[sacw] Bangladesh: Bin Laden's Next Target?

[Harsh Kapoor]

FYI
South Asia Citizens Web
================================

From: Washington Post
Friday, February 19, 1999; Page A17

Bangladesh: Bin Laden's Next Target?
Militant Seen Aiding New Islamic Force
By Kenneth J. Cooper

DHAKA, Bangladesh -- Reputed terrorist Osama bin Laden has financed at
least one Muslim militant group that aims to transplant to Bangladesh the
extreme brand of Islam that the Taliban militia has enforced in most of
Afghanistan, security officials here say.

Afghanistan's close neighbors -- Iran, the former Soviet republics of
Central Asia, India, Pakistan and China -- have been worried that the
Taliban would try to export militant Islam to their countries. But the
leap across the Indian subcontinent from arid Afghanistan to lush, humid
Bangladesh with the help of bin Laden, the Afghan-based Saudi exile
suspected of masterminding last year's U.S. Embassy bombings in East
Africa, caught officials in this distant capital by surprise.

Security officials said they were unfamiliar with the Bangladeshi group
that bin Laden has financed, Harkat-ul-Jihad, until last month, when three
of its members unsuccessfully tried to kill one of Bangladesh's leading
poets with an ax. Two attackers were arrested Jan. 18 at the poet's home
in Dhaka, and police later detained 16 additional suspects in a crackdown
in the capital, a suburb and the southern port city of Chittagong. The
group's two top leaders escaped and fled the country.

Some suspects have told police that one of the fugitives, Abdul Hye, a
Muslim cleric from Chittagong, received funds directly from bin Laden.
"They said, 'Our chief is linked up with Osama bin Laden,' " said a
security official who asked not to be named. A local newspaper said the
Saudi exile funneled $1 million to the group through four bank accounts in
Dhaka. Police confiscated $1,650 in Bangladeshi currency during a Jan. 19
raid on the small apartment where Hye lived for three years in a crowded
Dhaka neighborhood.

Security officials said other suspects also have identified one of the men
arrested, a South African of Indian descent, Ahmed Sidiq Ahmed, as a
"personal friend" of bin Laden. A Pakistani also was detained.

The allegations surrounding Harkat have emerged at a time when events in
Bangladesh have drawn the attention of international counter-terrorism
agencies whose efforts are directed against bin Laden.

In December, Indian authorities detained a Bangladeshi, Sayed Abu Nasir, a
member of another fundamentalist group, after he told U.S. officials of a
plan allegedly supported by bin Laden to bomb American consulates in the
Indian cities of Calcutta and Madras and possibly the U.S. Embassy in New
Delhi. State Department officials have not substantiated Abu Nasir's
statements.

Also in December, former guerrillas who joined the insurgency that ousted
the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s distributed leaflets in
Manikganj, a town 25 miles northwest of Dhaka, seeking members for a
"Bangladesh Movement" modeled on the Taliban. In addition, local
newspapers have said bin Laden visited Bangladesh in recent years.
Government officials have said they have no way of confirming such a visit
because bin Laden was not listed on an immigration watch list.

The exact origins of Harkat remain uncertain, but Hye and another cleric
known as Sheik Farid appear to have formed the group by 1995 at an Islamic
seminary in Chittagong. That seminary propagates the same strict
interpretation of Islam -- which originated in the last century in the
northern India town of Deoband -- as the seminaries in border areas of
Pakistan where Afghan refugees forged the Taliban movement in the early
1990s.

Initially, Harkat recruited seminary students, trained them in the use of
light arms at two small camps in southeastern Bangladesh and sent them to
fight alongside the Taliban against other factions involved in
Afghanistan's civil war. Security officials estimate that Harkat has 2,000
to 3,000 active members and as many as 10,000 overall.

"They have come back from Afghanistan and they are . . . saying, 'We
should have something like that, the Taliban of Bangladesh,' " the
security official said.

In its monthly magazine, Wake Up, Freedom Fighter, Harkat has published
excerpts of bin Laden's media interviews as well as the group's appeals to
Bangladeshis to join "holy wars" in Afghanistan and in Kashmir, the
Himalayan region claimed by India and Pakistan.

Although 83 percent of Bangladesh's 130 million people are Muslims,
government officials and Western diplomatic sources said they doubt a
violent Islamic movement styled after the Taliban or the international
terrorist organization bin Laden allegedly leads would readily take root
in Bangladesh. The nation's main fundamentalist political party, for
instance, has fared poorly in elections because its members collaborated
with Pakistani forces and killed intellectuals when Bangladesh, which was
then part of Pakistan, was fighting for its independence in 1971.

"I don't think we see Bangladesh as a center of some kind of political
Islam that has become violently extreme," a Western diplomatic source
said. "Bangladesh's is a kinder, gentler form of Islam than what you see
on the other side of the subcontinent."

As evidence of Harkat's limited capacity to carry out violent operations,
security officials cited the botched attempt to kill Shamshur Rahman, 70,
whom some critics regard as the best living poet in the Bengali language.
Rahman's wife, daughter-in-law and maid managed to ward off the three
attackers -- two in their teens -- inside his home. Besides the small ax,
the attackers carried a single-shot, homemade rifle they never had a
chance to fire.

"These people are not well trained," the security official said.

During police interrogation, the two attackers in custody said that Harkat
had planned to kill Rahman and three other intellectuals because of their
liberal beliefs.

"I don't think most of our people have become fundamentalists," the
soft-spoken Rahman said in an interview. "But you don't need to have many
people to kill an intellectual."

Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

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