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Bangladesh: Breeding ground for Muslim
terror
By Bertil Lintner
Among the more than 60 videotapes that the
American cable television network CNN obtained from
al-Qaeda's archives in Afghanistan in August this year,
one marked "Burma" (Myanmar) purports to show Muslim
"allies" training in that country. While the group
shown, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), was
founded by Rohingya Muslims from 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
eventually intervened, and most of the Rohingyas were
repatriated to Myanmar. However, in 1991 and 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 100,000 Rohingyas 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. Afghan instructors have
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 the 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 organization 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 Myanmar.
It is unclear when the now-famous videotape was
shot, but it presumably dates from the early 1990s,
since by the late 1990s the 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
or Sheikh Farid in Chittagong. Its members were
recruited mainly from students of Bangladesh's more than
60,000 madrassas (religious schools) and 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 statement released 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 the HuJI belongs),
when he signed the official declaration of jihad 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 the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan).
HuJI sent its own people, as well as Rohingya
recruits, to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban 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 (US$525) on
joining and then 10,000 taka per month. The families of
recruits killed in action were offered 100,000 taka.
(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 $380.) Recruits
were taken mostly via Nepal to Pakistan, where they were
trained and sent 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
in Afghanistan 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 organization 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 in southern 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 Organization (ARNO), 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
cooperation between the country's Islamist militants is
becoming closer. The presence of trainers from
Afghanistan and the arrival of more militants with
al-Qaeda connections, demonstrate their participation in
an international terrorist network.
Bertil
Lintner is a senior writer, Far Eastern Economic
Review
Published with permission from the
South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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