There is a saying in many South Asian languages that the wicked rarely listen to reason, let alone morality…kind of like the pearls before swines adage. Bangladesh’s one-party, one-family regime is no different. Messages, diplomatic notes, exhortations, and cautionary advice to these people is unlikely to do much. Short of Magnitsky type sanctions on key …
Author Archives: DocEsam
Only in Bong-land!
Awami League apologists like Gowher Rizvi and his ilk regularly regale us about how Bangladesh is the epitome of Westminster parliamentary democracy…..but shy away from the obvious truth that only in Bangladesh among such ‘democracies’ is the ruling party and the ‘official’ Opposition (Jatiya Party) elected as electoral coalition partners. It is the statecraft equivalent …
The torture prince of Virginia
One of the greater ironies of the Bangladeshi junta is that the ‘crown prince’ Sajib Wazed ‘Joy’ who is the son of the Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hasina and a cabinet level adviser on information technology to his mommy, lives in Virginia under the freedoms afforded by America’s Constitution while directing the surveillance, capture, and torture …
Second line enforcers of the Bangladeshi regime
The Bangladeshi regime’s grassroots terror squad “BCL” gets far less attention than its counterparts like the “Basij” in Iran, the “War Veterans” in Zimbabwe, or the “ANCYL” of South Africa do, for reasons ranging from its 1950s beginning as a student organization to the fact that most foreign journalists covering Bangladesh are too lazy to …
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Selling the dream of a Stalinist state
Despite the oft-repeated ludicrous claims of its mandarins that the ruling Awami League party is the most liberal political outfit https://bdnews24.com/politics/2018/12/24/awami-league-briefs-diplomats-on-election-issues, the truth is uglier and compelling. In its first run at the helm of Bangladesh in the 1972-1973 period, the party abolished a Westminster multi-party democracy and installed a Stalinist one-party state under an …
Rape as a weapon of compliance Part 2
The Awami League and its in-house vigilante group BCL have long used the threat and perpetration of sexual assault to keep dissenters in Bangladesh in line. In a conservative society where the issue continues to be taboo, the sheer terror of being victim of rape and being shamed for being that victim is a prospect …
Rape as a weapon of compliance Part 1
Unfortunately, these stories are a legion not only in this recently concluded ‘general election’, but throughout the reign of the Awami League since 2009. Or even before. In fact, the late Sheikh Kamal, the brother of the current dictator Sheikh Hasina, was well known for abducting co-eds from Dhaka University (in true style of the …
Bangladesh’s Schutzstaffel
Since the beginning of its reign in 2009, the Awami League party (which just won the ‘elections’ with 96 % of the seats lol) has used its in-house vigilante squad, acronymed “BCL”, to visit terror on its opponents when even it’s pet police and official paramilitary units demurred such acts on the basis of being …
Just like in Syrian elections
So, as expected, the Bangladeshi junta got about 90 % of the vote in the just concluded ‘parliamentary’ elections which its security chiefs claimed were the ‘most free’ in history. That is usually the percentage that dictators often get in their ‘elections’…the other 10 % of the vote a reflection of possibly a few very …
The myth of a democratic Bangladesh post-2008
Let us be perfectly candid: never in the history of Bangladesh has a political government presided over an election that it has lost…and this is not going to change by some magic this Christmas. Not only is this a function of the normal human greed for power when left unchecked, but also of a structure …
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