Militant training camps in a number of Bangladeshi Madrassas By Manoj Saxena

According to press reports, more than 700 militant training camps are in operation within the 69,000 Koranic Madrassas in Bangladesh. Talibans, returned from Afghanistan battle field or Kashmir, Palestine and Chechen war fields are giving training to the young students of the Madrassas with the agenda of shifting Bangladesh from present democratic structure to Caliphate state.

Dhaka’s prominent Bengali newspaper The Janakantha published an opinion editorial on April 5, 2009, where columnist Laila Najnin Harun said, in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a huge Madrassa cum militant training camp is openly operating at Kamrangirchar area, while law enforcing agencies are showing ignorance to this fact. She questioned the role of law enforcing agencies for such ignorance stating, this will allow the militants in further gaining strength.

Kamrangirchar’s Noria-Alia Madrassa was earlier used for militant training purpose by Harkajutl Mujahedin Bangladesh (HuJI) under the command of Mufti Abdul Hannan. Madrassas principal Moulana Ahmadullah Ashraf is the patron of such activities. During the Afghan war, Ashraf’s son took part in militancy with Talibans and died there.

Noria-Alia Madrassa in Kamrangirchar is the main base of Dhaka’s ultra radical group Bangladesh Khulafah Andolen (Caliphate Movement of Bangladesh). War criminal and Islamic terror mastermind Mufti Fazlul Haque Aminy is the advisor of this Madrassa. According to Bangladesh intelligence report, this Madrassa continues to receive large amount of money from different foreign donors on a regular basis.

According to expert reports there are more than 69,000 Madrassas in Bangladesh, mostly Koranic, which breeds militants. Bangladeshi law minister Barrister Shafiq Ahmed said, clerics in these Madrassas allure the students with the dream of heaven thus finally motivating them in Jihad against all non Muslims. Raping Hindu females are taught to be a sacred obligation of every Muslims. Madrassa students also consider all progressive people as ‘Murtads’ as well non-Muslims and consider killing them as holy task. These students attempted to assassin Bangladeshi progressive poet Shamsur Rehman in 1999. Same sects of people were behind the brutal attack of another progressive writer named Humayun Azad, who died in Germany while on treatment. Attackers injured Humayun Azad, a prominent writer and teacher of Dhaka University with sharp weapons.

Secularist forces are under attack in Bangladesh. When secularist and anti Jihad political party – Awami League (AL) won a landslide victory during December 29 election last year, anti secularist forces started conspiring to oust AL from power. With this agenda in mind, they plotted a bloody massacre inside BDR headquarters in Dhaka during February 25 this year. Several army officers were killed by the militants and their affiliates. While government started investigating the matter, some fanatic newspapers and forces in Dhaka became active in shifting the focus of the investigators to blank by pointing some secularist leaders as the ‘collaborators’ of this incident.

World renowned Bangladeshi peace worker and minority rights activist Shahriar Kabir in a commentary said, for the offense of only a few hundred BDR jawans, there is conspiracy of dismantling the entire para-military force. Referring to statement made by Col. Shams, who was saved from the mutiny, Shahriar Kabir said, outsiders were behind murders inside the BDR headquarters, and the investigators should find out these killers.

He vehemently opposed trying the BDR jawans and others related to the mutiny in Court Martial. Mr. Kabir referred statements by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which said, trial in Court Martial will be a great injustice. He appreciated the efforts taken by Awami League government in compensating and rehabilitating the families of killed army officers during the mutiny.

Shahriar Kabir has also rightly raised the illegal arrest, torture and murder of hundreds of people during ‘Operation Clean Heart’ conducted by Bangladesh Army under the command of Lt. Gen. Hassan Massud Chowdhury, who recently resigned from Anti Corruption Commission due to various allegations. He said, killer army officers and soldiers as well members of RAB and police, who took part in brutality during Operation Clean Heart were given impunity by BNP government.

Terrorism Versus South Asian Trio

by J. Sri Raman,

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A South Asian task force against terrorism – is this an idea whose time has come?

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed of Bangladesh seems to think it has. The task force was one of her election promises and, after winning a tidal vote to power, she has opened talks on it with two important visitors, India’s External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher.

Few, however, can miss a familiar pattern in Dhaka’s moves in the matter. Election promises, as a rule, sound more enthusiastic than ensuing action on them. If Prime Minister Hasina is sounding far more cautious about the task force than during the poll campaign, official constraints are not the only obvious reason.

Even more obvious is an ironical fact that militates against formation of such a force by the South Asian countries concerned – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (with the Himalayan states of Nepal and Bhutan figuring only as occasional havens of terrorists and Sri Lanka harboring a different species of terrorism). The fact is that the three countries cannot agree more on terrorism, but cannot act less together against the threat.

Theoretically, conditions cannot be more congenial for action on the idea. The people have pronounced their verdicts against terrorism in all three countries in unambiguous terms. A notable result of the Pakistan elections to decide on the post-Musharraf dispensation was the rout of religion-based parties with a record of relations with fundamentalists and extremists, especially in the frontier provinces. In Bangladesh, the landslide victory for Hasina and her Awami League (AL) came with a lethal electoral blow to the Jamat-e-Islami (JeI), an ally of Begam Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and an accomplice of terrorist outfits.

The electorate in India won’t exactly spring a similar surprise with an anti-terrorist vote, though it has rejected the far right Bharatiya Janta Party’s anti-minority take on terrorism in a recent round of state-level elections. In the nearly three months since the terrorist strike in Mumbai, both the ruling Congress Party and the BJP have revealed an unstated bipartisan consensus on according prominence to such threats in their campaigns for the parliamentary elections due by May 2009.

Officially, too, the three countries profess anti-terrorist policies of a similarly high priority. Islamabad has repeatedly been at pains to remind the region and the world that the country’s democratic forces are a direct victim of terrorism, having lost Benazir Bhutto in a bomb blast. Dhaka makes a similar claim, with the grenade attack of 2004 on a Hasina rally among the oft-recalled instances of grisly terrorism. As for India, the Mumbai outrage of November 26, 2008, was only the latest in a long series of terrorist attacks on the nation and its successive governments.

The popular and official consensus among the three countries on terrorism, however, has not made coordinated action against it any easier in practice. On paper, India and Pakistan have in place a joint mechanism against terror, set up during the five-year old “peace process” as a response to past instances of extremist violence. Even a joint investigation of the Mumbai case, however, remains an impracticable idea, despite India’s “dossier” on the subject made available to Islamabad and Pakistan’s detailed response to it.

Domestic opposition would not allow further progress in the direction easily. Online tirades against “traitors” in the Islamabad establishment, who have reported findings of the official investigation about Pakistani links to Mumbai, represent only the tip of an iceberg. Experts on talk shows on Indian television channels compare cooperative investigation of the case with consultations over a house break-in with the burglar himself.

Pakistan’s investigators may not have pleased many in the Hasina dispensation by publicizing their finding about the possible involvement in Mumbai of the Harakat-ul-Jehad-al-Islam (HuJI) of Bangladesh. Dhaka, however, has concealed any displeasure over the finding. It has, actually, admitted the possibility. It is a safe bet, though, that this is going to be no prelude to any joint Pakistan-Bangladesh exercise on the issue.

Domestic political compulsions, again, are sure to derail any effort in this direction. The opposition BNP is not going to be a silent spectator of any investigation of India’s worst-ever terrorist strike involving Bangladesh. Nor is any Dhaka-Islamabad cooperation in the cards, even as the Hasina regime promises to hasten trials in cases of “war crimes,” committed during the Bangladesh war of 1971 by fundamentalist and other forces opposed to a break up of erstwhile Pakistan.

Hasina has, of course, discussed the task force with Mukherjee during his recent visit to Dhaka. Even before details of the proposal could be divulged, Khaleda and her party came out with strong disapproval of any arrangement that would let India use Bangladesh’s territory for fighting its own battles. The fear is that the task force may help India counter separatist movements on the border of Bangladesh in the name of fighting terrorism.

In theory again, all the three countries are anti-terror allies of the US. Richard Holbrooke, special US envoy for India and Pakistan, has stressed this in Islamabad and New Delhi, while Boucher has done so in Dhaka. The formulation, however, is extremely unlikely to help the speedy emergence of the proposed force. Experience has shown the extremely limited extent to which the alliance can be advanced in each of the three countries. Washington has not won the unqualified support of the allies for the main objective of its anti-terror war in the region.

Pakistan cannot possibly acquiesce on US drones’ attacks on Pashtun areas even if described as part of an all-out offensive against al-Qaeda. India cannot agree to any proposal for US peacemaking in Kashmir, peddled as a ploy to help Islamabad focus on the al-Qaeda terrain. And we do not quite know whether the Pentagon is really unhappy about a splinter of al-Qaeda shifting from the Pakistan-Afghan border to Bangladesh and surviving as the HuJI.

All told, the time for the task force may not be yet. The time will come only when the people of the three countries prevail over political forces with the stake in perpetuating regional tensions and conflicts. It will come only when South Asia chooses to counter terrorism for its own sake and not in the cause of a superpower as it is popularly perceived.

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A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of “Flashpoint” (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.