Shahbagan: Garden of Hate and Fear

For the last week or so, the spectacle at Shahbag has continued to drive and distract political attentions in Bangladesh. This gathering calls for the execution of people it designates 1971 war criminals and the banning of religion based political parties, namely Jamat e Islami. Meanwhile the government has been busy passing legislation to allow itself the facility to hang people that its courts decide not to.

Without being a member of the party, standing for fair trials for the accused and non-secular political rights should be a no-brainer position. However, it requires a lot of people to argue uphill against their received wisdom and against a secular liberal establishment that has raised a blinded generation over some years. It doesn't help that Jamaat's own leaders have failed to address these issues directly, introspectively and convincingly enough.

Sentiment built over decades.

Into the mouths of babes:
"They are war criminals. We want them hanged."

The Shahbag demo is the descendant of a collective that rose to prominence in March of 1992 by holding mock trials of its designated war criminals. The demands and narrative of this Nirmul Committee match Shahbag, which builds on its emotional, organisational and (mis)informational foundations. The younger generation will have had less contact with people lived through enough of our political history to know history started well before 1971.

There has been a disappointing but predictable cover-up of the negative nature of the protest, a cover-up which shows not just me, but a wider audience how superficial so many of Bangalee Nationalists are with their oft-advertised liberal values.  From the naff novelist daughter of the Dhaka press baron, to the BRAC PR man, who used to run a human rights blog, and the trendy lefty anthropologist.  It's just quite sad.

Playground politics learnt from an earlier generation.
Nothing new here.

The twitter behaviour has been interesting to participate in. The intolerance of the proShahbag twitterati really is something of a liability to the liberal's projection of a new political horizon.  Detractors are put onto hit-lists and functionaries ordered to report them as spam (see left).

Such silencing of dissent is not confined to social media, but extends to print media, with Jamaat's newspaper Naya Diganta's building burnt by the ruling party student thugs. These are messy, dirty and greasy times. Mess has taken on new forms, for example, one of the things that Shahbag has prompted is a wider spread adoption of twitter amongst the different political camps in Bangladesh.

Shibir, Jamaat's student front, are not responding to violence against them in an angelic or cheek turning fashion. Accusations abound regarding their violence, from the usual quarters and usually without too much context. It appears that they have not, as yet, decided to go ape shit. It is difficult to know whether they have a creative way out of this. What would I do if I were them? Either way looks deadly and oppressive. Desh watchers have their work cut out for them establishing the truth of the violence these days.

Starting to unwind
Yesterday was Friday, the day of Jumma prayers. In the coastal areas of Cox's Bazaar, police fired on a post Jumma procession of Jamaat activists, killing between 4 and 7 individuals including a child and a random female bystander. Later at night, a young pro-Shahbag blogger was murdered in a grisly fashion in Dhaka.

All loss of life is to be mourned, and as we know, some loss of life is mourned and politically mobilised more powerfully than others. Late Rajib Haidar's death has unjustly and prematurely been attributed to Jamaat by co-protesters and now it seems the Prime Minster.  It looks set to fuel a new level of paranoia, fear and venom. Today many protesters were scratching their heads over the role of the janaza as funeral rites for someone who apparently didn't self identify with the faith any longer.

Watching the Shahbag nonsense engine deploy its master narrative on the loss of their comrade demonstrates just how a falsity, unchecked and unproven can be generated and spread in very little time. Within minutes of news being broken, the link was made to the Jamat and by morning it was well embedded into common sense.

Alternarratives
You might be interested to know who isn't joining on the bandwagon. An Indian writer mused on the similar sadisms of Indians and Bangladeshis.

...no matter how much we claim ourselves as democracies, at the end of the day we are nothing but a poor people who vent their frustration through sadistic instincts

At the start of the week it looked as in the Bangladeshi Nationalists (BNP) had started to wake up and recognise their irrelevance to an important public issue. The Weekly Holiday featured some less emotional thinking, and the ever challenging MBI Munshi cast a penetrating gaze on Shahbag's imagery, rhetoric and context. In the near future, Mahmudur Rahman's Amar Desh will continue to be one of the few major papers with the balls to face down our politics of hate and the sold-out nature of the main opposition BNP.

The BNP party seems to have left one of its senior member out to dry, Salahuddin Quader Choudhury was Parliamentary Special Adviser during the last BNP-Jamaat alliance government. Not particularly known for their balls-of-steel these days, they might sort their lives out nearer to the elections, but I am not holding my breath. They feed of the same master narrative as the Awami League, but with more militaristic, centre right, General Zia focussed trimmings.

What's a Razakar?
In the context of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the razakars were a paramilitary force raised to counter the Mukti Bahini.  In the context of Shahbag, a razakar, sometimes spelt with a 'j', denotes a person to be eliminated. It is a form of takfir, exclusion and casting out, applied selectively to political enemies of the regime in power.

Not only is this a historical lobotomy of the complex truths of how people tried to protect an established state from disintegration, but it is mighty convenient who isn't labelled a razakar and who overcompensates to distract attention.  HINT: There is a Minister in the Bangladesh Government, the ministry of Law to be precise, who is acting funny. More on him later.

These past days have taught me how little our people have moved on from 1971 thinking. Narrow racial thinking, autotakfir, very bad leadership, and the inability to see anyone else's pain or story.

What now?

• Keep in dialogue with friends and relations in desh.
• Do not feed this monster.
• Encourage press to pay attention to seculib head spinners and less articulate islamists.
• Duas for a Sakina (Tranquility) storm to enter the hearts of the restless.

The Case of Talha Ahsan: What is going on and what can I do?

Imagine that your child, sibling, relative or friend is taken from you and detained for years without trial.  They are accused of 'terrorism-related' crimes by a superpower waging war on its enemies.  Would you turn away from them or take notice?

Justice, dignity, humanity and mercy are crucial principles in our lives, which is why we must know what we can and do what we can for Talha Ahsan. 

Talha  is a 31 year old poet from Tooting who has been imprisoned for coming onto 6 years, without evidence or trial, pending extradition to the USA. Born and bred in London, Talha comes from a Muslim Bangladeshi background and is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.  A shy bookish young man, with a first class honours degree in Arabic from SOAS, he continues to write poetry from prison. At the time of his arrest in July 2006 he was due to be interviewed for a job as a librarian, we are poorer without him.

The USA government requested his extradition from the UK under dubious 'terrorism' related charges and the compliant British authorities did not even scrutinise the evidence against him properly.  Talha, his family and supporters are campaigning for a fair UK trial, which we believe is not possible in the USA.  Achieving justice whilst Muslim is hard, and we must exercise courage, skill and unity of purpose to get it. It is not a ready-made meal.

We must act immediately to build momentum in our communities. From July, as the Olympics capture public attention, Talha may be extradited to the rapturous applause of much of the media, who will drown out the injustice with dehumanising images of men with beards, hooks for hands and loathsome angry preachers.  We know that the story is different, but we need to share this story amongst our families, friends and neighbours and do it justice. 

Muslims in the UK are blessed with many favours but also endangered. Like the Irish throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland, we are proving easy to accuse, lock up and ignore. We request your support for Talha and others in similar situations help us establish a justice-making, supportive community of principles. There is no shortage of things to do.

• Become informed, organised and mobilised about the issues
• Attend the Public Meeting in Central London on 23^rd May*
• Speak to our close ones about and promote the Free Talha campaign
• Remember Talha in our prayers
• Champion the cause in our organisations
• Write to Talha (who can still receive correspondence so long as he is on these shores)
• Write to the media
• Write to your MP, make it relevant to them, it is surprising how little they know.

To learn more about the case visit www.freetalha.org

 

You can also get involved through social media: find the FreeTalha Ahsan page on Facebook, follow the @freetalha Twitter account and tweet #freetalha

*The Public Meeting will feature Salma Yaqoob, Gareth Pierce, Riz Ahmed and Bruce Kent and take place from 6pm - 8pm at Hend House, 233 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8EE. Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road  http://www.facebook.com/events/283339501756605/

Quilliam Responds to ‘Attempted Coup’ card played by Government of Bangladesh 19 January 2012 because that is todays date

Quilliam Responds to ‘Attempted Coup’ card played by Government of Bangladesh
 19 January 2012

We would like to expresses our excitement to hear the Awami League government is alleging that it has foiled a military coup in Bangladesh. This is not a ruse to deflect attention from them banging up Islamists left, right and centre. It means we can jump up and down and pretend that we know what is going on. The coup is said to have occurred on 22 December 2011, but has only been announced today by the Bangladeshi authorities. We do not find anything dubious in the previous sentence. BDNews 24, a Bangladeshi website is quoted as saying that on 22nd December 2011, Major Li-Miffed, an alleged Hizb ut-Tahrir leaflet holder, farted in the general direction of the gloriously liberated Bangladesh government. In company I tell you.

Some Army fellow that we met at a terrorisation and intimidation conference has confirmed to Quilliam that they have very strong suspicions that the coup is the work of Hizb ut-Tahrir.  This is because secular power in Bangladesh can’t tell its arse from its elbows. Quilliam knows, because we used to be members, that Hizb ut-Tahrir printed a few leaflets and talked to some army people in Bangladesh. We don’t know anything about the constellation of Islamic valued movements and shakements in Bangladesh. This is a game of language and power. Who promotes the use of military coups to gain power? [ Oh that was you the British government in Jan 2007]

[insert incomprehensible anonymous quote to mimic empirical insight]

"(change would) normally be...by the Party seeking to access the military in order to take the authority...After this the military would be capable of establishing the authority of Islām [did you see what I did to that a ?. smugface]. Hence a coup d'etat would be the manifestation of a political change...”

The anonymous source goes on to say that that Hizb ut-Tahrir has been actively targeting Bangladesh since the mutiny of the Bangladesh Rifle unit in 2009, when over 70 military personnel and civilians were killed. See we don’t know anything about Bangladesh, it was called the Bangladesh Rifles and there has been no independent investigation of this. Impossible with a pro-India regime.

This attempted military coup follows the 2011 Pakistani military coup attempt that wasn’t really an attempt, more of a dinner party. This charade was pinned on Brigadier Ailing Khandahar and four other senior military officers, all of whom were announced by the Armed Forces spokesperson as having ties to Hizb ut-Tahrir because they were handed a leaflet after juma prayers and thought the political parties were rubbish..

The porous border between Bangladesh and India is one that is being monopolised by extremist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, to recruit Islamist fighters to carry out attacks similar to those in Mumbai in 2008. I who am writing this, am a shameless bastard, because I know that Bangladeshis are routinely killed, beaten and bribed at the border. Maybe I should have passed this over to ‘Ed’ Hussain, but he’s in the US and is passing himself off as Assamese, if not white, cant remember.

Raam Pant Nob-Jawqi, our Native Informant Paki said

‘I have visited Bangladesh several times to chat my usual shit, self publicise and serve white power. I am therefore extremely proud to hear that the government is using my former group in its eyewash’.

This political charade follows the British Government’s reduction in Dhaka-based counter development tourism. We were planning to link up with those bad boys in CRAP and Gram Mean  to hijack local ideas like we did in Pakistan with that khudi propaganda.

We would like to finger some cash off the government, to spy on Muslims and annoy them please. East London here we come.

Norman Terawala, who is older than me said this highly general wishy-washy statement because you probably care about the oil and domination in the Middle East, and we all think we’re Arabs. Did I tell you the one about my ancestor...

‘This attempted coup is contrary to recent democratization trends witnessed in the Arab Uprisings, and Hizb ut-Tahrir appears to be ignoring the new realities in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia and other Arab Muslim majority countries. As such, Hizb ut-Tahrir and its narrative are no longer relevant to the masses of youth striving for a third way [ HT Tony and late Mu’ammar] between extremism and dictatorships [ Zzzzz, are we done yet?]’.

Bangladesh's own self serving Terrorism traders

Let us join together and laugh at the idiotic national security developmentia that is the Bangladesh Enterprise Insitute's 'The State of Terrorism Report' . It looks like the Danish Embassy plunged three years of money into creating to bullshit tool that people in the terrorism industry can bandy about with 'authority' for a while. To its credit it giver the resistive reader some idea of the lengths the government has gone to territorialise the security agenda and suckle on the teats of Empire.

Firstly, will somebody in desh corner Farooq Sobhan and those involved in the report, and slap them around a bit with a great big wet fish.

The sources are characteristically poor. Shahriar Kabir crops up quite a bit, and its publically quite well known that he's a RAW agent, also featuring are Developmentshire, shady (in)security think tanks, gratituous self reference, the Daily Star and the Indian media.

It looks like your usual Blame madrassas! Its poverty! All hail our secularity! nonsense making that is the charactersitic arsehole footprint of unfortunate Bangladesh's fortunately declining policy gatekeepers.  The report's crowning incredulity is the framing of Hizbut Tahrir as a terrorist organisation. A meme that has been carried in local developmentia's English-language mouthpiece The Daily Star.

I think it shows the depth of ideological insecurity amongst certain quarters to make a move like that. They see their sons and daughters, allegedly educated people, attracted to an Islam-sprung ideology and can't for the life of them understand what is going on outside their bubbles. Whatever the confusion, it is despicable that they should exploit the terrorism slur in these WarOnTerrorTimes, when HT have no record on this.

The everyday insecurity of the ordinary Bangladeshi people comes from the violence of everyday life, criminality, extortion and the banditry of the major political parties. Public interest research and intervention would target that, not The Empire's chief distraction tactic, carrot and stick.

Stabbing for Justice in Iraq

I do honestly wonder when it was that Anwar al Awlaki transformed from public islamic scholar into 'preacher of hate' and 'AQs spiritual leader in yemen'. Following the train of whiteous indignation doesn't really help. I want to know what flipped his switch or is this a category error. You see he is not in my cross hairs, my hairs do not meet in a cross. Yet I am cross.

One cannot take imperial labelling at face value, either. I pity the jury that has to made head or tail of these matters. Their every judgement will probably be unjust and wrong. I think some of the answers to these questions will be found in the heads of white people interpreting 4 lions and in the closed environments of jury deliberations of certain criminal cases.

Which is why the case of the Stephen Timms MP stabber is interesting. As well as being a sad and pathetic waste of talent, it defies the gender/discipline/race characterisation of the 'al kaida inspired'. That is assuming that listening to al awlaki on youtube is 'self radicalising'.

Where does her responsibility start and end? Anwar al awlaki is held responsibly for this specific act as a youtube video was viewed.

Roshanara C is going to spend a lot of time in jail. British MPs who aided and abetted the destruction of iraq will spend no jail time. They are shielded from accountability and justice by moronic force fields that I cant quite fathom.

Arguments, if you could call them arguments, of 'We didnt know it would end up like this' bleed into arguments of 'Saddam was worse' and 'How is this helping iraq?'

Meanwhile, theres an interesting Turkish film out in a couple of days.