In the shadow of the torturer: human rights are being violated in Bangladesh with scarcely a whisper from the West. Jeremy Seabrook argues that the country's history has combined with the methods of the 'war on terror' to produce a lethal cloud of concealment

New Internationalist, August, 2004 by Jeremy Seabrook

THE images of the soldiery of deliverance torturing prisoners in Iraq have cast long shadows. That the US, triumphal bearer of universal values, should have abused detainees, signals to authoritarian governments that the persecution of enemies within, real or imaginary, is unlikely to provoke an outcry from defenders of freedom, whose own frailties have now been advertised to the world.

A second consequence is that, with the overwhelming publicity generated by the public contrition of the US, the spotlight has been removed from regimes which habitually violate human rights, or practise extra-judicial killings and disappearances. The pictures of Iraqi humiliation have thrown into obscurity unrecorded coercions in dungeons, cellars and torture-chambers of countries which have benefited from a novel kind of liberation; namely, any need to account for their actions. The obscene imagery of the photographers of military sadism has eclipsed abuses of people in other corners of a darkening world. These appear insignificant compared with the epic irregularity in which the West has been found out: its preachings to those whose destiny it had been to chastise sound suddenly empty.

Bangladesh, to the Western media a distant land, known chiefly for its cheap garments, the export of its labour and its cyclones and floods, in which ferry-boats regularly capsize killing a few hundred people (one such incident, which drowned 200 people on 22 May, went unmentioned in the press) has faded from view. On 21 May, however, the British High Commissioner was injured in a bomb blast at a shrine in Sylhet, in which five people were also killed. This registers faintly on the monitors of Western intelligence as an example of the violent disorder into which the country is falling. The despatch of officers from Scotland Yard to investigate the explosion failed to trace the source of the outrage, since this lies with increasing fundamentalist influence in that country.

Militant vigilantes, led by an elusive commander called Bangla Bhai and protected by the police, have been killing 'outlaws' in the north of the country. The Government denies the presence of Islamic militants in Bangladesh, but the Jama'atul Mujahedin Bangladesh, the youth front of Harqatul-Jihad--an al-Qaeda organization banned in neighbouring countries and blacklisted in the US--claims to have 100,000 members operating across the country. A series of bomb attacks on secular cultural and political gatherings left more than 140 people dead between 1997 and 2004.

Earlier this year the Government banned all publications of the Ahmadiyya Islamic sect, which accepts Muhammad as the last prophet but not as the final emissary of Allah into the world. Its mosques were threatened by zealots as the sites of heretical worship. Journalists who 'tarnish the image' of Bangladesh have been routinely murdered. A popular Opposition MP was shot during a political rally in May 2004, which the Government airily dismissed as 'an internal struggle' of the Opposition. At the same time, abductions, kidnappings, shootouts--often involving the 'student wing' of the ruling party-increase the sense of insecurity in the country. In Chittagong it is reported that, on average, five businesses come under criminal attack each day in the city.

Proshika, one of the largest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Bangladesh, dedicated to secularism, human rights and the social and economic empowerment of women, has been targeted by the Government ever since it came to power in October 2001. The funds of Proshika were blocked, under pretext of 'financial irregularities'. Following a nationwide general strike by the Opposition, which had threatened to topple the Government at the end of April 2004, Proshika was accused of complicity, its premises raided, its offices besieged by Government supporters and its president, Dr Qazi Faruque Ahmed, and Deputy, David William Biswas, arrested and held incommunicado. At the end of June 2004 six leaders of Proshika were charged with 'sedition'. It is significant that while in Saudi Arabia in June 2004 the authorities decided upon closer scrutiny of Al-Haramain for its suspected links to militant groups, Bangladesh was doing precisely the opposite--crippling NGOs whose purposes are with human rights and secularism. Al-Haramain continued to operate freely in Bangladesh.

In May 2004 Christina Rocca, US Under-Secretary for South Asian Affairs, visited Dhaka and expressed concern that the tradition of Bangladesh as a 'moderate Muslim society' was going 'off-track'. In keeping with the report issued by Amnesty International, she complained to the Government that 'no great effort' was being made 'to end attacks on journalists and deaths in police custody'.

The first person arrested from Proshika was Abdur Rob, a man I have known well for many years and who helped me write my book about Bangladesh, Freedom Unfinished. Deputy head of the Cultural Section of Proshika, he was detained and tortured in prison and signed a 'confession' that Proshika had been in conspiracy with the Awami League Opposition to topple the Government. In court he stated that the confession had been extracted under duress. He was removed to another prison, where the treatment he received resulted in his being hospitalized.