Charlotte Jacquemart
The transitional government under Muhammad Yunus puts unwanted journalists in prison – with fabricated murder charges.
Getting into the country is easier than ever. The border police officer at Hazrat Shahjalal Airport in Dhaka waves you through. They are happy to have foreign tourists, as they have hardly been coming since the coup in the summer. Several embassies warn against traveling to the country between India and Myanmar.
Bangladesh is actually a welcoming country. Green, lush, with people who like to laugh and chat. But if you walk through the streets of the capital Dhaka, you will mostly see gloomy faces; women have become rarer. And mostly veiled.
Riots are becoming more frequent. Protests break out almost daily, bringing the city to a standstill. Bearded men run around with sticks, hitting others. people call it the mob.
Islamist groups exploit coup in Bangladesh
At the beginning of August, there was a coup in Bangladesh in which almost 100 people were killed. The government president of the Awami League, Sheik Hasina, was chased out of the country. Under the secular Awami League, radical Islamic parties and groups were banned and in some cases even persecuted. On the surface, the coup was presented as a “student revolution”: the students were protesting against the privileges of war veterans.
However, Islamist groups seized the opportunity – together with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus – and seized power. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his microcredit concept. An unelected interim government under Yunus has been in power in Dhaka for around five months now, and parliament has been dissolved. Islamist parties are allowed to operate again. “Advisers”, mostly young men, are in control of the levers of power. Their aim is to ban the Awami League and abolish the secular constitution of 1971.
The change of government has hit secular and liberal intellectuals the hardest. Not only members of the Awami League are being persecuted, arrested, charged and their accounts frozen, but also journalists who are close to the ideology of the former ruling party.
Colleagues who dare to speak openly about it have become rare. But you can find them: For example, Mustak*, whose award-winning journalism career ended overnight after 35 years when Yunus took office. The meeting with him takes place in the embassy district of Gulshan, where there are fewer protests. Mustak stares at a list of names that he has brought with him. “More than 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs since Yunus took office in August,” he says.
Journalists are arrested by Yunus government
Hundreds have been accused of murder and genocide, and several have been arrested. They are blamed for the deaths in the coup. “186 have lost access to the ministries – which is tantamount to a professional ban,” continues the journalist, who before the Yunus era appeared weekly on talk shows and taught at universities on the side.
Mustak himself is facing three murder charges. Like many others, he is hiding to avoid arrest. “I am no longer acceptable because I am too liberal. And because I have always held the view that politics should not be based on religion,” he says. Now his job and income are gone. Mustak says: “Many senior positions in the media are now in the hands of conservative journalists or those who are close to the Islamic Jamaal party.” Mustak sees no future for himself in the country: “My wife is looking for further training abroad. We have to leave.”
Farzana Rupa and Shakil Ahmed also wanted to leave with their underage daughter. They had been doing so since the end of August, when they received more and more death threats. Rupa is also an internationally renowned journalist who has received multiple awards. Although the family had valid visas for France, they were arrested at the airport. Since then, the parents have been held in the notorious Kashimpur prison on the outskirts of Dhaka, with limited access to lawyers and no contact with their family.
Their relatives have to go into hiding regularly because they are also threatened. Now the group of five is sitting around the kitchen table in one of the hiding places, the murder charges on the table. “Rupa and Shakil are accused of several murders that they have nothing to do with. They are locked up because they are journalists,” the relatives say with tears in their eyes.
Yunus himself admits escalation
“At the beginning we were allowed to speak to them on the phone once a week for 10 minutes. But we haven’t heard anything for weeks.” The relatives translate the accusations, which are written in Bangla. And they come to the conclusion: There is no evidence that the journalists committed murder. But there is plenty of evidence that they were in their office at the time of the deaths.
What the relatives learn from lawyers: “Rupa is worse off than Shakil. She is either isolated in solitary confinement on death row or in a room with 30 women, has to sleep on the stone floor, without warm clothes. She is humiliated, punished, even for harmless gestures or a smile.” Rupa suffers from severe arthritis. She has already lost a quarter of her body weight, does not get enough to eat. And no medical care.
International journalist organizations have been demanding for months that Nobel Peace Prize winner Yunus release all journalists and drop the charges. But nothing has happened, even though Yunus himself admitted in an interview with the Daily Star newspaper that the situation with the journalists had gotten out of hand.
Journalist Farzana Rupa as an example
“Rupa is the perfect target for the Yunus regime,” says the internationally and nationally award-winning investigative journalist Julfikar Ali Manik. He wants to be quoted using his real name. “Perhaps I can encourage others,” he says. Manik has been in hiding for weeks, his phone is switched off so that he cannot be tracked. He comes to the meeting in Gulshan wearing a hoodie. “Rupa is an open, worldly woman, fearless, has always fought for the rights of women and girls, against violence against women, and stands up for minorities,” he says. Yunus could make an example of Rupa, who likes to wear jeans and sneakers.
Manik is a specialist in Islamic fundamentalism and has published at home and abroad, including in the New York Times. He has been warning about Islamists in the country for years. This also makes him a target of the Yunus government. He looks around briefly and says quietly: “The Islamists have deceived the population. They have abused the fight against the privileges of war veterans to carry out a long-planned coup. Now they are in control of the most important levers of power.”
And they are cleaning up the country, says Manik. “It’s a witch hunt, everything that thinks secularly and liberally must go.” The charges of murder and genocide are all fabricated, says Manik. “The students who died in the coup were shot by the police and radicalized Islamists who had mixed in with the students.” Yunus has promised the police immunity from prosecution. Journalists and activists are the scapegoats for this, says Manik.
Does Yunus benefit from Islamists?
But why is an 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner making common cause with Islamists? The answer is given by the head of a press NGO, whose name cannot be mentioned, on the other side of Dhaka. “Because Yunus personally benefits from it: His first official act was to replace many judges. They overturned all past rulings against him. Yunus also no longer has to pay a large fine for tax evasion.”
And he continued: “For the Islamists, however, he is the perfect figurehead. The West does not question him as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, they look the other way,” says the activist. Yunus will want to stay in power as long as possible and delay elections. “He is where he always wanted to be: at the head of the nation.” In fact, the Nobel Peace Prize winner has never made a secret of his political ambitions.
The last visit is to the “Daily Star”, the largest English-language daily newspaper in Bangladesh. In the cafeteria, several colleagues are immediately seated at the table. The younger ones have just one question: whether there are jobs for them in Europe. “We are ducking down at the moment, not saying anything on social media. But in the long run, that’s not a life,” says one. A journalist pulls out her phone and shows a video in which she is attacked by a mob in the street while filming protests. The phone is knocked out of her hand, stones fly. “This has become my everyday life,” she says.
The editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, Mafuz Anam, is one of the few who still dares to call for the protection of press freedom, which is guaranteed by the country’s constitution, in his columns. But Anam does not want to speak publicly.
Understandable: In front of the editorial office, demonstrators are demanding that the editor-in-chief be hanged. On the same day, Islamists slaughtered a cow in front of the offices of the Bengali sister newspaper “Prothom Alo”. They are demanding that both newspapers be closed.
Leaving Dhaka is as easy as entering the country. The tourist does not have to queue like hundreds of others, but is allowed to go straight to passport control. People smile and hope that she will come back soon. She doesn’t know.
Original text published in Sonntagszeitung. link
Charlotte Jacquemart, Journalist, author
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