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I CAME across no proclamations of ‘Je suis Istanbul’ last week, nor any protestations of ‘Je suis Dhaka’, let alone Baghdad, over the weekend, in the aftermath of three horrendous terrorist attacks as the Islamic holy month of fasting drew to an end. It is supposed to be a period not just of dawn-to-dusk fasting but of introspection and forbearance. Sadly, it has also been a month of carnage.
Connections between the massacre in Orlando and the militant Islamic State group (IS, or Daesh) remain dubious, notwithstanding the perpetrator’s claims to the contrary, but the outrages at Ataturk airport and the Holey Artisan café, not to mention Baghdad, clearly were instigated by IS, which deployed jihadists from the former Soviet Union in Turkey and apparently relied on Bangladeshi recruits for the assault in Dhaka.
There may not be too many parallels to draw between Turkey and Bangladesh, but both are overwhelmingly Muslim-majority states with a questionable secular facade, and both are governed by leaders inclined to treat the opposition as a nuisance rather than as a necessary component of an ostensibly democratic polity.
Bangladesh needs a coordinated effort to eradicate the cancer.
In the face of frequent murderous attacks on individuals ranging from secular bloggers and gay activists to Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, at least some of them claimed by IS or Al Qaeda, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed has more or less consistently declared that neither of those organisations had a foothold in Bangladesh and that the perpetrators were locals in terms of both breeding and instigation.
That is not an entirely absurd line of argument, given that Bangladesh has been burdened with fundamentalists since before it gained independence in 1971, and that substantial numbers of them played an insidious role during the war of liberation. The parallels that have been drawn between the current terrorising of the intelligentsia and the efforts to effectively eliminate it 45 years ago are in fact far from ridiculous.
It has even been contended that the belated recent trials of Jamaat-i-Islami stalwarts, followed in some cases by executions, are a crucial motivating factor in the murderous campaign against those seen as particular foes of the fundamentalist creed.
It is not uncommon for those deemed guilty of war crimes to be put on trial decades after their purported deeds were perpetrated. There are still cases of Nazi functionaries and collaborators ending up in court and, if found guilty, being sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
In the case of Bangladesh, it is of course notable that none of the military officers who might have been responsible for mass killings were ever put in the dock. It obviously does not follow that their collaborators in locally constituted militias should also get away scot free. The trouble is that all too many international observers have expressed dissatisfaction at the conduct of the trials. Whether or not justice was done, it wasn’t seen to be done.
That plays into the narrative that the Awami League government is more concerned about scoring political points — the Jamaat being an ally of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by former prime minister Khaleda Zia — than about pursuing historical justice.
On the other hand, links between local fundamentalist outfits and the international jihadist phenomenon obviously can no longer be disregarded, as Sheikh Hasina has hitherto tended to do. Most of the gunmen who stormed the Holey Artisan café in Dhaka’s Gulshan district — which is relatively well protected — around iftar time on Friday have been hailed by an IS web outlet, which could hardly be a coincidence. The fact that most of them were known to the police, and may have been associated with Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh doesn’t necessarily vindicate home minister Asaduzzaman Khan’s claim that “they have no connections with Islamic State”.
The terrorists reportedly spared those who could recite a verse or two from the Quran — described by the father of one of the survivors as “doing a background check on religion” — and apparently butchered the rest, most of them Italian and Japanese, with knives and machetes. That has generally been the method by which individual bloggers, free thinkers, aid workers, priests, missionaries and various others have been put to death.
In many of those previous instances, large numbers of Bangladeshis have been motivated to protest against the savagery. This time the prime minister declared two days of national mourning. That’s all very well, but what Bangladesh really needs is a well-coordinated and preferably bipartisan — or at least non-partisan — effort to eradicate the cancer whose incidence and growth have thus far tended to spark denialism rather than an effective counter-offensive.
There are clearly lessons to be learnt here for other Asian countries as IS partially shifts its focus beyond the Middle East following its military defeat in Fallujah. One can only hope they will not go unheeded.
Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2016
