Published: September 06, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
Crossfire War: Dhaka - RAW Uses Ford Foundation in Anti-Bangladesh Campaign
By Willard Payne
Night Watch: DHAKA - As recent news has been indicating there are now in action a number of attempts to destabilize Bangladesh. A Bangladesh language paper, the Daily Manavzamin has published the details of an intelligence report, from 2002, warning of a conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Khaleda Zia.
The article mentions that 12 people met at a secret training location on the India-China border and took commando training. Implicated in the report is a former leader of the Awami League, Shamim Osman. It implies that agents of the country’s intelligence service, NSI (National Security Intelligence) are active in the "neighboring country" where its intelligence service recruited and trained several criminals to carry out the attempt.
Quoting the report, "Several diehard criminals of a particular political party recruited a number of terrorists associated with arms smuggling syndicate and performed a grenade throwing exercise against a truck at a remote place of the neighboring country." The report accuses India’s intelligence agency RAW (Research & Analysis Wing) for the grenade attack and other explosions.
"Since the Udichi blast in Jessore district almost all terror activities inside the country have been carried out by the powerful intelligence agency of the neighboring country." The grenade attack on the Awami League rally killed 23 people.
Another article again accuses India’s RAW of using a Ford Foundation fellowship to pursue its Anti-Bangladesh media campaign.
The article concentrates on an Indian intelligence operative, Jaideep Saikia, who it says was trained at the Rashtriya Indian Military College in Dehra Dun. Ostensibly he conducted research work on supposed Islamic militancy in northeast India under a Ford Foundation fellowship awarded in 2003.
But in reality such accusations are reported daily in India’s electronic and print media and gives respectability to New Delhi’s claim that Muslims from Bangladesh deliberately infiltrate into India’s northeast Assam province either to form a new Muslim state or to merge it with Bangladesh. The same problem India has been encountering for years with Kashmir-Pakistan in India’s north.
Such analysis is one of the reasons there are those in New Delhi who regard Bangladesh as a greater threat than Pakistan. In the meantime there are no guarantees that Beijing would refuse to help both Islamabad and Dhaka during the next war with India, in spite of the diplomatic overtures being made by both New Delhi and Beijing in the name of regional stability. Though reports like the one compiled by Saikia could be used as a basis for India to invade Bangladesh, in the name of security, New Delhi’s fears could have some basis in reality.
I suspect Tehran has entered the conflict using the subtle approach of the 400+ bombs it exploded around Bangladesh and in the diplomatic community of Dhaka on August 17. It is no secret Islamic militancy has been spreading in Bangladesh, as in every other Islamic country from Morocco to Indonesia ever since the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Their aim is basically twofold: spread the faith and defeat the enemies of Islam, one of whom is India, who used to encourage the war with Pakistan, which is why New Delhi ignored the warning from their first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru shortly before his death in 1964 on the dangers of Hindu extremism.
Tehran has some very concrete economic objectives, in the name of the Jihad, and any dispute, real or imagined, serves the purposes of the crisis driven Council of Guardians. Any crisis concerning Islamic people anywhere Tehran can blow it up, intensify it and use it as a unifying influence against the world around them.
Any military success or weakening of an economic rival such as the West, Russia or India serves Tehran’s economic agenda.
Night Watch Information Service
http://www.crossfirewar.com
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* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
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