The real source of terror in Bangladesh

The government's relentless repression of the opposition and civil society has unlea-shed extremist killers.

Last weekend a Buddhist monk was hacked to death, presumably with a machete, in southeastern Bangladesh. The week before, it was a Sufi Muslim leader, up north. Less than 2 weeks earlier, it was an LGBT activist. Just days before that, an English professor.

Some of these attacks have not yet been claimed, but they follow a gruesome pattern: There have been at least 25 violent, sometimes public, killings of religious minorities, secularists and free-speech advocates in Bangladesh since February 2015. A dozen more people have been assaulted in similar ways and survived.

Of these attacks, more than 20 have been claimed by the IS, about half a dozen by al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and one each by the indigenous Bangladeshi extremist groups Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangla-desh and Ansar al-Islam.

The surge is worrying Western governments, which fear that local Islamist terrorists may now be competing for the attention of international jihadist networks or cooperating with them. Several Western countries have responded with antiterrorism measures: Japan is providing aviation security; the United States has called for strengthening cooperation with the Bangla-deshi authorities to counter terrorism and violent extremism.

This is a predictable reaction, but it is misguided, and dangerous, because it proceeds from the wrong diagnosis. The recent string of vicious killings in Bangladesh is less a terrorism issue than a governance issue: It is the ruling Awami League’s onslaught against its political opponents, which began in earnest after the last election in January 2014, that has unleashed extremists in Bangladesh.

A zero-sum mentality has been the rule of Bangladeshi politics since the end of the military dictatorship in 1991. Between then and 2007, the country’s two main parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, traded power every term. Whichever one was leading the government focused on enriching itself and weakening the other. That left the private sector largely alone to invest in economic expansion and NGOs to provide education, healthcare and other social services the government wasn’t delivering.

In some respects, the government’s failure to do its job served the country well: The economy has grown by an average of 5% to 6% annually over the last two decades; Bangla-desh has outdone India and Pakistan on various social development indicators, such as healthcare and edu-
cation. But the country’s political culture steadily deteriorated.

Major protests broke out in late 2006, after the then-ruling BNP tried to rig elections scheduled for 2007. The army took over for a time. The Awami Lea-gue was voted back into office in 2009 and in 2011 used its vast majority in Parliament to rem-ove from the Constitution a cla-use providing that general elections be overseen by nonpart-
isan caretaker governments.

Towards one-party state

The BNP boycotted the 2014 election, largely in response to that amendment, and since winning that one-party election the Awami League has been hellbent on turning Bangladesh into a one-party state. The BNP has become the primary target of the government’s so-called law enforcement efforts. The Awami League routinely deploys the judiciary and the police against its political opponents and any dissenting voices in civil society.

High-ranking BNP members have been framed on spurious corruption charges, among other things. According to the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, the government has silenced critics by resorting to enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. Journalists who dare cover any of this are being cha-rged with sedition and treason.

The Awami League’s relentless campaign against the political opposition and civil society has allowed violent radicals of all stripes to let loose. Concentrating the state’s limited judicial and police powers on the BNP and its supporters reduces the resources that can be devoted to preventing terrorism and crime. Using illegal means to quiet perceived opponents undermines the rule of law, creating an atmosphere of impunity that emboldens extremists.

The first machete killing — of a secularist blogger — occurred in February 2013, before the last general election. The Awami League reacted as you would expect from an incumbent party: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left her office to offer condolences to the family and vowed to catch the culprits.

But since the party was re-elected, its response to similar attacks has become constructively evasive. At the same time that the leaders deny the presence in Bangladesh of al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent or the IS, they accuse the BNP of conspiring with the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami to destabilise the government.

It’s difficult to gauge the current terrorist threat in Bangla-desh, especially any links between local and international groups. Whatever its exact nature, however, it is largely the result of the government’s repression against mainstream dissent. Responding to this wave of attacks as though it were principally a security issue, rather than a governance problem, would only make matters worse.