Jamat Misuses Islam in Bangladesh

Author: Sona Kanti Barua

Muslims fundamentalists (Taliaban, Al-quida, Mujaheedin etc) copied violence from the Brahmin and Hindu fundamentalists and let us see what happens in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Pakistan, Bangladesh and India’s minority and peace loving Muslim people are appealing to the world conscience, world mass media and the United Nations for security in their homelands. The Jamaitul Mujahideen group calls for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Bangladesh while nation’s worst fears came true when the nation stood terrorized as set of off 400 bombs on August 17, 2005. So, Al – Qaeda Group suspect in Bali and Bangladesh Terror explosion. Buddhists all over the world have been shocked in January 1985 upon reading the news of the outrage at Borobudur Bombing in Indonesia.  Al-Qaeda and Taliban regimes destroyed two historic Great Buddha statues: one measuring 53 metres and the second one 48 metres in central Bamiyan province of Afghanistan in February 2001. So the 9/11 of the U.S.A. did not come without warning. Several of decades old Bangladesh state-sponsored campaign of blatant discrimination and barbaric atrocities against Bangladesh’s religious and ethnic minorities turned into one of religious and ethnic cleansing or genocide. Great poet Rabindranath Tagore encouraged us, “Fear not comes the message the direction of the rising Sun, those that will give life to the last throb; will diminish not, never.” But Holy Qur’an declared, “You can not abuse other religion. (6 : 106)” Even the Qur’an warned, “No religious place should be demolished.(22 : 38).” During the 10^th and 11^th centuries, Buddhism in South Asia was eclipsed by Islamic invaders.

Although the sudden escalation in this evil campaign of religious & ethnic cleansing is due to the astronomical rise of Islamists whose declared goal is to rid the country of its non-Muslim population so it can be transformed into a monolithic Islamic state, it is not going to cease even if you intervene to weed out the Islamists.  Unless the minority problem is dealt with by the community of civilized nations as a distinct problem they will be completely eliminated in the next two or three decades, as has been the case in Pakistan. This is because the land seized by successive governments from the minority Hindus by using the Enemy Property/Vested Property Act or from the indigenous people (including Raja Tridiv Roy, former minister of Pakistan) of Chittagong Hill Tracts through the scheme of Islamic colonization of the Hills is evenly distributed among the Islamic nationalists, Islamic extremists and the secularists or so called progressive Muslims.

Second Chapter

To whom the Islamists refers to as “infidels,” have no room in an Islamic state is a well known fact, which has also been repeatedly declared by Bangladesh’s Islamic extremists, who are driving  them out by serving ultimatums.   The Islamic nationalists (BNP&JP) are also doing the same thing, only slightly differently.  The BNP or JP may not have declared it as their party policy, but have 

1. declared Islam as the state religion;
2. denied the minorities access to jobs of power and prestige;
3. fired the few minorities that  were hired by the secularists;
4. have in the past refused to repeal the Enemy Property Act and  recently  blocked the implementation of the law that was passed by the progressive Muslim or secularist government repealing that infamous act;
5. continued the Islamic (Bengali Hindus, Buddhists or Christians are never given any land grabbed from the non-Bengali indigenous people) colonization of the Hill Tracts, in flagrant violation of the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Treaty.
6. had the Board of Education and Public Service Commission include questions that a minority student cannot either answer at all or pass the test if answers them truthfully.
7. banned their (of the Ahmaadiyas) religious publications;
8. subsidized pilgrimage for the Muslims but not for  the minorities;
9. used their cadres and even their parliamentarians to terrorize the   minorities, raze their places of worship, and rape their women;
10. used the police to protect their party cadres who brutalize the minorities;
11. the police deny them protection and justice;
12. incarcerated the journalists who have or attempted to report the incidents of atrocities  being conducted against the minorities;
13. as a part of the cover-up drive, incarcerated NGO personnel and noted journalists like Shahriar Kabir, Muntasir Mamun, and BBC journalists who have attempted to report atrocities against the minorities (see, BBC-News Mach, 15,’02;Dec. 9, ‘02).
14. fooled the world by claiming that even cases such as that of burning 11 people alive which include a 4-day-old infant and a 70-year old man to be a case of “robbery” and bombing of at a major religious festival as an attack on the police.

By hiring lobbyists as well as using her diplomats worldwide, the ruling Prime Minister Zia has  denied that the country’s minorities are being subjected to any atrocities; she has even emphatically claimed that ” the highest degree of communal harmony” prevails in the “Muslim Democracy of Bangladesh.” And, the community of civilized nations appears to have been fooled into believing the government’s following claims:

1. all the national media reports about the atrocities against the country’s minorities (and the alarming rise of militant Islam) are false. 
2. all the international media reports about the atrocities against the country’s minorities (and the alarming rise of militant Islam) are conspiratorial.
3. the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Refugees International reports are all exaggerated.

Renowned lawyer Dr. Kamal Hossain brought a lawsuit in the High Court on behalf of Ain-O-Shalish-Kendra (Law and Mediation Center) against the Begum Zia regime (Writ Petition # 6556/2001, under Article 102 of the Constitution of Bangladesh), charging that minority women and children were raped by the agents of the ruling parties (see The New York Times. Nov 27, ’01).  Afraid of reprisal, the helpless judges dismissed the case based on the government’s submission that the “few sporadic incidents” that have occurred are due to “family feuds” (The Statesmen, Oct. 17, ’02).

As evidence of atrocities mounted, and US and European legislators/government began to urge her to stop the carnage, she appointed a commission to investigate the incidents of atrocities against minorities, but, ironically, with her Principal Secretary as its chair, thus making a mockery of this colossal human tragedy.

Prime Minister Zia, the leader of the “Islamic hardliners” has flouted all those appeals/recommendations as exaggerated and baseless, like she had in 1992 (As can also be seen from Honorable Congressman Frank Pallone’s May 17, ‘04 speech in the House about our plight.).

Will the secularists or progressive Muslims solve the minority problem if the ever came back to power?  They will not.  This conclusion is based on their past behavior.  Even though by rejecting the two nation theory or the concept of Islam-based nationhood, Bengali progressive Muslims supported by the minorities seceded from Islamic Pakistan to create secular Bangladesh in 1971, and although the country’s founding fathers constitutionally (1972) guaranteed that no religion would be accorded preference over the others by the state, the secularist government reneged on all their pre-election promises.

Having undergone extremely disproportionate  suffering during the war of independence in 1971 (80% of the 10 million driven out of the country were minorities, according to Senator Kennedy report.), the minorities had naturally expected that if the secularists ever made it to power their misery would end for ever.  But that did not happen; rather they took the following pro-Islamic and anti-minority steps:

1. Created an Islamic Foundation, but no such foundations for the minority groups (We of course want none–we want a complete separation of  mosque and state).
2. Continued subsidizing pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia for the Muslim, but not so for people belonging to other faiths.
3. Joined the OIC and attended the OIC Foreign Minister’s summit meeting.
4. Refused to return the site of the holy shrine of Ramna Kali Temple and Mother Anandamayee’s Ashram-dorm complex to the Hindus (this shrine is symbolic of Hinduism in Bangladesh).
5. Refused to repeal the Enemy Property Act of 1965 (enemy = the Hindus who have had to leave for India after being persecuted/for safety of life), by using which successive governments have sized 2.5 million acres of land from the Hindus in a country smaller than the state of Wisconsin, by 2001 (See IRF/US Department’s Country Report 2001/2003).
6. The pursued the Pakistani practice of Islamic colonization of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, , i. e., kept sending Muslim settlers –but not from other faiths — backed by the armed forces.
7. They did not hire any member from the minority communities in a position of power and/or prestige either in the government or in their party, Awami League.

During their second tenure (1996 – mid-2001) they finally repealed theEnemy/Vested Property Act but with no provision for seeking compensation. Similarly, they signed a treaty with the indigenous people of Chittagong Hill tracts, but did not restore the autonomy.  The first President of the country, Late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman asked the non-Bengali indigenous people to “become Bengali,” totally disrespecting their distinct ethnic identities.

And they refused to return the site of the Ramna Kali temple to the Hindus, but finally returned it only after facing vigorous protests and condemnation everywhere. Worst of all, they did not even attempt to repeal the 5th and 8th Amendments (Declaration of Islam as the State Religion) although repealing those two Amendments would be the very first step toward according equal status to the country’s minorities.

Faced with blatant discrimination in employment, daily humiliation – - e.g., called ‘kafir’ ‘malaun’ or  ‘dandaya’ (these are slurs suggesting that non-Muslims are infidels) and  publicly making the wish Fi Naar-e- jahannam-E Khaledun-a (Let his/her soul burn in the fire of hell eternally when a non-Muslim passes away – - , and unable to bear the brunt of the barbaric atrocities imaginable only in the medieval times, the minorities have had to leave en masse for the neighboring state of India, Myanmar and North America, in a continuous exodus.

Consequently, as can be seen from the table below, whereas the minorities represented 30% of the population in the 1940s and 20% in 1970, they account for only 10% or less of the total of 145 million people, today:

Population Chart (1941-2001)

% (Percentage) of Total Population
Year	Muslim	Hindu	Buddhist	Christian	Others	Total
1941	70.3	28.3	-	0.1	1.3	100
1951	75.7	22.0	0.7	0.3	1.3	100
1961	80.4	18.5	0.7	0.3	0.1	100
1974	85.4	13.5	0.6	0.3	0.2	100
1981	86.7	12.1	0.6	0.3	0.3	100
1991	87.4	11.5	-	1.1	0.3	100
2001	90.0	08.0	0.6	1.1	0.3	100

Sources: Bangladesh: A Country Study, J. Heitzman & RL. Worden eds. 2nd Edition, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, Publisher US Army, 1989, & Ranjit Dey, et. al. (Ends) 2002.

It may be noted that since the average family size of the Muslims and non-Muslims happen to be the same, without the exodus the minorities would have been 62 million, but in fact only 15 million remain.  A population loss of 47 million people amounts to the disappearance of a dozen countries like Albania, Bahrain, Iceland, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Namibia, Oman, Panama,  Costa Rica or Malta from the face of the earth Lebanon, Panama, Kuwait, Malta, etc.  What is scarier though is that, if Pakistan (of which Bangladesh was a part) is taken as an example of how the Islamists of the subcontinent treat their fellow non-Muslims, then Bangladesh’s minorities will be completely eliminated through violence in the next two and a half decades.

In the past few years, we have urged Prime Minister Khaleda Zia several times to take the following steps to alleviate the minorities’ pain:

(i)   Shut down all Islamic terrorist organizations in the country;

(ii) Order the foot soldiers of this vicious campaign to stop the atrocities against the minorities immediately;

(iii) Repeal the 5th and 8th Amendments of the constitution through which secular Bangladesh was virtually transformed into an Islamic

(iv)  Repeal the anti-minority or racist law of Enemy Property Act/Vested Property Act with provision for the rightful heirs (according to Hindu Law of inheritance) of the Hindus from whom 2.5 million acres of land was seized by the government to reclaim/donate/sell the property;

(v) Fully implement the Chittaqong Hill Tracts Treaty of 1997, i. e. stop sending Muslim settlers to evict the indigenous people, and withdraw the army, etc.

(vi) End the Naziesque discrimination against the minorities in employment, by adopting and implementing an Affirmative Action Law as found in India or America, thus ensuring proportionate minority representation in all government sectors;

(vii)   Compensate and rehabilitate the victims;

(viii) Form an independent inquiry commission to investigate the incidents and bring the perpetrators to justice;

(ix)  Insure proportionate representation; and

(x)  Open a dialogue with the leaders of the minority religious and ethnic groups for finding a permanent solution to the problem.

Prime Minister Khaleda Zia never bothered to respond to our memoranda.  In a letter to the ruling Prime Minister, Honorable Congressmen Frank Pallone, Jr. and Anthony Weiner made similar recommendations, but she did not even show the courtesy of acknowledging receipt of their letter, either, let alone respect their request (please see attached that letter plus Congressman Pallone’s mention of her failure to respond to their letter in his speech about the plight of Bangladesh’s minorities in the Congress of May 17, ‘04).

For a half century, unable to bear the brunt of discriminatory treatment and atrocities they have fled to India and leaving behind their established business, jobs, and ancestral property. It has been going on endlessly since the massacre of Hindus in 1946.  Unlike the Kurds, or the Sudanese Christians they lack the ability to put up a meaningful resistance. The evil forces of the Islamic nationalist/extremists have always been so overwhelmingly powerful anyone who has ever resisted has been slaughtered right away.  Therefore the only options they have had were to either leave for India under the cover of darkness by paying hefty passage money or stay in East Pakistan/Bangladesh as caged animals regularly paying infidel tax and having to make their girls available on demand.

Many of those unfortunate children of the cursed night of 14th  August, 1947, who were able to buy their passage to India — many losing their female relatives to the Islamic nationalist/extremist rapists during their perilous journey — were able to live in India legally by virtue of the Liaquat/Nehru pact that allowed the minorities of each country legally immigrate to the other.  However the millions of minorities who have had to enter India after that pact was nullified in 1971, live in India in abject poverty as illegal aliens. And India doesn’t recognize these refugees as refugees which is why they do not qualify for the   benefits that international refugees usually receive.  Bangladeshi landless Muslims who go to India for economic reasons can easily obtain a ration card and then vote yet go back to his home in Bangladesh to invest his earnings.   But a minority cannot do that.  As soon as a Hindu leaves for India his home and property is seized by the government and given away to the Muslims thus precluding his possibility of returning home. If the exodus continues at its current rate then minorities will be completely eliminated in the next two or three decades.

We believe you will agree with us that having incurred a population loss of 47 million people, lost 2.5 million acres of land in a country smaller than the size of Wisconsin, and having lived like caged animals there for a half century in their ancestral homeland, the minorities of Bangladesh deserve a true permanent solution to their problem.

It will have been clear from the above that neither the Islamic nationalists/extremist nor the secularists have take any steps at all toward finding a permanent solution to this problem.  Yet, once again today, we would like to urge Prime Minister Khaleda Zia through your office to take the steps that we or Congressmen Frank Pallone & Anthony Winner have suggested.

However, should the ruling government fail to take those measures then it remains our humble request that America lead the rest of the civilized world to devise apermanent solution to the problem of Bangladesh’s fast dwindling minorities. You have extensive experience in resolving such problems around the globe, and we firmly believe that you can do the same for the minorities of Bangladesh if you so wish. (Courtesy by: Mr. Dwijen Bhattacharjya, Mr. Sitangshu Guha & members of   B. H. B. C.U.C.)

We fervently hope and firmly believe that as a country representing freedom and democracy, you will act to save the minorities of Bangladesh like you have elsewhere.

Finally, we would like to humbly remind you of Alex Perry’s warning that “Bangladesh may have become a dangerous new front in America’s war on terror.”  As insiders, we can assure you that today’s Bangladesh is the Afghanistan of the late 1990s.  Thus by acting now you will not only prevent minorities form being wiped out but also save the entire civilized world a lot of pain and suffering.

Thank you for your anticipated assistance in preventing our homeland from being turned into a monolithic Islamic state and saving its minorities.