In the past five days, four members of the illegal Islamist terrorist organisation Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) have been arrestedin Chapainawabganj in northwest Bangladesh. The men were all found to be possessing arms and ammunition and, during the raids, police also seized jihadi literature and equipment used to manufacture ammunition. Acting on a tip-off, a special team of police were dispatched from Dhaka to oversee the arrests. Superintendent of Dhaka police's intelligence wing, Zannatul Hasan, said that all four men had confessed to being part of the militant JMB during interrogation.
Police believe that this represents a new chapter in Bangladesh's fight against extremism; having been pushed out of Bangladesh's urban areas, the JMB is now regrouping in the rural localities from which the majority of its membership originated. The JMB was established in 1998 as an avowedly Islamist organisation, with its stated objective being to transform Bangladesh into an Islamic state. Following a number of high profile bombings, including an attempt in 2005 to assassinate a judge, the organisation was banned by the government of Bangladesh.
Despite the hanging of key members of its leadership in 2006, and the arrest of its munitions expert "Boma Mizan" in May, JMB continues to recruit new members from its base in the rural Northwest.
BDR still not secure four months after mutiny
Four months after the BDR mutiny, officers are still spending their nights outside their barracks in 14 out of 54 Bangladesh's Rifles battalions stationed outside Dhaka, it was revealedon Thursday. Col Md Jahangir Kabir, BDR director (operations), told reporters that officers remain at their posts between the hours of 6am and 6pm, before retiring to local rest houses operated by the district administration. Kabir went on to emphasise that, even during the uprising, the border was always protected because the revolt did not spread to the border posts.
The BDR mutiny, which took place between 25 and 26 February this year, claimed the lives of 55 officers including the border force's Director General and led to military units being deployed on the streets of Dhaka. Although the revolt originated in the paramilitary group's headquarters, it spread to other BDR units across the nation, sparking fears of a general rebellion. The probe report into the mutiny has yet to be released and search operations for mutineers and their collaborators are still taking place.
On Thursday, former BNP MP Nasir Uddin Ahmed Pintu was detained on remand for giving "inconsistent" testimony during interrogation regarding the uprising. He was first arrested on 2 June for aiding the escape of BDR mutineers from their Peelkhana headquarters in the mutiny's immediate aftermath. On Thursday his legal team's appeals for bail were quashed by the presiding judge, with a CID officer testifying that during his later rounds of questioning, having at first denied all knowledge of the affair, he was able to give the names and addresses of other collaborators.
Although there is speculation regarding other actors causing the mutiny for their own gain, a principal grievance given by the mutineers related to different stands in pay and treatment compared with the conventional armed forces, and also that their officer corps was staffed entirely by army personnel. The former issue is connected with the fact that BDR troops are never deployed for UN peacekeeping duties, which are a highly lucrative source of income for the army. Participation in these missions was a key demand issued by the rebelling troops.
On Thursday, a damning insight into the conditions faced by BDR troops was provided in another statement by Col Md Jahangir Kabir. Revealing that "about 10 deaths a month occur" within the force, Col Kabir stated that "death and birth are normal things in life."
Indigenous Community laid waste in arson attack
Last Friday, armed men evictedat least 74 families, including 56 belonging to the Santal Indigenous Community, from their homes in Khatirpur, Naogaon in northwest Bangladesh. In what appears to be a simple case of land grabbing. Between Friday night and Saturday morning, around 200 armed men surrounded the village, physically assaulted the indigenous people there, before ransacking their homes and burning them to the ground, having already looted their possessions.
The man leading the armed mob, when caught looting iron corrugated sheeting by NGO activists who arrived on Saturday morning to investigate, was unrepentant. Nur Hossain, of Chhaor, said that he had bought the six acres of land from their owners in 1976, but that he had not been able to take possession. Saying that the legal process for eviction was too lengthy, he had used armed force instead. Karamat Uddin, a lawyer working on behalf of local indigenous communities, denied this, saying that the legal documents supporting Nur's claim to the land had been declared invalid by the government in May 2007 and that the case was still ongoing in the Naogaon court.
Events such as this are typical in the lives of Bangladesh's indigenous people, known as the adivasi. Among the most marginalised groups in the country, the 45 recognised ethnic groups often do not have legal documents to prove their ownership of their land because of their cultural practise of collective land ownership. Because of their poor access to education and the discrimination they face at the hands of the wider Bengali community, this makes them extremely vulnerable to land grabbing by vested interest groups.
Reports from victims of the incident say that it occurred with the full knowledge and tacit backing of the local police authorities. Although Naogaon Deputy Commissioner Ahsan Habib Talukhdar and Superintendent of Police Mofazzel Hossain have announced the formation of a probe committee to look into the incident, Jatiyo Adivasi Parishad, a prominent regional Indigenous Peoples network, has called for it to be scrapped, noting that Nur Hossain himself is one of its members.