Rape and threats of rape: the tools of intimidation Bangladesh style

It seems not a day goes by where even the muzzled mainstream media of Bangladesh doesn’t report some girl, infant, woman being raped or threatened with such barbarity by some local leader of the BCL–the ‘student’ wing or actually the inhouse terror squad of the ruling one party Awami League junta. Two days ago the victims were the doctors in the emergency room of Sylhet’s Women’s Medical College who had dared to ask BCL members to step outside while their comrade was being treated for an appendix problem. Of course, the police routinely refuse to not only help victims but even record complaints, lest the BCL thugs get their masters in the ruling party to ruin careers of police officers. This is not new for the Awami League: their first government–of 1972-1975–routinely used sexual assault as a tool of coercion with the brother of the current ‘Prime Minister’ well knows for his rape exploits like Saddam’s sons decades later. This is the regime, by the way, that too many Western feminists and progressives defend and whose apologists get space in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post to regularly bellyache about their supposedly ‘progressive’ ‘Prime Minister’. Commonsense and decency would dictate that Western governments would classify the BCL as a terror organization just like the Revolutionary Guard of Iran and Zimbabwe ‘War Veterans’. But I guess in Washington, Ottawa, and Brussels, some victims are far more worthy of sympathy than others, if for no other reason than intellectual laziness. That said, it is hard to blame the Western civil servants given that almost all of the mainstream press in Bangladesh has set a new record of cowardice in ‘seeing no evil’; even in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe there were actual journalists who wrote the truth regularly.