‘De-Islamizing’ Bangladesh

DHAKA – Trials of Islamist leaders on alleged charges of war crimes and constitutional amendments that eliminated the state principles of absolute trust and faith in Allah are sparking accusations against the Bangladeshi government of “de-Islamizing” the country and turning it into a secular state.

“The present secular government has been attacking Islam to satisfy leftist and secular groups,” AHM Abdul Kader, coordinator of Dhaka-based Center for Study of Peace and Security (CSPS), told OnIslam.net.

“Government has turned itself into a police state and is harassing the opposition and particularly the Islamic forces and parties in order to create a safe haven for the growth of atheist and secularist forces.”

Bangladesh has been in turmoil over the trial of Islamist leaders on alleged war crimes during the 1971 independence war.

Tension further escalated over postings by bloggers seen as defaming Islam and Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him).

The turbulence also followed constitutional amendments that eliminated the state principles of absolute trust and faith in Allah the Almighty.

Abdul Kader opines that the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is trying to eliminate Islamic forces and leaders by trying them on alleged war crimes during the independence war.

Professor Mujahidul Islam, a senior teacher at Dhaka University, shares a similar opinion.

“The government has dealt a serious blow to the majority of Muslims by eliminating the state principles of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty from the constitution,” he said.

He believes that the incumbent government has given itself up to a secularist group deeply engaged in conspiring against Islam and Muslims in Bangladesh.

He thinks that an atheist and leftist quarter within the government has now the upper hand to “de-Islamize” the country through infusion of fragmentation and conflicts.

Mujahidul Islam, a former chairman of the finance department of Dhaka University, describes government attempt to ban Islamic politics in Bangladesh as “undemocratic and unconstitutional”.

He says this type of thinking and decision will generate bad effects and cause disunity, hostility and disorder in the country.

De-Islamization

Many Bangladeshis believe that the government of Sheikh Hasina is actively working to “de-Islamize” the Asian Muslim country.

“The very act of eliminating the constitutional provision of absolute trust and faith of Allah is a big conspiracy against Bangladesh and Muslims,” Rawshan Ara Swapna, a writer and former student of political science at Dhaka University, told OnIslam.net.

“Their target is to turn Bangladesh into a secularist country.”

She agrees that the aim of the war crimes trials is to abolish Islam and the Islamic movement from Bangladesh in order to satisfy secular and communist forces.

“But they wouldn’t see success in this country as the third largest Muslim country,” she stressed.

Golam Mostafa Bhuiyan, general secretary of Bangladesh NAP, an opposition party, agrees.

“The present Awami League government has created conflict and clash in Bangladesh by eliminating the state principles of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah as enshrined in the Bangladeshi constitution,” he told OnIslam.net.

He believes that attempts to reinstitute secularism in the constitution would be a big mistake by the government.

“The present government is itself a party to a conspiracy to make Bangladesh a non-religious country.”

Mohammad Mustafijur Rahman, a businessman, shares a similar opinion.

“Elimination of the trust and faith of Allah from the Bangladeshi constitution by the Awami League government would not be acceptable to Muslims and it was a cruel onslaught on Islamic values,” he told OnIslam.net.

He believes that the government move to replace iman (faith) with secularism in the constitution would be rejected by Muslims of Bangladesh.

“Bangladeshi Muslims will resist all moves toward de-Islamization of Bangladesh by present secular government’s conspiracy insallah.”

Bangladesh is the world’s third-largest Muslim majority nation with a population of some 148 million.

Plunge in stock market leads to riots in Bangladesh

Trading has been halted at Bangladesh’s main stock exchange amid protests over the largest single day loss in the bourse’s 55-year history.

The exchange halted trading on Monday as per orders from the Securities and Exchange Commission after the benchmark index plunged 9.25 per cent within the first hour of trading.

Buses of riot police were deployed to the stock exchange building in the capital Dhaka where protesters chanted slogans against the government and market regulators.

Some protesters burned vehicles as riot police struggled to keep control, firing tear gas and charging the crowd with batons.

Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque, reporting from the capital, said: “Because Bangladesh’s stock market is largely driven by individual retail investors, many investors have lost their savings.”

Monirul Islam, an investor attending the protests, told the AFP news agency: “I lost $70,000 dollars. This is insane – my whole savings are gone.”

“I poured all my money into the Dhaka stock exchange,” Humayum Kabir, another Bangladeshi investor, said.

“The finance minister lured us into the stock market, he told us it was safe, but now we have lost everything. They artificially jacked up the prices of junk shares and now our savings have vanished,” Kabir said.

Necessary correction

The country’s stock exchange hit a record high of 8,918.51 on December 5, but it has so far lost 27.4 per cent, which many experts have called a necessary correction.

Tanvir Chowdhury, the editor of the online journal News from Bangladesh, told Al Jazeera: “One of the factors that could explain these dramatic losses is how the market has widened but the number of the shares does not match the expectations of the people waiting to buy. There is also a lot of speculation from investors who do not understand the stock market.

“Small time entrepreneurs who have little money to invest think they’ll get a quick return out of the market by buying stocks without realising the real face value of the stock versus the performance of the companies they are buying from, but it doesn’t work like that,” Chowdhury said.

Prices of shares have suffered a series of slides since early December after the stock regulator and the central bank took measures to cool the market, prompting some street protests.

The central bank had raised banks’ cash requirement ratio from 5.5 per cent to 6 per cent, effective December 15, to rein in on inflation and to curb runaway credit flow, especially to the volatile capital markets.

Call money market rates also hit a record high last month. Some banks have invested 75 per cent of their deposits in the stock market against a ceiling of 10 per cent and had been told to get back under the limit by December 30.

This deadline has now been extended to January 15.

Muslim-Buddhist clash in Burma leaves many dead

Security forces have been deployed in western Burma, near the border with Bangladesh, to restore peace after an outbreak of ethnic violence that left at least seven people dead.

Police and military units restored calm and established a curfew in Rakhine state on the weekend, after overnight rioting between ethnic Rohingya, who are Muslims, and local Buddhists.

State media said at least seven people died in the fighting and hundreds of buildings were set ablaze.

The United States has expressed concern about reports of ongoing violence in Rakhine State. A spokeswoman for the State Department, Victoria Nuland, said Washington is monitoring the situation and urges an immediate halt to violent attacks.

The statement issued Saturday also encourages the government to pursue an investigation in accordance with the rule of law.

Tensions have been high in Rakhine since last Sunday, when a Buddhist mob attacked a bus and killed 10 Rohingya, mistakenly believing they were responsible for the recent gang-rape and murder of a Buddhist woman.

Burma does not consider the Rohingya to be Burmese citizens, despite the presence of as many as 800,000 of them in its western region, according to the United Nations.

Burma’s government has recently begun implementing political reforms, sparking approval among Western nations who had long called for change. State media have released an uncharacteristically large amount of information about this week’s violent incidents.

Bangladesh’s Islamist parties face ban after court rules against religion-based politics

DHAKA — Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has reinstated a ban on Islamic political parties in the latest blow to religious hardliners in the impoverished South Asian country, a minister said Thursday.

In a detailed, 184-page verdict released late Wednesday, the Supreme Court scrapped the bulk of the 1979 fifth amendment, including provisions that had allowed religious political parties to flourish and legalised military rule.

“Secularism will again be the cornerstone of our constitution,” law minister Shafiq Ahmed told AFP on Thursday.

After independence from Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh’s first constitution made secularism a key pillar. Following a 1975 coup, the army-led government amended the constitution’s guiding principle to “faith in Allah” in 1979.

Religious parties, which were banned in the original 1971 constitution but legalised by the 1979 amendments, are now banned again as the “faith in Allah” provision has been thrown out, said Ahmed.

“Islamic parties cannot use religion in politics any more,” he said.

In 1988, a second military-led government made Islam the state religion in the Muslim-majority nation and incorporated Koranic verse into the constitution. Neither of those changes are affected by the court verdict.

“But following the scrapping of the fifth amendment, these later amendments can now be challenged in court,” Ahmed said.

In the verdict, which was issued in January but became trapped in an appeals process until Wednesday, the Supreme Court also declared the 1975-1990 military rule illegal, and recommended punishing military dictators, Ahmed said.

“This means that, in theory, any Bangladeshi citizen could initiate a lawsuit against a former military dictator,” he said, adding that the repeal of the amendment would also limit the possibility of a future military coup.

“It is a landmark verdict,” Supreme Court lawyer Shahdeen Malik, who is also dean of law at the private BRAC university told AFP, adding that lawmakers would now have to clarify how the verdict would be applied by law.

Since the Awami League’s landslide election win over the Islamist-allied Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in 2008, the government has cracked down on Islamic groups and parties.

BNP founding father, Ziaur Rahman, put the 1979 amendments in place during his 1975-1981 rule. The party, now led by his widow, Khaleda Zia, appealed the Supreme Court’s first ruling on the amendments in January.

“We are now studying this verdict,” BNP spokesman, Khandaker Delwar Hossain, who is also secretary general of the party, told AFP.

The government outlawed one Islamic party in October last year, accusing it of destabilising the country.

Four other Islamist organisations, including the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh, were earlier banned after they carried out a series of nationwide bombings that left 28 people dead in 2005.

This week, four leaders of the country’s largest Islamic party, BNP-allied Jamaat-e-Islami, were arrested by the country’s fledgling war crimes court, set up to try those responsible for atrocities during the 1971 Independence war.

Bangladesh verdict angers world Muslims

DHAKA – The death sentence against a leading Islamist leader in Bangladesh on war crimes charges is inviting a storm of condemnations from Muslim groups around the world, amid calls for a fair trial for the defendant.

“The Muslim Brotherhood denounces the unjust death sentence against one of the Islamist opposition leaders in Bangladesh,” Dr Mahmoud Ghozlan, spokesman of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood group, said in a statement obtained by OnIslam.net.

The group also “condemns the deadly force used against citizens during activities protesting the evidently wrongful sentence.”

Delwar Hossain Sayedee, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami group, was sentenced to death last week on war crime charges during the 1971 independence war.

The 73-year-old leader was the third person to be convicted by the war crimes tribunal, whose verdicts have been met with outrage from supporters.

The sentence has triggered massive protests across Bangladesh and deadly clashes between supporters and the police.

At least 60 people have been killed in deadly violence since the death sentence was announced on Thursday.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic party, enforced a nationwide two-day strike on Sunday in protest against the verdict and the killing of activists in police brutalities.

“We call upon all pro-peace, freedom and justice groups and movements to intervene to stop the blatant assault against the freedoms of citizens in Bangladesh in violation of all international charters and norms of international humanitarian law,” Ghozlan said.

“While we reject and condemn these unjust and unfair trials that violate all international norms and conventions, we call upon all States, and in particular Muslim countries, and international bodies and institutions to apply all pressure to put right these trials and lift the injustice befalling political detainees in Bangladesh and to apply pressure, politically and morally, to stop this human tragedy.”

Fair Trial

The verdict has also prompted calls from Muslim groups for a fair trial for the Islamist leader.

“Ennahda expresses its full solidarity with Sheikh Delwar Hossain Sayedee and his fellow detainees held for false charges dating back to 1971 when they had stood against the division of Pakistan and the separation of Bangladesh,” the ruling Tunisian party said in a statement obtained by OnIslam.net.

It appealed to international organizations and human rights associations to raise their voices against police brutality against protestors.

“The party strongly condemns the policy of mass liquidation used by the authorities against the Jamaat Islami of Bangladesh and the political trials which seek to silence all dissident voices.”

The anger reached India, with the All India Muslim Personal Law Board accusing Bangladeshi Premier Sheikh Hasina of turning into a “dictator”.

“Sheikh Hasina has turned into a dictator and is using the war crimes tribunal to crush the opposition,” board member Raisuddin said.

“Those who have been convicted belong to the Jamaat-e-Islami which is in the opposition.”

Leader of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan Syed Munawar Hasan called on the Pakistani government to take action on the sentence against the Bangladeshi leader.

He warned that the verdict could plunge Bangladesh into civil war.

Bangladesh is the world’s third-largest Muslim majority nation with a population of some 148 million.

The country has a secular legal system but village councils issue fatwas to resolve disputes in rural areas.

Bangladesh follows Shari`ah in resolving issues related to inheritance and marriage.