Bangladesh's Lurking Terror
It has been just two months since my father was killed in an act of political terrorism. He had traveled from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to address a public meeting in the northeastern part of the country on Jan. 27. Hundreds of people had gathered to hear him speak. As he left the auditorium, without any police protection, a series of grenades exploded.
My father was badly hurt, but despite the frantic requests of my mother and many of his colleagues in the hours after the attack, the government did not provide him with helicopter transport to medical facilities in Dhaka. His ambulance ran out of gas as it raced toward a hospital, and he bled to death. Four other opposition party members also died in the attack.
My father's name was Shah A.M.S. Kibria and he was a renowned public figure in Bangladesh; he had served as finance minister and foreign secretary, as well as undersecretary-general of the United Nations. At the time of his death, his party was out of power, and he was serving as a member of the opposition in Parliament and as a newspaper columnist. In recent years, he had become a highly vocal critic of the sharp rise of militant Islamist extremism and state-sponsored political violence in Bangladesh.
Though it's gotten very little attention in the United States, his assassination has plunged Bangladesh into a political crisis reminiscent of what happened in Lebanon in the wake of the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Bangladesh, as in Lebanon, people from all walks of life have taken to the streets to express their outrage at the brutal killing and their conviction that the government is implicated in it. Our family, like Hariri's family, is demanding an international investigation. But unlike Lebanon, the Bangladesh government -- an alliance of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami -- has shown no interest in cooperating.
What prevails today in Bangladesh is a climate of impunity for terrorists, fostered by the apathy of the government and its repeated claims that there is no terrorism problem. And so those who wish to hurl grenades at members of the opposition or to bomb secular cultural events or to club to death progressive writers and intellectuals may do so without fear of prosecution. Music festivals, movie theaters and even a Valentine's Day reception have all been the scenes of recent attacks.
