The US sanctions on a few high level leaders of the Bangladeshi dictatorship’s brutal security establishment are not only welcome news but are already having a measurable impact: since the announcement of the sanctions until last night, not a single victim has died in staged encounters with the regime security forces, and no known cases of dissidents being bundled into unmarked vans have come to pass. That will change as the world’s attention turns elsewhere.
Yet, such punitive sanctions come too late for too many victims like this 7 year old girl pictured above whose father, a pro-democracy activist, was snatched away by the regime in the dead of the night from their family home, bundled in an unmarked vehicle, and never heard from again. No surprisingly, most of Bangladesh’s ‘free press’ studiously avoided this story, like it has much of the sordid saga of the Awami League policy of making its substantive critics simply ‘disappear’. After all, much of the ostensibly ‘private sector’ press is owned by regime affiliated businesses; in some cases the ownership is far more direct with the ruling party politicians, “MP”s and central committee members outright owning media outlets.
A far better approach will be to take preventive sanctions early on targeting a regime’s ‘polite’ apologists of brutality: the publishers and editors of regime-affiliated newspapers along with their families; the executives of regime aligned corporations and business conglomerates along with their families; and high ranking members of the university faculties and bar associations whose credentialed prestige is put to use as a cover for regime atrocities. In Bangladesh, there is a singular desire for all these elites to help their children, spouses, and ultimately themselves migrate to the democratic West, even as they mouth off condemnations of that very West in public. From both a moral and pragmatic perspective, such a preventative approach to sanctions is far better suited to save more lives.