A year after Dhaka cafe attack, Bangladesh's war on terror is far from over
A year after the brutal attack at Dhaka's Holey Artisan cafe, where 20 hostages were killed, the ghosts of terror refuse to be exorcised as jihadists continue to unleash horror in various flashpoints across Bangladesh.
The sensational July 1 terror attack in Dhaka last year and the subsequent confirmation by authorities that all gunmen were Bangladeshi nationals clearly pointed out the fact that Islamist radicalism has taken deeper roots in the nation.
The high-profile homegrown terrorists (in the Dhaka cafe attack) baffled investigators and security specialists both home and abroad.
Mostly in their early 20s, they belonged to the country's upper middle class (one was the son of a senior member of the ruling Awami League party) who had been to elite schools and universities.
The attack marked the rise of what has been the prototype of homegrown terrorist in recent times — well-educated and well-versed in using social media tools, fitting in the cosmopolitan profile that terrorist outfits such as al Qaeda and ISIS have used in recent terror attacks from Paris to Istanbul.
"Gone are the madrasa recruits from the impoverished rural countryside," says Humayun Kabir, senior research director at the Dhaka-based think tank, Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.
The militant attacks were the culmination of a wave of atrocities by unidentified machete-wielding assailants against the country's religious minorities — Hindus, Buddhists and Christians priests, bloggers, writers, publishers and moderate Muslims.
Islamic extremists have killed over 40 people in such attacks since 2013. Over 16,000 people were arrested in a crackdown in June since last year, but clearly it was a little too late.
"Anyone who believes in religion cannot do such an act," Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina had said after the Dhaka cafe attack.
"They do not have any religion. Their only religion is terrorism."
Interestingly, Hasina advised bloggers and social media activists to exercise restraint in their exercise of free speech or to leave the country for their safety.
Meanwhile, journalists in Bangladesh are alarmed by email threats warning them of “severe action” if they publish news about the killing of “atheist” bloggers or anything against Islamist beliefs.
The warnings, which were purportedly sent by the group known as Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladesh branch of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent or AQIS, has threatened to kill all “anti-Islam atheist” bloggers.
The Bangladesh government doesn't take kindly to criticisms of its Constitution or its state religion, Islam. Nor do the Islamist groups. Both clandestine and overt Islamic organisations have threatened and regularly attacked journalists and bloggers.
Anyone who resists censorship or self-censorship on these issues risk life imprisonment, death penalty, or murder by Islamist militants, who often issue online calls to kill outspoken secular bloggers and writers.
Although there is real pluralism, media self-censorship is growing as a result of the endemic violence against journalists and media outlets, and the systemic impunity enjoyed by those responsible.
In 2016, the government took a tougher line towards its critics and the media in general. This was made clear by official statements expressing hostility towards the media, the blocking of dozens of websites, news portals, private TV stations and the numerous lawsuits brought against journalists by the Sheikh Hasina’s government. The repressive law has fallen as the sword of Damocles on 21 journalists who have been sued by the authorities under the controversial Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Act in the past four months.
After Islamists called for public execution of secular bloggers, nearly 30 bloggers and secular advocates have been hacked to death since 2013.
Bloggers, writers and online activists who have written against religious fundamentalism have been regularly targetted.
Although the police have made arrests in connection with the killing of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-origin US national who founded a secular blogging platform Mukto-Mona (free mind), they too have been criticised for their heavy-handedness and lack of transparency in pursuing the cases.
Roy was hacked to death in front of the Dhaka University in February 2015, an attack that was later claimed by the Ansarullah group.
According to the SITE Intelligence group, a US-based organisation that monitors extremist activity online, Ansar al-Islam, said in a statement posted online that its members carried out the attack on another blogger, Nazimuddin Samad, in “vengeance”.
It also reportedly claimed responsibility for the killing of Avijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Das, Ahmed Rajib Haider and Neeladri Chatterjee.
The underground Islamist group, in 2015, had issued a global hit list of bloggers and writers, and reiterated its death threat against 15 bloggers – nine of them living abroad – accusing them of participating in anti-Islam campaigns.
According to NBC TV, those bloggers and online activists who have fled the country and living in exile in United States, Canada, Germany and Australia are slowly reconnecting and trying to organise a meeting to assess the situation.
"One of the common responses that we get from them is that they don’t trust the authorities,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, head of Asia-Pacific desk of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Salil Tripathi, the chairman of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee, approached a long list of Bangladeshi writers for a commentary after a blogger was killed. Most writers refused, saying that attaching their name to the subject would be too perilous .
The sensitivity has become so great, that Bangladeshi friends sometimes ask not to tag them in Facebook posts that discuss attacks on bloggers, said Tripathi, the author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, a book about Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan and its legacy.
Meanwhile, small-minded bigots have not stopped attacking the women in media. They have even asked them in an email, dispatched to most media outlets in Bangladesh, to quit their jobs and stay indoors.
The banned ABT, reportedly says it is against Islamic law for women to work in the media. In a letter , the ABT asked magazines/periodicals not to use "beautiful female models in advertising", adding that picture of women without veil cannot be printed in the newspapers".
The threat highlights the challenges that the press faces from all directions, said Sumit Galhotra, Asia programme research associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based worldwide press freedom advocacy group.
“Journalists and media houses (in Bangladesh) are already being squeezed under mounting government pressure, now journalists also have to contend with the diktats from militant groups,” Galhotra told Voice of America (VOA) Radio.
“They are putting pressure on the media to buy their interpretation of the Islamic law,” Paris- based media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told Al Jazeera.
The LGBTQ community too is facing increasing threats.
While authorities in Bangladesh recently arrested 27 men on suspicion of being gay, a criminal offence in the country, radical Islam is waging an equally violent war on homosexuals.
The killings of an LGBT activist and US government employee, along with a friend, in the capital last year marked a troubling new turn.
Interestingly, in December 2008, Bangladesh was among the 59 countries that signed a statement opposing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights at the United Nations General Assembly.
The New York-based rights defender, Human Rights Watch (HRW) states that "discrimination against LGBT people is pervasive in Bangladesh".
While homosexual relations are criminalised, many LGBT activists have also been forced into exile.
The attacks on homosexuals have driven local LGBT activists underground, according to various news reports.
Dreaded Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or ISIL (Daesh in Arabic) in their official communiqué in October 2016 stated that their "mujahidin" will target expats, tourists, diplomats, garment buyers, missionaries, sports teams to be found in Bengal (Bangladesh).
The official ISIS publication, Rumiyah, Issue 2, Muharram 1438, writes that the campaign in "Bangladesh would continue until the land is purified from the crusaders and all other 'kuffar' (non-believers) and the law of Allah is established in the land".
The newsletter in PDF format mention Bangladesh territory as "Bengal" and warns that the deadly Gulshan attack on July 1, 2016, wasn't the first attack against the "crusaders by the soldiers of the Khilafah in Bengal and it certainly will not be the last" .
The government refuses to see the growing ISIS footprint in Bangladesh and its uncharted terror campaign. So does Monirul Islam, chief of Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit.
Thus, ISIS has not been outlawed or banned by the Bangladesh government even as the Interpol and United Nations have included it in their terror list.
"Hasina used to scoff at claims of homegrown Islamist terrorists linked to the global terror network," says columnist Syed Badrul Ahsan. She goes on to explain that there is a terrorist group that has published a series of articles, statements and other communiqués detailing on what it wants and why, while the Bangladesh government on the other side has quite possibly adopted the ostrich as its totem.
There could be various reasons why the government wants to believe that jihadists or Islamic militants are non-existent in the country.
Bangladesh in the past has been a recruitment hotbed for global Islamist jihadists. It seems the jihadi fear will continue to haunt its future as the country grapples with a new wave of terror. And all this possibly with the full knowledge of domestic security agencies. Hundreds of Bangladeshi fighters, most of them poor rural youth, have joined secret wars in 36 countries, from Chechnya in Russia to Mindanao in Philippines.
In the 1980s, as many as 8,000 Bangladeshi youths, many of them Left and socialist-leaning, volunteered to fight for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, a year after Yasser Arafat visited Dhaka to a warm welcome from media and political circles.
Most of them returned home after the defeat and expulsion from Lebanon in 1982. Soon after 9/11, over a thousand Bangladeshi nationals who had joined the Taliban, fled to Pakistan when the American coalition invaded Afghanistan. Since then, Bangladesh has been rocked by attempts of the Afghan veterans to launch a jihad in their native country.
An unknown number of militants have escaped police dragnets to join the IS in Syria and Iraq. The CTTC unit is unaware about the exact number of such escapees. It also does not know how many may have travelled to the terror hotspots to join the IS.
It is equally clueless how many of them have returned either. Just as it doesn't know how many attackers, like in the Black Friday Dhaka attack, are waiting to strike again.
Amid the various developments, the terror scene looks pretty hazy in the country. Having said that, one must also acknowledge that the anti-terror forces in Bangladesh have increased their vigil and appear to be fully geared up to meet any eventualities, as noticed in the last one year.
Yet, quality intelligence gathering is perhaps the need of the day to defeat the terror threats knocking from all sides.
The above thoughts were appropriately shared at an international seminar held at Brussels last week, with noted journalist Selim Samad articulating the factual position existing in Bangladesh ostensibly to sensitise the government and other stakeholders.