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.
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