Bangladesh's Political Turmoil Opens Space for Islamist Extremism

Soon after student protesters dramatically took down Bangladesh’s government last month, a group of boys broke into the home of Tureen Afroz, the former chief prosecutor of a tribunal for war crimes committed during the nation’s independence movement in the early 1970s.

They burst into her bedroom, interrogated her about why she wasn’t wearing a hijab — a head covering worn by some Muslim women — and then proceeded to shave her head. For days, the youths kept her hostage, stabbing her with pencils and lecturing her about Islam. Afroz worried that they’d rape her young daughter.

“I thought they’d kill me,” she said, recalling the incident from her house in Dhaka, the capital. “We were terrified.”

Bangladesh, home to the world’s fourth-largest Muslim population, is now at a critical turning point. Western and Indian officials fear Islamist extremists are on the verge of gaining a foothold in a volatile part of the world where terrorist networks like the Islamic State have made advances in recent years. Higher tensions in the Middle East, with Israel fighting Hamas and threatening a ground invasion of Lebanon, provide a ripe environment for recruitment.The ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule initially spurred hopes that the nation would embrace a new era of democracy and clean government. The army reinforced that optimism by tapping Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, a friend of Hillary Clinton who pioneered microcredit to the poor, to lead an interim government.

Yet Hasina’s downfall also reopened old wounds stemming from a genocide half a century ago that has fueled extremism and shaped Bangladesh’s politics ever since. Despite her flaws, Hasina was praised by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular for keeping Islamists at bay and providing a moderate foil to Pakistan, where terrorist groups have found safe haven for decades.

As many as 3 million Bengalis were killed in the 1971 struggle to break free from Pakistan, while another 10 million people — mostly in the Hindu minority — fled to neighboring India. Hasina, whose father served as Bangladesh’s first president before his assassination, sought to prosecute those responsible for acts of genocide after she took power in 2009, including figures associated with her Islamist political rivals such as Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.

In recent weeks, revenge-style attacks against Hasina’s supporters and religious minorities have proliferated. Lawlessness rules Dhaka, where embassies are running with reduced staff, teenagers have helped direct traffic and police stations are burned-out shells. Thousands of Hindus have already tried to flee into a sensitive sliver of India that borders Tibet and Myanmar — and has a long association with armed rebel groups.

“These kind of post-revolutionary environments are incredibly contingent,” said Paul Staniland, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies international security. “There’s a risk that a meaningful opening will persist for Islamist groups to operate within a deeply uncertain political environment.”

What happens next is unclear. The army, which forced Hasina out after refusing her orders to shoot at protesters, has said it wants democratic elections within a year and a half, though that timeline isn’t definite. Bangladesh’s once-promising economy, built on the world’s second-largest garments industry, needs at least $3 billion of emergency aid from the International Monetary Fund — and could soon become a bailout candidate.

Months of curfews and deadly street protests have disrupted operations for fast-fashion brands like Zara, Gap and H&M. Exporters expect as much as a 20% decline in sales this year and some labels are already planning to produce elsewhere next season.

And the threat of sectarian violence is growing. About a decade ago, extremists affiliated with Islamist groups began hunting down secular bloggers in Bangladesh with machetes. In 2016, several militants — most with cosmopolitan backgrounds — opened fire on Holey Artisan Bakery, an upscale restaurant in Dhaka, picking out non-Muslims and killing more than a dozen foreigners. Hasina responded with force, banning Jamaat-e-Islami — a fundamentalist Islamic group — and sentencing the ringleader of the blogger murders to death.

After Hasina fled to India on Aug. 5, masked men set Hindu temples ablaze and decapitated statues depicting secular icons like the poet Rabindranath Tagore. A letter circulated at the University of Dhaka instructing female professors to wear “traditional clothing.” The ban on Jamaat-e-Islami — which has previously allied with the Awami League’s bigger political rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party — was lifted. And a memorial for the police officers who died defending Holey Artisan Bakery was recently smashed and replaced with a poster for a fundamentalist group.

With the backing of Bangladesh’s military, students who led the movement to topple Hasina recruited Yunus to clean up the mess. For years, Hasina publicly castigated the economist, accusing him of “sucking blood” from the poor through his microcredit programs. Under Hasina, Yunus faced life imprisonment for money laundering and graft, charges that were dropped soon after the change in leadership.

Yunus, who declined an interview, has condemned the blood-letting and expressed confidence that he can restore order “within a short period of time.” But he has little formal experience navigating the life-or-death politics of Bangladesh, which has seen more than two dozen military coups since its founding. His advisers, a handpicked team of 19, are largely academics, activists and students — far removed from the biography of figures like Hasina, who has survived multiple assassination attempts.

“Yunus doesn’t seem to have much control, much actual power,” said Sajeeb Wazed, Hasina’s son. Since the fall of the government, he said, Islamists and related groups have piggy-backed off the protest movement to capture power in institutions.

In Dhaka, a sprawling city dominated by murals about the revolution, it’s hard to know who’s in charge. Though technically in Hasina’s seat, Yunus has spent much of his time holed up in a fortified guest house typically used by visiting heads of state, where he’s living and working because the official residence for prime ministers was ransacked. Separated from family and colleagues, Yunus is trailed by military personnel everywhere he goes, including up the spiral staircase to his bedroom.

People close to Yunus say he accepted the chief adviser position because he felt he had no choice. By the time students approached him about the job, several hundred protesters had already died in skirmishes with the police and army. The volume of demands foisted on Yunus so quickly has exasperated the economist, who uses the phrase “expectations management” to describe his approach to the role.

Patience is a hard sell in Bangladesh these days. Hasina’s political rivals are eager to hold a national vote as soon as possible. Student leaders aren’t so keen. They want Yunus and his team to reform the Election Commission — and ensure a free and fair process — before Bangladeshis head to the polls. How long the impasse will last is anyone’s guess. Yunus has resisted casting himself in the role of mediator. His advisers say they’d likely need at least a year to enact substantive change.

High on their list are addressing slowing growth and the dearth of quality jobs, the genesis of many of the initial protests.

Hasina was widely credited with lifting millions out of poverty through building out a $47 billion garment exports industry. But her administration likely overstated the strength of Bangladesh’s economy, releasing inaccurate data on exports, inflation and gross domestic product, according to Debapriya Bhattacharya, an economist preparing a white paper for Yunus analyzing these anomalies.

In an interview, Bhattacharya said Hasina sold out the government to corporate interests, pointing to Bangladesh’s tax-to-GDP ratio of around 8%, less than half that of neighboring India and one of the lowest in the world. This month, the country increased a key policy rate by half a percentage point to fight decade-high inflation. Bangladesh’s central bank said it’ll need more than $5 billion of emergency aid beyond $4.7 billion it already secured from the IMF last year.

“They gave money to their cronies,” Bhattacharya said of Hasina’s administration. “Oligarchs sustained this regime, but at one point in time the government lost its autonomy.”

For Hasina’s supporters, the vigilantism of the past few weeks is evidence that the prime minister’s tough approach to governance was necessary. Politics is personal in Bangladesh. In the 1970s, while Hasina was abroad, most of her family was murdered in a military coup. She’s long suspected the involvement of the BNP and the husband of her fiercest rival, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who has denied involvement.

In recent days, dozens of Awami League leaders — along with business tycoons and journalists who were considered their allies — have been charged with crimes, including genocide. A former Supreme Court justice, and sharp-tongued critic of the protest movement, was beaten by a mob while trying to cross into India on foot. Hasina’s ministers have been mostly driven underground, popping their heads up to question why a student movement built on respect for human rights is now ignoring theirs.

For weeks, Hasina has kept a low profile around Delhi, where she’s believed to be under the watch of the Indian government, a close ally. In a statement, she called for an investigation into “acts of sabotage, arson and violence” and vindication for those who’d “fallen victim to terrorist aggression.”

Innocent people are caught in the crossfire. From a bare apartment on the outskirts of Dhaka, Aysha Begum recounted the day her husband, Faruk Molla, was murdered. Last month, a mob burst into their home and identified themselves as members of the BNP, Aysha said. They stabbed her in the head, lunged at her husband with axes and argued about whether to kill their seven-year-old son.

Though Faruk wasn’t intimately affiliated with the Awami League, his brother was. After five hours, the mob left and burned down the house. Aysha fled to a sister’s apartment in Dhaka, where family members tense up every time the doorbell rings.

“All I want from this government is justice for my husband’s murder,” said Aysha, 40, wiping tears with a red shawl. “Nothing else.”

Retribution is on everybody’s mind — and it’s hard to see the cycle of violence ending anytime soon.

Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, a senior BNP leader, denied the party’s role in the attacks, adding that officials in Hasina’s government and media outlets in India had exaggerated reports of reprisal killings and the targeting of minority Hindus, who’re often Awami League supporters.

“There is no problem,” he said.

Instead, Islam highlighted Hasina’s own blotted record. Under the former prime minister, Bangladesh’s intelligence wing ran a secret prison called the “house of mirrors.” Detainees say they were kept in dark, windowless cells, sometimes for years, where they were interrogated about their criticism of Hasina.

Rizwana Hasan, one of Yunus’s advisers, said the new government wants to “prove ourselves different” than Hasina’s and has already started investigating human rights abuses against minorities and others.

Hasan, a prominent environmental activist, said perhaps the only way forward is to create an entirely new political establishment freed from the rot of a state that abused its power to “harass, kill, oppress, suppress.”

Years ago, Hasan’s husband was abducted under Hasina’s watch. Long after his release, he still sleeps with a light on.

“What Hasina has done is something we can’t forgive,” she said. “People are now asking for a corruption-free Bangladesh. Their demands, however long the list is, have to be met.”

On the other side is Afroz, the former war crimes prosecutor, who had her head shaved last month by Islamists because they perceived her to be a supporter of the ousted prime minister. She’s worried about the new regime and likened the current period to the fight for independence from Pakistan in the 1970s. If the extremists get their way, she said, they’ll change the country’s flag, national anthem and identity.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to Bangladesh,” Afroz said. “But I pray we’ll fight until the last drop of our blood.”