July 14, 2015
In January, electoral disputes between Bangladesh’s two major political parties ignited a wave of political violence familiar to the country’s recent history. By the end of February, targeted attacks by supporters of the ruling Awami League (AL) and of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), AL’s political opposition—as well as by Bangladeshi police and paramilitary forces throughout the country—against opposition protesters killed more than 100 civilians.
This year’s crisis has ample precedent: the same time last year, a series of orchestrated attacks by Bangladeshi security forces, ruling party supporters, and opposition supporters against political opponents killed hundreds. The main source of disagreement between the two parties is AL’s 2011 abandonment of the interim “caretaker government,” an oversight body established by constitutional amendment in 1996 to lessen opportunities for large-scale electoral fraud. In recent months, violence against civilians has receded. But the recurrence and severity of violence between supporters of the country’s two major parties suggest the risk of targeted mass violence against civilians will grow as electoral instability persists.
The Early Warning Project’s statistical assessment currently places Bangladesh 12th among countries most at risk of a new episode of mass killing. The Project’s July summary of expert opinion pool forecasts, placed Bangladesh 24th on a list of 36 countries of primary concern. Country experts we interviewed said the two main factors affecting the risk of mass killing in Bangladesh are national-level power struggles between the AL and the BNP, and the civilian government’s growing accommodation of Bangladeshi security forces.
The Project uses an averaged set of three statistical models to produce a single best assessment of the risk of mass killing in a specific country. Often, specific features of one model drive a country’s risk of mass killing more than do the specific features of another model. One statistical model—the “bad regime” model—explains the risk of mass killing as a consequence of specific features, like authoritarian governance, of a country. The second—the “elite threat” model—explains the risk of mass killing as a consequence of threats, both real and perceived, against a country’s government. The third model, “random forest,” considers a combination of variables included in both preceding models. In Bangladesh, the first two models contribute almost equally to the risk of mass killing. This suggests multiple scenarios through which mass killing might occur there.
Mass violence against civilians has been a periodic feature of political jockeying between those in power in Bangladesh and their opposition since the country’s war of independence in 1971. Following a decade and a half of successive coup regimes, the transition to civilian rule in 1990 injected constitutional malfeasance and electioneering into the lifeblood of Bangladeshi democracy, according to NGO reports. Since then, Bangladeshi national elections have occurred with varying levels of procedural integrity. The rivalry between the AL and the BNP—and between their leaders, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia—has often amounted to a cycle of attempts to seize power, alter electoral procedures, and dispatch opposition officials to the political margins. It is this cycle that undergirds the country’s protracted political crisis and that has prompted the use of targeted violence against opposition leaders and civilians in recent years.
“Most violence witnessed in the context of Bangladeshi politics is based on issues of a national nature,” said Ali Riaz, professor and chair of politics and government at Illinois State University. Dr. Riaz said the unique national scope of the AL’s and BNP’s rivalrous political machines likely prompts a quicker and wider spread of targeted violence against civilians than might otherwise occur.
Murky relations between the AL government and the country’s security institutions, including the Bangladeshi army, intelligence chiefs, and paramilitary forces, create parallel variables that may heighten the risk of mass targeted violence against civilians. Governments since Bangladesh’s transition to civilian rule, rightly wary of new military interventions in domestic politics, have offered ever-greater commercial and political concessions to senior security officials. The current AL government has paired these concessions with military leadership purges intended to close ranks around the ruling party. The AL’s “carrot-and-stick approach,” as the International Crisis Group described it, has paradoxically entrenched the influence of Bangladeshi security forces and “coup-proofed” the AL regime. The AL’s concessions, however, have only reached the upper echelons of the country’s military command. In the unlikely scenario of a coup by disenfranchised junior officers, mass targeted violence against civilians by Bangladeshi military forces and paramilitary units is probable.
Each of these scenarios—future electoral violence, and the instability that might follow a military coup—will likely have the gravest consequences for Bangladesh’s religious and ethnic minority communities. Some of the gravest mass attacks against minority Hindu civilians have occurred in the wake of demonstrations against the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), which has tried and sentenced multiple former leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami party for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during the Bangladeshi independence war. Organizations like the Jamaat “can easily create a state of fear [against minorities] by attacking their land and businesses,” said Dr. Riaz. Attempts by Jamaat and its political allies to intimidate minorities and political opponents reveal accountability efforts like the ICT as a double-edged sword: while impunity for past atrocities allows violence to persist, actions organized to protest the ICT create new windows of atrocity risk.
As elsewhere, fear of Bangladeshi minority groups manifests itself in common expressions of intercommunal distrust, including rumor and disinformation. Discrimination against vulnerable minority populations like Bangladeshi Rohingya also suggests warning signs of mass atrocities more broadly, if not of mass killing. Though members of the Jamaat and its affiliates are the most frequent perpetrators, violence and discrimination against minority civilians span the ideological spectrum of Bangladeshi politics.
Few national sources of restraint exist without a durable resolution to the electoral crisis between the AL government and its BNP opposition. At a local level, however, experts observe that programs to restore intercommunal trust and counter disinformation may mitigate further targeted violence against minority communities. Local efforts to repair intercommunal trust may provide opportunities for broader collaboration amid an otherwise corrosive environment of political instability. But the risk for the most extreme scenarios of mass violence against civilians will likely remain.
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