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Bangladesh: Celebrations and
bombs
By Bertil Lintner
More
than 3 million Muslim devotees from 52 countries
gathered along the banks of the Turag river, 30
kilometers north of Dhaka in Bangladesh at Tongi,
Gazipur, for the three-day annual Biswa Ijtema (World
Congregation) between December 14 and 16. The
significance of the event was underlined by the profile
of political leaders who attended: present at the
concluding prayers were Bangladesh President Iajuddin
Ahmed; the Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia; the leader
of the opposition in parliament, Sheikh Hasina, and
other political, civil and military leaders. The Ijtema
is organized annually by the Tablighi Jamaat.
The Biswa Ijtema, the second largest
congregation of Muslims in the world after the Hajj,
ended peacefully despite rumors that some international
terrorist groups may have planned to disrupt the event.
But the fact that millions of Muslim devotees from
across the world gathered in Bangladesh emphasizes the
role that the country has come to play in the context of
international Islamic brotherhood. Although the
government in Dhaka has reacted fiercely to any
suggestion that the country is becoming a haven for
Islamic extremists, reports from Asian and Western
intelligence services suggest otherwise.
Shortly
after the fall of Kandahar in late 2001, several hundred
Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters escaped by ship from
Karachi to Chittagong. They were then trucked down to
hidden camps in the Ukhia area, south of Cox's Bazaar.
Local people report seeing heavily armed men, with a few
Bangladeshis among them, in those camps. They were told
that they would be killed if anyone told "outsiders"
about this regrouping of ex-Afghanistan fighters in this
remote corner of southeastern Bangladesh.
According to other reports from Asian security
services, militants from the Jemaah Islamiah - which is
connected to al-Qaeda and wants to set up a gigantic
Islamic state encompassing Malaysia, Singapore,
Indonesia and southern Philippines - are also hiding out
in these camps, which were set up in the early 1990s to
train rebels from the Muslim Rohingya minority in
Myanmar's Rakhine State. In more recent years, these
camps have in effect been run by Bangladesh's most
extreme Islamic outfit, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-i-Islami
(HuJI), which was set up in 1992, reportedly with
financial support from Osama bin Laden.
The
Jemaah Islamiah is suspected of being behind a number of
planned - but foiled - attacks against Western targets
in Singapore, as well as the devastating bomb blast on
the Indonesian island of Bali on October 12, in which
nearly 200 people were killed, most of them Western
tourists.
The Jemaah Islamiah militants in
hiding in southeastern Bangladesh are believed to be
mostly Malaysian and Singaporean citizens. It is,
however, uncertain to what extent the Bangladeshi
security services have been involved in their
relocation. But well-placed local sources say that it
would have been impossible without at least some tacit
agreement with the Directorate General of Forces
Intelligence (DGFI), Bangladesh's chief intelligence
agency, which is closely connected with Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Security
concerns heightened over the holding of the Biswa Ijtema
in Tongi only a week after at least 18 persons were
killed and 300 injured in bomb blasts in four cinema
halls in the central Bangladeshi town of Mymensingh on
December 7. Without being specific, Prime Minister
Khaleda Zia described these as a "planned terrorist
attack", while opposition leader Sheikh Hasina of the
Awami League claimed that an "identified fanatic
terrorist group within [the ruling] alliance is behind
these heinous bomb blasts". The international news
agency Reuters first reported that Home Minister Altaf
Hossain Chowdhury had said that bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network was behind the blast, but later had to retract
the report after denials from the minister.
Subsequently, the police raided the local office
of Reuters in Dhaka. Dozens of opposition activists were
also arrested, but no link to them could be established.
The raid on Reuters and the arrest of opposition
politicians came only days after a British TV team and
their local helpers had been arrested for trying to
document the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in
Bangladesh and its possible consequences on the
country's non-Muslim minorities.
Many foreign
observers may contend that the Bangladeshi authorities
are simply overreacting to international press coverage,
but it could also be that the DGFI has too much to hide,
and therefore wants to silence any reports suggesting
that their country has become a hot-bed of Islamic
fundamentalism.
The four-party alliance that won
the Bangladeshi elections in October 2001 includes the
fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, which has two ministers
in the present government. Its youth organization, the
Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), was behind Bangladesh's
most devastating bomb blast before the cinemas in
Mymensingh were hit - an explosion on June 15, 2001, at
the Awami League office in Narayanganj, in which 21
persons were killed and over 100 others injured. The
same government-connected outfit is also suspected of
being behind several other bomb blasts as well as
attacks on secular Bangladeshi politicians, journalists
and writers.
The ICS is closely connected with
the most militant of the Rohingya organizations along
the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO), which also has links to the
al-Qaeda. Video footage released by the American cable
television network CNN in August this year and obtained
from al-Qaeda shows Rohingyas as well as Bangladeshis
training in camps near the country's southeastern
border, but well inside Bangladesh.
Al-Qaeda's
involvement in Bangladesh was confirmed in September
this year when the police in Dhaka arrested seven "aid
workers" working for the Saudi-based Al Haramain Islamic
Institute. The men, who came from Libya, Algeria, Sudan
and Yemen, belonged to an organization that had first
come to Bangladesh to help Rohingya refugees, but later
became involved in running Islamic centers all over the
country. The so-called institute has been named by
several sources as a front for al-Qaeda. Perhaps not
surprisingly, nothing came out of the arrests and the
whole affair was quickly hushed up by the Bangladeshi
authorities, suggesting that the "arrests" were a
mistake by some local police officer.
The United
States has so far accepted the Bangladeshi government's
assurances that the country is not playing host to
international terrorist movements, and that it is a
reliable partner in the global war on terror. But this
ostrich-like mentality may change as more evidence to
the contrary comes to light. The arrests of foreign
journalists and the raid on Reuters in Dhaka are
worrying signs of increasing intolerance in Bangladesh.
And the hosting of the Biswa Ijtema is bound to attract
the attention of "friendly" Islamic organizations, which
see the country as a perfect place to hide out when
international attention is focused on events in more
high-profile countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia.
Bertil Lintner, senior writer, Far
Eastern Economic Review.
Published with
permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review of
the South Asia Terrorism
Portal.
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