US penchant for Islamist radicals resurface with human rights report

The US deep state and policy establishment seems very fond of right-wing Islamist radicals or the 'mullahs'. They used them to bring down Iran's secular nationalist and democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh regime when it threatened to nationalise Iran's oil industry in the 1950s.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the radicals backed and sheltered by Pakistan to torpedo Afghanistan's Saur revolution that was doing wonders for women's emancipation and the end of clan-based feudalism.

They backed the Pakistani military using radicals to attack India or suppress the 1971 Bengali uprising.

The US brought down Saddam Hussein with a fake scare that he had developed weapons of mass destruction -- the bluff was called by the BBC at some cost to its finances. The net result -- the rise of ISIS in the vacuum caused by the withering away of the secular though autocratic Baath Party.

The US-sponsored Arab Spring ended Hosni Mubarak's 'police state' but propelled the Islamic brotherhood to power. General Fateh Al Sisi has restored Egypt's secular polity in the great military tradition of backing secularism in the Islamic world, but US efforts to keep the Talibans out with a parachuted liberal like Ashraf Ghani failed miserably because Washington's regional favourite - Pakistan's military - played both sides -- supporting NATO forces with logistics and selective intelligence while backing the Talibans.

The US failures in fighting asymmetric campaigns across the world failed despite its overwhelming military power, because its deep state and military-industrial complex suffered from the: cowboy mindset' with overwhelming emphasis on force and confused approach to politics.

In the Islamic world, the US has always floundered because it has often found value in radicals/ mullahs for immediate tactical gains, but then seen them emerge as huge long-term threats.

Osama Bin Laden's saga comes to mind but is too well known to be recounted in detail.

Fearing that the US was about to repeat its historical mistake in Bangladesh which India could ill afford for an awful long list of reasons, Pranab Mukherjee ( later President) fought a long verbal duel with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during the unfolding of the 1/11 Minus Two saga, reminding her that Islamic radicals in Bangladesh have to be fought by 'homegrown secular forces ' rather than US Marines or some propped up pot-bellied Bengali general.

Mukherjee prevailed and Bangladesh got a free and fair poll that brought back the Awami League to power. The late president has recounted this graphically in his memoirs "The Coalition Years".

Now the US is back to its old mischief of regime change using a mix of 'civil society' figures, Trojan horses inside the national power structure ranging from bureaucracy to political parties to military, and media assets.

The trouble is the US deep state rarely conjures up new innovative operational plans -- rather they prefer sticking to an accepted template.

In the case of Bangladesh, the US deep state and its cohorts in the policy establishment are following the 2013 Euromaidan model that worked so well in Ukraine. In fact, many from the Euromaidan team are handling the Bangladesh regime change operations. Now what works in Ukraine may not work in Bangladesh. But the Knight charlatans in Washington and Langley often miss out on regional peculiarities.

The latest US human rights report is part of the regime operations in Bangladesh. It seeks to boost the radical outfit Jamaat-e-Islami at a time when it has unleashed a hate campaign against the Ahmediyyas.

“Leaders and members of Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat), the largest Muslim political party in the country, could not exercise their constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly because of harassment by law enforcement authorities. Jamaat was deregistered as a political party by the government, prohibiting candidates from seeking office under the Jamaat name,” observes the human rights reports on Bangladesh.

Ironically, the state department is not in keeping with the issues that the Ahmediyya community raised with US Bangladesh Ambassador Peter Haas about the fundamentalist pro-Pakistan party running a boycott Ahmediyya campaign and pressing the government to declare them as “Unislamic”.

According to a press release issued by the Ahmediyya community, Ambassdor Haas, during his courtesy call to some of their leaders was told about "the serious concerns over the Jamaat-sponsored hate campaign and the highly communal statement from BNP’s secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir calling the attempt to hold the Ahmediyya rally controversial .

Days after the attack, Jamaat acting Secretary General Maulana ATM Masum issued a statement on March 5, asking the government to officially declare the Ahmadiyya community “non-Muslim”.

Moreover, an ardent Jamaat-backed Twitter handle named Basherkella posted a series of tweets asking people to boycott Ahmediyya, in clear evidence of a vicious hate campaign by the minority community.

The US human rights report also projects controversial rights body Odhikar as an “independent body”, oblivious to the fact that its founder Adilur Rahman Khan Shuvro was a deputy attorney general during the BNP-JAMAAT coalition government (2001-06).

'Odhikar' has been the moving force behind human rights data faking like blowing up the casualty figures during the 2013 police crackdown on ardent hardliners from Hefazat-e-Islam, then joined by opposition parties including Jamaat who even vowed to siege the capital to bring in Sariah Law, which was exposed by national media.

The UN ended up with eggs on its face when its reports contained names of hail-and-hearty Indian insurgents in the Bangladesh country report on Enforced disappearances -- again based on data fed by Odhikar and its fraternal organisations.

Moreover, the US report seems to quote frequently about Jamaat’s key ally, Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP), claims centering shrinking freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but ignores the party’s series of attacks on the country’s press and role in instigating communal violence.

This has provoked sharp reactions from Awami League leaders and their concerns are valid. But what top civil society personality Sultana Kamal has approached will hopefully compel Washington into some kind of introspection.

She said in an interview and I quote:

"This report concerns the Jamat- e-Islami (Jamaat) Bangladesh, a political party which has a proven record of collaborating with the Pakistani Military Junta in 1971 in the acts of Genocide, abduction, loot, arson, rape and other kinds of violence against women.

It is an established fact that its military wings in the name of Al-Badar and Al-Shams were responsible for the intellectual killings between December 10 and 14. With due respect, I would like to submit that scanning through the media, Pakistani government communications and international reports on the Bangladesh genocide of 1971, one can not miss seeing what the role of Jamaat was during the nine months of massacre of Bangladesh from March to December.

It was through a process of law that Jamaat was de- registered. As a freedom fighter, I would like to also ask whether the Nazi party be allowed to function in Germany?

I have no idea on what basis the report states the war crimes trial in Bangladesh was flawed. Since I have not seen any clear explanation as to why some quarters make such remark about the war crimes trial, I prefer not to comment. However, my experience with the tribunal was that the accused's right to self defence was fully respected."

Now if the US wants us to believe Zillur Rahman’s Center for Governance Studies is a more credible institution than those helmed by Sultana Kamal, they are making a vain effort. We know how the ISI funded his so-called glorified interview of war criminals, along with the self-confessed killer of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with one reportedly recorded in Pakistan, and how they then passed him on to the Chinese who took care of his TV show. Now the US finds value in him because he is agreeable, like a few others, to play a role in facilitating regime change in Bangladesh.

"The US agenda of demeaning the Hasina government is so preponderant that it goes all out to support a dangerous group like Jamaat which not only joined the Pakistani army in 1971 in perpetrating horrible atrocities. They nearly killed me in 2001 because my liberal views were unacceptable to Jamaat," former actress-playwright and minister Tarana Halim told a media outlet recently.

Halim, now Central Executive Member of the Awami League, said the West pitches for women's rights and human rights and then in the same breath upholds a group like Jamaat-e-Islami which is determined to impose Shariat law and curb gender rights in Bangladesh.

"The Western hypocrisy is so palpable and annoying. How can they get away with this," Awami League women leader Shahanaz Parvin Dolly told Bangladesh media.

A joint secretary at the Jubo Mohila League until the recent reorganisation of party committees, Dolly said the West talks of reconciliation in Bangladesh.

"That is impossible. How can we accommodate Jamaat-e-Islami, which opposed our freedom struggle and sided with Pakistan's occupation army to commit horrible brutalities on our people, especially against our women? As a Bengali woman, I will never accept their attempt to curb women's rights. We can't allow our country to be another Afghanistan," said Dolly.

According to the country’s eminent rights activists, the BNP’s top leadership, Tarique Rahman was convicted in cases of money laundering and holding a strong nexus with proscribed terror outfits during their rule in power back in 2001 to 2006. Tarique is now leading a fugitive life in London, who left the country having submitted an undertaking.

Under the rule of Tarique Rahman, Bangladesh became a hot bed for transnational terrorists while militants enjoyed a free reign with the highest state patronage, while a nefarious attempt known as the 21st grenade attack was executed in collusion with radicals that then opposition leader Sheikh Hasina has narrowly escaped.

Moreover, the absence of BNP’s threat of replication of the 1975-style assassination, calling out rights activists as AL sympathisers, and warning of capturing state power through violence — all that made the report ring hollow, according to experts.

So, from overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the 1950s to using hardcore Islamists to fight the Afghan Jihad to backing the most regressive regimes of Saudi Arabia, the US has always found radical forces as ready-to-use material for regime change operations to defeat progressive forces in the Islamic world.

For Washington during the Cold War, Arab or Persian nationalists like Gamal Nasser, Saddam Hussein or Mossadegh were the principal enemy. On occasions, the script has gone wrong for Washington when volcanic events like the Islamic revolution unfolded in Iran in 1979 or when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996.

Those like us who covered the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War closely and the events that followed find a continuity in US policy – first in backing the bloodthirsty Pakistan army and followed by Washington's covert backing to the brutal 1975 coup. For the Nixon-Kissinger duo, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – the founding father of the nation – was a "Soviet-Indian proxy". So Washington's dislike for Arab nationalists like Nasser easily translated into distrust of Bangali nationalists like Mujib and Sheikh Hasina.

So this ardent US defence of Jamaat in the State Department report proves a striking continuity in American policy of backing pro-Pakistan forces in Bangladesh. The US always had problems with passionate nationalists like Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Gamal Nasser. Regressive regimes like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan have always fitted Washington's bill by being too willing to play by Western strategic interests.

Not to mention a slew of earlier reports by the country’s leading outlets that laid bare how Jamaat's former money man Mir Quasem Ali schemed to foil the war crimes trial with a $25 million deal with one of the most influential US lobby firms, Cassidy & Associates, for engaging with the US government and the Bangladesh government "to protect his interest".

Sukharanjan Dasgupta is a veteran columnist and author of "Midnight Massacre" on the 1975 Bangladesh coup. As chief correspondent of Anandabazar Patrika, he reported on the Liberation War by gathering information from freedom fighters in Bangladesh.

Sukharanjan Dasgupta is a veteran columnist and author of "Midnight Massacre" on the 1975 Bangladesh coup. As chief correspondent of Anandabazar Patrika, he reported on the Liberation War by gathering information from freedom fighters in Bangladesh.

Source: IndiaToday