Since 2013, Bangladesh has been experiencing a series of targeted assassinations of bloggers, journalists and academics, who have been hacked to death with knives and machetes as a result of being perceived to have criticised Islam.
In the latest attacks in April, a professor of English and the editor of a magazine, together with his friend, were brutally murdered by knife-wielding gangs.
Challenging radical Islam
Although these attacks have primarily targeted atheists, the common factor in all of those who have been murdered has been criticism of radical Islam, particularly Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, the Jamat-i-Islami. The murder of one such victim, a Muslim university lecturer who had stopped his female students from wearing the burqa (a full-length robe including a face covering with only a grill to see through) because he believed it could be used to cheat in exams, was justified by his killers on the grounds that he was a murtad (apostate), for which shari’a requires a compulsory death penalty for adult males.
What has received little attention in the press is that Christians have been subjected to similar attacks. On 22 March, Hossain Ali, a 68-year-old church leader who had converted from Islam, was similarly knifed to death while walking in Valacopa, in the Kurrigram District of northern Bangladesh. On 5 October 2015, Pastor Luke Sarkar was attacked in Pabna district of north-west Bangladesh by militants who tried to cut his throat.
Hit list
Last September, the Ansarullah Bangla Team, who have claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, issued a hit list of Bangladeshi bloggers, including nine in the UK, seven in Germany, two in the USA, one in Canada and one in Sweden. Despite this, few arrests have been made and the police seem reluctant to investigate more than superficially.
This reluctance reflects the ambivalence of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, who, responding to some of the latest attacks, said: ‘Everyone has to hold their tongue, has to maintain a level of decency in what they write. If they write something provocative and something bad happens, the government will not take responsibility.’
She was also reported as saying: ‘I obey the commandments of my religion. If someone writes bad things about the person whom I obey as my prophet, it would not be acceptable to me.’
Bangladesh is one of the few Muslim-majority countries that are officially secular, and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami league is the main secular political party in Bangladesh. However, the country has for several years seen violent street protests by Islamists demanding an Islamic blasphemy law. The government appears to be trying to appease the Islamists in order to maintain its own hold on power. However, the Prime Minister’s comments will alarm Bangladesh’s non-Muslim minorities of Christians and Hindus, who together make up 11% of the country’s 169 million population.
