| They've certainly made the Burg more enjoyable... |
The cable, marked secret and recently posted on whistleblower website WikiLeaks, was sent to Washington by the then US ambassador in Dhaka Patricia A Butenis on April 13, 2006.
The killings in the name of "crossfire" or "encounter" by Rapid Action Battalion
(Rab) have generated concern and ire among local and international rights groups.After their calls for an end to the trend fell on deaf ears,
| As if other countries could supply authentic shutter guns to the RAB... |
Bari, the former additional director general of Rab, later became the counterintelligence director of Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI).
"I was there at the initial planning," Butenis quoted Bari as saying. The diplomat also identified him as "a forceful advocate" for Rab, citing a discussion on April 15, 2006 on the margins of the 2006 PASOC conference in Hawaii.
Bari "recounted the origins of the controversial anti-crime unit, disparaged the skills and integrity of police", and cited the interrogations of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh
The JMB is said to be the youth front of Al Mujahideen, the parent organization that began working toward establishing Bangladesh as an Islamic state in the mid 1990s which remains obscure even today. Other organizations, such as Jama'atul Jihad, JMB, Jagrata Mohammedan Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), Hizbut Tawhid, Tawhidi Janata, Islami Jubo Shangha, Islami Shangha, Al Falah A'am Unnayan Shanstha and Shahadat-e al Hiqma are believed to be part of the Al Mujahideen network. The JMB at its peak was reported to contain at least 100,000 members, and an alleged 2,000-man suicide brigade, few of whom actually went
kaboom!. JMB allegedly received financial assistance from individual donors in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Pakistan, Soddy Arabia and Libya. Reports have claimed that funding of JMB by international NGOs like Kuwait based Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage (RIHS) and Doulatul Kuwait, Soddy Arabia based Al Haramaine Islamic Institute and Rabita Al Alam Al Islami, Qatar Charitable Society and UAE-based Al Fuzaira and Khairul Ansar Al Khairia. The top leadership of JMB was captured in 2005 and hung in 2007, which pretty much shot their bolt.
(JMB) suspects to suggest that Bangladesh's zeal in arresting the August 17, 2005 bombers ironically triggered JMB's deadly campaign of terror in late 2005 as retaliation.
Though the original plan had been to have 44 percent military, 44 percent police, and 12 percent from the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles (BDR, now Border Guard Bangladesh), police were reluctant to fill their slots, Bari told US officials.
Explaining the reluctance, he said police "earned more money on the outside" from bribes and other illicit activities, the cable said, adding, "Senior coppers, he claimed, preferred to sit in their offices."
"Military disdain for the police is not new, and police failings are often cited to justify the military's continuing dominance of Rab -- about 80 percent of its total force structure and virtually all of its senior officers except for the director general himself," Butenis wrote in the cable.
"The police, he agreed, operate like a giant pyramid scheme, where street personnel pass payoffs up to their bosses. Corruption, he added, was one reason police failed to capture JMB commander Sheikh [Sheikh] Abdur Rahman."
Bari further complained that "police remain unwilling to second able personnel, often providing instead the old and physically unfit. Police personnel lack basic skills, such as shooting, and have no training in special operations", the cable read.
Asked if there was one political sponsor of establishment of the Rab, "Bari said no, there were several," the cable said.
The then prime minister
Khaleda ZiaThree-term PM of Bangla, widow of deceased dictator Ziaur Rahman, head of the Bangla Nationalist Party, an apparent magnet for corruption ...
herself selected black uniform for Rab from six alternate designs, including the distinctive black Rab "doo-rag," it quoted Bari.
Identifying the JMB as a "home grown" military organization, the former Rab second-man described JMB operatives as poor people who flunked out of madrasas. "Being poor, they could easily blend in as rickshaw pullers and hawkers and go anywhere to recruit for JMB."
Bari, who attended many of JMB leader Abdur Rahman's interrogations in his capacity at the DGFI, said law enforcement personnel quickly tossed in the clink 70 persons involved with the August 17 countrywide bomb kabooms by the JMB.
The arrests "angered the JMB rank-and-file and generated internal pressure on Rahman to retaliate and demonstrate that JMB remained a viable entity. The result, Bari claimed, was the onset in October [in 2005 when a number of people including two judges were killed] of the deadly attacks on the judicial system".
Butenis found it as an "interesting twist" to suggest, as Bari did, that the deadly JMB attacks in late 2005 were an unplanned action triggered by Bangladesh government's zeal in rounding up August 17 bombers.
Along with downplaying JMB's religious credentials as failed madrasa students and describing JMB as home-grown, Bari is toeing the government line that JMB operatives were basically local yokels with little or no interest in "true" Islam, the cable adds.