This is the compilation of a three-part series on corruption, politics and violence during 2001-06 period based on secret US embassy documents. It was first published on Dhaka Tribune
BNP leaders claim that all charges of corruption, election engineering and patronization of terrorist activities against the party’s acting chairman, Tarique Rahman and his Hawa Bhaban false and baseless. They tend to dismiss the allegations as political propaganda, and that the Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and Tarique Rahman used to visit the Hawa Bhaban office regularly. Nothing wrong had taken place at the office.
After the political changeover of August 5, the interim government released many convicts and prisoners from jail and took measures to withdraw cases and charges levelled against political leaders, including Tarique, since 2007.
However, several senior BNP politicians, Dhaka’s US embassy officials, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the media during 2001-08 revealed that Tarique and his notorious associates had made “Hawa Bhaban” an alternative powerhouse that took many crucial decisions bypassing the laws of the land.
In 2005, for the fifth consecutive year, the non-governmental organization Transparency International named Bangladesh the world’s most corrupt country. During the tenure, the World Bank cancelled funding for three development projects, blaming government corruption for its decision. Hundreds of journalists were harassed, intimidated and attacked by state agents and non-state actors, including Islamist groups, for reporting the corruption.
Following the ascent of the BNP-Jamaat alliance to power in 2001, BNP chief Khaleda Zia set up her political secretariat at Hawa Bhaban on Banani Road 13. Before that, the building was used by her elder son as his political campaign office.
With tight security at the entrance, the building soon became the powerhouse of the government, thanks to the “Dark Prince” and his cronies. Then it became plagued by rampant corruption, ruthless vengeance, patronization of terrorism, and abuse of power, and consequently, led to the arrest of the BNP’s top brass, including the mother and her two sons. The BNP’s freefall in the 2008 election was evident.
‘Wind Tunnel’
PMO Principal Secretary Kamal Uddin Siddiqui referred to Tarique as “Wind Tunnel”, a translation of the name of his “Hawa Bhaban” office.
“Wind Tunnel has some psycho friends” that he listens to because of his lack of experience, Siddiqui said, describing Tarique as “unsophisticated and dangerous”. He was talking to the then-US ambassador on March 14, 2005.
The envoy informed Siddiqui that Tarique’s request to arrange meetings with senior US government officials was not accommodated for protocol and other reasons.
Siddiqui wholeheartedly agreed, adding: “Dynastic politics are not good for a nascent democracy.” He described PM Zia’s indulgence and protection of her “corrupt” son as her “biggest political failure.”
Poor human rights record
Before and after Tarique’s arrest, the military-backed caretaker government investigated corruption charges against him and remanded him in custody. His cohorts, like Harris Chowdhury and Giasuddin Al Mamun, were also grilled.
After being released from jail on parole on the condition that he would never engage in politics, Tarique went to London on September 11, 2008, and has since been running the party from abroad.
A US embassy cable said that with deep political ties that reach the highest court in the land, Tarique managed to manipulate the judicial process and overcome a concerted effort by the caretaker government to block his bail.
“Notorious for flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes in connection with government procurement actions and appointments to political office, Tarique is a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics in Bangladesh,” said former ambassador James F Moriarty.
The government also awarded impunity to the perpetrators involved in violence against Awami League supporters, Hindu and Ahmadiyya communities, women, journalists and the marginalized ethnic communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the plains, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Escalating levels of violence, including several waves of bombings, combined with a lack of appropriate action by the authorities pushed Bangladesh to the edge of a human rights crisis, Amnesty said. In February 2005, the government banned two militant groups – JMB and JMJB – for attacks on NGOs and non-Muslim communities.
In a report, the HRW said: “Political and security conditions deteriorated in Bangladesh in 2005. The country saw nearly daily bombings throughout the year”, including the simultaneous blasts in 63 districts, all of them targeted at government institutions, by the JMB.
The New York-based rights group said: “The country’s human rights record, already of pressing concern, worsened, as Bangladesh’s security forces continue to commit numerous abuses, including extra-judicial killings, excessive use of force, and custodial torture. Human rights defenders and journalists who report on the abuses continue to be harassed and intimidated.”
A ban on entry
In November 2008, US envoy James F Moriarty sought a security advisory opinion under Section 212(F) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Presidential Proclamation 7750, suspending the entry of Tarique Rahman into the US.
Blaming Tarique for dozens of specific allegations, the ambassador said Tarique’s “flagrant corruption” has also seriously threatened specific US Mission goals.
“Embassy Dhaka has three key priorities for Bangladesh: democratization, development, and denial of space to terrorists. Tarique’s audaciously corrupt activities jeopardize all three.
“His history of embezzlement, extortion, and interference in the judicial process undermines the rule of law and threatens to upend the US goal of a stable, democratic Bangladesh. The climate of corrupt business practices and bribe solicitation that Tarique fostered derailed US efforts to promote economic development by discouraging much-needed foreign investment and complicating the international operations of US companies.
“Finally, his flagrant disregard for the rule of law has provided potent ground for terrorists to gain a foothold in Bangladesh while also exacerbating poverty and weakening democratic institutions. In short, much of what is wrong in Bangladesh can be blamed on Tarique and his cronies.”
Moriarty suggested that applying a 212(F) finding to Tarique Rahman supports the US’ strong stand against corruption in Bangladesh. “Embassy recommends that Tarique Rahman be found subject to Presidential Proclamation 7750 for participating in public official corruption as defined by Section 1, Paragraph (c) of the Proclamation,” read the cable.
Election and cabinet
In mid-2005, the BNP, on the directives of Tarique, was “increasingly preoccupied with preparing for the election and, it seems, doing whatever it can get away with to win,” according to a cable sent to the State Department from Dhaka on June 20, 2005.
Tarique and his Hawa Bhaban office systematically monitored constituency politics and devised nationwide campaign strategies, a US official said in a cable dated December 4, 2006.
Earlier, he played a key role in forging the breakthrough alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami and conducting a nationwide survey before the 2001 parliamentary election. And, before the January 22 election of 2007, Tarique had convinced Jatiya Party’s Gen HM Ershad to join the BNP alliance in exchange for the president’s position, according to the US embassy officials.
Khaleda Zia hoped that her alliance would win 180-190 seats, compared to the 220 it held in the eighth parliament, as Gen Ershad had already promised to support her, she told the US ambassador to Dhaka, Patricia Butenis.
“[Khaleda] Zia insisted that, opposition assertions aside, her party has strong support from the Hindu community,” Butenis wrote to Washington on November 2, 2006. She said the BNP had submitted several names among the advisers named by the president.
After the 2001 polls, Tarique’s growing strength within the party — mainly among the new generation leaders — created tensions between the BNP’s old and new guard. Many leaders opposed seeing him as the party chief after Khaleda Zia, but were scared of expressing their views. His countrywide tour of 2004-05 instilled enthusiasm among the youths and helped him pick and back local winners who became part of his BNP clique.
“By selling state minister portfolios to a suddenly ballooning cabinet in 2002 onwards, Tarique produced a coterie of senior figures who owed him their positions while padding his already ample bank accounts,” said US Ambassador Patricia Butenis.
Osman Farruk, the education minister, revealed to an embassy official how Tarique benefited from the portfolio trading.
He said: “The current cabinet initially was to have only 29 members, but after Tarique and some of his colleagues heard about it, they realized there would be little or no room for new ministers. So, Tarique insisted upon an expanded cabinet, including state or junior ministers.”
Finally, the size of the Council of Ministers rose to 60 members, he told a US embassy official on April 23, 2006. It implies the sizeable sum of money Tarique and his close friends had amassed.
Mountains of cash
Another US embassy cable said Tarique accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit wealth. Multiple extortion cases pending against him were founded on the testimony of numerous prominent business owners whom he had victimized and exploited.
Tarique helped create and maintain bribery, embezzlement and a culture of corruption, while “his theft of millions of dollars in public money has undermined political stability in this moderate, Muslim-majority nation.”
According to former envoy James F Moriarty, Tarique’s corrupt activities were not limited to the extortion of local companies like Monem Construction, which paid a bribe worth $450,000 to Tarique to secure contracts.
A witness who funnelled bribes from Siemens to Tarique and his brother Arafat Rahman Koko, the Dark Prince received a bribe of approximately 2% on all Siemens deals in Bangladesh.
Harbin Company, a Chinese construction company, paid $750,000 to Tarique to open an 80MW plant in Tongi. One of Tarique’s cronies received the bribe and transported it to Singapore for deposit with Citibank, Moriarty said.
Former state minister for power Anwarul Kabir Chowdhury said he was against several energy deals with Harbin. He had to step down on October 3, 2006 after he uncovered significant corruption involving Tarique and then state minister for energy AKM Mosharraf Hossain, Chowdhury told a US embassy official the same week.
He said he had asked an intermediary to convey his allegations to the Prime Minister’s Office. “Unfortunately, the PM’s secretary, Khandaker Shahidul Islam, with whom the intermediary spoke, turned out to be part of the group backing Harbin.” He alerted Tarique Rahman to the allegations.
Chowdhury claimed Tarique Rahman then instigated the mob attacks on the power offices and facilities around Dhaka, protesting loadshedding to create a pretext for the prime minister to sack him.
The power plant was essentially useless, having tripped more than 75 times in one year since it was commissioned in October 2005.
To thwart the prosecution of a murder case against Shafiat Sobhan Sanvir, son of the Bashundura Group owner, Tarique accepted a Tk2.1 crore ($3.1 million) bribe. Tarique had solicited the payment, promising to clear Sanvir of all charges, Moriarty said, quoting ACC sources.
Tarique also succeeded in looting Tk2 crore ($300,000) from the Zia Orphanage Trust Fund account, of which he was a co-signer. He used the funds from the trust for a land purchase in his hometown Bogra and spent money on the 2006 election campaign, said the US envoy.
Symbol of violent politics
Terrorist attacks on political opponents using local and Pakistan-based militant groups, and torture and intimidation using the state machinery, including the army, marked the 2001-06 tenure of the BNP-led four-party alliance government.
In April 2006, veteran politician Col (Retd) Oli Ahmad said his grievances were more pointed and included a disdain for Tarique while talking to a US embassy official.
In mid-2006, Oli Ahmed publicly charged his party’s leadership with condoning rampant corruption in its ranks. A 1971 war hero and respected confidant of the BNP founder, Oli Ahmed, in meetings with the US and other Western diplomats, disparaged the BNP’s heir apparent as “arrogant and immature.”
A former lawmaker from Bogra, Golam Mohammad Siraj, criticized Tarique for “acting like royalty” and surrounding himself with “lickspittles”. “When Tarique came into politics we could not adjust,” Siraj said of the reformists while talking to a US embassy official in December 2008. “We were very uncomfortable.”
US envoy Patricia Butenis said in December 2006 that BNP members not in Tarique’s faction complained about him privately, sometimes citing his corruption and heavy-handed tactics.
“Some claim to be threatened and surveilled by intelligence services as a result of their anti-Tarique stance… It takes a party leader of Saifur Rahman’s stature as finance minister and a party founder to survive losing challenges to Tarique’s influence in party affairs,” she said in a cable on the country’s emerging leaders.
Before and after Tarique’s arrest in March 2007, the military-backed caretaker government investigated corruption charges against him and remanded him in custody. His cohorts, like Harris Chowdhury and Giasuddin Al Mamun, were also grilled.
After being released from jail on parole on condition that he would never engage in politics, Tarique went to London on September 11, 2008, and has since been running the party from abroad.
In 2005, Amnesty International said escalating levels of violence, including several waves of bombings, combined with a lack of appropriate action by the authorities had pushed Bangladesh to the edge of a human rights crisis.
In a report in 2006, HRW said: “Political and security conditions deteriorated in Bangladesh in 2005. The country saw nearly daily bombings throughout the year”, including the simultaneous blasts in 63 districts, all of them targeted at government institutions, by the JMB.
“Over the last few years, as religious intolerance across Bangladesh has increased, several hundred thousand Hindus, Buddhists and Christians have fled the country.”
The New York-based rights group said: “The country’s human rights record, already of pressing concern, worsened, as Bangladesh’s security forces continue to commit numerous abuses, including extra-judicial killings, excessive use of force, and custodial torture. Human rights defenders and journalists who report on the abuses continue to be harassed and intimidated.”
Patronization of militancy
In 2001, soon after the election, government supporters carried out violent attacks on Awami League activists and members of the Hindu community across Bangladesh.
A three-member judicial probe committee, led by former district judge and President Mohammed Shahabuddin, was formed in 2009. The committee found the involvement of several ministers of the BNP-Jamaat government among 26,352 people in more than 18,000 violent incidents.
Before the formation of RAB, the Khaleda-Tarique government launched “Operation Clean Heart”, a ruthless joint drive by troops from October 17, 2002 to January 9, 2003.
Amnesty said at least 40 men died, reportedly as a result of torture, after being detained by soldiers. Later, immunity from prosecution was granted to officials and army personnel associated with human rights violations in parliament.
In early 2004, with the help of intelligence agencies and government officials, Hawa Bhaban facilitated the import of a ship loaded with arms for the Indian separatist group ULFA through Chittagong. Major General Gaganjit Singh, the retired deputy director general of India’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), recently told India Today that then-Commander-in-Chief of Ulfa Paresh Barua was the mastermind of the whole plot.
“But he was operating in close coordination with DGFI and some NSI officials who had close links with Tareque Rahman (current acting chairman of BNP) and his cronies in what was then referred to as Hawa Bhaban (political office of BNP),” he said. The arms were being supplied by taking advantage of the BNP-Jamaat alliance to use Bangladesh as a sanctuary.
On January 25, 2005, then-US ambassador in Dhaka Harry K Thomas wrote to Washington that the government’s “inability or unwillingness to solve such incidents [committed in 2004] fuels speculation that the perpetrators, Islamist or otherwise, enjoy political protection”.
On February 7 of the same year, Thomas met Khaleda Zia. In a cable regarding the meeting, the ambassador wrote: “We have serious concerns given our experience after the August 21 attack, when the BDG denied ATF consultants access to key witnesses and failed to protect the crime scene from severe contamination.”
Due to Washington’s bitter experience in the past in dealing with the August 21 incident, Thomas wanted to make sure that the involvement of US law enforcement consultants in the SMAS Kibria murder probe would be meaningful. Scotland Yard, too, had a bitter experience with the investigations of the August 21 attack in Dhaka and the May 21 attack on UK High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury in Sylhet in 2004, said Thomas.
On June 13, 2005, Sheikh Hasina, at a press conference, alleged that four people offloaded a consignment of arms from a tinted jeep at Tarique’s in-laws’ residence at Dhanmondi the night before the grenade attack.
On December 15, 2005, PMO Principal Secretary Kamal Uddin exposed Tarique’s connection with the militant groups Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) while talking to the US ambassador.
He said the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) had been forced to release Khamaru, a key associate of Bangla Bhai, after a phone call from Tarique Rahman, who was acting at the behest of his close aide, State Minister for Land Ruhul Quddus Talukder Dulu.
Four days later, Babar told a US embassy official that at one time, when Bangla Bhai was popular in the Rajshahi division for his vigilante action against local criminals, several government ministers supported him. Asked if those ministers were being held accountable, he sighed: “This is a difficult question you are asking me.”
Another telegram cited Inspector General of Police Noor Mohammad telling the media in April 2007 that the government would name terrorist patrons — Dulu, former telecommunications minister Aminul Haque and former lawmaker Nadim Mustafa — for their support and financial backing of the JMB.
According to another cable, Aminul had recruited Bangla Bhai in 2004 to conduct his armed operation against the BNP’s political opponents — Awami League and ultra-leftists in Rajshahi and Natore areas.