Bangladeshi Sex Blog
Rapheal Charlton
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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for all charges to be dropped against Asaduzzaman Noor, a 25-year-old Bangladeshi blogger held for the past three weeks for blog posts allegedly critical of Islam, and meanwhile supports the request for his release on bail that his lawyer will make in court today.
Hounded by radical Islamist groups and fearing for his life, Noor has been living in hiding in Bangladesh and India for the past year. A religious leader filed a complaint on 11 January 2017 accusing him of violating article 57 of the ICT Act.
Several Bangladeshi Islamist groups, including the biggest one, Hefazat-e-Islam, have said chaos will engulf Bangladesh if Noor is not sentenced to death. When his Indian visa expired, Noor flew to Dhaka on 25 December with a view to continuing to Nepal to seek refuge there, but border police arrested him at the airport and he has been held ever since.
After the ICT law was amended in 2013, the police began arresting citizen-journalists for hurting religious feeling. Four bloggers were arrested in the space of four days on the grounds that they had blasphemed in comments posted online. At the same time, at least 30 journalists and bloggers were attacked for criticizing Islamic fundamentalism.
Following calls for their deaths by extremist groups, a total of eight blogger and journalists were killed from February 2015 to April 2016. They include Niloy Neel, who was hacked to death in his Dhaka home in August 2015. In most of these cases, no one was ever convicted.
Ashamoni, wife of blogger Niloy Chakrabati, cries at her house in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Friday after her secular activist husband was hacked to death by suspected Islamist extremists. A.M. Ahad/AP hide caption
Niloy Chakrabati Neel, a Bangladeshi blogger who used the pen name Niloy Neel to criticize Muslim extremism, was hacked to death by a machete-wielding gang who broke into his apartment Friday. He is the fourth such social media activist to be killed in the South Asian country so far this year.
"They entered his room on the fifth floor and shoved his friend aside and then hacked him to death," Imran H. Sarker, head of the Bangladesh Blogger and Online Activist Network, or BOAN, tells Agence France-Presse.
Police and others carry the body of activist and blogger Niloy Chakrabati, aka Niloy Neel, downstairs after he was slain in his upstairs apartment. Abir Abdullah/EPA/Landov hide caption
According to The Associated Press: "Hours after the assault, Ansar-al-Islam, which intelligence officials believe is affiliated with al-Qaida on the Indian subcontinent, sent an email to media organizations claiming responsibility for the killing and calling the blogger an enemy of Allah. The authenticity of the email could not be independently confirmed."
NPR's Julie McCarthy says that Sarker called Neel "a voice for the oppressed" who advocated women's rights as he denounced extremism. Sarker added that Chakrabati had been on a hit list and had been "targeted on social media" by Islamist fundamentalists. The three other bloggers slain this year were similarly targeted.
As we reported in February, Bangladeshi-born U.S. citizen Avijit Roy, described as a science writer and blog site moderator, was also hacked to death by a pair of attackers who assaulted him on a Dhaka street. The following month, 26-year-old Rahman was killed. In May, so was Das, 32. All were hacked to death by attackers in crimes in which Islamist groups subsequently claimed responsibility.
"More than 150 writers, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel and Colm Tibn, signed a letter condemning the series of fatal attacks and calling on the country's government 'to ensure that the tragic events ... are not repeated'.
"All of the victims had been active on social media, criticizing the extremist Muslim ideologies that have gained strength in Bangladesh in recent years or arguing in favour of progressive causes. On his Facebook account, [Neel] frequently wrote in favour of women's rights.
The murder of Roy, an atheist who published a popular and provocative blog, marks an escalation by Islamist militants for control of Bangladesh. Religious fundamentalists are competing daily with secular government officials for power in the majority-Muslim country, one of the world's largest and poorest democracies.
In an interview, Sajeeb Wazed, the son of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said his mother offered private condolences to Roy's father. But the political situation in Bangladesh is too volatile for her to comment publicly, he said.
"We are walking a fine line here," said Wazed, an informal consultant for the ruling party, the Awami League. "We don't want to be seen as atheists. It doesn't change our core beliefs. We believe in secularism," he said. "But given that our opposition party plays that religion card against us relentlessly, we can't come out strongly for him. It's about perception, not about reality."
"We are shocked at the killing of Avijit Roy and have taken all measures to find the culprits responsible for this heinous act," said spokesman Shamim Ahmad. "Bangladesh is committed to fighting and ending extremism in all its forms."
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation deployed agents to Dhaka and is working with Bangladesh authorities, an FBI spokeswoman said. Agents met most recently with Ahmed in the United States on Friday, Ahmed said.
Wazed said Roy's death came during a three-month period when 160 people died in bus bombings in Dhaka, and shortly before explosions near the prime minister's motorcade. Wazed blamed political opponents who, he said, seek to destabilize his mother's government.
"To us, Avijit Roy is no different than the 160 others that have been killed," he said. "We want to bring all the killers to justice. I understand why [his wife] is upset. My mother has been targeted by these same fundamentalists."
Roy, 43, wrote eight books and moderated a blog called Mukto-Mona (Free Thinker). To some, he was a provocative atheist, but his blog also reflected a strong belief in the value of civil debate, said his stepdaughter, Trisha Ahmed, 18. "My dad was building a community of secularists who thought rationally," she said. "He wanted to start a conversation and see where it would go."
Roy was a young child during the formative years that followed Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. The war had roots in colonialism and religion. Although Pakistan and Bangladesh shared neither a border nor common language, they had been joined as one in 1947, as the British departed the subcontinent. The demarcation was largely based on one factor: most who lived in Pakistan and Bangladesh were Muslim.
Bangladesh was founded as a secular country, but U.S. and Bangladesh officials said the Islamic fundamentalist influence began to increase in the 1990s as wealthy Arabs began building hundreds of religious schools. The same officials say militant influence also increased as waves of Bangladeshis who had moved to the Persian Gulf as laborers returned home with stricter Muslim views.
A threat
In 2002, while in Singapore, Roy noticed a blog post from a U.S. woman who wrote of religion, "I don't understand how people can believe in fairy tales." It was Rafida Ahmed, who would become his wife.
"A lot of people attacked me online for that post," she recalled. "I was a tech manager in Atlanta at the time, a single mom. I was intimidated and didn't respond. The next day, someone named Avijit Roy is defending me."
They dated long distance for years, and he reluctantly moved from Singapore to Atlanta in 2006: Ahmed would not leave the United States until her daughter completed high school. Roy held a doctorate in biomedical research, but found it easier to get a lucrative job and a U.S. visa as a software architect, his wife said.
"We knew that anything can happen in a country like that, and we took precautions," Ahmed said. "There was only one threat against him but we didn't take it seriously. Otherwise, we wouldn't have gone."
Final days
Roy was a star attraction at the book fair. On a tranquil morning before his murder, he outlined a book he planned to write with Ahmed, and took her on a rickshaw tour of his childhood neighborhood. He exchanged Facebook messages with his stepdaughter, sharing in her excitement at attending a U.S. college lecture by the feminist Gloria Steinem.
After Roy's murder, a Dhaka man who had posted online threats was detained but not charged. Dhaka police have said they believe the Roy and Rahman murders were committed by the militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team.
Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.
First, women constitute a significant percentage of frontline workers. They made up 90.5% of Bangladeshi nursing professionals in 2017. Multiple studies are finding that women face more domestic violence during lockdowns, thereby suffering from increased physical and mental traumas. Lockdowns are also associated with an increase in the already high burden of care work that women carry, especially likely given the patriarchal social structures in Bangladesh. Finally, women are often in inferior positions in the labour market, relative others, and therefore more likely to be impacted by the economic fallout.2
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