Michael Rubin
Violent protesters in Bangladesh on Aug. 5 forced the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, the country’s longtime prime minister, Awami League politician, and daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father. After Sheikh Hasina fled for her life (she never technically resigned), the protesters appointed Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus to act as Bangladesh’s interim administrator.
While the protesters described their actions as organic, foreign interests and political parties that enjoy external support appear to have co-opted, if not crafted, the protests that snowballed across the country.
At issue is Jamaat-e-Islami, a hard-line Islamist group intricately tied to terrorism. The roots of Jamaat-e-Islami date to 1941. The Muslim Brotherhood inspired its founder, Syed Abul Ala Maududi, to reject both the West and liberal democracy in favor of a far more conservative Islamist approach.
Just as the Muslim Brotherhood spawned terrorist groups such as Hamas, Gama’a Islamiyya (which killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat), and al Qaeda, Jamaat-e-Islami also spun off terrorist groups across South Asia such as Jaysh-i-Muhammad, Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.
Within Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami was particularly brutal. It was intimately involved in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide that killed up to 3 million. For this reason, many Bangladeshis consider Jamaat-e-Islami members to be war criminals. Indeed, Jamaat-e-Islami became just the second political party after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party to face an international tribunal for its crimes. Nevertheless, Jamaat-e-Islami still receives active support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the same group that helped hide al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and sponsored the Taliban insurgency.
Since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, figurehead leader Yunus has been on the warpath, imprisoning more than 1,000 journalists, including Farzana Rupa and Shakil Ahmed, to ensure he can operate absent accountability. Whether due to his own rivalry with Sheikh Hasina or ideology, he has unleashed Jamaat-e-Islami terrorism across Bangladesh and sprung local al Qaeda affiliates from prison. Minorities are terrified. Yunus and Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami now conspire to outlaw the Awami League. True, Sheikh Hasina strayed toward the autocratic in recent years, but outlawing the strongest and most popular secular party in the country shows disdain for democracy.
Too often, American policymakers and diplomats understand terrorism through the lens of grievance. They assume occupation, poverty, or a lack of education motivates terrorism. This can be comforting to diplomats because it means diplomats can assemble a magic formula of incentives to resolve problems. What Jamaat-e-Islami represents, however, is the rise of ideologically driven terrorism. Jamaat-e-Islami activists support the 2008 Mumbai bombers, the murder of minorities, and al Qaeda offshoots because the extremist group’s ideology demands it.
The United States, the Western world, and South Asia must calibrate their diplomacy and policy to reality rather than wishful thinking. Jamaat-e-Islami may hide its true self in the effeteness of the 84-year-old Yunus, but the reality of its vision has much more to do with the Taliban, cave-dwelling al Qaeda terrorists, and the Islamic State.
To judge Jamaat-e-Islami by both its friends and its actions is to come to a singular conclusion: In both Pakistan and Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami is a terrorist organization. The State Department should designate it as a foreign terrorist organization. The secretary of the treasury should also designate the group’s assets and property under Executive Order 13224, which President George W. Bush signed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Terrorism left to fester snowballs. In Bangladesh, it has found fertile ground. Rather than normalize a group guilty of genocide and empowering al Qaeda, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should reverse the neglect and ideological naivete of President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and designate Jamaat-e-Islami for what it is: a terrorist group as deadly and ideologically driven as Hamas or al Qaeda.
Michael Rubin
Senior Fellow