Is this the year when the US exposes Bangladesh for what it is?

People who have any ground-up familiarity with Bangladesh find the notion of it as a "moderate" country laughable.  It's an idea that springs forth from elites in the diplomatic corps, academia, the media, and leftists everywhere.  It's not a notion that has any relation to what is actually happening there.

For decades, radical Islamists have taken over one social institution after another, including education, banking, even the law.  Perhaps the most tragic irony of calling Bangladesh moderate, though, is how it receives the title while allowing or even participating in the systematic elimination of its non-Muslim minorities.  My own focus is Bangladesh's Hindu community, which has fallen from almost a fifth of the population at Bangladesh's birth in 1971 to perhaps as few as one in 15 today. During that time, we have received ongoing reports of anti-Hindu atrocities including murder, rape and gang rape, child abduction, forced conversion, religious desecration, land seizures, and more.  But minorities face attacks in many nations.  The situation in Bangladesh becomes a human rights atrocity that deserves international intervention because Bangladeshi governments regardless of party have refused to prosecute all but a few cases; they have enabled it and still do.

Those who believed the current, Awami League government would be different were wrong.  During its first term in office, major anti-Hindu atrocities occurred at or over an average of one per week.  There were especially horrendous periods, such as a nine-day span May 2012 that included a murder in broad daylight, a child abduction, and two rapes (one of a child on her way to a Hindu religious festival).  While my tabulation is not final yet, the situation in 2013 and so far in 2014 appears no better.  Not only has the government refused to help retrieving abducted women and children; in many cases, its officials participated in the crimes.

These are only the crimes I verified myself; many more were reported, which my limited resources did not let me investigate.  All of them were confirmed by at least independent witnesses, occurred under the Awami League government, were not prosecuted, and were targeted specifically against Hindus and Hinduism.

Organizations like the Hindu American Foundation have been publicizing Bangladesh's ill-treatment of Hindus for years.  Bangladeshi human rights giant, Rabindra Ghosh, has been investigating and documenting it for at least that long.  Yet, people who can do something about it seem to want to hold on to their fairy tale about a moderate Bangladesh, truth be damned.  Until now.  I am currently involved in initiatives in multiple international capitals that would restrict Bangladesh’s ability to sell its exports, provide UN peacekeeping troops, and otherwise maintain its current economy as long as it is the economic engine that drives the ethnic cleansing of Hindus and other minorities.

The US House Foreign Affairs Committee (one of the most powerful) and its Chairman Congressman Ed Royce have been working with me to hold hearings this year on Bangladesh's ethnic cleansing of Hindus.

Mount Prospect, Illinois (just outside of Chicago) recently became the first US city to issue a formal proclamation recognizing Bangladesh's ethnic cleansing of Hindus; we expect more localities to follow, and expect them to be the basis for action depriving Bangladesh of the income it uses to maintain its persecution of minorities.

Bi-partisan representatives of Members of the US Congress have let the US Commission on International Religious Freedom know that they can no longer give Bangladesh a pass on its human rights violations because it threw off military rule over six years ago.

At least three major NGOs have asked me to work with them on the issue of Bangladesh's Hindus.

And just this week, some Congressional aides asked if they could help me get the matter before the US House's human rights commission.

Bangladesh depends on the tacit complicity of other by way of their silence.  Once the matter is out in the open, companies that currently purchase their goods will not want to be associated with ethnic cleansing; the UN would not have peacekeepers who cannot even keep the peace within their own borders; and the Awami League government will actually have to do something rather than mouth empty platitudes.  Stay tuned because we expect a lot to happen in the near future to change this debate forever.

Post Script:  In a recent human rights mission, I saw first hand that Bangladesh has been exporting its anti-Hindu jihad across the border to West Bengal and Assam states in India. Its large scale infiltration is also causing an environmental disaster in Assam that we expect to address this year as well.  My advice to Bangladesh's leaders:  take action before others force action upon you; and recognize that once you lose those international markets, others will step into the void and you will never re-gain your previous position if you later decide to do the right thing.  Just do it now.

Effort to Save Bangladesh's Hindus Gaining Ground

On May 28, 2013, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) executives and activists spread across Capitol Hill in Washington to urge US lawmakers to act to stop the oppression and slaughter of Hindus in Bangladesh.   HAF has been documenting atrocities against Hindus in the small but heavily populated South Asian country annually for several years.  (Bangladesh is the only nation to rank among the world's ten most populous and the ten  most densely populated nations.)

Samir Kalra, HAF Director and Senior Fellow for Human Rights, has noted that "according to Odhikar, a Bangladeshi human rights group, there were nearly 1,200 incidents of violence directed against religious minorities (mostly Hindus) between 2008 and 2011"; and that "Islamic extremism is not a fringe phenomenon" in Bangladesh.  The period Kalra cites, by the way, all transpired under the rule of the supposedly "pro-minority" Awami League, which like its predecessors has not prosecuted crimes against Hindus.

HAF's efforts come on top of my own to educate Senators and Members of Congress about the human rights travesty perpetrated on Bangladesh's 15 million Hindus.  Last year, I confronted Bangladesh's ambassador to the United States, who tried to deny the evidence with nonsensical responses, like Hindus "cannot find suitable matches for their children, so they go to India where there are more Hindus" in perhaps the most ridiculous attempt yet to explain why Hindus have gone from a third of Bangladesh's population to under eight percent.  In February of this year, I similarly confronted Bangladesh's Home Minister in Dhaka, the nation's capital, who fared no better.  He was left with responses like "33 people were killed in Connecticut," "union membership is declining in the United States," and "I have seen the enclaves of the Red Indians" as his lame attempt to justify his government's complicity in ethnic cleansing.  He also promised to investigate any evidence I sent him--which I found rather strange, and asked him why the Home Minister in the nation's capital is dependent on "some guy from Chicago" for information about hate crimes in his own country.

All of this was dutifully reported to members of both the US House and Senate, several of whom are looking at initiatives to stop the ethnic cleansing of Bangladesh's Hindus.  These US lawmakers are prominent on committees that control trade policy (critical to Bangladesh's economy), foreign relations, aid, and funding for the UN.  The latter is important because Bangladesh supplies the largest contingent of UN peacekeepers of any nation and is dependent on those receipts--so dependent in fact, that the military's fear of losing this cash cow was the proximate cause of its 2007 military coup.

Look, no one is looking to hurt the Bangladeshi people; their government does a thorough enough job of that itself.  But if the government of Bangladesh will not act to stop the ethnic cleansing of its Hindu citizens, the rest of the world must.

American Hindus in 2012

Earlier this spring, anti-Hindu riots raged in Bangladesh’s Satkhira District after a local newspaper published an article alleging that “indecent remarks” were made about the Prophet Mohammad during a play at the local high school. A few days later, area Muslims exited their Friday prayers whipped into a violent frenzy over the allegations and attacked the Hindu community for two successive days. Dozens of homes were razed or looted; belongings of entire families destroyed; and there was at least one sexual assault reported. Hundreds of university students took to the streets in the nation’s capital to protest the riots, tying up traffic and bringing large sections of Dhaka to a standstill. And although the article that incited the riots was proven to be false (in fact, the paper’s charter to publish was summarily revoked as a result), the school’s headmaster and assistant headmaster were arrested on charges of “blasphemy.”

How many of you read about these events your morning newspaper; events of major import in the world’s third largest Muslim-majority country? Was it in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today; or for that matter, Times of India? What about the cable news giants like the BBC, CNN, or Fox News? Did they report it? The news blackout by the media should surprise no one. Deliberate, government-tolerated attacks on Hindus like these—and worse—have been a regular feature of Bangladeshi life since long before the nation’s official birth. They have brought the once-robust Hindu community from almost a third of the population to less than eight percent. Yet, it was only last year that a lone US Congressman, Robert Dold of Illinois, raised the issue from the floor of the US House; and there still is no mention of Bangladesh’s Hindus in any of the world’s major media, or from those who claim the mantle of human rights, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the UN Human Rights Council.

People have explained this and related phenomena to anti-Hindu bias, pro-Muslim bias, petro-dollars, fear, and more. I would also add the fact that the deliberate elimination of non-Muslims in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran fit politically correct philosophies that insist ad nauseum that the problems of Islamic extremism are limited to, well, Islamic extremists. Identifying that sort of thing in retrograde states like Saudi Arabia does not upset their comfortable theories. But when it occurs in an institutionalized way in a “moderate Muslim nation”like Bangladesh, it does.

Dr. Subramanian Swamy puts a lot of the blame, however, on the “Hindu mindset,” that he says is not oriented towards conflict in the same way as other religio-ethnic groups are. His insight is shared by the vast majority of Hindus with whom I work. Thus, it is no surprise that when I travel both home and abroad to speak about the ethnic cleansing of Bangladesh’s Hindus, many Hindus claim to not to know anything about their brethren’s persecution; even though the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has been publishing information about Bangladesh’s persecution of Hindus for years, usually right in the front of its annual human rights survey. Others admit to knowing about anti-Hindu persecution in Bangladesh, but have done little or nothing to stop it. For Hindus in the United States, the hotly contested election year of 2012 offers an opportunity to change that.

Shalabh Kumar, founder of the National Indian American Coalition (NIAC), has noted that the American Hindu community is around half the size of the American Jewish community, but you would never know it given the extent to which Jewish community concerns are considered by the media and public officials compared to those of the Hindu community. Nor would one know that there are only about a million more Muslims in the United States than Hindus by the way media and elected officials react to Muslim organizations like the Congress on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) compared to the HAF. In neither case are Jews or Muslims the problem; they are only doing what every American community and interest group has a right to do: organize and advocate for the interests of their constituents.

We got a small taste of that potential in 2010. A group of us in the Chicago area contacted several Congressional and one Senatorial candidate who had a history of support for the Hindu community. None of us claimed the ability to deliver any particular number of votes, but we did make known to them some of the issues that were on the minds of several community members. While no one would allege that we were the difference between victory and defeat, our efforts did help launch more extensive relationships that enable us to make sure officials are aware of some of these matters.

The atrocities being perpetrated against Hindus in Bangladesh are the perfect issue around which such efforts can be organized. Ours is a country that sent troops into Bosnia when 10,000 people were victims of ethnic cleansing; there are more than 100 times that many Hindus facing ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh. The issue is not political but moral. It is not something that appeals to either Democrats or Republicans, but to both. It is a matter of right and wrong, and if Mandirs take a leading role in organizing to save lives, the pristine nature of our cause will be even clearer. Does it work?

Anyone who was around in the 1970s and 1980s will recall that it was impossible to pass a synagogue without seeing a large banner reading “Free Soviet Jewry.” Our people were being oppressed in the Soviet Union, and the American Jewish community recognized its obligation to do something about it; and our religious institutions were the focus. Religious school children were taught about it and given pen pals—Jewish children in the USSR whom they came to see as brothers and sisters, kids just like them. When children had their Bar and Bat Mitzvah, the synagogue would “twin” them with similar aged kids in the USSR—who did not have the freedom to celebrate their own. Average people whom you might see at the water cooler or in the supermarket, went on trips to Russia and smuggled in religious books and artifacts. The American Jewish Committee and other Jewish groups took a lead role in making sure our elected officials did not ignore us; and before it was all over, we got 1.2 million Jews out of that Gulag.

Let the Bangladeshi Hindus be your Soviet Jews!

New Hope for Bangladeshi Hindus

On July 28, something happened that forever changed the situation for the oppressed Hindus of Bangladesh. Congressman Robert Dold (R-IL) addressed the US House in support of HR440, sponsored by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) to establish a “Special Envoy to Promote Religious Freedom of Religious Minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia” with the rank of ambassador. HR440 passed 402-20; the few nay votes coming as a protest against any new expenditures (even this tiny one) at this time.

Dold began his speech by doing something that had never been done before in the United States Congress: He raised the issue of Bangladesh's oppression of Hindus forcefully and specifically. One of the greatest impediments we face in moving people to action that will stop the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh is the failure of people to name it as an atrocity. Now it is a matter of record in the United States Congress, and will provide the basis for more severe action. Dold's first words were:

"Since 1947, 49 million Hindus in Bangladesh have gone missing according to Professor Sachi Dastidar. And a recent Hindu American Foundation report concluded that the Hindus of Bangladesh continue to be victims of daily acts of murder, rape, kidnapping, temple destruction, and physical intimidation. Dr. Richard Benkin, an authority on human rights abuses in Bangladesh, has described to me on several occasions the atrocities and human rights abuses suffered by Bangladesh's Hindus that he personally has verified."

Some people make hours-long speeches and do little more than waste the time of their listeners; but in a one and a quarter minute speech, Dold created a watershed event that gave hope to millions of the oppressed by refusing to bury their plight amid generalities like "minorities" and "extremism"; and he urged the US to act. It did not take long before word of his action spread among many of them. Now, perpetrators, appeasers, and deniers can no longer pretend that the atrocity is not happening. Naming it was the first step in defeating it and sets a new basis for several actions now in the works to do just that. Thank you, Bob Dold, for doing what no one else has been able to do. And thank you, USA.