How the US State Department Helped Jihad Come to Power in Bangladesh

Recently, at a protest arranged by a Jewish coalition protesting the biased journalism at CNN, I captured others who have the same complaint:

And then Madeline Brooks’ wonderfully detailed article arrived, to illuminate and clarify. Thank you, Madeline.

“Ironically, heartbreakingly, the original inhabitants of the land, invaded by conquering Muslims centuries ago, now live in abject fear….the Hindus, Buddhists and indigenous people are trapped in their own homeland…”

By Madeline Brooks

Will Bangladesh become another Afghanistan? So goes the fear of non-Muslim minorities – Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and animists – in Bangladesh as jihad advances in their country. It is not an unreasonable fear, given longstanding persecution and the recent overthrow of the prime minister who fought for secularism against Islamic forces. On August 5, 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had to flee the country after weeks of protests that claimed lives on both sides. Sheikh Hasina was elected five times as head of her country, starting in 2009 and for the last time, in January 2024.

Since its establishment as an independent country, breaking away from Pakistan in a bloody revolution in 1971, Bangladesh has been struggling to find its basic policies. The issue is religion. Shall the country be Islamist like Pakistan or secular, granting the right for survival and equal rights to its minorities who, after all, have lived there long before the Islamic invasion into their homeland? Sheikh Hasina, herself a Muslim was the head of the Awami League Party which defined secularism as “Religion as per one’s own, but festivals common to all.” This sounds like it not only reflects the live and let live philosophies of the minorities but cheerfully looks to a good time for all. The now overthrown Awami League has been trying to keep a lid on Islamist strivings. Its opposition was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose website states its founding principle to be “full faith and trust in Allah.”  The BNP is allied with the Jamaat-e-Islami party, the country’s largest Islamic group, whose constitution calls for an end to secular rule, a polite way of saying the country would be ruled only by strict Islam, just as we see in Afghanistan. Jamaat opposed the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, and has been continuing to undercut the secularist orientation by organizing strict Islamic groups in villages, even after it has been in and out of being banned.

Other Islamic groups go further. Hefazat e Islam demands capital punishment for “atheist bloggers.” Another fundamentalist group, Khelafat Majlish,  has put forth demands including that “no laws or policies are enacted [that] contradict the Quran and Sunnah” As an answer to anxieties about whether Bangladesh would become another “Afghanistan or Pakistan,” Islamic forces answered by taunting with chants of “We shall become Afghan, Bangla will be Taliban.” Pakistan has several Islamic parties while Afghanistan has only one, the Taliban, so they would go further. Another group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned by several other Muslim countries, broadcast its desire to establish an Islamic caliphate in Bangladesh.

So as we can see, the difference in intentions of the two parties is very clear and it would have made sense for the US to back Hasina’ Awami League, but they did not, for reasons we will see later. Charges by US critics and others were ostensibly that Sheikh Hasina’s party went way too far in its efforts to keep a lid on jihad, and had become anti-democratic in its squashing of dissent.

On August 1, 2024, just days before Hasina’s forced departure, she took an action against jihad and announced that the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing would be banned as militant groups, since she saw them as a major part of the student riots that had begun months earlier. This announcement just incited rage further, and the main target became the government’s job quota system which favored descendants of the men who fought in the 1971 War of Liberation from Pakistan by reserving 30% of its jobs for them. The job quotas led to nepotism in a time of widespread unemployment as the rapidly expanding country went through a sharp contraction.  According to Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the Awami League was fighting to get rid of the quotas that a court had reinstated. However, even after the quota system had been dropped and replaced by a mostly merit based system, the protesters persisted, enraged by things that arose from their own demonstrations: the internet was slowed down or stopped, universities had been closed, over 9,000 people were arrested according to an activist’s report, and worst of all more than 300 of their fellows had been shot dead by the police. There are reports of police gunfire coming from helicopters that killed even young children near their homes, but whether this was accidental or not is not clear. Some police were hurt or killed too in the struggle.

When the protesters’ rage reached boiling proportions, the Prime Minister had to flee for her life in a helicopter with her sister to India. Her palace was torn into with zeal. Anything that could be picked up was stolen and paraded for the cameras, even, shamefully, two of her bras. Hasina, fiercely loyal to the memory of her father, Sheikh Mujibar Rahman, who had led the 1971 revolution, and then been assassinated, was said to have added fuel to the fire by taunting the protesters with a name for traitors, razakars, implying they were disloyal to the very founding of the country. She later denied this, saying her words were distorted by others; however there are reports that she tried to silence political dissent even before the recent protesters by calling her critics razakars. Ominously, she is now facing demands for extradition from India to be tried on 75 charges ranging from genocide to murder and abduction and she seems to be having trouble finding a country who will accept her, as India questions whether she should stay there. There are fears that she will be summarily killed if returned to Bangladesh.

Student protesters and other critics contend that Hasina’s party had a long history of more than 600 disappearances, extra judicial killings of political rivals and repression of dissent. She and 49 of her former ministers are accused by the country’s anti-corruption commissioner of siphoning off more than $150 billion to various countries throughout the world through such things as money laundering, overspending on government projects, and bribes.  As well, Hasina amended the Constitution in a way that is said to have prevented a peaceful transition of power. These charges may be true, but according to her, they were not the real reason the US wanted to end her regime,

What is not as well known yet to Americans, although the foreign press is ablaze with it, is suspicion that the US arranged for a coup against Hasina. Hasina claims that the US wanted to buy Saint Martin’s island, a small area in the Bay of Bengal, for security reasons. The reasoning goes that an airbase there could be used to monitor and control Chinese economic and military activities in the area. When Hasina refused to sell or lease it, she states that she was told her next election could be made easier for her (with the implication that it could also be made worse.) She also alleged that the US wanted to take more territory from her country.

After she left she explained, “I resigned so that I did not have to see the procession of dead bodies. They wanted to come to power over the dead bodies of students but I did not allow it… I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin’s island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal…If I had remained in the country, more lives would have been lost, more resources would have been destroyed. ..Like East Timor … they will carve out a Christian country taking parts of Bangladesh [Chattogram] and Myanmar with a base in the Bay of Bengal.”

The US also wanted independent minded Hasina to join the Indo Pacific Treaty and steer clear of BRIC (an economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which would have kept her out of China’s influence, but she resisted, and instead took loans from China to develop her country. In what looks like punishment, the US put visa restrictions on members of her party in September, 2023. They frequently criticized her party and her for being insufficiently “democratic,” while showing favor to Pakistan which is obviously not democratic, as a Muslim dominated country, the same one that allowed Osama bin Laden to stay there. Dhaka was also kept out of one of Biden’s Summits for Democracy. One of the Awami League members alleged that favor was shown to the rival BNP that gave a home to Jamaat and other fundamentalists. In April, 2024 Hasina told her Parliament that the US was putting pressure on her to take initiatives against China, and then came the student riots. Hasina’s perception that the US was working on a regime change was shared earlier by a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, who in December, 2023, said that the US was planning a “chaotic regime change” in Bangladesh. More specifically, Ms. Zakharova claimed that the US ambassador to Bangladesh, Peter Haas, and a high-ranking BNP representative had been discussing plans to organize mass anti-government protests in the country. This would be a color revolution, which the US flatly denies. However, it looks to some that the woman who was once a model of female empowerment became unfairly regarded as a despot, a disposable female.

US antipathy to an independent Bangladesh is not new. During the Cold War, the US State Department was hyper focused on competing with the USSR and containing it. Countries that opposed the USSR became allies, while neutral countries were seen as potential threats. Pakistan allied with the US and other Western countries. Bangladesh, however, did not become a country until 1971, and it had to split from Pakistan to do so. Pakistan’s military continued to be a problem for Bangladesh, and is believed by Indian journalist Palki Sharma to be a contributor to Bangladesh’s problems, along with the US working against the Awami League. Hasina’s son cites the manipulation of social media as an incitement to bring down his mother’s reign, and says that protesters were given guns to attack the police. In a country where ownership of fire arms is tightly regulated, Joy questions who gave them guns and claims that his mother’s regime tried to meet all the protesters’ demands but that constant inciting egged them on.

At this point, it might be hard to say with certainty that the US engineered this blow to the head of a state. But there are more indications it may have happened. An economist who was deeply tied to the Democratic Party in the US was called in to be the interim head of the country. He is Muhammed Yunus, an economist known for starting the Grameen bank, making loans to very poor people. The bank’s interest rate is so high, 15-18 %, that it has led to despair and even suicide among many of the bank’s recipients. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against Yunus for other business interests, and he was sentenced to six months in prison for labor law violations connected with a phone company he ran. Yunus declares that the charges were trumped up, designed to stop him from starting a political party rivaling Hasina’s. She was his one-time friend, who went on to call him a “blood sucker” for exploiting the poor. Now there is bad blood between Yunus and Hasina. Nevertheless, he was very popular with the West and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Yunus’ new cabinet appears to be all Muslim, with the following possible add-on exceptions:  the portfolios of the remaining three members – psychiatrist Bidhan Ranjan Roy from the minority Hindu community, former diplomat Supradip Chakma from the Indigenous Chakma community, based in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and independence fighter Faruk-e-Azam. Yunus apparently had so little regard for these “also mentioned” people that they themselves were not even asked or notified about being in the cabinet beforehand. They learned about their new appointments from the media, according to a Hindu Bangladeshi source, and they call it mere window dressing.

Yunus did give scant encouragement to persecuted Hindus by making a ceremonial visit to a temple, along with a flood of smiling luminaries, who look like they are at a party. But his alliances with Islamist groups create confusion and fear for those who are left out. As the interim head of Bangladesh, Yunus promptly lifted the ban on the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party that had been imposed by Hasina just a month ago. Jammat e Islami is back to declaring that “peace will not return until the religion of Allah is established.”  Yunus’ also released from prison an Al-Qaeda linked terror group Chief , Jashimuddin Rahmani. And he met with Mamunul Haque, a leader of the extremist group Hefazat-e-Islam. Moving quickly to secure his interim government, Yunus had a state meeting on September 2 with heads of seven Islamic parties. Representatives of the opposition party and minorities were left out. They have reason to be terrified.

Mobs are rampaging against Awami League members and politicians; some are killed, others are in hiding. The Bangladeshi media completely ignores this; reports come out only on social media, and are often taken down quickly. Hindus are especially targeted for attacks, even though they had political problems with Hasina too. She did not speak up for them when they were attacked and she ignored their attempts to reclaim confiscated property and set up a national minority commission to protect religious minorities. Hindus are asking politely for so very little. But Hasina denied these simple requests for justice because she apparently wavered between appeasing minorities and not stirring up Islamist anger. So much for placating Muslims. It looks like Hasina both caved to Islamists and bullied them. Would there have been a better way to rule? Is it even possible for a secular government to exist side by side with an Islamist one that is determined to obliterate it? These are questions other counties must face as they naively allow themselves to be dominated by Islam.

Will Bangladesh become another Afghanistan? This is what some Hindus and other Bangladeshi minorities fear. It is not an unreasonable fear, given the free hand given now to Islamists. Hindus say they are being “slaughtered.”  For many of their attackers, the hate is strictly about religion, not politics since some of their Hindu victims once participated with them in the student protests. Hindus are beaten, raped, murdered. Their houses, businesses, temples are set on fire. Professors are humiliated by their students and forced to stay out of their classrooms. This is happening by the hundreds. Calls to the police or military for assistance are not answered because the police are not functioning. There is no law and order. At least 205 attacks have been noted in 52 districts, though the number is probably much higher but without a functioning police department it is hard to register reports. This is called the bloodiest period in the country’s history since its 1971 war of independence. Hindus call out for help but the mainstream media in Bangladesh is alarmingly silent on this. Reports are coming out mainly through social media, many of which are quickly removed from Facebook and YouTube.

Ironically, heartbreakingly, the original inhabitants of the land, invaded by conquering Muslims centuries ago, now live in abject fear. Hindus have been killed and victimized since the inception of Bangladesh. Their numbers have plunged from 33% as measured in 1901 to only 7% today. Now the Hindus, Buddhists and indigenous people are trapped in their own homeland, unable to flee because they are denied entry at India’s border.

Summing up, the US in its drive to pursue a possibly out dated Russian policy of containment, and a similar current Chinese policy, has thrown secularism in Bangladesh under the bus. This is the opposite of democracy and has exposed Hindus and other minorities to possible extinction. Such a heartless policy, which is ultimately foolish for the US too, given the mandate of Islamic jihadists to conquer the world, must be changed. If Bangladesh does become an Afghanistan in South East Asia, America’s security interests will be severely threatened.

Madeline Brooks, M.A., is the former head of the New York chapter of ActforAmerica and is a conservative and counter-jihad writer. Her articles have been published in AmericanThinker.com, CanadaFreePress.com, FamilySecurityMatters.org, and elsewhere. Her book, What You Need To Know About Islamic Jihad: Information The Main Stream Media Is Not Giving You, is available for free on Scribd. She can be reached at ResistJihad@aol.com.