ICC Note:

The wave of religiously motivated violence that has struck Bangladesh since 2013 reached its height last week when Islamic radicals took hostages at a bakery in Dhaka and killed 20. Since the beginning of 2016, over 40 religious minorities, gay rights activists, secular bloggers, and academics have been murdered by militants claiming to be ISIS. This violence has shown that there is a battle being fought over Bangladesh’s identity. Although the country is 90% Muslim, Bangladesh has for the most part been a secular and tolerant country for religious minorities. Now with so much religiously motivated violence, many wonder whether this secular and tolerant society is a part of the past. 

7/7/2016 Bangladesh (ABC) – A steel hatch slides open, and a guard eyes reporter and crew carefully.

Inside the home, several locks slide open and Imran Sarkar peers cautiously around the door.

Challenging religion here is risky.

“Almost every day, I get death threats,” the atheist and secular campaigner explained.

“They’re spreading hatred, intolerance, extreme ideas,” he said of the extremists responsible.

Mr. Sarkar showed the ABC some of the messages he receives — by email, social media, even via text message.

“Here is a photograph — my photograph,” he said, pointing at a computer screen.

When police revealed the identities of last Friday’s restaurant attackers, Bangladeshis were gobsmacked to learn that they were sons of middle and upper class families — university students — radicalized online.

“The entire country is in shock,” editor of the Dhaka Tribune newspaper, Jafar Sohban, said of the attack in Dhaka, which left 20 people dead.

“We always thought that the terrorist attacks in Bangladesh have been disaffected youths with a madrasa background, no education, no future.”

One, Rohan Ibne Imtiaz, was even the son of a local leader of the ruling Awami League party, Imtiaz Khan Babul.

Nasima, a textile worker attending a vigil in Dhaka, said: “This is not our country actually, please stop this.”

Of Bangladesh’s 160 million people, 90 per cent identify as Muslim, but the country is politically secular and historically moderate.

Long before last Friday’s brutality grabbed world attention, however, that tradition of tolerance has been under pressure.

Since 2013, police estimate radical Islamists have carried out approximately 40 killings — targeting secularists, writers, academics and members of minority religions like Hindus and Christians.

Fear has driven many, like Mr. Sarkar, into seclusion, amid what is being seen as a battle for the country’s future.

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