Free Bangladesh

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 regime figures like the ministers, police chiefs, election commissioners, party leaders, university chancellors, the junta’s key business allies in the apparel sector, and their respective families, little is going to change. The Bengali mind is not yet ready for shame emanating from the sage advice emanating from friends (let alone foes) if that advice is not backed up with consequences. In the Bengali ruling class, we are not dealing with the Marquis of Queensberrry-rules sort of people; sad but true.

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 of dissenters in his his mommy’s “people’s republic”. One of his other pastimes is regularly bashing the ‘West’ and ‘America’ for not falling in line with his regime’s dictatorial efforts to crush any dissent. Wasn’t it for such situations that from the times of the Framers to today, there exists the Alien Torts Statutes?

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 delve deeper.  But the BCL is nothing if not the street enforcer of the Awami League regime: when even the police can find no legal avenue to visit state terror and the compliant judiciary has the occasional rare judge who sides with defendants in state sponsored prosecution, it is left up to the Awami goon squad BCL to get things taken care of ‘unofficially’.  It was localized armed units of the BCL who were used in the recently concluded ‘election’ to beat up almost every Opposition candidate, destroy their cars, and threaten their families so that only the Awami League nominees could ‘campaign’. Rare is it, if ever, for a criminal associated with BCL to be apprehended, let alone prosecuted for the perpetration of any and all crimes. Of course, at the country’ premier seat of learning—the University of Dhaka—the BCL runs the roost determining who gets admitted, who gets to stay in the dorms, and which faculty members get tenure https://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2018/01/27/du-authorities-using-bcl-like-pakistan-rulers-used-nsf-cpb-chief-selim . Not surprisingly, most news outlets in Bangladesh are too afraid of having their own facilities and employees getting ‘visits’ from BCL and hence rarely report on the vigilante organization. It remains a mystery—except for the lack of interest shown by lazy Western journalists—as to why the BCL has not been branded a terror organization by the major democracies of the West.

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 ideology called “BKSAL” with all civil servants, judges, and military officers required to take oath to the President for Life…which just happened to be the father of the current “prime minister” Sheikh Hasina. Some of the Awami League leaders who were part of the one-party putsch—like Hasina’s key adviser H T Imam—continue to serve at the highest levels of government in this Awami League regime. Aware that the world doesn’t quite like, in the aftermath of the Cold War, outright one party states of the Soviet variety, the current regime has adopted a de facto rather than de jure approach to its well-known desire for a one-party system. The approach involves harsh suppression of any real dissent at home, stage managed ‘elections’ like the one of December 30, 2018, draconian censorship policies, and grassroots level non-government vigilante forces like the BCL terror group to ensure localized compliance. A big part of selling this as a Third World utopia falls to smooth talking spokesmen duos who can charm low level functionaries in the foreign ministries of Western capitals and junior editors on Fleet Street with the panache these functionaries and scribes are not used to enjoying. Among these apologists are couples like Gowher Rizvi, once a professor of politics in Virginia and his Italian wife Agnese Barolo; K Anis Ahmed,  the owner of the regime’s flagship private university “ULAB” and his American wife and former Newsweek columnist Juditha Ohlmacher, and, of course, Hasina’s son Sajib Wazed Joy and his lawyer wife Christine Overmire, both living in the Washington DC area off the ‘consulting fees’ from the taxpayers of Bangladesh. Credit where it is due: The Dhaka regime has perfected the art of finding the right people to do its advocacy while the utterly sidelined and slightly awkward foreign ministers (they have two of them) are rarely at the front and center of such frays of schmoozing bedazzled, mid-level, foreign dignitaries.