Critics of Bangladesh government likely to fade

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August 19, 2021

BABA KOBE ashbe? (When will dad come?), Asks Sajedul Islam Sumon’s youngest daughter. No one has an answer, but she keeps asking anyway. Her family’s life and hers revolve around her absence. Now eight years old, she was only one year old when security forces arrived in their suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and picked up her father, a local leader of an opposition party. , in the back of a van. It was the last time he was seen or heard.

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Mr Sumons’ story, in a new report on enforced disappearances in Bangladesh, is a chilling example of what can happen to those who oppose or criticize the government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Under his 12-year tenure, at least 600 Bangladeshis are said to have disappeared.

Many eventually reappeared. Some have been found and implausibly produced in court such as Shafiqul Islam Kajol, a photojournalist who, 53 days after his disappearance in March of last year, found himself blindfolded, with his legs and arms bound, in a no mans land between Bangladesh and India. Police took him into custody on a trespassing charge over his original crime of posting a sex scandal on Facebook involving a ruling party politician. Others, like Aminul Islam, returned in body bags. He was a trade union activist whose tortured remains were found abandoned on the outskirts of Dhaka, days after his kidnapping in 2012. Eighty-six victims, including Mr. Sumon, are still missing.

While those numbers may seem low in a country of 170 million people, the fear of being goom (missing) muzzles millions of voices. Disappearances, along with a host of other human rights abuses, are not new in Bangladesh. Under previous governments, including those led by the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party and the ruling Awami League, dissidents have disappeared and been killed. But since 2009, when Sheikh Hasina took office for the second time, state-sponsored kidnappings have become a systematic tool of oppression, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, the advocacy group behind the report.

Bangladesh is not the only South Asian state to secretly kidnap its citizens. Yet, Ms. Ganguly says, such actions elsewhere are usually linked to civil unrest or insurgencies. Only Bangladesh is so blatantly targeting political opponents and critics for secret detentions. Disappearances increased the most as the election approached, with more than 130 before the 2014 vote and 98 in the year before the 2018 election.

Despite such shamelessness, ruling party politicians deny or downplay the kidnappings. In 2017, Sheikh Hasina claimed enforced disappearances in Bangladesh were paltry compared to Britain, falsely citing data on missing persons. Her son, Sajeeb Wazed, recently wrote an article for the Diplomat, an online news site, calling the disappearances comical. Many of the missing were fugitives who, he joked, had gone into hiding to escape arrest.

Such mocking attitudes infiltrate the state apparatus. When Marufa Islam Ruma asked for answers about her missing husband, Mofizul Islam Rashed, security forces officers scoffed at the fact that he had likely fled with another woman. Years after Mr. Sumons disappeared, a senior officer came to his family’s home and theatrically circled the house shouting Where’s Sumon? Let him out, I have to talk to him !, remembers his niece.

Families interviewed for the report cited the Rapid Action Battalion, an elite police squad, as being behind the kidnappings. But other security units are also guilty, according to various rights groups. And they all operate with impunity.

Some families give up or don’t try in the first place, says Afroja Islam Akhi, Mr Sumons’ sister, who runs Mayer Dak, an organization for the families of missing Bangladeshis. They know their questions can have punitive repercussions rather than helpful answers. She estimates that the number of missing is much higher than the 600 known. Only God knows the exact count.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “They Just Disappeared”

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