A general election is scheduled in Bangladesh for January 7, but if it is anything like the last two elections, most people in the country are not expected to cast their ballots.
The election in January 2014 was boycotted by the main opposition, which feared widespread rigging. The ruling Awami League attained a majority: even before election day, 153 of 300 seats were declared uncontested.
Fears of rigging notwithstanding, the opposition did participate in the December 2018 polls. Perhaps they should not have. Across the country, ballot boxes were stuffed the night before election day.
The government of Sheikh Hasina, which has been in power since 2008, has swapped democratic affirmation by voters with a reliance on security agencies that carry out rampant human rights violations – extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and suchlike. Dissenters and human rights activists – Adilur Rahman Khan, among them – have been jailed on trumped-up charges.
Hasina shows every intention of staying in power come what may, describing her party in an interview with The Economist earlier this year as the only legitimate one in Bangladesh. One wrinkle in her plans, however, is the fact that the world has started to take notice of the situation.
In December 2021, the Biden administration slapped sanctions against senior officers of police and paramilitary forces for human rights violations. This has been followed with visa bans that will apply to anyone trying to impede a free and fair election in Bangladesh.
Legislatures and the executive branches from Brussels to Canberra have discussed Bangladesh’s democratic backsliding in general, and the worsening human rights situation in particular. The European Parliament, for example, adopted a resolution in September that specifically criticised the prison sentences against Adilur Rahman Khan and his colleague.
Meanwhile, Russia, China, and Iran have come out in favour of the Hasina regime, claiming that the concerns expressed by liberal democracies about human rights abuses in Bangladesh constitute “meddling in internal affairs”.
As part of its strategy to counter the critiques, the government has over the past year reportedly sought out writers, academics and content creators to drum up favourable opinion pieces and events that could be reported in global media.
For example, a seminar in Brussels on October 11, attended by high-profile Members of the European Parliament and European Commission officials, featured a robust defence of the regime’s governance record and strong arguments that the accusation of human rights abuses are propaganda.
The event, titled “Human Rights Situation and Democracy in Bangladesh: The Fight against Disinformation and False Narratives” in a European Union building would presumably have supported the regime’s counteroffensive against human rights groups in Bangladesh quite effectively.
Except it didn’t quite go right.
The event was hosted and helmed by MEP Maximilian Krah, who belongs to the notorious far-right Alternative for Germany or AfD party, and has been accused of fraud and influence peddling from Beijing. Krah’s case on contract fraud has been transferred to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office and is under criminal investigation.
The event was sparsely attended, as demonstrated by photos of the audience.
Dr Raihan Rashid, one of the panellists at the seminar, suggested EU parliamentarians to “do their own homework” when it comes to human rights allegations from Bangladesh. However, it is unclear whether he is credible when it comes to judicial transparency in Bangladesh due to his involvement in the notorious Skype scandal in 2012. This was when the Chief Justice of the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh was exposed for having Skype conversations with Dr Ziauddin Ahmed, a Belgium-based international humanitarian lawyer, about the cases and verdicts against the alleged war criminals. The conversation revealed Raihan Rashid’s involvement in the unlawful affair as well.
The Skype scandal undermined the legitimacy of the War Crimes Tribunal and put the Bangladesh government in a difficult position at that time. The judge had to resign amid the controversy. The controversy would have been enough to result in a mistrial in most jurisdictions, but not in Bangladesh. Curiously, among the few attendees of the event, there seems to be a high concentration of Bangladeshis who prominently advocated for the War Crimes Tribunal in the past, including names such as Syed Mozammel Ali and Jamal Ahmed Khan, in addition to Dr Raihan.
Pause and think about it for a moment. A Beijing-linked far right European politician hosts an event attended by people known to have been involved in a controversial trial process where the said event is supposed to highlight how the concerns about human rights abuses in Bangladesh reflect disinformation and false narrative.
A further icing on the cake of irony is that, during the controversial war crimes trial in Bangladesh, panellist-organizers such as Rashid and Jamal Khan, who are now seeking the patronage of a German far-right politician, used to continuously promote the Bangladeshi tribunal as similar to the Nuremberg Trials and depict the accused as akin to Nazi war criminals.
Even a maestro like Mikhail Bulgakov couldn’t have come up with this stuff!
As it happens, the Hasina regime seems to have a penchant for getting suckered by propaganda that backfires. For example, hundreds of articles popped up in the English-language global media praising the Bangladesh government in the past year, but the authors were subsequently found to be completely fictitious. It was a massive disinformation campaign by fake experts and authors to fool the world and the country – except the campaign was so incompetent that the non-existence of these authors was discovered quite easily by AFP.
Or consider the time when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her son (also an official adviser to the PM) Sajeeb Wazed Joy, took part in an elaborate con run by a notorious Chinese fraudster Cary Yan in the USA in 2016. Mr Yan — later convicted for bribing elected officials in the strategically important Republic of the Marshall Island as part of a Chinese influence-gathering operation — set up a shell organization called World Organization of Governance and Competitiveness (WOGC) that managed to affiliate itself with the United Nations offices in the US. In September 2016, as part of WOGC’s glitzy public launching process, Mr Yan hosted an expensive ceremony where Sheikh Hasina was the keynote speaker and Sajib Wazed Joy was honoured with an ICT for Development Award. The whole thing has been included in school curriculum as a signal achievement of the regime!
Undaunted with the exposes and debacles, the regime is proceeding with a programme to train 600,000 activists to counter what they claim is Opposition propaganda.
Yet another embarrassment is highly likely.
Perhaps the Hasina regime’s apparatchik really does share an ideological affinity with far‑right European politicians and agents of the Chinese Communist Party. Or perhaps the regime is so incompetent that it can’t even organize propaganda properly, and corruption is so entrenched that there is no honour among thieves. Whatever it is, things are quite rotten in Sheikh Hasina’s Bangladesh.
In this age of social media, election campaigns in even mature democracies are plagued by disinformation and propaganda. Bangladeshi democracy has been described as “being on life support”, with the government clamping down on the Opposition ahead of the election. In this environment, disinformation campaigns – even if incompetent –can have very serious consequences.
Previous versions were published in the Road to Democracy and Scroll.
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