Within six days of announcing a crackdown on Muslim militants, Bangladesh had filled its jailhouses with 11,600 new detainees in what seemed like an astonishing display of law enforcement might.
The problem is, less than 2 percent of those picked up are suspected radicals, and not one is considered to be a high-level operative.
Most are accused of petty crimes such as theft, burglary or small-time drug smuggling.
Photo: AP
At least 2,000 are members of the main opposition party, a party spokesman said, while others were believed to belong to a key ally of that party.
Analysts, rights groups and opponents of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government now question the crackdown.
Was it truly an effort to stop a series of brazen, deadly attacks by Muslims on various minorities, or an attempt to gain political advantage from the fear the killings have generated at home and abroad?
Lisa Curtis, an expert on South Asia at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington said a crackdown on militants was needed, but given that according to police only 177 of the thousands detained are actually suspected of militancy, she said that the dragnet will begin to look more like a tool to pressure the political opposition rather than a serious effort to stop the attacks.
The law enforcement campaign could actually deepen the divide between the government’s supporters and those longing for Islamic rule, possibly even encouraging militants, analysts said.
“The current political deadlock in the country is opening the door for Islamist extremists to gain more recruits and influence, and will make it difficult for the Bangladeshi government to build a national consensus against the extremists,” Curtis said.
Bangladesh, in addressing the criticism over the crackdown, pledged to refocus its security efforts against suspected militants blamed for the killings of nearly two dozen atheist writers, publishers, religious minorities, social activists and foreign aid workers since 2013. Many of those deaths have occurred in recent months.
The so-called “machete attacks” have terrified the country’s minorities and triggered alarm in the US and Europe, where some governments have begun offering asylum to those at risk.
In most of the killings, a group of young men cut people down with meat cleavers and machetes before fleeing the scene.
While most of the attacks have been claimed by either the Islamic State or groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, the government denies the presence of either transnational group in Bangladesh.
Hasina’s government accuses local terrorists and Muslim political parties — especially the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami — of orchestrating the violence to destabilize the nation.
The two parties deny any involvement.
Hasina announced the crackdown last week, after the wife of a police superintendent was shot and stabbed to death. The woman had been an ardent campaigner against militants, and many within the country’s establishment were stunned by the attack on someone they had considered one of their own.
Police say the crackdown was never meant to target only radicals, but was also aimed at arresting people accused of trading in narcotics and firearms.
While that “special drive” was carried out in tandem with the anti-militancy campaign, it was never communicated to the media until it was over, police spokesman Kamrul Ahsan said.
Human Rights Watch on Friday said in a statement that while Bangladesh should be boosting its anti-militancy efforts, it “should immediately stop arbitrarily arresting people without proper evidence of crime” and release those who are not charged.
Human Rights Watch Asia director Brad Adams accused the government of trying to make up for “a slow and complacent response” to the militant attacks by “falling back on old habits of rounding up the ‘usual suspects’ instead of doing the hard work of carrying out proper investigations.”
Most of the detainees were still in custody on Friday, with their families and friends crowding into police stations, courthouses and jails in an effort to pay bail or in some other way secure their loved ones’ release.
According to local media, that has included bribing the police.
Those rounded up this week included two suspects who, under questioning, revealed the identity of a man wanted in an attack in October last year against a publisher, police said on Thursday.
That suspect could help authorities apprehend more suspects wanted for the separate killing of another publisher on the same day, police said.
Still, most attack suspects remain at large.
Authorities have yet to explain why the investigations have been so difficult even as they insist they know who is behind them.
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