [HT] are becoming extremely active in Bangladesh. According several confirmed information, HT has direct link with Al Qaeda and tries to implement ideologies and policies of Ossama Bin Laden in a number of countries in a different ways. In Bangladesh, this notorious group is headed by one Mohiuddin Ahmed, who is a professor with Dhaka University. Ahmed is recruiting members for Hizb Ut Tahrir in Bangladesh not only from various religious schools but also is doing the same in non-religious educational institutions. Bangladesh government is aware of such activities of HT, but is maintaining a kind of silence on this organization for reason unknown.

The most notorious agenda of Al Qaeda, which is implemented mostly by Hizb Ut Tahrir is to recruit activists for various notoriety from non-Islamic educational institutions. Moreover, Hizb-Ut Tahrir is also working for Al Qaeda in orientation and training of male and female with the ultimate objective of recruiting and sending them to various Western destinations, especially to Britain and United States. HT activists are working under cover of Islamist Tablig Jamaat, which has already spread its wings to a large number of countries in the world, including the West. In United States too, Tablig Jamaat has huge presence. In most cases, both Tablig Jamaat and Hizb Ut Tahrir preach religious hatred and provoke people towards killing of Jews and Christians as part of ‘holy Jihad’. According various investigative information and reports, notorious Jihadists activists recruited by Hizb Ut Tahrir or similar Al Qaeda affiliates are regularly entering Western world as well as a number of moderate Asian and Arab nations under the garb of ‘workers’, ‘nurses’ and even ‘house wives’.

Many of such highly trained females are entering Western societies through marital relations. Al Qaeda spends significant amount of money in orientation, training and even education of selected male and female, who are recruited for ‘deployment’ in Western or non-Muslim societies under cover, with the ultimate mission of jihad.