Bangladesh: Championing Islamist Extremism/sonar bangla

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Bangladesh: Championing Islamist Extremism. Written By: Bertil Lintler.This

article first appeared in the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia

Terrorism Portal, September 16, 2002. Among the more than 60 video tapes that

the American cable television network CNN obtained from the Al Qaeda's

archives in Afghanistan in August this year, one is marked 'Burma' (Myanmar),

and purports to show Muslim 'allies' training in that country. While the group

shown, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), was founded by Rohingya

Muslim'sfrom Myanmar's Rakhine State and claims to be fighting for autonomy or

independence for its people, the tape was, in fact, shot in Bangladesh.

 

The RSO, and other Rohingya factions, have never had any camps inside Myanmar,

only across the border in Bangladesh. The camp in the video is located near the

town of Ukhia, southeast of Cox's Bazaar, and not all of the RSO's "fighters"

are Rohingyas from Myanmar.The Rohingyas, who are Muslims and speak the same

language as the population in the Chittagong area of Bangladesh, are not

regarded by the government in Yangon as an indigenous race. Hundreds of

thousands of them fled across the border to Bangladesh during a crackdown in

1978, and militant groups soon emerged among the refugees. The UN

eventuallyintervened, and most of the Rohingyas were repatriated to Myanmar.

However, in 1991/1992, another wave of 250,000 refugees came across the border,

and while most of them have also been repatriated, more than 20,000 remain in

United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) supervised camps southeast

of Cox's Bazaar. An estimated 100,000Rohingyas live outside the UNHCR's camps,

and it is among these destitute and stateless people that various Islamist

militant groups have found fertile ground for recruitment.The RSO was set up in

the early 1980s when radical elements among the Rohingyas broke away from the

more moderate, main grouping, the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF). Led by a

medical doctor from Arakan, Muhammad Yunus, it soon became the main and most

militant faction among the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and on the border. Given its

more rigid religious stand, the RSO soon secured the support of like-minded

groups in the Muslim world. These included the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh

and Pakistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan,

Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) in Jammu and Kashmir, and Angkatan Belia Islam

sa-Malaysia (ABIM) - the Islamic Youth Organization of Malaysia.

Afghaninstructors ave been seen in some of the RSO camps along the

Bangladesh-Burma border, while nearly 100 RSO rebels were reported to have

undergone training in the Afghan province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami

Mujahideen.The RSO's main military camp was located near the hospital that the

Rabitat-al-Aalam-al-Islami had built at Ukhia. At this stage, the RSO acquired

a substantial number of Chinese-made RPG-2 rocket launchers, light

machine-guns, AK-47 assault rifles, claymore mines and explosives from private

arms dealers in the Thai town of Aranyaprathet near Thailand's border with

Cambodia, which in the 1980s emerged as a major arms bazaar for guerrilla

movements in the region. These weapons were siphoned off from Chinese arms

shipments to the resistance battling the Vietnamese army in Cambodia, and sold

to any one who wanted, and could afford, to buy them.The Bangladeshi media gave

extensive coverage to the RSO buildup along the border, but it soon became clear

that it was not only Rohingyas who were undergoing training in its camps. Many,

it turned out, were members of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the youth

organisation of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami, and came from the University of

Chittagong,where a 'campus war' was being fought between Islamist militants and

more moderate student groups. The RSO was, in fact, engaged in little or no

fighting inside Burma.It is unclear when the now-famous videotape was shot, but

it presumably dates from the early 1990s, since, by the late 1990s, he RSO's

training camps southeast of Cox's Bazaar were taken over by Bangladeshi

Islamist militants. Bangladesh's main militant outfit, the

Hakrat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), was formed in 1992, allegedly with financial

support from Osama bin Laden himself. HuJI now has an estimated strength of

15,000 followers and is led by Shawkat Osman aka Maulana orSheikh arid in

Chittagong. Its members are recruited mainly from students of Bangladesh's more

than 60,000 madrassahs (seminaries), and year 2001, they called themselves the

'Bangladeshi Taliban.' The group has become notorious for masterminding violent

attacks on Bangladesh's Hindu minority, as well as on moderate Bangladeshi

Muslims. In a statementreleased by the US State Department on May 21, 2002,

HuJI was described as a terrorist organization with ties to Islamist militants

in Pakistan.The existence of firm links between the new Bangladeshi militants

and Al Qaeda is established through Fazlul Rahman, leader of the 'Jihad

Movement in Bangladesh' (to which HuJI belongs), when he signed the official

declaration of 'holy war' against the United States on February 23, 1998. Other

signatories included bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (leader of the Jihad Group in

Egypt), Rifa'i Ahmad Taha aka Abu-Yasir (Egyptian Islamic Group), and Sheikh

Mir Hamzah (secretary of theJamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan). HuJI sent its own

people, as well as Rohingya recruits, to Afghanistan to fight for the Taleban

and Al Qaeda. The Rohingyas, especially, were given the most dangerous tasks in

the battlefield, clearing mines and portering. According to intelligence

sources, Rohingya recruits were paid 30,000 Bangladeshi taka ($525) on joining

and then 10,000 ($175) per month. The families of recruits killed in action

were offered 100,000 taka ($1,750). [Ed.: While these appear to be small sums

in dollar terms, they are princely amounts in a country where the annual per

capita income works out to a bare US $ 380]. Recruits were taken mostly via

Nepal to Pakistan, where they were trained and send on to military camps in

Afghanistan. It is not known how many people from this part of Bangladesh -

Rohingyas and others - fought in Afghanistan, but the number is believed to be

quite substantial. Others have gone to Kashmir and even Chechnya to join forces

with Islamist militants there.In an interview with the CNN in December 2001,

American 'Taliban' fighter, John Walker Lindh, relates that the

Al-Qaeda-directed ansar (companions of the Prophet) brigades, to which he had

belonged in Afghanistan, were divided along linguistic lines: "Bengali,

Pakistani (Urdu) and Arabic," which suggests that the Bengali-speaking

component - Bangladeshi and Rohingya - must have been significant. It is now

also becoming clear that some militants fleeing the American strikes

inAfghanistan in late 2001 have ended up in Bangladesh. With the heavy American

presence in Pakistan, many militants who fled Afghanistan in October and

November 2001 have found it safer to hide in third countries.

 

In early 2002, a ship reportedly sailed from Karachi to Chittagong carrying

assorted militants from Afghanistan. On May 10-11, 2002, nine Islamist

fundamentalist groups, including HuJI, met at a camp near Ukhia South and

formed the Bangladesh Islamic Manch (Association). The new umbrella

organisation includes groups purporting to represent the Rohingyas and the

Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam (MULTA), a small group operating in India's

northeast. By June, Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan

were reported to be training members of the new alliance in at least two camps

insouthern Bangladesh.An internal document from HuJI lists no less than 19

'training establishments' all over Bangladesh, but it is uncertain how many of

them actually offer military training. What is certain, however, is that since

a new coalition government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) took

over in October 2001, Bangladesh's Islamist militants have become more vocal

and active. The coalition includes, for the first time, two ministers from the

Jamaat. The four-party electoral alliance that brought the new coalition

government to power also includes a smaller Islamic party, the Islamic Oikya

Jote, whose chairman, Azizul Huq, is a member of HuJI's advisory council.The

Bangladeshi authorities have shown no sign of being willing to crack down on

these groups and their activities. On the contrary, after some adverse

international publicity about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in Bangladesh

earlier this year, the government cracked down on the most moderate of the

Rohingya factions, the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO; Arakan is

another name for Myanmar's Rakhine State), in Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar. ARNO

has no known links to Al Qaeda or any of Bangladesh's groups of Islamist

militants. It issued a strong statement condemning the crackdown and

disassociating itself from the militants. The RSO, on the other hand, was not

targeted by the Bangladeshi authorities.For many years, Bangladesh was seen as

a moderate, even liberal, Muslim country. This is evidently changing, and the

formation of the Bangladesh Islamic Manch in May this year clearly indicates

that co-operation between the country's Islamist militants is becoming closer.

The presence of trainers from Afghanistan and the arrival of more militants

with AlQaeda connections, demonstrate their participation in an international

terrorist network. 

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