Bangladesh’s year of barbarism
DHAKA, Bangladesh —There seems to be no end to the gruesome killings in Bangladesh. A 75-year-old Buddhist monk was found Saturday morning with his throat slit in a small monastery in the country’s remote southeast.
His daughter-in-law found his body at 5 a.m., when she went to bring him food.
Mong Shwe U Chak had lived alone in the monastery in hilly Bandarban district for the last two years, police said. His death bore the hallmarks of a spate of recent hacking deaths of secular Muslims and members of minority religious communities that have been blamed on radical Islamists.
Jyotirmoy Barua, a human rights lawyer who is close to the Buddhist community, told journalists that U Chak had received anonymous threats before he was killed.
“He had received death threats, but nobody took it seriously,” Barua said.
A police official in Naikkhangchhari, where the monastery is located, said authorities collected evidence from the site but did not have any suspects.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
Bangladesh’s government is facing growing criticism at home and abroad for the apparent inability of its law enforcement agencies to end the killings. At least 15 people have died in targeted attacks over the last year, including secular bloggers, foreign priests and aid workers.
In recent weeks, the pace of the bloodshed has accelerated.
This month, a Sufi Muslim religious leader was found hacked to death in a pool of blood in a mango grove in northern Bangladesh. That followed killings in previous weeks of a gay rights activist and a Hindu tailor, both of whom were fatally wounded with machetes.
Islamic State and Al Qaeda — rival Islamist extremist organizations that are jockeying for a foothold in the South Asian nation — have claimed responsibility for some of the previous slayings, although the government denies that either has a presence in Bangladesh.
Western diplomats are increasingly alarmed at the violence and at what they see as a lack of urgency from Prime Minister Sheik Hasina Wajed’s government to deal with the problem. Wajed has often blamed the violence on her political rivals, including the most powerful Islamist political party, and has continued a crackdown on the opposition that many believe is fueling an extremist backlash.
Last week, a former leader of the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami was hanged following his conviction by a special court that Bangladesh established to try suspects accused of war crimes during its 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan. Three other Jamaat leaders were also executed after what critics called unfair trials, leading to accusations that Wajed is using the court to target her political opponents.
Bangladesh, a country of 160 million, is overwhelmingly Muslim but until recently had not been seen as a hotbed of Islamist extremism. The economy has improved thanks to a large garment manufacturing sector, and the country has won praise for expanding access to healthcare, sanitation and other social needs.