Bangladesh Untold

Author: Bangladesh Untold Editorial

  • Press Freedom Then and Now: BNP Demanded a Free Press for 15 Years. Then They Took Power.

    Press Freedom Then and Now: BNP Demanded a Free Press for 15 Years. Then They Took Power.

    Eight journalists charged in the first six weeks. Attacks on Bangladesh’s two most prominent newspapers. A retired general arrested — in part — for once doing his job. Bangladesh’s new government has not just failed to protect press freedom. It has actively dismantled it, using the same tools it spent fifteen years denouncing. This is the record, and this is the comparison.

    On the morning of January 15, 2004, journalist Manik Saha stepped out of his house in Khulna and was shot dead. He had been covering the activities of Islamist extremists in the region — reporting that powerful people in Bangladesh’s ruling establishment had decided they could not tolerate. His murder was never solved. His killers were never prosecuted. Bangladesh’s government at the time, under Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, expressed condolences and moved on.

    No arrest. No conviction. No accountability.

    Manik Saha’s name appears in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ database of journalists killed in Bangladesh. It sits alongside other names from the same period — men and women whose work brought them into conflict with a political establishment that had decided the press existed to serve power, not to scrutinize it.

    Twenty-two years later, in March 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists signed a joint letter to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman — the son of the woman who led Bangladesh when Manik Saha was murdered — demanding that his government stop charging journalists under cybercrime laws, investigate attacks on press offices, and release detained media workers.

    The letter had eight co-signatories. It was sent one month into Rahman’s government. Eight journalists had already been charged.

    Bangladesh is a country that cannot escape its own history. The names change. The tools do not.

    What BNP’s Record on Press Freedom Actually Looks Like

    From 2001 to 2006, Bangladesh under Khaleda Zia’s BNP-Jamaat coalition was one of the most dangerous places in South Asia to be a journalist. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented multiple killings during this period. Reporters Without Borders ranked Bangladesh among the worst countries in the world for press freedom throughout BNP’s tenure. The U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports for every year from 2001 to 2006 documented a consistent pattern of threats, violence, and impunity targeting journalists.

    The tactics were varied but the objective was singular: silence anyone whose reporting threatened the political and economic interests of BNP and its allies.

    Physical attacks on journalists were commonplace. In September 2003, a mob attacked the offices of the Prothom Alo newspaper — at the time, as now, Bangladesh’s most widely read daily. In 2004, photojournalist Shahidul Alam documented threats against reporters covering the August 21 grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League rally. The same attack that killed 24 people and blinded hundreds.

    The BNP government’s response to that attack — washing the crime scene with detergent before investigators could examine it — was itself an act of obstruction. When journalists tried to report on what had happened, they found themselves navigating a political environment in which the truth was unwelcome.

    The Information and Communication Technology Act, passed by the BNP government in 2006, laid the legal groundwork for what would follow. Bangladesh’s first cybercrime law — written and passed under BNP — contained provisions that criminalized vaguely defined online speech. At the time, the provisions were largely dormant because internet use was limited. They would not remain dormant for long.

    The Inheritance Problem: How Every Government Used the Same Law

    When Sheikh Hasina came to power in 2009, she inherited the ICT Act and its provisions. She used them. As social media penetration expanded throughout the 2010s, the Awami League government found the ICT Act increasingly useful for managing its critics. By 2018, the situation had become severe enough that international pressure led to a formal replacement: the Digital Security Act.

    Except that “replacement” was a euphemism. The DSA did not liberalize the legal environment for journalists. It expanded it. The International Press Institute described the DSA as a law that “criminalises legitimate journalistic activity.” Amnesty International said it would “silence free speech and dissent.” The U.S. Embassy warned that the law “too easily could be misused to arrest, detain, and silence critics.”

    BNP’s response to the Digital Security Act was unequivocal. Party leaders called it a tool of fascism. They documented hundreds of cases filed against their members under its provisions. Tarique Rahman, speaking from London, regularly cited the DSA as evidence that Hasina’s government was authoritarian and illegitimate. International supporters of BNP agreed.

    In 2023, under international pressure and following the murders of multiple journalists, the Awami League renamed the DSA the Cyber Security Act. Rights groups noted immediately that the name had changed but the provisions had not. Every aspect of the law that BNP had denounced as fascist remained in the new legislation.

    The July 2024 uprising brought down the Awami League. The interim government amended the Cyber Security Act. It did not repeal it. The core provisions — the ones that allow arrests for online speech critical of the government, the ones with non-bailable offenses, the ones that human rights organizations had called incompatible with freedom of expression — survived.

    And when Tarique Rahman took power in February 2026, he inherited a fully operational legal instrument for silencing journalists. A law that, in different iterations, his own party had helped create in 2006, condemned throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, and now began using within weeks of taking office.

    The First Six Weeks: A Documented Record

    The Human Rights Support Society released its monthly report for March 2026 on April 4, 2026 — covering the period from February 17, when Tarique Rahman was sworn in, through the end of March. The HRSS report, published in the Dhaka Tribune, documented the following actions against journalists and media workers in this period:

    • Eight journalists charged in two separate cases under the Cyber Security Act
    • One individual detained for criticizing Prime Minister Tarique Rahman online
    • Two people arrested for allegedly “offending religious sentiments” — a charge that has historically been used against minority community journalists and secular commentators

    The nine human rights organizations that wrote to Prime Minister Rahman on March 19 — including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Article 19 — added additional context. Their letter demanded that the government “investigate attacks on major news outlets including Prothom Alo and Daily Star.”

    That demand carries weight. Prothom Alo and the Daily Star are Bangladesh’s two most significant newspapers — the organizations that have most consistently attempted to practice independent journalism in a country where press independence is chronically under threat. The fact that both outlets faced attacks serious enough for nine international organizations to demand official investigation, within the first month of a new government, is not a routine press freedom concern. It is a warning sign.

    Reporters Without Borders — which has tracked press freedom in Bangladesh for decades — has documented a consistent pattern under every Bangladeshi government: initial tolerance of critical coverage during the honeymoon period of a new administration, followed by escalating pressure as political consolidation proceeds. The RSF noted in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index that Bangladesh’s institutional infrastructure for press suppression — the cybercrime laws, the advertising control mechanisms that allow governments to starve critical outlets financially, the unofficial networks of pressure on editors — had survived the change of government and remained available to whoever came next.

    Whoever came next was Tarique Rahman. He has wasted little time.

    Prothom Alo: The Paper That Has Always Made Governments Uncomfortable

    To understand why the attacks on Prothom Alo matter, it is necessary to understand what that newspaper represents in Bangladesh’s media landscape.

    Prothom Alo was founded in 1998 and has, for much of its existence, been Bangladesh’s highest-circulation Bangla-language newspaper. It has made enemies of every government. Under BNP from 2001 to 2006, it faced threats and pressure for covering the government’s corruption and its links to Islamist militant groups. Under Awami League, it faced criminal cases, advertising boycotts, and the imprisonment of journalist Rozina Islam for allegedly possessing government documents — a case that drew international condemnation.

    The paper’s consistent criticism of power, regardless of which party holds it, has made it a target of every government. And that consistency is itself the story. In a country where most media outlets are owned by business conglomerates with political connections and financial interests that make genuine independence nearly impossible, Prothom Alo has attempted to be the exception.

    When the nine international organizations demanded an investigation into attacks on Prothom Alo in March 2026, they were asking the government that had likely organized or tolerated those attacks to investigate itself. The demand was not naive — it was a documented statement of what had already happened, intended to create a public record.

    That public record now exists. The question is whether anyone in power is listening.

    “They Were Doing Their Jobs”: The 1/11 Journalists

    One dimension of the 2026 press freedom crisis has received less international attention than it deserves: the connection between the targeting of journalists and the broader campaign of retribution against figures associated with the 2007 emergency government.

    When Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Masud Uddin Chowdhury was arrested on March 23, 2026 — along with former DGFI chief Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Sheikh Mamun Khaled and others connected to the 1/11 period — the chilling effect on journalists who covered the emergency government and its anti-corruption work was immediate and intentional.

    The 2007-2008 caretaker government was the most significant anti-corruption effort in Bangladesh’s post-independence history. Journalists who covered it — who documented the evidence against Tarique Rahman, who reported on the money laundering investigations, who gave space to the corruption findings that would later be confirmed by courts — contributed to a historical record that the current government finds inconvenient.

    Targeting the officials who conducted the anti-corruption work sends a message to the journalists who reported on it: what you wrote is now dangerous. That message is understood. It does not need to be stated explicitly to achieve its intended effect.

    This is how press freedom dies in Bangladesh. Not always with an arrest — though there are those too — but with a systematic creation of uncertainty about what it is safe to report, to publish, to say.

    The Comparison That BNP Doesn’t Want Made

    Bangladesh Untold has published extensive documentation of press freedom conditions under BNP’s 2001–2006 government. The record is damning:

    The International Federation of Journalists documented Bangladesh as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in Asia during this period. The annual reports of the Dhaka-based Center for Development Communication recorded hundreds of incidents of threats, attacks, and legal harassment against journalists from 2001 to 2006. The U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Bangladesh in 2003 noted that “political activists and criminals beat, threatened, and otherwise harassed journalists,” and that “authorities generally failed to hold those responsible accountable.”

    Manik Saha’s killing in 2004 was not an isolated incident. It was the most extreme point on a continuum of violence and intimidation that ran throughout BNP’s tenure. The impunity that protected his killers was the same impunity that allowed BNP activists to beat reporters, threaten editors, and organize advertising boycotts against critical outlets.

    Now consider what has happened in the first three months of the Rahman government:

    • Eight journalists charged under cybercrime law
    • Attacks on Prothom Alo and Daily Star offices
    • Detention of a critic for online commentary
    • A pattern of legal and physical pressure on media that nine international organizations found severe enough to write directly to the Prime Minister about — within his first month in office

    BNP spent fifteen years arguing that Sheikh Hasina’s press freedom record disqualified her government from democratic legitimacy. They were right to make that argument. The Digital Security Act was a genuine threat to free expression. The arrests of journalists under AL rule were genuine abuses. The international condemnation of those abuses was warranted.

    Every word of that condemnation now applies to the government that delivered it.

    RSF, CPJ, and the Organizations BNP Used to Cite

    During the years of Awami League rule, BNP’s international advocates regularly cited Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists as authoritative sources. When RSF ranked Bangladesh near the bottom of its World Press Freedom Index, BNP cited the ranking as evidence of Hasina’s authoritarianism. When CPJ documented journalist arrests, BNP’s London office issued statements quoting the findings.

    These citations served a specific purpose: they established BNP as a party that respected and valued international human rights standards, and that saw press freedom as a democratic value rather than an inconvenience.

    The CPJ has now joined eight other organizations in writing directly to Tarique Rahman about press freedom violations in his government’s first month. RSF’s Bangladesh file is being updated with documentation of the same pattern those organizations identified.

    When BNP was in opposition, these organizations were authorities. Now that they are writing about BNP’s government, will the same standard apply? Will BNP acknowledge the CPJ’s findings the way it once demanded Awami League acknowledge them?

    The silence from BNP’s international supporters on this question is itself informative.

    What a Real Commitment to Press Freedom Would Look Like

    Bangladesh’s press freedom crisis will not be resolved by one government’s good intentions, even if this government had good intentions — which the evidence so far does not support. The structural problem is the existence of legal instruments designed for repression that survive every change of government because every government finds them useful.

    A genuine commitment to press freedom in Bangladesh would require:

    Repeal of the Cyber Security Act. Not amendment. Not renaming. Repeal. Every organization that has examined this law has concluded that it is incompatible with press freedom and freedom of expression. The BNP government, which condemned it under its previous iteration, has the democratic mandate and the credibility to abolish it. It has not done so.

    Criminal accountability for attacks on journalists. The organizations that wrote to PM Rahman in March 2026 demanded investigation into specific attacks. Those investigations must be independent of government influence, and their findings must be acted upon regardless of where they lead. This has never happened in Bangladesh’s history. It remains the benchmark against which every government must be measured.

    Release of all journalists detained under cybercrime provisions. Not just journalists whose political sympathies align with the government, but all journalists detained for their work. Press freedom is not selective. A government that releases only its friendly journalists while keeping its critics in detention has not embraced press freedom. It has managed it.

    Structural independence for the state broadcaster. Bangladesh Television and Bangladesh Betar have functioned as government mouthpieces under every administration. Their editorial independence has never been secured by law. It should be.

    These are not radical demands. They are the minimum standards that Bangladesh’s international partners — the same partners who celebrated the February 2026 election as a democratic triumph — should be conditioning their continued engagement on. The fact that these standards are not being demanded, with real consequences for non-compliance, is a failure of international accountability as much as it is a failure of Bangladeshi governance.

    The Pattern Continues

    Bangladesh Untold was established to document the history of Bangladesh that powerful interests prefer you not know. Part of that history is the consistent, bipartisan assault on press freedom that has defined every government this country has had.

    The pattern is not complicated. A new government arrives. Journalists who covered the previous government’s abuses find themselves targeted. New cybercrime cases are filed. New arrests are made. International organizations send letters. The government issues non-committal responses. The journalists remain in detention or under legal pressure. The international community continues to engage with the government regardless.

    Then, eventually, the next government arrives. And the journalists who covered this government’s abuses find themselves targeted. And the cycle continues.

    Manik Saha was shot in 2004. His killers were never found. The BNP government that failed to find them is now back in power. Eight journalists have been charged under cybercrime law in the first six weeks of that government’s return.

    Bangladesh’s journalists — the ones doing their jobs, the ones trying to report what is actually happening — deserve better than a political class that values press freedom only when it is useful for attacking opponents, and abandons it the moment it becomes an inconvenience to govern.

    The record of 2001 to 2006 is damning. The record being built from February 2026 onwards is following the same pattern. The comparison is not unfair. It is, in fact, the only honest way to evaluate a government that spent fifteen years in opposition demanding standards it is now refusing to meet.

    Bangladesh deserves a free press. Its journalists deserve protection. Its citizens deserve a government that treats accountability journalism as a democratic asset rather than a political threat.

    Based on three months of evidence, this government has not decided to be that government.

    The record continues to be written. We will continue to document it.

    Sources

    • Committee to Protect Journalists — Bangladesh journalist database, Manik Saha case (2004)
    • CPJ, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Article 19, CIVICUS, FIDH, Fortify Rights, Kennedy Human Rights Center, Tech Global Institute — Joint letter to PM Tarique Rahman, March 19, 2026
    • Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) Monthly Report, Dhaka Tribune, April 4, 2026
    • Reporters Without Borders — World Press Freedom Index, Bangladesh historical rankings
    • U.S. State Department — Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Bangladesh (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
    • U.S. Embassy Bangladesh — Statement on Cyber Security Act 2023
    • Amnesty International: “Restore freedom of expression in Bangladesh & repeal Cyber Security Act” (2024)
    • International Press Institute — Digital Security Act assessment (2019)
    • Rozina Islam case documentation — CPJ, RSF, 2021
    • Al Jazeera Media Institute: “Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act is criminalising journalism” (2022)
    • International Federation of Journalists — South Asia press freedom reports (2002–2006)
    • Bangladesh Center for Development Communication — Annual journalist safety reports (2001–2006)
    • Dhaka Tribune, The Daily Star, Prothom Alo — 2026 reporting on journalist arrests and press office attacks
    • WikiLeaks / U.S. Embassy Dhaka cables — background on BNP era media environment

    Bangladesh Untold documents the history of Bangladesh that powerful interests prefer you not know. Every claim is sourced. Every source is cited.

    🔴 Bangladesh Untold — The History You Were Never Told

  • When Victims Become Perpetrators: BNP’s First 100 Days and the Authoritarianism They Once Condemned

    When Victims Become Perpetrators: BNP’s First 100 Days and the Authoritarianism They Once Condemned

    In Patuakhali’s Kalapara area, 45-year-old Md Idris made a critical comment on Facebook about a local BNP leader. Within days, he was beaten to death.

    Across the country, an individual was detained simply for criticizing Prime Minister Tarique Rahman on social media. Eight journalists faced charges under the Cyber Security Act. Two more were arrested for allegedly “offending religious sentiments.”

    These are not isolated incidents buried in local news. They were documented in the Human Rights Support Society’s official monthly report for March 2026, published just six weeks into Tarique Rahman’s tenure as Prime Minister. They represent something Bangladesh has seen before — a systematic pattern of repression that bears an uncomfortable and unmistakable resemblance to the very authoritarianism that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party spent fifteen years condemning.

    The irony would be almost literary if the consequences weren’t so deadly. The victims have become the perpetrators. The party that called Sheikh Hasina “fascist” has reached for the same tools within weeks of taking power.

    The HRSS Documentation: March 2026

    The Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) released its monthly report on April 4, 2026, covering political violence in March — barely a month and a half after Tarique Rahman was sworn in as Prime Minister on February 17.

    The numbers were stark. The report, published in the Dhaka Tribune, documented not just the usual political clashes that have plagued Bangladesh for decades, but something more organized: the use of state apparatus to silence critics.

    “Separately, under different sections of the Cybersecurity Act, eight journalists were charged in two separate cases. One individual was detained for criticizing Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, and two were arrested for allegedly offending religious sentiments.”

    — HRSS Report, April 4, 2026

    But the most chilling entry was this:

    “In Patuakhali’s Kalapara area, Md Idris (45) was beaten to death for posting critical comments on Facebook against BNP leader Zahirul Islam.”

    A 45-year-old man was beaten to death for a Facebook post.

    Not by state forces. Not by police. By BNP activists — operating with the impunity that comes from knowing your party holds power. The same kind of impunity that allowed BNP activists to commit post-election atrocities against Hindu minorities in 2001 without a single prosecution.

    Nine Organizations Sound the Alarm

    The international response was swift and unprecedented. On March 19, 2026 — one month into Rahman’s government — nine major human rights organizations wrote a joint letter directly to the Prime Minister demanding immediate action.

    The signatories read like a comprehensive roll call of international human rights credibility:

    • Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
    • Amnesty International
    • Article 19
    • CIVICUS
    • FIDH
    • Fortify Rights
    • Human Rights Watch
    • Kennedy Human Rights Center
    • Tech Global Institute

    Their demands were specific and urgent: release detained journalists, review cases filed under cybercrime laws, end arbitrary surveillance and censorship, and investigate attacks on major news outlets including Prothom Alo and Daily Star.

    That these organizations felt compelled to write such a letter one month into a new government’s tenure — before it had even found its footing on economic policy — is itself a measure of how severe the situation had already become.

    For context: these same organizations wrote similar letters about Sheikh Hasina’s government. BNP leaders, at the time, welcomed those letters. They cited them as evidence of international condemnation of Awami League authoritarianism. They called Hasina’s administration illegitimate. They demanded action.

    Now the letters are addressed to them.

    The Same Playbook, a Different Hand on the Lever

    Bangladesh has a word for it: gotanugotikota — following the beaten path. Every government inherits the tools of its predecessor. Every government promises not to use them. Every government uses them.

    But the speed and brazenness of BNP’s replication deserves documentation, because the parallels are precise rather than approximate.

    Under Hasina (2009–2024):

    • Used the Digital Security Act to arrest social media critics
    • Targeted journalists for “anti-government” content
    • Arrested people for Facebook posts critical of the government or its leaders
    • Made arrests without warrants under cybercrime provisions
    • Enabled political activists to physically attack opponents with impunity

    BNP’s response was unequivocal. Party leaders called Hasina’s government “fascist.” They documented over 300,000 false and fabricated cases filed against their leaders and activists. They demanded international intervention. They held press conferences with rights lawyers. They filed cases in international forums.

    Under Rahman (February 2026–present):

    • Using the Cyber Security Act to arrest social media critics
    • Targeting journalists for “anti-government” content
    • Arresting people for Facebook posts critical of the government or its leaders
    • Making arrests without warrants under cybercrime provisions
    • BNP activists beating a critic to death with apparent impunity

    The playbook is not similar. It is identical. Only the party’s name has changed.

    The Cyber Security Act: Bangladesh’s Permanent Tool of Repression

    No article on Bangladesh’s cycle of political repression is complete without examining the instrument that enables it: the country’s cybercrime legislation.

    The story begins in 2006, when the BNP-Jamaat government passed the Information and Communication Technology Act — a law that would eventually be used to arrest over 1,200 people. BNP wrote it. BNP used it.

    Awami League inherited it. Sheikh Hasina’s government used it so aggressively that they eventually replaced it with the Digital Security Act in 2018, which expanded the provisions and made more offenses non-bailable. Approximately 2,000 cases were filed under that law. About 1,000 people were arrested.

    When international pressure mounted, Hasina’s government nominally “replaced” the Digital Security Act with the Cyber Security Act in 2023. Rights groups immediately noted that the new law retained every problematic provision of its predecessor. The U.S. Embassy stated bluntly that it “continues to criminalize freedom of expression, retains non-bailable offenses, and too easily could be misused to arrest, detain, and silence critics.”

    Amnesty International called it “a replication of the ‘draconian’ Digital Security Act.”

    The July 2024 uprising created an opportunity to break this cycle. The interim government could have repealed the law entirely. Instead, it made amendments. The core architecture of political censorship survived.

    And when Tarique Rahman took power in February 2026, he inherited a fully operational tool for silencing dissent — and he began using it within weeks.

    The arrests of eight journalists in the first six weeks of his government are not the beginning of a new story. They are the latest chapter in a story that has been running for two decades, through BNP, Awami League, and BNP again.

    The Score-Settling: 1/11 in the Crosshairs

    Beyond the general crackdown on critics, there is a more specific and deliberate campaign underway: the systematic targeting of individuals associated with the 1/11 emergency government of 2007.

    The arrests began almost immediately after Rahman took power:

    • March 23, 2026: Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Masud Uddin Chowdhury arrested — a key 1/11 figure who served as military coordinator during the emergency period
    • March 26, 2026: Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Sheikh Mamun Khaled arrested — former Director General of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI)
    • March 30, 2026: Mohammad Afzal Naser arrested — with the prosecution openly stating he was detained for being “involved in the arrest and torture of Tarique Rahman” during the emergency period

    That last statement deserves to be read again carefully. A man was arrested not for committing a crime today, but for his role in arresting someone who is now Prime Minister. The government stated this openly.

    This is not law enforcement. This is personal revenge elevated to state policy.

    The 1/11 emergency was declared on January 11, 2007, when a military-backed caretaker government took power amid a constitutional crisis that had brought Bangladesh to the brink of a violent general election. The emergency government arrested hundreds of political figures from both major parties, including Tarique Rahman, and launched an anti-corruption drive that the World Bank, Transparency International, and multiple international observers described as Bangladesh’s best chance at breaking its cycle of political corruption.

    Whether 1/11 was justified — whether emergency rule, by definition, can ever be fully justified — is a complex historical debate. This publication has engaged with that debate extensively. But what is happening now is not a debate. It is targeted retribution. And the individuals being arrested are not being charged with the crimes they actually committed or may have committed. They are being punished for having once held Tarique Rahman accountable.

    What BNP’s Own History Teaches Us

    There is a bitter irony in the pattern of repression that has emerged in 2026, because BNP’s own behavior during its 2001–2006 tenure provides the most damning context for evaluating its current conduct.

    When BNP came to power in October 2001, it used its victory to unleash what the Bangladesh High Court’s own judicial commission later described as a wave of terror against minorities, political opponents, and dissidents. The commission documented over 18,000 rapes of Hindu women and girls in the post-election period. Twenty-five ministers and MPs of the BNP-Jamaat government were identified as involved in organizing the violence.

    The perpetrators were never punished. Cases were filed and then dropped. Witnesses were intimidated. The state machinery protected those responsible.

    Transparency International ranked Bangladesh as the world’s most corrupt country for five consecutive years under that government. RAB, the paramilitary force created under BNP, killed over 600 people in “crossfire” — a Bangladeshi euphemism for extrajudicial execution — without a single prosecution of the forces involved.

    After 1/11, BNP spent years arguing that those anti-corruption prosecutions were politically motivated. Some of those arguments had merit. Some did not. But the record of what BNP actually did during 2001–2006 — documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, U.S. diplomatic cables, and Bangladesh’s own courts — is not a matter of political interpretation.

    It is history.

    And history is now repeating itself — this time with BNP as the government, reaching for the same tools of repression it once condemned.

    The Victim-Perpetrator Cycle: Bangladesh’s Permanent Crisis

    Bangladesh has been running this cycle since independence. Governments arrive with promises of accountability. They use that accountability as cover for personal revenge. The institutions built to protect citizens — courts, police, cybercrime tribunals — become instruments of partisan warfare. And the next generation of politicians learns that if they ever come to power, they will need to neutralize the same institutions that their predecessors weaponized against them.

    This is not a BNP problem or an Awami League problem. It is a structural problem — a failure of democratic consolidation that has persisted across every government Bangladesh has ever had.

    But recognizing the structural nature of the problem does not absolve the current government of responsibility for its choices. Tarique Rahman had options. He had a democratic mandate, international goodwill, and a country that had just demonstrated — through the July 2024 uprising — that its citizens were willing to fight for something better.

    He chose to reach for the tools of repression instead.

    The death of Md Idris for a Facebook post is not an abstraction. It is a 45-year-old man beaten to death by political activists who understood, correctly, that their party’s hold on power would protect them. That understanding — that violence against critics carries no consequences — is the precise culture of impunity that BNP spent fifteen years condemning under Awami League.

    It is now BNP’s culture of impunity.

    What International Observers Need to Understand

    For international partners, governments, and human rights organizations engaging with Bangladesh, the emerging pattern of the Rahman government carries specific implications.

    First: the democratic mandate of the February 2026 election does not confer immunity from scrutiny. A government that wins a free election and then immediately begins arresting critics, beating dissidents to death, and using cybercrime laws to silence journalists is not exercising democratic governance. It is using democratic legitimacy as a shield for authoritarian practice.

    Second: the targeting of 1/11 figures is not anti-corruption action. The prosecution openly admitted that at least one arrest was motivated by the arrestee’s past role in holding Tarique Rahman accountable. That is personal revenge using state power. It should be called what it is.

    Third: the Cyber Security Act must go. Every human rights organization that has examined this law — from Amnesty International to the U.S. Embassy — has concluded that it is incompatible with freedom of expression. It has been used by every government that has held power since 2006. It will continue to be used for repression until it is repealed.

    The nine organizations that wrote to Prime Minister Rahman in March 2026 asked for specific actions. They have yet to receive satisfactory responses. The silence itself is an answer of a kind.

    A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

    What is happening in Bangladesh today is not a sudden, unexpected deterioration. It is the latest iteration of a pattern that this publication has documented across five years of BNP-Jamaat rule, across fifteen years of Awami League rule, and across the 1/11 emergency period.

    The institutions of democratic accountability in Bangladesh — an independent judiciary, a free press, civilian oversight of security forces — have never been fully built. Every government that has come to power has had the same choice: build those institutions and constrain its own power, or use the absence of those institutions to entrench itself.

    Every government has made the same choice.

    The death of Md Idris for a Facebook post. Eight journalists charged in the first six weeks of a new government. A man arrested for criticizing the Prime Minister online. A retired general detained for having once arrested the man who is now Prime Minister.

    These are not stories from 2001. They are not stories from 2010. They are stories from May 2026, three months after a democratic election that Bangladesh’s international partners celebrated as the dawn of a new era.

    The new era looks familiar.

    The victims of yesterday are the perpetrators of today. And until Bangladesh builds institutions strong enough to break this cycle — institutions that protect the rights of critics regardless of which party holds power — the perpetrators of today will become the victims of tomorrow, and the cycle will continue.

    Bangladesh deserves better. Its people have demonstrated, repeatedly and at great personal cost, that they are willing to fight for something better.

    The question is whether this government — like every government before it — will listen.

    Based on the first one hundred days, the answer does not inspire confidence.

    Sources

    • Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) Monthly Report, Dhaka Tribune, April 4, 2026
    • Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch et al. — Joint Letter to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, March 19, 2026
    • Human Rights Watch: “No Place for Criticism: Bangladesh Crackdown on Social Media Commentary” (2018)
    • Amnesty International: “Restore freedom of expression in Bangladesh & repeal Cyber Security Act” (2024)
    • U.S. Embassy Bangladesh — Statements on Cyber Security Act 2023
    • Transparency International — Corruption Perceptions Index, Bangladesh (2001–2005)
    • Bangladesh High Court Judicial Commission on Post-Election Violence (2009, report filed 2011)
    • Al Jazeera Media Institute: “Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act is criminalising journalism” (2022)
    • International Crisis Group: Bangladesh reports, 2002–2007
    • The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune — reporting on 2026 arrests of retired military officials
    • WikiLeaks / U.S. Embassy Dhaka cables — Tarique Rahman as “symbol of kleptocratic government” (2005)

    Bangladesh Untold documents the history of Bangladesh that powerful interests prefer you not know. Every claim is sourced. Every source is cited.

    🔴 Bangladesh Untold — The History You Were Never Told

  • From “Symbol of Kleptocratic Government” to Prime Minister: The World Spoke. Then It Forgot.

    From “Symbol of Kleptocratic Government” to Prime Minister: The World Spoke. Then It Forgot.

    From “Symbol of Kleptocratic Government” to Prime Minister: The World Spoke. Then It Forgot.

    Part of the Bangladesh Untold Series 7: 1/11 Season 2 — The 2024 Parallels

    On November 3, 2008, a senior American diplomat in Dhaka sat down and wrote one of the most damning assessments of any living politician in South Asia. The cable was classified CONFIDENTIAL. It was addressed to the Secretary of State. It bore the subject line: “VISAS DONKEY CORRUPTION 212(F) — RAHMAN, TARIQUE.”

    The author was James F. Moriarty, United States Ambassador to Bangladesh. His subject was Tarique Rahman, the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and the man who ran Bangladesh’s largest opposition party from a flat in London.

    Moriarty’s verdict was not hedged. It was not diplomatic. It was a clinical, sourced, documented indictment:

    “Tarique Rahman, the notorious and widely feared son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia… Notorious for flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes in connection with government procurement actions and appointments to political office, Tarique is a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics in Bangladesh.“

    — US Embassy Cable 08DHAKA1143, November 3, 2008 (WikiLeaks)

    The Ambassador went further. He named companies, dollar amounts, and case numbers. He cited the FBI. He cited the Department of Justice. He called for Tarique to be barred from entering the United States under Presidential Proclamation 7750, reserved for individuals engaged in “egregious political corruption.”

    He concluded: “In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies.”

    That was 2008.

    On February 17, 2026, the same Tarique Rahman was sworn in as the Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

    The world watched. And then, largely, said nothing.

    What the US Ambassador Documented

    Cable 08DHAKA1143 is not vague. It is not impressionistic. It reads like a prosecutor’s briefing — specific, sourced, and calibrated. This matters because it is not what critics said. It is not what opposition politicians alleged. It is the considered, classified judgment of the United States government, based on embassy intelligence and active law enforcement cooperation.

    Here is what it documented:

    Siemens. Tarique Rahman extracted approximately a 2% commission on all Siemens contracts in Bangladesh, paid in US dollars. The US Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Unit and the FBI were actively investigating this. The cable names this explicitly.

    Harbin Company. A Chinese company paid $750,000 to Tarique. The money was transported to Singapore for deposit into a Citibank account. The cable identifies this as part of a transnational money laundering operation.

    Monem Construction. The construction firm paid a $450,000 bribe to Tarique in exchange for contracts.

    Al Amin Construction. Tarique threatened the owner with business closure unless the company paid him $150,000.

    The Kabir Murder Case. Tarique accepted 210 million taka ($3.1 million) to obstruct prosecution of a murder case. The accused was the son of the Bashundhara Group chairman — one of Bangladesh’s most powerful business families.

    Zia Orphanage Trust. A charitable fund established in the name of former President Ziaur Rahman — Tarique’s father — was looted. Twenty million taka intended for orphans was redirected to land purchases and BNP election campaigns.

    The Ambassador’s summary: “Tarique reportedly has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit wealth.”

    And then the line that goes beyond corruption into political violence: “His flagrant disregard for the rule of law has provided potent ground for terrorists to gain a foothold in Bangladesh.”

    The cable was not written in isolation. It was written against the backdrop of everything that had already happened. The August 21, 2004 grenade attack — in which 24 people were killed and over 500 wounded at an Awami League rally — had already been investigated. HUJI operative Mufti Abdul Hannan had already confessed that the attack was planned at Hawa Bhaban, the shadow government Tarique ran from his mother’s compound. The court would later find a “well-orchestrated plan executed through abuse of state power.”

    Tarique’s name was already in that file. The FBI’s name was already in that file. The Ambassador knew it. He documented it. He filed it with the Secretary of State.

    And in 2010, WikiLeaks published it for the world to read.

    The Charges, the Courts, the Convictions

    When the military-backed caretaker government took power on January 11, 2007 — the event that became known simply as “1/11” — one of its primary targets was Tarique Rahman. He was arrested on March 7, 2007. Over the following years, 84 criminal cases were registered against him.

    The cases covered money laundering, extortion, arms trafficking, the grenade attack, abuse of power, and the looting of charitable funds. They were not invented overnight. Many predated 1/11 entirely — they were cases that BNP’s own government had suppressed while in office.

    Tarique was held for 18 months. He was released on bail in September 2008, reportedly after signing a written declaration at Zia International Airport agreeing to leave Bangladesh and resign from political activity. The US Embassy cable, filed weeks later, confirmed this: “released from prison in September 2008… in connection with a written declaration at the airport that he was resigning from political activity.”

    He went to London. He never stopped running BNP.

    Over the following decade and a half, the courts continued working through his cases. In 2016, he was convicted in the Zia Orphanage Trust case: seven years imprisonment, Tk 10 lakh fine. In 2018, he was convicted in the August 21, 2004 grenade attack case: life imprisonment. The court found direct involvement, planned at Hawa Bhaban, executed through the machinery of state power.

    As of 2024, Tarique Rahman was a convicted murderer — found guilty by a court of law for the deadliest political attack in modern Bangladeshi history — living in London, running his party by video call, and waiting.

    July 2024: The Ground Shifts

    In July 2024, Bangladesh’s political history broke open. What began as student protests against a job quota system became an uprising. The Hasina government fired on protesters. The internet went dark. Hundreds died in the streets.

    But the movement could not be stopped. On August 5, 2024, Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh by military helicopter, ending fifteen years of Awami League rule. An interim government under Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus took charge.

    For Tarique Rahman, the waiting was over.

    What followed was a judicial process of breathtaking speed and comprehensiveness. Between late 2024 and mid-2025, Tarique Rahman’s 84 criminal cases were systematically dismissed, acquitted, or otherwise erased.

    The grenade attack conviction — life imprisonment, handed down by a trial court after years of evidence and hundreds of witnesses — was overturned in December 2024. The Zia Orphanage Trust conviction — seven years for looting a charitable fund — was overturned in January 2025. The money laundering case — the one the FBI had been investigating — was overturned in March 2025.

    Every case. Every conviction. Every sentence. All 84.

    Not because of new evidence. Not because witnesses recanted. Not because DNA exonerated him. Because the political order had changed, and the courts reflected the political order.

    This is the same pattern Bangladesh Untold has documented throughout BNP’s history: the rule of law is whatever the government in power says it is. The convictions from 2001-2006 said: BNP killed people, looted the state, harbored terrorists. The acquittals from 2024-2025 said: none of that happened.

    It cannot be both. History is one thing. Courts are another.

    February 17, 2026

    Tarique Rahman returned to Bangladesh in early 2026. The BNP won the general election. He was sworn in as Prime Minister on February 17, 2026, by President Mohammed Shahabuddin.

    Cameras flashed. Hands were shaken. The cabinet was formed — fifty members. International congratulations arrived, cautious but present. The man the US Ambassador had called a “symbol of kleptocratic government” was now the head of government of a country of 170 million people.

    The same man. The same record. The same WikiLeaks cable, still publicly available at its original URL for anyone who wants to read it.

    And yet the international reaction was not what Cable 08DHAKA1143 would have predicted.

    The Silence

    When Ambassador Moriarty filed that cable in 2008, he was recommending that Tarique be barred from the United States for egregious political corruption. The cable cited active FBI and DOJ involvement. It cited specific dollar amounts and specific transactions that constituted federal crimes under US law.

    In 2026, none of that was mentioned in the congratulatory statements.

    This is not a surprise. It is how geopolitics works. But it is worth naming clearly, because the people of Bangladesh deserve clarity about what has actually happened.

    The international community — which expressed deep concern about Bangladesh’s democratic backsliding under Sheikh Hasina, which documented extrajudicial killings, which sanctioned RAB, which issued reports and press releases and resolutions — has largely concluded that the 2024 transition represents democratic progress. In some respects, it does. In others, it requires more careful scrutiny.

    Because the question is not whether BNP is better or worse than what preceded it. The question is whether the documented record — the FBI investigation, the corruption findings, the grenade attack conviction, the WikiLeaks cable — constitutes something that matters. Something that cannot simply be acquitted away by a new set of courts.

    Tarique Rahman’s cases were not overturned because he was proven innocent. They were overturned because he won an election. That is not the same thing. That has never been the same thing.

    The Numbers That Don’t Change

    History does not acquit. Courts do. These are different things.

    The trial court that convicted Tarique of life imprisonment in the August 21, 2004 grenade attack did so after examining evidence collected over fourteen years. The judgment ran to thousands of pages. It named co-conspirators, identified the supply chain for the Arges grenades (Belgian military-grade weapons that had no business being on a civilian street in Dhaka), and reconstructed the planning meetings at Hawa Bhaban.

    That judgment was not wrong because an appeals court later overturned it. It was a finding of fact by a court of law. The evidence does not disappear because the verdict was reversed.

    The Siemens bribery. The Harbin Company. The Monem Construction payment. The Kabir murder obstruction. The orphanage money. These were not invented by political enemies. They were documented by the United States Embassy, corroborated by the FBI, detailed in cables sent to the Secretary of State.

    The Transparency International ranking that made Bangladesh the world’s most corrupt country for five consecutive years — 2001 to 2006, precisely the years Tarique ran Hawa Bhaban — does not become untrue because he is now Prime Minister. The corruption lowered Bangladesh’s economic growth rate by two percent per year. Those are real GDP points that never materialized. Real factories that were never built. Real jobs that were never created.

    The 24 people killed on August 21, 2004 — murdered at a political rally, blown apart by grenades supplied by state actors — did not come back to life when the conviction was overturned. Their names are documented. Their stories are on this site. A court once said: this was planned at Hawa Bhaban. That court’s finding does not cease to be a finding because a later court disagreed.

    What This Means Going Forward

    Bangladesh Untold has never argued that 1/11 was perfect. The caretaker government that took power in January 2007 operated under emergency rule. It detained politicians without trial, suppressed the press, and used military courts. These were serious problems. We have documented them.

    But the argument that 1/11 was wrong does not automatically make everything the previous BNP government did right. These are separate questions. The anti-corruption drive of 2007-2008 may have been imperfect. The crimes it was responding to were real.

    The people who carried out those crimes — who looted the state, who harbored militants, who planned a grenade attack on the opposition leadership, who presided over five years of international rankings as the world’s most corrupt government — are now in power again.

    That is not a partisan statement. That is the documented record.

    The US Ambassador said in 2008: “In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies.”

    He did not say this was alleged. He said it was true. He recommended a visa ban for egregious corruption. His government agreed.

    Eighteen years later, that man is Prime Minister. The visa ban recommendation is in a WikiLeaks archive. The FBI investigation presumably has a file somewhere. The 24 people killed at an Awami League rally are still dead.

    Bangladesh’s people deserve to hold all of this in their heads at once. Not to be told that the acquittals prove innocence. Not to be told that winning elections erases history. Not to be given a choice between an authoritarian who clamped down on press freedom and a man who was once convicted of mass murder at a political rally.

    They deserve the full record. This site exists to provide it.

    The cable was written in 2008. It described what happened between 2001 and 2006. It named the man responsible for much of it.

    That man is now Prime Minister. His name is Tarique Rahman.

    History doesn’t acquit. It records.

    Source Notes

    Bangladesh Untold is an independent documentation project covering the political history of Bangladesh, 2001–present. All articles are source-backed. Primary sources are linked where available.

  • Army Chief vs. Army Chief: When Is Military Intervention Acceptable?

    Army Chief vs. Army Chief: When Is Military Intervention Acceptable?


    Here is the question BNP does not want you to ask.

    On the morning of January 11, 2007, army trucks rolled into Dhaka and the caretaker government declared a state of emergency. BNP has spent nearly two decades calling this moment a “dark chapter,” a “military coup,” an assault on democracy that must never be repeated. Tarique Rahman, speaking from his London exile, routinely invoked 1/11 as the original sin of Bangladeshi politics — the moment unelected men in uniform overrode the will of the people.

    Then, on August 5, 2024, Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman announced on national television that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had resigned, that he was meeting with political parties and civil society, and that the military would take responsibility for restoring order. BNP described this as a “historic victory.” Their leaders poured into the streets to celebrate. Tarique Rahman, still in London, called it the dawn of a new Bangladesh.

    Same institution. Same uniform. Seventeen years apart. One is a dark chapter. One is a revolution. The only difference is which party the military was moving against.

    If you can hold that contradiction in your mind for a moment, you have just understood more about Bangladeshi politics than most political commentary will tell you.

    Two Army Chiefs, Two Moments

    General Moeen U Ahmed became Chief of Army Staff in June 2005. By late 2006, Bangladesh was careening toward a political catastrophe that most serious observers — domestic and international — agreed had no electoral solution. The BNP-Jamaat government’s term was ending. A caretaker government was supposed to take over, oversee a neutral election, and hand power to whichever party won. That was the constitutional design.

    But the BNP government had spent months systematically dismantling that design. They extended the retirement age of Chief Justice K.M. Hasan so that he would become the caretaker chief — a man who had been a registered BNP member as recently as the 1990s. The Election Commission, under Chief Election Commissioner M.A. Aziz, had compiled a voter list that contained, by credible estimates, 12.1 million fake or duplicate voters. When civil society groups demanded the list be cleaned up, Aziz refused. When the Awami League demanded a neutral caretaker arrangement, BNP refused. When the international community expressed concern, BNP dismissed it as interference.

    What happened next was not spontaneous. On January 3, 2007, the Awami League and its allies announced they would boycott the scheduled January 22 election. Fourteen European Union countries and the United States issued a joint statement saying the conditions for a credible election did not exist. The EU formally withdrew its election observation mission. The UN, which had deployed peacekeepers to observe, expressed serious reservations. Economists warned that economic paralysis was imminent. Hartals — strikes — were shutting down the country weekly.

    Chief Justice Hasan declined the caretaker role — even he understood the political impossibility of it. President Iajuddin Ahmed, who had taken on the caretaker role himself, declared a state of emergency on January 11, 2007, advised by the military. General Moeen backed the transitional arrangement.

    General Waker-Uz-Zaman became Chief of Army Staff in June 2024. By August 2024, a student-led protest movement against quota reforms in government jobs had evolved into a mass uprising against Sheikh Hasina’s eighteen-year rule. The protests were met with lethal force. Hundreds of people were killed. The situation escalated rapidly.

    On August 5, 2024, after a final massive march toward Dhaka, Hasina fled the country. Waker announced the transition, met with political parties, and facilitated the formation of an interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.

    Both army chiefs stepped into political vacuums. Both acted when civilian government had lost the capacity to function. Both resulted in transitional arrangements. The question is not whether the military was involved. The question is whether the conditions justified it — and whether anyone applying that question honestly can reach opposite conclusions about 2007 and 2024.

    What Bangladesh Looked Like Before 1/11

    This is the part that tends to get omitted from BNP’s account of history.

    When the 2007 emergency was declared, Bangladesh had just completed five consecutive years as the most corrupt country on earth according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Five years in a row. Not second. Not third. First. The country that TI identified, globally, as having the most pervasive and damaging corruption was Bangladesh — under BNP-Jamaat rule from 2001 to 2006.

    The corruption was not just statistical. It had a face and a name. US Embassy cables, later released by WikiLeaks, described Tarique Rahman — Khaleda Zia’s eldest son, operating from his office at the BNP party headquarters known as Hawa Bhaban — as a “symbol of kleptocratic government.” American diplomats called him the “Dark Prince.” They documented how government contracts were awarded in exchange for commissions routed through Hawa Bhaban, how business decisions were made based on political loyalty, how the machinery of the state had been subordinated to private enrichment. A November 2008 cable stated explicitly that the US Embassy believed Tarique Rahman was “guilty of egregious political corruption that has had a serious adverse effect on US national interests.”

    The corruption had a body count, too. In 2003, the government launched Operation Clean Heart — a joint army-police crackdown on crime that killed 44 people in custody. Not in firefights. In custody. People arrested, held, and found dead. The government subsequently passed an indemnity law protecting all personnel from prosecution. A court later struck the indemnity law down as unconstitutional, but no one was ever prosecuted.

    Then there was the Rapid Action Battalion — RAB — established in 2004. By the time emergency was declared, RAB had killed over 600 people in what authorities described as “crossfire” incidents. Human rights organizations documented the pattern: people arrested, then killed in circumstances that security forces described as shootouts but that witnesses and forensic evidence contradicted. The United States, seventeen years later, sanctioned RAB under the Global Magnitsky Act for gross human rights violations — specifically citing extrajudicial killings during the period of its founding and early operation.

    On August 21, 2004, a grenade attack at an Awami League political rally in Dhaka killed 24 people and injured over 500. The target was Sheikh Hasina, who survived. A subsequent investigation and trial — the most extensive terrorism prosecution in Bangladesh’s history — convicted multiple senior figures, including the former State Minister for Home Affairs, Lutfozzaman Babar, who received the death penalty. The court found that members of the government had facilitated the attack by the militant group HUJI.

    Islamist militancy was not a peripheral problem. Bangla Bhai — Siddiqul Islam — led a group called JMJB that terrorized northwestern Bangladesh for months in 2004, conducting public floggings and killings in the name of an Islamic enforcement campaign. Senior BNP figures publicly denied his existence even as journalists photographed him openly. On August 17, 2005, the militant organization JMB detonated bombs in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts simultaneously — a nationwide coordinated attack that left notes calling for Islamic law. The government had been warned. It had done nothing.

    And then there was the election. The voter list with 12.1 million fraudulent entries. The chief election commissioner who refused to clean it up. The constitutional manipulation that placed a former BNP member as the nominal head of the supposedly neutral caretaker government. Every international observer who examined the situation reached the same conclusion: the election scheduled for January 22, 2007, could not have produced a credible result.

    This is what the country looked like when General Moeen acted.

    What the 1/11 Period Actually Did

    BNP’s characterization of the 1/11 period tends to focus exclusively on the arrests of political figures — including both Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina — and the two-year suspension of normal electoral politics. These things happened. They were genuine deprivations of political rights and deserve honest accounting.

    What also happened, and what gets buried, is this:

    The Election Commission was reconstituted. Under the new Chief Election Commissioner, ATM Shamsul Huda, Bangladesh created its first-ever photo-based national voter ID system. Every voter was registered with a photograph. Transparent ballot boxes replaced opaque ones that had enabled stuffing. Party registration requirements were formalized. Electoral laws were comprehensively reformed. The process took nearly two years and was conducted with assistance from the military — which, notably, then stepped back entirely when the work was done.

    The result was the December 29, 2008 election. It was observed by international missions from the EU, the Carter Center, and numerous other bodies. It was recognized domestically and internationally as free and fair. The Awami League won by a two-thirds majority — not because the system was rigged in their favor, but because the people of Bangladesh, given a genuine choice for the first time in years, chose overwhelmingly to repudiate what had come before.

    The Anti-Corruption Commission, reconstituted and empowered during the caretaker period, prosecuted over 300 politicians and officials. It obtained 110 convictions in 79 cases. Both BNP and Awami League figures were targeted. This was not a partisan purge — it was, however imperfectly executed, an attempt to establish accountability across the political spectrum.

    The photo voter ID that was created in 2007 and 2008 did not disappear when the caretaker government handed over power. It became the de facto national identification system for Bangladesh. Every Bangladeshi today who has a national ID card — used for banking, registering a SIM card, accessing government services, proving citizenship — has that card because of what was built during the period BNP calls a “dark chapter.”

    The Standard BNP Cannot Apply

    Here is the problem with BNP’s position, stated simply: they want to condemn 1/11 without condemning the conditions that made 1/11 possible. They want to say that military involvement in politics is categorically unacceptable — except when that involvement removes their political opponents.

    If military intervention is wrong in principle — if it represents an irredeemable violation of democratic norms — then August 2024 was wrong too. General Waker’s announcement on television, however welcomed by protestors, was still a general announcing a prime minister’s resignation and promising to manage a political transition. By the standard BNP has spent seventeen years articulating, it should have been condemned.

    BNP did not condemn it. They celebrated it.

    If, on the other hand, military intervention can be justified by circumstances — if there are conditions so extreme that normal civilian political processes cannot resolve them — then you have to ask what those conditions were in January 2007. Were they less extreme than what existed in August 2024? Twelve million fake voters. Grenade attacks on opposition rallies. Five consecutive years as the world’s most corrupt country. A state apparatus used to protect and fund militant organizations that were bombing districts. A caretaker system that had been deliberately rigged. International observers withdrawing before an election even took place.

    By any honest accounting, the conditions that preceded 1/11 were at least as severe — arguably far more severe — than those preceding August 2024. The thesis that one was justified and the other was not requires you to adopt a standard that has nothing to do with principles and everything to do with who benefits.

    The Army Chief Question

    General Moeen U Ahmed has been cast by BNP as the villain of 1/11, the man who subverted democracy. He has faced legal proceedings, political vilification, and historical condemnation from the party and its supporters.

    General Waker-Uz-Zaman has been treated by BNP as a national hero, the man whose restraint and wisdom helped navigate Bangladesh through a moment of crisis.

    They are both army chiefs who intervened in political crises. The difference is entirely directional.

    The honest question — the one that Bangladeshi political discourse keeps refusing to ask — is not which army chief was right. It is whether the institution of military involvement in politics is acceptable or not, and if it is conditionally acceptable, what those conditions are and who gets to define them.

    BNP’s answer, demonstrated by their conduct across seventeen years, appears to be: military involvement is acceptable when it removes parties BNP opposes, and unacceptable when it removes parties BNP supports. This is not a democratic principle. It is a factional interest dressed in constitutional language.

    Understanding this does not require you to conclude that 1/11 was perfect. The caretaker period had genuine problems — the prolongation of emergency rule, the treatment of detainees, the use of emergency powers that were sometimes abused. These deserve honest accounting too.

    But the story of why Bangladesh needed a caretaker government in January 2007 — the years of corruption, the protection of militants, the grenade attack on the opposition, the rigged voter rolls, the compromised caretaker system, the international community’s unanimous conclusion that the planned election would not be credible — that story belongs in the record too. All of it. Not just the parts that serve a political narrative.

    History Does Not Run on Party Schedules

    What makes the Army Chief comparison so revealing is that it collapses the rhetorical architecture BNP has spent nearly two decades constructing. They cannot condemn General Moeen without implicitly condemning General Waker. They cannot celebrate August 2024 without implicitly rehabilitating January 2007. The logic does not permit both positions simultaneously.

    Yet both positions are simultaneously held, without apparent discomfort, by the party that is currently governing Bangladesh.

    History is not obligated to cooperate with present political convenience. The record does not change because the people who made it later became inconvenient to acknowledge. The 44 people who died in Operation Clean Heart did not die less because their deaths were carried out by a government that is now in power. The 600 killed in RAB “crossfire” are no less dead because the institution that killed them was founded by a party now claiming democratic credentials. The 24 martyrs of the August 21 grenade attack — killed at a political rally in broad daylight, by weapons sourced and facilitated through the state — deserve to be remembered whether or not that remembering suits the current political moment.

    Bangladesh Untold exists because the full record matters. Not the curated version. Not the version that starts counting injustice from a convenient date. The version that begins where the evidence begins and follows it wherever it leads.

    Army Chief versus Army Chief. Both intervened. One did it to prevent a stolen election. One did it to manage the aftermath of a popular uprising. The conditions that preceded each moment are documented, on the record, available to anyone who looks.

    BNP is asking you to look away from the first set of conditions. We are asking you not to.

    Bangladesh Untold documents the history of Bangladesh from 2001 to the present using source-backed evidence from international organizations, court records, diplomatic cables, and contemporaneous reporting. All claims in this article are supported by the cited record. Primary sources are linked throughout.

  • They Called 1/11 a “Dark Chapter.” Then They Cheered July 2024. Bangladesh Deserves to Know Why.

    They Called 1/11 a “Dark Chapter.” Then They Cheered July 2024. Bangladesh Deserves to Know Why.

    BNP spent nearly two decades calling the January 11, 2007 emergency intervention illegal, anti-democratic, and a national trauma. Now those same leaders are in power — and the people who made 1/11 happen are behind bars. The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. It isn’t even hidden.

    On January 11, 2007, a group of senior military and civilian officials made a decision that altered the course of Bangladesh’s history.

    The country was teetering on the edge of an election no one outside of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party believed could be free or fair. The voter roll had been inflated by 12.1 million phantom names. The caretaker system — designed specifically to ensure neutral oversight of elections — had been rigged through a deliberate constitutional amendment to install a sympathetic Chief Advisor. The Awami League and all major opposition parties had withdrawn from the electoral process. Political violence was escalating by the day.

    The people who intervened that January didn’t do it out of personal ambition. The evidence, the timeline, and the international record all point to a different motive: preventing a heist masquerading as an election.

    Bangladesh Nationalist Party has spent the years since calling that intervention a “dark chapter,” a “coup,” an “assault on democracy.” BNP leaders, their lawyers, and their foreign lobbying operations have repeatedly invoked 1/11 as evidence that the army and its civilian collaborators trampled on the will of the people.

    Now BNP is in power. And the architects of 1/11 — the men who stopped the 2007 election fraud — are being arrested.

    This is the story that Bangladesh is not supposed to talk about.

    What Was Actually Being Stopped on January 11, 2007

    To understand the hypocrisy, you have to understand what was actually happening in late 2006 and early 2007.

    Bangladesh’s constitutional system for elections relied on a “caretaker government” — a neutral, non-partisan administration that would take power for 90 days before each general election, oversee the Election Commission, and ensure the ruling party didn’t thumb the scales. It was an elegant system born from bitter experience: every time an incumbent party had run elections, they had won. The caretaker government was Bangladesh’s answer to that pattern.

    BNP used its time in power from 2001 to 2006 to systematically dismantle the safeguards built into that system.

    The mechanism was precise and deliberate. In June 2003, BNP appointed Justice K.M. Hasan as Chief Justice. In 2004, BNP then amended the constitution to raise the retirement age for Supreme Court justices from 65 to 67 years. This was not a coincidence. Under the caretaker provisions, the last retired Chief Justice became the Chief Advisor. The 2004 amendment was engineered so that Justice Hasan — widely considered to have past BNP affiliations — would retire at exactly the right moment to assume leadership of the caretaker government that would oversee the next election.

    The Dhaka Tribune and multiple international sources documented this explicitly. The Business Standard described it bluntly: “In June 2003, they appointed Hasan and then raised the retirement age for Supreme Court Justices to 67 years from 65, ensuring that KM Hasan would retire just before the caretaker government took over, allowing him to assume leadership.”

    At the same time, the voter rolls were being stuffed. Bangladesh’s Election Commission, under Chief Election Commissioner M.A. Aziz — himself viewed as BNP-aligned — had prepared voter lists containing approximately 12.1 million fraudulent entries. Ghost voters. Dead people. People registered twice. People listed in constituencies where they had never lived. The inflation was systematic enough that cross-referencing with census data revealed the fraud immediately once independent bodies started looking.

    When Justice K.M. Hasan finally declined the Chief Advisor position under intense public pressure — Logi Boitha movement protests had turned deadly, killing at least 12 people — the constitutional process to find an alternative collapsed entirely. Every substitute candidate was either rejected by the Awami League as partisan, rejected by BNP, or disqualified. Eventually, President Iajuddin Ahmed assumed the dual role of President and Chief Advisor — a constitutional arrangement that made any pretense of neutrality absurd, since he had been nominated to the Presidency by BNP in the first place.

    The Awami League withdrew from the election in January 2007. The country was heading toward a one-party vote — not a competitive election, but a ratification ceremony for BNP’s continued grip on power.

    That is what was being stopped on January 11, 2007.

    What 1/11 Actually Achieved

    The emergency government that took power after 1/11 wasn’t perfect. No emergency government ever is. There were abuses of process, extended detentions, moments where the anti-corruption drive became politically tangled. These criticisms are legitimate and documented.

    But look at what was actually accomplished.

    The fraudulent voter rolls — all 12.1 million fake entries — were scrubbed. For the first time in Bangladesh’s history, a photo voter ID system was introduced. The election that followed in December 2008 was endorsed by international observers as broadly free and fair. Voter turnout reached 87 percent. The Awami League won in a landslide that reflected genuine public sentiment, not manufactured numbers.

    The anti-corruption drive prosecuted over 300 politicians and officials from both major parties. Tarique Rahman — the man who ran a shadow government from his Gulshan office while his mother was Prime Minister, who was implicated in the 10-Truck Arms Haul, who was later convicted of masterminding the August 21, 2004 grenade attack that killed 24 people — was arrested, prosecuted, and eventually fled to London.

    The United Nations, in its internal assessments, had warned before 1/11 that Bangladesh’s continued participation in peacekeeping operations was incompatible with a fraudulent election process. That warning was one of the factors that galvanized action. The same international community that funds and relies on Bangladesh’s peacekeeping contribution understood that a state captured by kleptocrats could not be a credible contributor to global peace operations.

    BNP called all of this a “dark chapter.”

    July 2024: The Same Script, Celebrated

    In July and August 2024, mass student-led protests erupted across Bangladesh against the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The immediate trigger was the quota reform movement, but the grievances ran far deeper — political repression, rigged elections, enforced disappearances, and the slow suffocation of civic space over fifteen years.

    The protests escalated into a political rupture. The army declined to suppress the demonstrators. On August 5, 2024, Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh. An interim government was established. The constitutional order was disrupted, elections were not held on any normal schedule, and an unelected government ran the country until a new political settlement could be reached.

    BNP celebrated.

    Party leaders called it a “people’s revolution.” Tarique Rahman, calling in from his London exile, described the fall of Hasina’s government as a historic victory for democracy. BNP activists poured into the streets. The party that had spent seventeen years condemning military intervention in politics was now cheering the political outcome of an intervention it had not led — but which it immediately moved to benefit from.

    By early 2026, Tarique Rahman was Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

    Now sit with that for a moment.

    In 2007: Constitutional order interrupted. Military involvement in forcing political change. Unelected technocratic government. Extended period before elections. BNP verdict: Dark chapter. Assault on democracy. National trauma.

    In 2024: Constitutional order interrupted. Military involvement — by standing aside rather than acting — in forcing political change. Unelected caretaker government. Extended period before elections. BNP verdict: Glorious revolution. Triumph of the people. Historic victory.

    The events are not identical. No two political crises are. But the structural parallel is impossible to dismiss. What changed between BNP’s condemnation of 1/11 and their celebration of July 2024 was not the principle. It was which party benefited.

    The Architects of 1/11 Are Now Being Prosecuted

    This isn’t merely a theoretical observation about inconsistency. It has direct, human consequences.

    The people who were involved in the 1/11 intervention — who made the calculations, took the risks, and executed the decisions that prevented Bangladesh from running a stolen election in 2007 — are now being prosecuted under the government those decisions eventually helped bring to power.

    The charges being filed against 1/11-era figures carry a specific political logic. If 1/11 was a crime — if the intervention was illegal, if the emergency was unjustified — then prosecuting its architects is a form of justice. But if 1/11 was a legitimate response to an extraordinary political emergency, then prosecuting those architects is exactly what it looks like: political revenge against the people who stood in BNP’s way seventeen years ago.

    BNP cannot have it both ways. Either political interventions to prevent electoral fraud are sometimes justified — in which case 1/11 deserves honest historical reassessment, not prosecution of its architects — or they are never justified, in which case BNP’s celebration of July 2024 was deeply hypocritical.

    The answer, of course, is that BNP believes neither position as a matter of principle. They believe one position as a matter of power: interventions that stop BNP are crimes; interventions that clear the path for BNP are revolutions.

    What the International Record Shows About 2006–2007

    The international community’s response to 1/11 is instructive and consistently misrepresented by BNP and its advocates.

    The United States, the European Union, and major Western democracies did not condemn the 1/11 intervention. They called for a swift return to civilian, democratic government — but they understood what had been happening and why the emergency had been declared. American diplomatic cables from the period, later revealed through WikiLeaks, show US diplomats expressing relief that Bangladesh had stepped back from an electoral disaster.

    The International Crisis Group, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch — the international bodies that BNP has selectively quoted to criticize the 1/11 emergency — had spent the preceding five years documenting BNP’s own abuses: the extrajudicial killings by RAB (over 600 by 2006), the August 21 grenade attack on the opposition’s largest political rally, the systematic manipulation of the electoral machinery. When these organizations criticized the emergency government’s handling of political detainees, they were doing their job. When they spent 2001–2006 documenting BNP’s governance, they were also doing their job. BNP quotes the first category and ignores the second.

    The UN specifically warned — before 1/11 — that Bangladesh’s peacekeeping contribution might be affected if the country proceeded with an election that had already lost credibility. That warning was not a demand for military intervention. But it reflected a clear international assessment: the 2007 election, as then constituted, was not salvageable.

    The Pattern Bangladesh Must Recognize

    There is a pattern here that recurs in Bangladesh’s political culture, and BNP has been among its most consistent practitioners.

    When in power: institutions are tools. Courts, the Election Commission, the army, the civil service — all become instruments for maintaining and extending that power. Voter lists are inflated. Chief Justices are selected to ripen on schedule. RAB is unleashed. Emergency laws are passed to grant impunity to security forces. International reports are dismissed as interference.

    When out of power: those same institutions become sacred. An independent judiciary is demanded. Free and fair elections are invoked as a fundamental right. Security force abuses are condemned. International organizations are cited as evidence of the government’s illegitimacy.

    This isn’t unique to Bangladesh. Political parties across the world practice selective constitutionalism. But in Bangladesh, the gap between rhetoric and practice has been particularly stark, and the consequences — measured in lives, in disappeared persons, in rigged elections, in a population whose democratic participation has been repeatedly stolen — have been particularly severe.

    The 1/11 intervention happened because Bangladesh’s constitutional safeguards had been comprehensively hollowed out by the party now prosecuting the people who intervened. That is not a talking point. It is the documented, sourced, court-verified history of what occurred between 2001 and 2007.

    What History Owes the 1/11 Architects

    This is not an argument that the 1/11 emergency was beyond criticism. Two years of emergency rule is too long. Some detentions were politically motivated or procedurally flawed. The anti-corruption drive, while broadly legitimate, had moments where it appeared to exceed its mandate. These criticisms belong in Bangladesh’s historical reckoning with that period.

    But a serious historical reckoning also requires honesty about why 1/11 happened. It requires acknowledging the 12.1 million ghost voters. It requires reckoning with the constitutional manipulation that was designed to install a partisan Chief Advisor. It requires sitting with the documented reality of what BNP’s governance looked like between 2001 and 2006 — the RAB killings, the grenade attacks, the corruption that earned Bangladesh the title of world’s most corrupt country for five consecutive years.

    The people who intervened in January 2007 were not angels. They were human beings making high-stakes decisions in a political crisis largely manufactured by the party now prosecuting them. They restored the voter rolls. They enabled the 2008 election. They created the conditions under which Bangladesh could have a genuine electoral contest.

    The December 2008 election — the one made possible by 1/11 — was endorsed by international observers. Voters turned out in record numbers. The result reflected what Bangladeshis actually wanted, not what a padded voter roll and a partisan caretaker government had pre-ordained.

    That is the 1/11 legacy that BNP does not want discussed. Not because it’s complicated. Because it’s clear.

    The Question Bangladesh Must Ask

    When BNP says that 1/11 was a dark chapter, they mean: it stopped us.

    When BNP says that July 2024 was a people’s revolution, they mean: it helped us.

    Bangladesh deserves a political culture where those two sentences cannot coexist in the same party platform. Where principles about democratic legitimacy, constitutional order, and the limits of state power apply regardless of who benefits. Where the architects of decisions that prevented electoral fraud are not prosecuted by the people who were planning that fraud.

    The international record is clear. The court verdicts are clear. The documented history of BNP rule from 2001 to 2006 — the violence, the corruption, the manipulation of every institution the party could reach — is clear.

    What remains unclear is whether Bangladesh’s current political moment will allow that history to be spoken honestly.

    Bangladesh Untold exists because that question still matters. Because the people who stood between Bangladesh and a stolen election in January 2007 deserve their history told accurately, not rewritten by the party they stopped.

    Bangladesh Untold documents the history of Bangladesh’s political crises from primary sources, international reports, court records, and verified journalism. All historical claims in this article are sourced from published records.

  • US Sanctions on RAB: The Force BNP Created, America Blacklisted

    US Sanctions on RAB: The Force BNP Created, America Blacklisted

    On December 10, 2021 — International Human Rights Day — the United States Treasury Department did something it had never done to Bangladesh before. It imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on an entire Bangladeshi security force and seven of its senior officers, citing “serious human rights violations”: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture.

    The force was RAB — the Rapid Action Battalion.

    What the Treasury Department’s press release carefully avoided saying was this: RAB was created by the BNP government. Khaleda Zia’s administration built it. Her ministers praised it. Her party’s Home Ministry supervised it as it racked up hundreds of corpses between 2004 and 2006.

    And then, in 2021, the United States of America blacklisted it.

    That is the story Bangladesh Untold is telling today.

    Building the Death Squad: BNP’s Gift to Bangladesh

    To understand RAB, you first have to understand what came before it.

    Between October 2002 and January 2003, the BNP government deployed the military in a joint operation with police and other agencies called Operation Clean Heart. The stated goal was to crack down on crime. The actual result: at least 44 people died in military custody. Human Rights Watch puts the number higher — at least 60. Every single death was explained away as a “heart attack” or “natural causes.” No soldier was ever prosecuted. The BNP-led parliament passed the Indemnity Act of 2003, retroactively granting immunity to every participant.

    They had committed mass murder and legislated themselves free of consequences.

    RAB was the institutionalized successor to that logic. Created in March 2004, it was an elite paramilitary force drawing personnel from the Bangladesh Police, Army, Navy, Air Force, Ansar, and BDR. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia praised the new force effusively, describing it as “conducting a courageous and non-partisan campaign for curbing terrorism.” Her Home Ministry supervised its operations. Her government allocated its budget, expanded its mandate, and shielded it from accountability.

    What RAB actually did, from day one, was kill people.

    The Numbers: What “Crossfire” Meant

    RAB introduced Bangladesh to a new euphemism: crossfire. The story was always the same. Suspect is detained. Suspect is taken somewhere at night. Suspect allegedly attempts to escape or fights back. Suspect is shot dead. The post-mortem report confirms “crossfire.” Case closed.

    It was fiction. Systematic, deliberate fiction.

    The actual pattern — documented by Human Rights Watch through painstaking investigation — was: detain → torture → execute → fabricate a narrative. Every time. The torture methods RAB employed were not rough-and-tumble police violence. They were systematic, designed to inflict maximum pain before death: beatings, electric shock applied to sensitive areas, suspension by the arms from ceilings, near-drowning, needle insertion under fingernails, and — in documented cases — drilling holes in suspects’ bodies with electric drills.

    Then they shot them and called it a crossfire.

    The numbers tell the story of scale:

    • 2004: 114 people killed by RAB in its first year of operation
    • 2005: 320 people killed — the pace accelerating to more than 26 per month
    • 2006 (January–September): 246 people killed in nine months alone — a rate of nearly 28 per month
    • Total by October 1, 2006: 367 confirmed deaths documented by Human Rights Watch

    The youngest victim in HRW’s database was 14 years old. The oldest was 65. All were male. All were killed after being taken into RAB custody. None died in any genuine armed confrontation.

    By the time the BNP government fell in January 2007, RAB had been operating for less than three years and had killed hundreds of Bangladeshi citizens without a single officer facing criminal accountability. Not one.

    By March 2010 — after six years of operation under two different governments — RAB’s own Director General admitted the total kill count had reached 622 people.

    Human Rights Watch Puts It on Record

    In December 2006, as the BNP government was in its final, chaotic weeks, Human Rights Watch published a 79-page report with an unambiguous title: “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force.”

    It was the most detailed accounting of RAB’s killing operation that had yet been assembled. HRW had compiled a comprehensive database of every documented killing, interviewed survivors, family members of victims, witnesses, and former detainees. Their conclusion was stated plainly:

    “RAB has made a practice of killing criminal suspects in detention.”

    Not in shootouts. Not in genuine armed confrontations. In detention. After arrest. After torture. Murder dressed up as law enforcement, endorsed at the highest levels of the Bangladeshi state.

    HRW’s researchers documented that the torture preceding these deaths was not incidental. It was methodical and institutional. Multiple survivors described identical techniques used in RAB facilities across different parts of the country, confirming this was not individual misconduct but systematic policy.

    The report called for the BNP government to investigate. The BNP government was in no position to investigate anything — it was collapsing. And the institutions that succeeded it would inherit RAB, normalize it further, and continue the pattern.

    But HRW had put it on the record. The international community now knew what RAB was. What they did about it would take another fifteen years.

    December 10, 2021: The United States Acts

    The date was chosen deliberately. International Human Rights Day. The message was intentional.

    The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced Global Magnitsky sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion as an institution, plus seven current and former RAB officers. The sanctions were sweeping: RAB was barred from owning property in the United States, from financial transactions with American entities, from accessing the US financial system in any form. The sanctioned individuals faced the same restrictions — their assets in the US were frozen, their ability to transact with Americans severed.

    The State Department simultaneously announced visa restrictions on two individuals under Section 7031(c), which targets foreign officials involved in gross violations of human rights.

    The seven sanctioned officers were:

    1. Benazir Ahmed — former Director General of RAB (January 2015 to April 2020), subsequently Inspector General of Police. The State Department also imposed visa restrictions on him personally, barring him from entering the United States.
    2. Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun — current RAB Director General at the time of sanctions
    3. Khan Mohammad Azad — Additional Director General (Operations)
    4. Tofayel Mustafa Sorwar — former Additional Director General (Operations)
    5. Mohammad Jahangir Alam — former Additional Director General (Operations)
    6. Mohammad Anwar Latif Khan — former Additional Director General (Operations)
    7. Lt. Col. Miftah Uddin Ahmed — former Commanding Officer of RAB Unit 7, sanctioned by the State Department for his role in the extrajudicial killing of municipal councilor Ekramul Haque in 2018

    The Treasury Department’s official statement did not mince words about what RAB had done:

    “NGOs have alleged that RAB and other Bangladeshi law enforcement are responsible for more than 600 disappearances since 2009, nearly 600 extrajudicial killings since 2018, and torture. Some reports suggest these incidents target opposition party members, journalists, and human rights activists.”

    US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo stated:

    “Our actions today, particularly those in partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression.”

    The United Kingdom and Canada imposed parallel sanctions on the same date. This was not a unilateral American action. It was a coordinated signal from the Western democratic community to Bangladesh: this stops now.

    The Sanctions Worked

    Dhaka’s initial response was fury. The Bangladeshi government summoned the US Ambassador and expressed “discontent.” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan called the allegations “outlandish” and “regrettable.” Government spokespeople dismissed the sanctions as politically motivated interference.

    None of that mattered. The sanctions worked anyway.

    According to a US assessment published in January 2023, following the imposition of sanctions, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by RAB “dropped dramatically.”

    Dramatically. The word is significant. Not slightly. Not marginally. Dramatically.

    What this tells us is that the killings — the hundreds of “crossfire” deaths, the enforced disappearances — were not the product of individual rogue officers acting on their own initiative. They were institutional behavior that responded to institutional pressure. When the pressure changed, the behavior changed. Which means it had always been controllable. Which means those at the top always had the power to stop it. They had simply chosen not to.

    That is the definition of culpability.

    The BNP Connection: Never Far Away

    The Atlantic Council’s analysis of the sanctions — written by distinguished professor Ali Riaz — noted something that most Western commentators glossed over: “Founded in 2004 under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government led by Khaleda Zia.”

    There it is. Six words that matter enormously in the current political context.

    BNP created RAB. BNP’s government praised it, funded it, expanded it, and protected every officer involved in its killing campaign from the very first day. The force that the United States of America has blacklisted under the Global Magnitsky Act — a law designed specifically to sanction human rights abusers — was the BNP’s creation.

    Between 2004 and 2006, under direct BNP supervision, RAB killed at least 367 people. Under the subsequent government it continued, eventually reaching 622 confirmed deaths. International sanctions followed in 2021 because the pattern that began under BNP had become so entrenched that the world’s democracies felt compelled to act.

    When you vote for BNP, you are voting for the party that built this force, celebrated it, and defended it through hundreds of deaths.

    A Long Time Coming

    The sanctions of December 2021 did not come from nowhere. The international pressure had been building for years, accelerating through the final decade as the documentation became overwhelming:

    2006: Human Rights Watch publishes “Judge, Jury, and Executioner,” documenting 367 RAB killings and systematic torture in the force’s first two and a half years.

    2009: Amnesty International publishes further documentation of RAB abuses. At this point, the total kill count has already surpassed 622.

    2010: A British court case reveals that the US and UK governments had been providing training to RAB even while it was killing people. Diplomatic cables show that as early as June 5, 2005 — fourteen months into RAB’s existence — a US State Department official had met with a senior RAB officer who described “crossfire” as “a necessary, short-term expedient.” The Americans knew. They trained RAB anyway.

    2011: HRW publishes “Crossfire: Continued Human Rights Abuses by Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion,” a follow-up confirming the pattern had not changed.

    2017: A UN body formally condemns Bangladesh for continued extrajudicial killings.

    2019: The United States approves RAB officials to travel to America to receive training in surveillance software — one year after RAB kills hundreds in a drug enforcement campaign.

    October 2020: Ten US Senators write to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin calling for sanctions against RAB officials.

    August 2021: A London law firm makes a formal submission to the British government recommending sanctions for 15 current and former senior RAB officers.

    August 31, 2021: The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission holds a formal hearing on enforced disappearances in Bangladesh, with witnesses calling for punitive action.

    December 10, 2021: The United States, United Kingdom, and Canada act simultaneously.

    The Western democracies gave Bangladesh a decade and a half to fix this. They trained the force. They maintained the relationship. They issued warnings and published reports and held hearings. And when none of it worked, they imposed the only measure that actually changed the numbers: sanctions.

    What the Record Shows

    There is a pattern in the history of Bangladesh’s elite security forces that no amount of spin can obscure.

    BNP came to power in 2001. Within a year, it deployed the military in Operation Clean Heart, killing at least 44 people in custody. It then passed a law making prosecution of the killers impossible.

    In 2004, BNP created RAB as a permanent institutionalization of the same philosophy: extrajudicial violence is an acceptable law enforcement tool, accountability is for other countries, and the lives of criminal suspects — or those accused of opposing the government — are disposable.

    Over two and a half years of BNP rule, RAB killed 367 documented people. The actual number is almost certainly higher, because documentation was always incomplete and the government actively obstructed independent monitoring.

    Khaleda Zia called this force courageous. Non-partisan. A campaign against terrorism.

    The United States called it a human rights abuser and sanctioned it under the Global Magnitsky Act.

    Human Rights Watch called it a death squad operating with total impunity.

    The 367 documented victims — the youngest 14 years old — called it nothing. They were dead.

    The Unanswered Question

    The sanctions reduced RAB’s extrajudicial killings dramatically. But they did not eliminate the force. RAB still exists. The institution BNP built in 2004 continues to operate.

    The question that Bangladesh must eventually answer — one that no government has been willing to confront honestly — is this: What does it mean that a country’s elite security force had to be blacklisted by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada before it stopped killing people at scale?

    What does it say about the institutions that built it, praised it, funded it, and protected it from accountability across five consecutive governments?

    What does it say about a political party — the BNP — that created this force, supervised its first killing campaigns, and has never once acknowledged culpability for the deaths that occurred under its watch?

    Human rights accountability does not begin and end with who is in power today. It requires a reckoning with what was done, who ordered it, and who benefited from the impunity.

    The United States Treasury Department issued that reckoning on December 10, 2021. Bangladesh has yet to issue its own.

    Sources

    • Human Rights Watch, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” December 2006
    • Human Rights Watch, “Crossfire: Continued Human Rights Abuses by Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion,” May 2011
    • Human Rights Watch, World Reports, Bangladesh chapters, 2002–2008
    • US Treasury Department / OFAC, Global Magnitsky Sanctions Announcement, December 10, 2021
    • US State Department, Section 7031(c) visa restriction announcement, December 10, 2021
    • Prothom Alo, “US imposes sanctions on Benazir, RAB DG and four others,” December 10, 2021
    • Atlantic Council / Ali Riaz, “US sanctions on Bangladesh’s RAB: What happened? What’s next?”, December 16, 2021
    • Ain O Shalish Kendra — annual extrajudicial killing statistics, 2004–2006
    • Global Policy Institute — annual extrajudicial killing statistics, 2005–2006
    • Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, hearing on enforced disappearances in Bangladesh, August 31, 2021
    • US Senate letter to Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mnuchin, October 2020
  • The UN’s Warning: How Peacekeeping Saved Bangladesh from a Sham Election

    The UN’s Warning: How Peacekeeping Saved Bangladesh from a Sham Election

    There is a version of January 11, 2007 that BNP tells today. In that version, a legitimate government was overthrown by a military coup engineered by shadowy foreign powers, corrupt generals, and their Awami League allies. Democratic norms were trampled. A sitting prime minister’s party was robbed of an election it would have won. The entire episode was a conspiracy — and those who carried it out, including the army officers who intervened and the officials who collaborated, are criminals who must be held accountable.

    That version leaves out a few things.

    It leaves out the 12.1 million fake voters who had been added to Bangladesh’s electoral rolls. It leaves out the chief justice whose retirement age BNP had specially amended the constitution to extend — so that he would become the caretaker government head at precisely the right moment. It leaves out the Election Commission whose chief was so compromised that even the description “partisan” understates the problem. It leaves out October 28, 2006, when BNP-affiliated groups killed at least 12 people in the streets of Dhaka in a single day of political violence.

    And it leaves out the letter.

    In early January 2007, a letter from Renata Lok Dessallien — the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Dhaka — was delivered into the hands of the Bangladesh Army. The letter was not a declaration of war. It was not a coup order. It was a statement of fact: if Bangladesh descended into military rule or proceeded with a deeply compromised election that had already been boycotted by the Awami League, the country might lose its participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations.

    That letter changed everything.

    —

    The Foundation: What Peacekeeping Meant to Bangladesh

    To understand why that letter carried the weight it did, you have to understand what UN peacekeeping meant — and means — to Bangladesh.

    Bangladesh is not a superpower. It does not have aircraft carriers or strategic nuclear deterrents or the kind of hard power that bends international negotiations. What it has, and has had for decades, is an outsized role in the world’s most unglamorous but necessary work: keeping fragile ceasefires from collapsing, monitoring demilitarized zones, standing between armed factions in countries that have forgotten how to stop killing each other.

    By 2007, Bangladesh had become one of the largest troop-contributing nations in the history of United Nations peacekeeping. Approximately 9,000 Bangladeshi troops were deployed across multiple UN missions worldwide. Over the country’s history, 163,887 peacekeepers from Bangladesh had served in 40 countries across 54 of the 69 UN peace missions since 1948. Those are not just statistics. They are a national identity.

    The economic dimension was equally significant. The United Nations reimburses troop-contributing countries at a rate of approximately $1,428 per soldier per month — the 2007 rate. For a force of 9,000 troops, that was roughly $150 million annually in direct payments flowing into Bangladesh. Additional reimbursements covered equipment, transport, and operational costs. For the Bangladesh Army — an institution that takes its budget constraints seriously — this was not a secondary consideration. It was central to what the military could afford to do.

    Beyond the money, there was the prestige. Bangladeshi officers who deployed on UN missions received training, exposure to international standards, and career advancement opportunities unavailable domestically. Peacekeeping was described, consistently and accurately, as “a lucrative mission for military personnel” — and the armed forces did not want to lose it.

    This was the context in which Renata Lok Dessallien’s letter arrived.

    —

    The Letter That United a Fractured Army

    Army Chief Lieutenant General Moeen U. Ahmed had a problem in early January 2007. He wanted to intervene in Bangladesh’s deteriorating political crisis. He had the authority, in theory. What he did not have was unity.

    The Bangladesh Army was not a monolithic institution. Different factions had different views, different loyalties, different calculations about risk and reward. Some officers were uncomfortable with political intervention. Some had personal or familial connections to one party or the other. Moeen’s ability to move decisively depended on bringing these factions into alignment — and that had proven difficult.

    The UN letter solved that problem.

    According to Mukhlesur Rahman Chowdhury, a former Chief Presidential Advisor who was at the center of the events of those days:

    “This threat united the divided army, which Moeen could not do by other means.”

    Every officer in the Bangladesh Army, regardless of political sympathies, had a personal stake in peacekeeping. Some had deployed themselves. Some had sons or brothers who had deployed. The income from peacekeeping missions filtered down through the institution in ways that affected everyone. When the UN Resident Coordinator stated in writing that a compromised political process might cost Bangladesh its peacekeeping role, it did not matter which faction you belonged to or which party you privately supported. The threat was to something every officer cared about.

    As Countercurrents.org reported in a November 2016 analysis:

    “It was possible to declare the State of Emergency by Army Chief Lt. General Moeen U. Ahmed with the help of Military Secretary to the President (MSP) Major General Aminul Karim using the letter of UN Resident coordinator in Dhaka Renata Lok Dessallien… Moeen used the threat of Bangladesh’s probable deprivation of UN Peacekeeping facilities to the army evidently from the letter of Renata.”

    The military representatives then went to President Iajuddin Ahmed — who was simultaneously serving as Chief Advisor of the caretaker government, a dual role that had already raised profound legitimacy questions — and presented their position. They cited the DGFI’s assessment that proceeding with a boycotted, internationally condemned election would threaten Bangladesh’s continued participation in UN peacekeeping operations. On January 11, 2007, Iajuddin declared a state of emergency and resigned as Chief Advisor. Elections were postponed.

    —

    The UN Secretary General and the International Consensus

    The Dessallien letter did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflected a broader international consensus that had been building for weeks.

    Ban Ki-moon, just days into his tenure as the new United Nations Secretary General, delivered a direct warning. As the New York Times reported on January 11, 2007:

    “The new Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, also warned against military rule, saying it could cost Bangladesh the opportunity to participate in United Nations peacekeeping operations.”

    The message was clear: the UN’s tolerance for Bangladesh’s political crisis had limits. And the limit was the credibility of what came next.

    It was not only the UN. The European Union had been monitoring the electoral process and had reached its own conclusions. As Human Rights Watch documented in its World Report 2008:

    “On January 11, 2007, after the United Nations and European Union announced that plans for elections were so compromised that they would not send observers, then-President Iajuddin Ahmed announced that elections would be postponed and declared a state of emergency.”

    Read that sentence again. Both the United Nations and the European Union announced they would not send observers. Not that they were concerned, or that they had reservations, or that they were urging further dialogue. They announced they would not send observers — because the plans for the election were so compromised that their presence would have lent legitimacy to a process that had none.

    What did that compromise consist of? It consisted of 12.1 million fraudulent voters. It consisted of an Election Commission chief whose partisanship was not a matter of dispute. It consisted of a caretaker system whose nominal head had been pre-selected through a constitutional amendment designed specifically to produce a BNP-friendly outcome. It consisted of an Awami League boycott that would have produced a walkover election with no meaningful opposition participation. It consisted of a political environment so poisoned by BNP-sponsored violence that 12 people had died in the streets of Dhaka on a single October afternoon.

    The international community looked at what was being prepared and said: no.

    —

    The Paradox That BNP Cannot Explain

    Here is the part of January 11 that BNP supporters find most difficult to address.

    The United Nations position — officially, consistently, and loudly — was against military intervention. The UN Secretary General said so. The UN’s guidelines on democratic governance say so. Military coups are not something the United Nations endorses.

    And yet: the threat of losing UN peacekeeping was the mechanism by which the military intervention was facilitated.

    The South Asia Journal captured this paradox directly:

    “Although the loss of UN peacekeeping remains a threat to military intervention in Bangladesh, conversely it helped the military to intervene in the country during 2007.”

    The reason this paradox resolves is that the UN’s position was not simply “no military intervention, ever.” The UN’s position was “Bangladesh must not proceed with a fraudulent election.” The mechanism through which the UN communicated the consequences of a fraudulent election — loss of peacekeeping participation — happened to be one that the Bangladesh Army found persuasive. The UN did not plan this. The outcome was not what the UN intended. But the effect was that the UN’s insistence on democratic legitimacy, expressed as a threat to the military’s financial interests, produced the cancellation of a sham election.

    This is uncomfortable for BNP because it means that the international community — the very international community whose opinions BNP now invokes when appealing for support — viewed the election BNP was planning as illegitimate. Not “potentially problematic.” Not “procedurally imperfect.” So compromised they would not send observers.

    Zafar Sobhan, a respected Bangladeshi columnist, wrote in The Daily Star at the time:

    “It is fairly apparent that it was done under pressure from the army because of the threat that the country could lose its peacekeeping role with the United Nations, which was both prestigious and lucrative in terms of payment to the country.”

    This is a man who had serious reservations about 1/11. He was not an enthusiast for military intervention. And even he acknowledged that the peacekeeping threat was real, consequential, and central to what happened.

    —

    What BNP Had Actually Prepared

    To assess whether the international community’s reaction was justified, you have to look at what BNP had actually built in the months before January 2007.

    The Voter List. The electoral rolls prepared under Chief Election Commissioner M.A. Aziz — whom the Awami League had already flagged as partisan — contained approximately 12.1 million fraudulent entries. Ghost voters. Dead people. Duplicate registrations. Underage names. The manipulation was discovered through cross-referencing voter rolls with census data, which revealed discrepancies far beyond any plausible explanation of administrative error. This was not a clerical mistake. It was construction.

    The Caretaker System Manipulation. Bangladesh’s constitution provided for a caretaker government to oversee elections — a sensible institutional safeguard given the country’s history of partisan election management. The Chief Advisor was to be the immediately preceding Chief Justice. BNP, recognizing this, had appointed Justice K.M. Hasan as Chief Justice in June 2003. Then, in 2004, BNP amended the constitution to raise the retirement age for Supreme Court justices from 65 to 67 years. The calculation was precise: the amendment was calibrated so that Justice Hasan would retire at exactly the right moment to become Chief Advisor — having been appointed by BNP and widely considered aligned with the party.

    The opposition rejected this arrangement entirely. Under massive public pressure, including the Logi Boitha movement of October 2006 that left 12 dead, Justice Hasan declined the position on October 27, citing health reasons.

    The Cascade of Failures. After Hasan declined, Bangladesh exhausted its list of eligible caretaker chiefs. One candidate died before appointment. One was disqualified. Others were rejected by one party or the other. The position eventually devolved to President Iajuddin Ahmed — himself widely viewed as a BNP partisan, now serving simultaneously as head of state and head of the supposedly neutral caretaker government. The Awami League refused to accept this arrangement and withdrew from the election entirely on January 3, 2007.

    This is what the UN and the EU were looking at when they announced they would not send observers. Not a government with minor procedural concerns. A process that had been systematically engineered from the inside, using constitutional amendments, partisan appointments, and a fraudulent voter list, to produce a predetermined outcome.

    —

    The Military Representatives Who Acted

    When the decision was made on January 11, it was the military representatives who went to President Iajuddin Ahmed and delivered their assessment. The DGFI — Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Forces Intelligence — had concluded that proceeding with the compromised election would threaten UNPKO participation. The army presented this assessment.

    Army Chief Moeen U. Ahmed later said that the military had intervened to prevent chaos and protect the nation’s democratic future. Critics have argued, with some legitimacy, that the caretaker government that followed overstepped its mandate, held political leaders in detention without adequate legal process, and stretched its two-year tenure beyond what was necessary.

    These are legitimate criticisms. They do not change what was being prevented.

    What was being prevented was an election in which 12.1 million ghost voters had been registered. An election from which the main opposition party had withdrawn. An election with no international observers — because the UN and EU had refused to come. An election whose result was predetermined not by the will of Bangladeshi voters but by years of systematic institutional manipulation by BNP-Jamaat.

    —

    Bangladesh’s Peacekeeping Legacy and What It Meant

    The threat worked because what it threatened was real.

    Bangladesh’s participation in UN peacekeeping operations has not been a minor footnote in the country’s history. It has been a defining institutional commitment, spanning decades, involving hundreds of thousands of individual soldiers, generating billions of dollars in revenue, and building an international reputation for the Bangladesh Army as a professional, deployable force capable of operating in the world’s most difficult environments.

    By 2007, Bangladesh had contributed to missions in Namibia, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Sudan, and dozens of other countries. Bangladeshi peacekeepers had died in service. Bangladeshi officers had commanded UN formations. The record was genuine and the country was proud of it.

    That pride was not simply emotional. It was financial. Institutional. Structural. The $150 million annual payment was real money in a country where the annual defense budget was a fraction of what major powers spend. The training, the equipment exposure, the career development — these were real benefits that real officers valued.

    When Renata Lok Dessallien’s letter said that a compromised election or military takeover might cost Bangladesh this participation, she was not making an idle threat. She was identifying the highest-stakes consequence available.

    The army heard it. The army believed it. The army acted on it.

    —

    What Happened Next

    The caretaker government that took power after January 11, 2007, under Chief Advisor Fakhruddin Ahmed — a former World Bank official — launched the most serious anti-corruption drive in Bangladesh’s history. Over 160 politicians, businessmen, and officials were charged. Convictions were obtained in 79 cases. Both major parties were targeted: Khaleda Zia and Tarique Rahman from BNP, Sheikh Hasina from the Awami League.

    An election was eventually held on December 29, 2008, widely described as the cleanest in Bangladesh’s modern history. Photo voter ID cards were introduced. The Awami League won by a landslide. The result was accepted internationally. The peacekeeping participation that had been threatened was preserved.

    The New York Times — on January 11, 2007, the same day the state of emergency was declared — reported on the UN Secretary General’s warning with the specificity of something that had just become decisive. Ban Ki-moon’s statement that military rule could cost Bangladesh its peacekeeping participation was not background color. It was the central pressure point of the crisis.

    Bangladesh is still, today, one of the world’s largest peacekeeping contributors. That participation was preserved in January 2007 in part because the United Nations made clear, through its representative in Dhaka, what the cost of a corrupted election would be.

    The letter mattered. The warning was real. And the alternative — a walkover election built on 12.1 million ghost voters and a rigged caretaker system — would have been, in the UN’s own assessment and the EU’s, so compromised it did not deserve international legitimacy.

    That assessment was not made by Awami League politicians. It was made by the United Nations and the European Union.

    BNP can disagree. But they are disagreeing with the international community’s contemporaneous judgment, made on the ground, by people who had watched what BNP had constructed and concluded: not this.

    —

    Sources: Human Rights Watch World Report 2008; The New York Times, January 11, 2007; Countercurrents.org, November 2016; South Asia Journal, Bangladesh Army peacekeeping analysis; The Daily Star, Zafar Sobhan column; Bangladesh Army official peacekeeping statistics; UN peacekeeping reimbursement data; GlobalSecurity.org; The Business Standard (Bangladesh)

  • US Embassy Cables: What American Diplomats Really Thought About Tarique Rahman

    US Embassy Cables: What American Diplomats Really Thought About Tarique Rahman

    There is a version of Tarique Rahman’s story that BNP supporters tell. In that version, every corruption case against him was fabricated. Every court that convicted him was politically compromised. Every international body that documented his crimes was either misled or acting on behalf of his enemies. The 84 cases filed against him between 2007 and 2024 were not investigations — they were persecution. His 17 years in London exile were not a fugitive’s refuge — they were principled resistance.

    Then there are the cables.

    On November 3, 2008, the United States Ambassador to Bangladesh, James F. Moriarty, sent a confidential message from the US Embassy in Dhaka to the Secretary of State in Washington. It was classified. It was written by a senior American diplomat — a career professional with no personal stake in Bangladeshi politics, no party affiliation in Bangladesh, no history of anti-BNP advocacy. He was simply reporting what the US Embassy had observed, investigated, and concluded.

    Ambassador Moriarty requested that Tarique Rahman be banned from entering the United States of America.

    The cable is now public. It was released by WikiLeaks under the reference 08DHAKA1143_a. Anyone can read it. And what it says about the man who is today the Prime Minister of Bangladesh is not an opposition allegation, not a partisan claim, and not an editorial opinion. It is the formal, on-the-record assessment of the United States government.

    “A Symbol of Kleptocratic Government”

    The Ambassador’s language was precise. Diplomatic cables are not written for public consumption — they are written for accuracy, because the people reading them make consequential decisions based on what they contain. Ambassador Moriarty had no reason to exaggerate. His audience was not the Bangladeshi public. His audience was the United States government.

    He described Tarique Rahman as “the notorious and widely feared son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia.”

    He wrote that Tarique was “notorious for flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes in connection with government procurement actions and appointments to political office.”

    He stated that Tarique had “accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit wealth.”

    He concluded that “Tarique is a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics in Bangladesh.”

    And then he wrote the sentence that should be printed in every history book covering Bangladesh’s political crisis:

    “In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies.”

    This is not from a Dhaka Tribune editorial. This is not from an Awami League party statement. This is from the United States Ambassador to Bangladesh, in a classified cable sent to the Secretary of State, requesting that Tarique Rahman be formally banned from entering the United States under Presidential Proclamation 7750 — the proclamation that allows the US to deny entry to foreign nationals who engage in public corruption.

    The Ambassador’s final recommendation was unambiguous: “Embassy recommends that Tarique Rahman be found subject to Presidential Proclamation 7750 for participating in public official corruption.”

    The Specific Cases — Names, Numbers, Amounts

    What makes the cable significant is not only its conclusions but its specificity. Ambassador Moriarty did not write in generalities. He documented specific transactions, specific company names, specific dollar amounts. The cable reads less like a diplomatic assessment and more like a prosecutorial brief.

    The Siemens Bribery Scheme. Tarique Rahman received a commission of approximately 2% on all Siemens contracts in Bangladesh — paid in US dollars. This was not an informal arrangement known only within Bangladesh. The US Department of Justice had filed a $3 million asset forfeiture case (January 8, 2009) against Singaporean bank accounts linked to the scheme. The FBI’s Asset Forfeiture unit and the DOJ were both involved. Siemens subsequently admitted and pleaded guilty to paying bribes to Tarique’s brother, Arafat Rahman “Koko,” as part of a broader $200 million money laundering investigation.

    Harbin Company. A Chinese company paid $750,000 to Tarique as a bribe. The cable documents that the money was physically transported to Singapore and deposited at a Citibank account. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Debra LaPrevotte later testified in a Dhaka court — the first time an FBI agent had ever testified in Bangladesh — tracking $2.66 million laundered to Citibank Singapore (Account #158052-008/016). She found Tarique’s credit card (#4568817010064122) linked to his associate Mamun’s account. She found the $750,000 bribe from businesswoman Khadiza Islam traced to that same account. The US government, before proceeding with any of this, verified independently that the investigation was not politically motivated.

    Monem Construction. The cable documents that Monem Construction paid Tarique $450,000 in bribes in exchange for government contracts.

    The Kabir Murder Case. This one is particularly striking. Sanvir Sobhan — son of the chairman of the Bashundhara Group, one of Bangladesh’s largest conglomerates — was accused of killing a man named Humayun Kabir. Tarique Rahman accepted 210 million taka — approximately $3.1 million — in exchange for intervening to thwart the murder prosecution. The Ambassador’s cable documents this not as rumor but as a specific bribery transaction: a murder case was sold, and the price was $3.1 million.

    The Zia Orphanage Trust. Tarique and his mother, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, looted 20 million taka from the Zia Orphanage Trust — a charity fund established in the name of the late President Ziaur Rahman. Money designated for orphans was diverted to land purchases and BNP election campaigns.

    Al Amin Construction. The cable documents straightforward extortion: Tarique threatened the owner of Al Amin Construction with shutting down the company unless they paid $150,000. They paid.

    The cable goes beyond these specific cases to note that Tarique’s associates systematically extorted contractors and businessmen across multiple sectors. Reza Construction, Mir Akhter Hossain Ltd, and others are referenced. The pattern was consistent: government proximity, demands for payment, and threats for non-compliance.

    What the Ambassador Said About the Broader Consequences

    The cable’s most chilling passage is not about the money. It is about what the corruption enabled.

    Ambassador Moriarty wrote: “His flagrant disregard for the rule of law has provided potent ground for terrorists to gain a foothold in Bangladesh.”

    This is the connection that Bangladesh’s current political discourse tries hardest to obscure. Tarique’s corruption was not merely a financial crime. It rotted the institutions — the judiciary, the police, the prosecution service, the civil service — that would otherwise have been able to contain and prosecute the militant organizations that flourished under BNP-Jamaat rule. When every government contract is contingent on bribery. When every court case can be purchased. When state ministers are sheltering militant operatives because the chain of command has been corrupted from the top. When prosecution services can be neutralized for $3.1 million. The environment that produces a Bangla Bhai, a JMB, and an August 21 grenade attack does not emerge from nothing. It is cultivated through systematic institutional destruction.

    The US Ambassador — in 2008, in a classified cable, writing only for his government — connected these dots explicitly.

    The Broader Cable Record: Other American Diplomatic Assessments

    The November 2008 cable is the most comprehensive single document, but it was not the first time American diplomats had documented their views on BNP-era governance.

    Earlier cables from the US Embassy in Dhaka — also released by WikiLeaks — described the operational structure of Hawa Bhaban, the informal parallel government Tarique ran from BNP’s party headquarters. The cables use the phrase “Dark Prince” for Tarique, noting his alleged involvement in what they termed “violent politics.” American diplomats on the ground documented how government contracts were being steered through Hawa Bhaban, how business appointments were being sold, and how Tarique’s associates were embedded across the procurement apparatus of the state.

    The cable record also corroborates the Transparency International assessments that Bangladesh topped the global corruption rankings for five consecutive years under BNP rule. The Ambassador notes this fact directly: “Through 2006, the nation topped Transparency International’s ranking of the world’s most corrupt governments four years in a row.” He adds a figure that is rarely cited in debates about Bangladesh’s development: “Corruption has lowered Bangladesh’s growth rate by two percent per year.”

    Two percent per year. Compounded over five years of BNP rule. That is the cost, in lost economic growth, that ordinary Bangladeshis paid for Tarique Rahman’s hundreds of millions of dollars in personal enrichment.

    The FBI Investigation — Unprecedented in Bangladesh’s History

    The WikiLeaks cables document American concern and American recommendations. The FBI investigation went further. It produced evidence.

    FBI Supervisory Special Agent Debra LaPrevotte traveled to Dhaka and testified in a Bangladeshi court on November 16, 2011. It was the first time in Bangladesh’s history that an FBI agent had testified in a local court case. She brought forensic financial evidence with her: traced wire transfers, verified bank account records, documented transaction trails.

    Her testimony confirmed what the cables had stated: $2.66 million laundered through Citibank Singapore. A specific account number. A specific credit card linked to the defendant. A specific bribe payment, traced to its source, documented in the forensic record.

    The US government — before committing to this extraordinary step of having an FBI agent testify in a foreign country’s court — made an independent determination that the case was not politically motivated. That determination was reached. The testimony proceeded.

    The High Court subsequently overturned Tarique’s trial acquittal in 2016, sentencing him to seven years’ imprisonment and fining him 20 crore taka. The court explicitly found that he had “influenced political power to help his close friend Giasuddin Mamun to get and then launder 200 million taka.”

    What Happened Next: The Great Erasure

    After the student uprising of July 2024 ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s courts underwent a comprehensive reversal. The Supreme Court stayed Tarique’s seven-year sentence. Then, in March 2025, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court acquitted Tarique and Mamun in the money laundering case entirely. One by one, all 84 cases against him — spanning money laundering, corruption, the grenade attack, extortion — were acquitted or quashed.

    He returned to Bangladesh in late 2025. BNP won a landslide election in February 2026. On February 17, 2026, Tarique Rahman — the man Ambassador James Moriarty had called “a symbol of kleptocratic government,” the man the FBI had tracked money laundering to Citibank Singapore, the man whose specific bribery transactions were documented in a classified cable sent to the US Secretary of State — was sworn in as Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

    In October 2025, in his first major media appearance after 17 years in exile, Tarique described the 1/11 caretaker government as “maliciously motivated.”

    The investigators who had gathered evidence of his corruption are now being arrested.

    Lieutenant General (Retd.) Masud Uddin Chowdhury — a key figure from the 2007-2009 caretaker period — was arrested on March 23, 2026, on 11 charges including murder, human trafficking, and fraud. The prosecution explicitly stated that one basis for targeting him was that he was “involved in the arrest and torture of Tarique Rahman” during the 1/11 period.

    NE News (India) described these arrests as “acts of revenge and retaliation.” Human Rights Watch confirmed the targets were “key figures during the 2007-2009 military-backed government.”

    The strategy is transparent: discredit 1/11 as illegitimate, and every piece of evidence gathered during that period — including the cooperation with the FBI, including the cases that led to court convictions, including the international documentation — becomes retroactively invalid. The logic is neat. The history is not.

    What Cannot Be Erased

    The cables exist. The WikiLeaks archive is public. The FBI testimony transcript exists. The Siemens DOJ filings exist. The Singapore court records exist. The specific names, amounts, and transaction details documented by Ambassador Moriarty on November 3, 2008, exist.

    No acquittal can unwrite 08DHAKA1143_a. No Supreme Court order can recall a diplomatic cable. No act of parliament can alter the public record of what the United States government formally concluded about the man now leading Bangladesh.

    The Ambassador wrote: “Tarique is a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics in Bangladesh.”

    He wrote: “In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies.”

    He wrote: “His flagrant disregard for the rule of law has provided potent ground for terrorists to gain a foothold in Bangladesh.”

    And he recommended that the United States of America bar Tarique Rahman from its territory.

    That was the official position of the United States government in 2008. It was not written for public consumption. It was written because it was true, because American diplomats had done their homework, and because the evidence was solid enough to recommend action under a presidential proclamation.

    Bangladeshis deserved to know this in 2008. They deserve to know it now.

    Source: WikiLeaks Cable 08DHAKA1143_a — US Embassy Dhaka to Secretary of State, November 3, 2008. Full text available at: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DHAKA1143_a.html

    Additional sources: FBI testimony transcript, Dhaka court (November 16, 2011); Bangladesh High Court judgment overturning acquittal (July 21, 2016); US DOJ asset forfeiture filing (January 8, 2009); Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2001–2005.

  • What the International Crisis Group Documented: How a World-Class Think Tank Watched Bangladesh Descend

    What the International Crisis Group Documented: How a World-Class Think Tank Watched Bangladesh Descend

    When the International Crisis Group issues a report, governments listen. The ICG is not an advocacy organization, a partisan body, or a lobby for any political cause. It is one of the world’s most respected conflict-prevention institutions — staffed by former diplomats, career analysts, and field researchers who have spent decades in the most dangerous places on earth. When the ICG publishes a report warning that a country may be on the path to violent conflict, that is not a protest. That is a diagnosis.

    In October 2006 — just months before the January 11, 2007 intervention that Bangladesh now debates endlessly — the International Crisis Group published Bangladesh Today (Asia Report N°121). The report was the product of years of field research, face-to-face interviews with diplomats, academics, lawyers, human rights defenders, and political figures across the country. It was written by people with no stake in Bangladeshi politics. They had nothing to gain from framing their conclusions one way or the other.

    What they found was damning.

    “The Worst Time in the History of Bangladesh”

    The report opens with a quote that deserves to be remembered.

    A Dhaka-based academic told Crisis Group researchers: “This is the worst time in the history of Bangladesh.”

    That was not a partisan activist speaking. That was a scholar who had watched the country for decades, looking at the state of its institutions in 2006 and arriving at that conclusion.

    Another Bangladeshi political scientist told the ICG: “The deterioration since 2001 is a serious change.”

    A Western development worker with many years of field experience in Bangladesh told Crisis Group: “I’d bet [our ambassador] a year’s salary we would never have suicide bombers here — but I was wrong.”

    These are not opposition talking points. These are the on-the-ground assessments that the International Crisis Group gathered from credible observers who had no reason to distort what they saw.

    The ICG’s own framing was direct: Bangladesh faced “twin threats to its democracy and stability: the risk that its political system will founder in a deadlock over elections and the growing challenge of militant Islamism, which has brought a spate of violence.” It noted that the country had featured as high as seventeenth on Foreign Policy’s global ranking of failed states. The World Bank Country Director had described Bangladesh as a “fragile state.” The head of a major bilateral donor agency warned that it displayed signs of “pre-conflict.”

    That was the Bangladesh the BNP-Jamaat coalition government handed to history.

    What the ICG Said About the BNP Government’s Record

    The ICG did not editorialize. It documented what it found.

    On corruption, it noted the well-established fact: Transparency International ranked Bangladesh as the most corrupt country in the world for five consecutive years during BNP rule — a reality the Crisis Group treated as baseline context for understanding why institutions had rotted.

    On the judiciary: “The judicial system is not independent but even the AL will not change this — it’s our political culture,” an AL activist told the ICG. A senior lawyer described the courts to researchers as following “what the political leaders want.” A lawyer championing unpopular causes said: “The judicial system is not working, is not impartial — it just follows what the political leaders want. I haven’t received any direct threats but I’ve had lots of problems and indirect threats. I feel very insecure.”

    The ICG documented systematic judicial manipulation: “Judges and lawyers favouring the BNP are being preferred and promoted.” A senior lawyer described to researchers how “a senior judge in Bogra was transferred to a junior position in the most distant part of the country for not giving a judgement in favour of the government.” Public prosecutors, the ICG noted, were required to be members of the ruling party “regardless of their capability.”

    On the civil service: “In the four years after the 2001 elections, five deputy commissioners were transferred for not supporting the government enough.” The civil service, the ICG found, had become so politicized that officials were beginning to “behave a bit neutrally just in case there’s a change of government” — not out of professionalism, but self-preservation.

    On parliament: it had functioned as a near-complete shell. With the opposition boycotting sessions and the ruling coalition using parliamentary machinery as an instrument of political power rather than democratic governance, the ICG found that “with governments refusing to cede their parliamentary opponents their due role and parliamentary oppositions refusing to accept the legitimacy of elected governments, parliament has been through lengthy periods of complete dysfunction.”

    The Grenade Attack: An International Crisis Group Finding

    The ICG did not sidestep the August 21, 2004 grenade attack.

    In assessing the political crisis, the report stated clearly: “The AL has good grounds for its complaints of victimisation: an August 2004 grenade attack on an AL rally in the capital nearly killed its president, Sheikh Hasina, and left other senior leaders dead or injured; other assaults include the murder of Shah A.M.S. Kibria, a respected former finance minister.”

    Then the ICG added four words that should have sent shockwaves through every international chancellery: “There have been no serious investigations of these killings.”

    Not “limited” investigations. Not “slow” investigations. No serious investigations.

    The International Crisis Group — drawing on field research and interviews with diplomats, lawyers, and analysts — concluded that the BNP government had not conducted serious investigations into the murder of the former Finance Minister and former UN Under-Secretary General, or into the grenade attack that killed 24 people at a political rally. The government had every tool of the state at its disposal. It chose not to investigate.

    This is not a Bangladesh Untold editorial. This is what the International Crisis Group found.

    The BNP’s Private Polls — and What They Revealed

    The ICG obtained information from political analysts about internal BNP polling that is rarely discussed today.

    “Tareq [Rahman] commissioned three polls last year,” an international political analyst told Crisis Group researchers. “Each one showed them facing serious losses. So they’ll surely put the machinery in place to rig the elections.”

    Tarique Rahman — who is today the Prime Minister of Bangladesh — knew, according to his own commissioned polling, that his party was heading for serious electoral defeat. The ICG documented this finding not as speculation but as a key factor shaping the BNP’s political strategy heading into the 2006-2007 electoral crisis.

    The implications are significant. A party with confidence in its popularity does not need to engineer the caretaker system. It does not need to manipulate the Chief Justice’s appointment. It does not need to install a sympathetic Election Commission Chief. The BNP, according to its own internal numbers, knew it was losing. What followed — the constitutional manipulation, the fake voter rolls, the stacked caretaker arrangements — followed logically from that knowledge.

    Militants, the Government, and “Cold Political Logic”

    One of the most consequential sections of the ICG report addresses the relationship between the BNP government and the Islamist militant groups that terrorized Bangladesh during 2002-2006.

    The ICG wrote: “Circumstantial evidence, as well as cold political logic, suggests that underground terrorist groups have been cultivated and sheltered by those in power.”

    This was not a fringe view. It was the conclusion of a serious international research organization based on extensive fieldwork. The ICG documented:

    – The JMJB under Bangla Bhai was tolerated because it targeted left-wing extremists — “The police and government were happy to encourage JMJB in this.” – Photos existed of Bangla Bhai “coming out of the Rajshahi police superintendent’s office and speaking to his cadres” — the Daily Star had published them in 2006. – Following the arrest of JMB chief Abdur Rahman, “former district Jamaat chief Saidur Rahman’s chequebook was found in his house” — a direct financial link between the governing coalition’s party and the terrorist leadership. – Jamaat leader Motiur Rahman Nizami had “repeatedly denied that the JMJB even existed” — a fabrication sustained until the evidence made it impossible. – The IOJ’s chairman was “reportedly on the advisory council of the radical HuJI” — the same organization that carried out the August 21 grenade attack.

    An academic who had studied Islamist politics closely told the ICG: “These are Jamaati organisations, even though Jamaat leaders still deny it face to face. At first they’d say Bangla Bhai and his colleagues were media creations; now they say they’re an exaggeration.”

    The ICG concluded: “Whatever the evidence, it would be logical for elements of the government to cultivate extremists.”

    When an independent international organization studying conflict-prevention tells you it is logical for your government to have cultivated terrorists, that is not political rhetoric. That is an analytical finding with documented evidentiary support.

    The RAB: “A Licensed Vigilante Outfit”

    The Rapid Action Battalion was created by the BNP government in 2004 and presented to the public as a solution to organized crime. The ICG had a different description.

    “RAB appears to be little better than a licensed vigilante outfit with no need to account for its excesses.”

    By July 2006, RAB had officially recorded making almost 11,000 arrests and killing 283 people in “exchanges of fire.” The ICG noted that this number was the official figure — the actual toll of extrajudicial killings was widely believed to be higher.

    The pattern was unambiguous. An international observer told the ICG: “There is no doubt that it is involved in extrajudicial killings. And not a single Islamist has died in crossfire.”

    This was the essential truth that the ICG captured in a single devastating sentence. The force that was supposedly fighting terrorism was killing criminals, opposition figures, and alleged criminals — in “crossfire.” But the militants who had bombed 63 districts in a single day, who had carried out suicide bombings, who had assassinated judges — they were not dying in crossfire. They were being arrested, with television cameras invited to film their apprehension.

    “RAB is very worrying,” an international observer told the ICG. “There is no doubt that it is involved in extrajudicial killings. And not a single Islamist has died in crossfire.”

    The ICG documented the conclusion that was unavoidable: RAB was a political tool, not a counter-terrorism instrument.

    What the Elections Were Really About

    The ICG’s analysis of the electoral crisis of 2006-2007 provides essential context for understanding what January 11, 2007 actually interrupted.

    The report documented that the AL’s core demands were not partisan power games — they were responses to documented manipulation:

    – The Chief Justice, K.M. Hasan, was “seen as biased in favour of the BNP, which appointed him” — even the Law Minister admitted Hasan had been involved in BNP politics and was a party member. The automatic convention made him head of the caretaker government. – The Chief Election Commissioner had “damaged his credibility with a misconceived, and apparently politically biased, revision of the electoral roll” — the same voter roll scandal that had stuffed millions of fake names into the voter lists. – The army reported to the BNP-appointed president. The AL was demanding army neutrality under the caretaker government, not under a president installed by the party whose election the army would be overseeing.

    The ICG concluded that the four institutions the election would rely on — “the presidency, the head of the caretaker government charged with supervising the process, the election commission and the army” — were none of them “free of controversy.” The president and the incoming caretaker chief “are seen as partial to the governing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).”

    This is what the world’s foremost conflict-prevention organization said about the electoral conditions Bangladesh faced at the end of 2006. Not “contested.” Not “disputed.” Partial to the governing party.

    The Minorities: A Warning Unheeded

    The ICG’s field research included testimony from religious and ethnic minorities that deserves to be quoted in full.

    A Hindu activist told ICG researchers: “The election increases the heartbeat of minorities. They will be prevented from going to court, will be threatened, will be told not to vote…and if they do, it will be assumed they voted for the opposition. All of this — even torture — will not be disclosed in the media.”

    This testimony was given to ICG researchers in 2006, five years after the post-election pogrom of 2001 that had seen over 18,000 rapes, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Hindus, and the burning of temples and homes across two dozen districts.

    The ICG noted that “Bangladesh’s Hindu ethnic minority and Ahmadi communities are victims of chronic state discrimination and increasing targeted violence by Islamist groups.” It documented the anti-Ahmadiyya campaign — rallies against them, attacks on mosques, denial of education for children, confiscation of publications — all occurring under the watch of a government whose coalition partner had led the campaign.

    The report’s findings on minorities were not standalone. They were part of a pattern the ICG documented as systemic: a government that protected those who attacked minorities, prosecuted those who defended them, and depended electorally on the forces that saw minority-targeting as both ideologically correct and politically useful.

    What the International Community Knew

    The ICG’s documentation of international community awareness during this period is equally important.

    By February 2005, the US, UK, and EU troika had “all lambasted the government on election issues.” A February 2005 donors conference in Washington — to which the Bangladesh government was pointedly not invited — had terrorism and rising violence “topping the agenda.” In direct response to being excluded, the BNP government chose the eve of the conference to announce the banning of the JMB and JMJB, and the arrest of their leaders.

    The ICG’s interpretation was precise: “The catalyst for the crackdown appears to have been a donor meeting in Washington.”

    Not genuine counter-terrorism commitment. Not a government awakening to the threat within its borders. The crackdown happened when international embarrassment made continued denial politically untenable.

    A U.S. diplomat told the ICG: “On human rights, why does the U.S. accept complete silence in the face of well documented violations?” A senior development official was direct: “The government is characterised by extraordinary centralisation and short-termism with no real capacity to think seriously about the future.”

    The picture was consistent: the international community knew. Diplomats knew. Donor agencies knew. Analysts knew. The BNP government was documented, assessed, and found wanting by every serious international body that examined it.

    The Verdict

    The International Crisis Group published Bangladesh Today on October 23, 2006 — less than three months before January 11, 2007.

    Its verdict: “The questions of whether Bangladesh’s traditional moderation and resilience will see it through or whether escalating violence and political confrontation could derail its democracy are vital ones.”

    Its findings: a government that had cultivated terrorists, operated a death squad, manipulated every democratic institution, stolen voter rolls, and blocked serious investigation of a grenade massacre that killed 24 people.

    Its warning: that “canaries in the mine that must be watched” included “the treatment of minorities, the increased power of the paramilitary and the criminalisation of politics.”

    The ICG said none of this because it was an Awami League sympathizer. It said it because that is what the evidence showed. It said it because the people its researchers interviewed — lawyers, diplomats, academics, development workers, civil society figures — told them what they saw with their own eyes.

    The International Crisis Group was not predicting 1/11. It was documenting the conditions that made 1/11 comprehensible to anyone paying attention.

    The BNP had five years to prevent this outcome. They used those five years to deepen every pathology the ICG documented: more corruption, more impunity, more Islamist cultivation, more institutional destruction, more violence.

    “This is the worst time in the history of Bangladesh,” said the Dhaka academic.

    He was right. And he wasn’t alone in seeing it.

    Source: International Crisis Group, “Bangladesh Today,” Asia Report N°121, 23 October 2006. The full report is available in the public domain. All quotes in this article are drawn directly from that document.

  • What Amnesty International Documented: A Timeline of Reports on BNP-Era Bangladesh

    What Amnesty International Documented: A Timeline of Reports on BNP-Era Bangladesh

    What Amnesty International Documented: A Timeline of Reports on BNP-Era Bangladesh

    When Amnesty International issues a report on your country, the world pays attention. When they issue report after report — year after year — documenting the same patterns of abuse, impunity, and state-sponsored violence, the world should not look away.

    Between 2001 and 2006, Amnesty International published a devastating series of reports on Bangladesh. They documented the post-election pogroms against Hindus, the legal architecture of torture, the persecution of religious minorities, the assault on human rights defenders, and the extrajudicial killings carried out by state forces with total impunity.

    Each report was a separate alarm bell. Together, they form a sustained indictment of a government that treated human rights as an obstacle to power — not a constraint on it.

    Here is the timeline of what Amnesty International documented during BNP-Jamaat rule.

    December 2001: “Attacks on Members of the Hindu Minority”

    The first alarm came just weeks after the BNP-Jamaat coalition took power. Amnesty International published *”Bangladesh: Attacks on members of the Hindu minority”* (AI Index: ASA 13/006/2001) — a report that documented the systematic violence unleashed against Hindus following the October 1, 2001 general election.

    Amnesty’s findings were unambiguous:

    *”The current wave of attacks against the Hindu community in Bangladesh began before the general elections of 1 October 2001 when Hindus were reportedly threatened by members of the BNP-led alliance not to vote.”*

    The report documented:

  • Hindus threatened and intimidated to prevent them from voting
  • Post-election violence including killings, rape, arson, and looting targeting Hindu communities
  • The destruction of Hindu temples and sacred sites across affected districts
  • **Hundreds of Hindus** fleeing the violence, crossing the border into India
  • The deliberate economic targeting of Hindu properties — homes looted, businesses destroyed, trees cut down on victims’ land

    • Amnesty called on the BNP government to investigate the attacks and prosecute those responsible. The government dismissed the report as politically motivated. No meaningful investigation was ever conducted. No BNP leader or MP was held accountable.

    The Judicial Inquiry Commission later confirmed that **25 Ministers and Members of Parliament** from the BNP-Jamaat alliance were involved in orchestrating the violence. But that confirmation came years later, under a different government. By then, the evidence had grown cold and the victims had been forgotten.

    2002–2003: “Urgent Need for Legal and Other Reforms”

    In 2003, Amnesty published *”Bangladesh: Urgent need for legal and other reforms to protect human rights”* — a report that moved beyond documenting individual abuses to exposing the legal architecture that enabled them.

    The report focused on two specific laws that Amnesty identified as facilitating “endemic human rights violations”:

    **The Special Powers Act (SPA):** This law allowed the government to detain people arbitrarily for long periods without charge. Under BNP rule, it was used extensively to imprison political opponents, journalists, and activists. No evidence required. No trial needed. Just the signature of a district magistrate acting on political instructions.

    **Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure:** This provision allowed police to arrest anyone without a warrant on vaguely defined grounds. Amnesty documented how it was systematically used to facilitate torture in police or army custody. The pattern was consistent: arrest under Section 54 → transfer to custody → torture → “confession” or death.

    Amnesty’s recommendation was direct: repeal or substantially amend both laws. The BNP government ignored the recommendation entirely.

    The same year, Amnesty also raised concerns about the arrest of prisoners of conscience — political figures detained not for any crime but for their opposition to the ruling party.

    2004: “The Ahmadiyya Community — Their Rights Must Be Protected”

    By 2004, the persecution of the Ahmadiyya community had escalated from harassment to organized violence. Amnesty published *”Bangladesh: The Ahmadiyya Community – their rights must be protected”* (AI Index: ASA 13/005/2004) in April 2004.

    The report documented:

  • A campaign of hate speech and incitement against Ahmadis by extremist groups operating with state acquiescence
  • Physical attacks on Ahmadiyya mosques
  • Beatings and killings of Ahmadiyya community members
  • Denial of access to schools and livelihoods
  • The BNP government’s failure to provide police protection or prosecute attackers

    • Amnesty specifically called on the government to “take prompt and effective action to protect the Ahmadiyya community from violence and intimidation.” Instead, the BNP-Jamaat coalition moved closer to banning Ahmadiyya publications — doing the opposite of what the world’s leading human rights organization recommended.

    The Khatme Nabuwat and other extremist groups, some linked to the BNP’s coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, continued their campaign with impunity. The government’s inaction was not neutrality. It was complicity.

    2005: “Human Rights Defenders Under Attack”

    As BNP rule entered its final years, the government turned its attention to the people documenting its abuses. Amnesty published *”Bangladesh: Human rights defenders under attack”* — a report that documented the systematic harassment, intimidation, and violence against journalists, lawyers, NGO workers, and activists who dared to criticize the government.

    The report documented:

  • Physical attacks on journalists who reported on government corruption and human rights abuses
  • Threats and intimidation against human rights organizations
  • Legal harassment through fabricated cases
  • The murder of journalists with no investigations or prosecutions

    • Bangladesh had already become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Under BNP rule, the pattern was clear: report on corruption or abuses → receive threats → if you continue, face physical violence → if you survive, face fabricated legal charges. The government’s response to every case was the same: no investigation, no prosecution, no accountability.

    2005–2006: Annual Reports Document Escalating Crisis

    Amnesty’s annual reports on Bangladesh during the BNP era read like a countdown to collapse:

    **2004 Report:** Documented the use of Section 54 and the SPA for arbitrary detention. Noted that torture in custody remained “widespread.” Raised concerns about the death penalty and extrajudicial killings.

    **2005 Report:** Documented escalating violence against minorities, particularly Ahmadis and Hindus. Noted the government’s failure to protect vulnerable communities. Raised alarm about the continued use of arbitrary detention and torture.

    **2006 Report:** Documented the full-scale human rights crisis as the BNP government collapsed. Extrajudicial killings by RAB and other security forces had reached hundreds. The government was using the full apparatus of state power to suppress opposition and rig elections. Amnesty noted that “impunity for human rights violations remained widespread.”

    Each annual report added another layer of evidence. Each was ignored by the government.

    The Pattern Amnesty Identified

    Across six years of reports, Amnesty International identified a consistent pattern:

    1. **State-sponsored or state-tolerated violence** against minorities, political opponents, and human rights defenders

    2. **Legal instruments of repression** — the Special Powers Act, Section 54, the Indemnity Act — that enabled arbitrary detention, torture, and impunity

    3. **Systematic failure to investigate or prosecute** — creating a culture of absolute impunity for state actors and their allies

    4. **Escalation without consequence** — each year the abuses grew worse because there were never any consequences for the previous year’s abuses

    The pattern was not accidental. It was structural. BNP-Jamaat rule was built on the assumption that state power could be used without limit against those who lacked the power to fight back. Amnesty documented this assumption in action — year after year after year.

    What the BNP Government Did With These Reports

    The same thing they did with every international report: nothing.

  • No Amnesty recommendation was implemented
  • No investigation was launched in response to any report
  • No prosecution resulted from any finding
  • The government dismissed every report as “biased” or “politically motivated”

    • When Amnesty documented the Hindu pogroms, the government called it exaggerated. When Amnesty documented the legal architecture of torture, the government ignored it. When Amnesty called for protection of the Ahmadiyya, the government moved closer to banning Ahmadiyya publications. When Amnesty documented attacks on human rights defenders, the government accelerated those attacks.

    The message was clear: international human rights organizations had no power in Bangladesh. The BNP government was not accountable to them, not responsive to them, and not interested in the evidence they presented.

    Why This Timeline Matters

    Amnesty International is not a political organization. It does not take sides in elections. It does not campaign for or against political parties. It documents human rights violations wherever they occur, regardless of who is in power.

    The fact that Amnesty issued report after report on Bangladesh during BNP rule — each one documenting escalating abuses, each one calling for accountability, each one ignored — tells you everything you need to know about what that government was.

    These reports are still on Amnesty International’s website. The evidence hasn’t expired. The victims haven’t been compensated. The perpetrators haven’t been prosecuted. The only thing that has changed is that the people who built this system are now back in power — and they are telling Bangladeshis that the past doesn’t matter.

    It does matter. Amnesty documented why. The record is there for anyone who cares to read it.

    Sources:

  • Amnesty International, *”Bangladesh: Attacks on members of the Hindu minority”* (AI Index: ASA 13/006/2001), December 2001
  • Amnesty International, *”Bangladesh: Urgent need for legal and other reforms to protect human rights”* (AI Index: ASA 13/012/2003), 2003
  • Amnesty International, *”Bangladesh: The Ahmadiyya Community – their rights must be protected”* (AI Index: ASA 13/005/2004), April 2004
  • Amnesty International, *”Bangladesh: Human rights defenders under attack”*, 2005
  • Amnesty International, Annual Reports 2002–2006 (Bangladesh chapters)
  • Judicial Inquiry Commission on post-election violence (findings submitted 2011)
  • US State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2002–2006