HomeBetween Pakistan, Bangladesh and muslims in India, an islamic force of nearly 500 million muslims is being created that has already exterminated its minority populations in Pakistan and Bangladesh. As they get more virulent and powerful, funded by the anti-semitic (and anti-hindu) hatred of their wahhabbi patrons in Saudia and Pakistan, the danger that Israel Imagine how it would be like when one is subjected to rape, unending torture, forced conversion, discrimination in education and employment, intimidation to practice one's own religious faith, loot, arson and other savageries of worst kind. may one day have to face them (even from 3000 miles away) is not that farfetched.
http://www.satribune.com/archives/fe...ion_bertil.htm
Ethnic Cleansing & Rise of Islamic Militancy in Bangladesh
Bertil Lintner
IMAGINE how it would be like when 25 million people vanish from a projected population of 39 million. Imagine how it would be like when two and a half million acres of prime land is grabbed from a country smaller in size than the State of Wisconsin.
Imagine how it would be like when one is subjected to rape, unending torture, forced conversion, discrimination in education and employment, intimidation to practice one's own religious faith, loot, arson and other savageries of worst kind.
This is the story of the Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and the ethnic minorities of Bangladesh -- a story of slow genocide , a story of violence and betrayal by their own government, a testament of hard-line Islamic politicking designed to minority cleansing, a continuing saga that has played out since 1947 to the present day Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has been a fertile ground for bigoted Islamic idealism for a long time. Especially, since 1975 with the assassination of the country's founding father and altering of the constitution, the Islamic Radicalism has been thrust into the political landscape of the country. With enormous financial help from branded terrorists, outlawed regimes, and proponents of Wahabism such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Iran and other renegade terrorist networks.
Bangladesh has built hundreds of thousands of Mosques and madrassahs that constantly foment violence against non-Muslims and country's progressive groups and cultural institutions. There are 64,000 madrassahs or so called religious schools where the unsuspecting Muslim youths are recruited and trained to be the foot soldiers for a Taliban style Bangladesh. They espouse hate and bigotry against anyone that does not conform to their brand of militant Islam. The infamous American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, was a graduate from one such Madrassah in Pakistan.
Persecution of minorities in Bangladesh has been a lingering issue for past sixty years with some intermittent reprieves that came along with the changing hands of power. But the aura of minority cleansing never fully subsided. October 2001, when the coalition of Islamic hard-liners swept into power trumpeting their goal to make Bangladesh a pure Islamic Country as their election themes-- brought a new momentum to their hostility towards minorities. They marked their victory with unprecedented and unprovoked attacks on innocent men, women and children belonging to the minority communities.
The government not only shamelessly failed to provide the country's 15 million ethno-religious minorities any protection against these attacks, but also showed its utter indifference to human life by cowardly aiding in the history's worst savagery. Since then, hundreds of thousands of young girls and women have been abducted and raped, tens of thousands of minority owned homes and businesses have been looted and razed, hundreds of places of worship have been burnt down all across Bangladesh. Women as old as seventy and girls as young seven have not even been spared of their brunt of rape and terror. Abduction of young girls from homes at gunpoint, gang rape, and forced conversions to Islam have been endemic in Bangladesh. (Leon Uris: I will refrain from adding a comment here)
Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is responsible for this latest cycle of crimes against humanity.
She has personally orchestrated each and every recent dreadful terror against the minorities with a clear and unambiguous purpose of cleansing the country's minorities to transform it into a Pure Muslim Country. She has used every resource of the government at her disposal to intimidate, terrorize and torture people into either leaving the country or submitting to convert to Islamic extremism. Today, forced conversion to Islam has become a corrosive fodder to the fundamentalists, courtesy of Begum Khaleda Zia.
It may recall the massacre that took place back in April 1992. The then Prime Minister of the country, Begum Khaleda Zia used her army to systematically murder 600 tribal residents of Logang in Chittagong Hill Tracts, and burned the entire village to the ground. Seven months later, she orchestrated another wave of minority persecution in which 15 minorities were killed, 2,600 women raped, 10,000 injured, 40,000 dwelling houses destroyed, 3, 600 temples damaged/razed and 200,000 rendered homeless. Begum Zia, like her Islamic fundamentalist predecessors has been a mortal danger to pluralistic democracy and the rule of law.
Recently, while she has deployed armies on the streets to curtail the rights of citizens, to take prisoner of political rivals and human rights activists, to stifle the voices of progressive thinkers and journalists on vital national issues such as human rights, freedom of religion. she has allowed Bangladesh to become a cocoon of terror, a hub for international terrorism.It is an established fact that Bangladesh now harbors and supports international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Harkat-ul-Jihad. Fighters trained and given new identities in Bangladesh routinely find their ways to conflicts throughout the world and are wrecking havoc everywhere.
These are worrisome developments for Bangladesh, the world and for the entire humanity.
With the government's active encouragement the fundamentalists have often revealed their ugly fangs by perpetrating terrors on Bangladesh's most vulnerable citizens, the minorities. We believe the initiative to correct the great miscarriage of justice, to right the decades of wrongs committed by the Islamic Zealots must come, first and foremost, from the citizens of Bangladesh who believe in peace, freedom and justice by forming a united resistance against militant Islam in the country.
In the same vein I remind the International Community that Bangladesh has willfully violated all International Laws and Conventions that specifically address the Human Rights and Freedom of Religion Issues. Today, throughout the world terror has cast its ugly spells on life and liberty- the very things the civilized world pride itself upon. And persecution of minorities in Bangladesh is certainly an inseparable phenomenon of global terror because the terrorist networks responsible for this are also global.
They are linked together with a common purpose to exterminate anyone not subscribing to their brand of religion. History has taught us, time and again, that cowering into inaction when terror manifest itself is at civilization's own great peril. It challenge the civilized nations to heed the history's call to actions against the plague of Islamic Jihad.
All along it has demanded retribution and justice for all sufferings, to repatriate and compensate victims of forced exodus. In 2001, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, promised the nation to investigate the carnage and to rehabilitate the victims. Two years elapsed since she has predictably failed to deliver on her promise, for she is a player in that "axis of terror". It has demanded the government to restore the original constitution of Bangladesh by repealing the 5th (Introducing Islam to the Constitution) and 8th (Declaring Islam as the State Religion) Amendments the two very divisive issues that took away 'Equal Rights' and destroyed the moral fabric of the nation.
Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has shown no indication of changing course, let alone acting on this. Rather she has partnered with the Islamic hard-liners and the proponents of these discriminatory laws and publicly professed her desire to make Bangladesh a pure Islamic Country. Her newfound majority in the parliament is only an added incentive for her and her partners in Islamic Jihad to make their bigoted dream come true. It has also demanded the repeal of "Enemy Property Act" or "Vested Property Law" of 1965 from the constitution, under which the country's minorities have been dispossessed of more than 2.5 million acres of prime land. Legislation was passed in the parliament by the Awami-League Government, providing a ray of hope, to end this dreaded episode of grabbing of our lands. But the new government of Khaleda Zia, scuttled the entire legislation through various administrative maneuvers even before the law took effect. She failed this time too. Trusting her again would further jeopardize the minorities of Bangladesh.
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