by John Rossomando
Echoes of the Arab Spring surround the ouster of former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Washington supported Islamist parties and accused the sitting governments of suppressing the will of the people in both instances. As in the Arab Spring, many the leading organizations that opposed her rule were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Hasina has claimed the U.S. administration pushed her out because she would not cede control of an island in the Bay of Bengal to the American military. Voices across South Asia are saying her ouster had to do with corrupt Democratic Party cronyism and a sympathy for Islamists at the highest levels of the Biden administration.
Her fall has seen an outbreak of pogroms by Islamic extremists against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority, not unlike the orgy of violence against Christians and other religious minorities that followed the Obama administration’s Arab Spring effort.
The Biden administration increased attacks on Hasina upon coming to power in 2021, accusing her of being anti-democratic. It took the side of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami, which the former government accused of supporting genocidal actions in the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury warned in December that the Biden administration had become too close to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist allies Jamaat-e-Islami and the pro-caliphate Hefezat-e-Islam in the name of democratic change. This echoes the Obama administration’s support for Islamists during the Arab Spring.
“Biden administration’s recent actions may have severe consequences for Bangladesh, potentially turning it into a neo-Taliban state,” Choudhury wrote in the Jerusalem Post. “In recent years, the Biden administration has claimed to uphold democracy but has shown hostility towards Bangladesh’s ruling secularist Awami League government, while seemingly collaborating with the ultra-Islamist Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its jihadist allies, including Jamaat-e-Islami.”
Choudhury continued: “This approach is dangerously pushing Bangladesh towards a future reminiscent of a neo-Taliban state or even a caliphate.”
The BNP hired Blue Star Strategies, a D.C. lobby firm linked to Hunter Biden, to “to educate officials, policy influencers, and the media [in the United States] about the BNP and its commitment to free and fair elections” in 2018.
Hasina resigned on August 5 following weeks of violence. Her government blamed Jamaat-e-Islami and Chhatra Shibir, its student wing. The Bangladeshi government banned Jamaat-e-Islami on August 1, days before her resignation. Jamaat-e-Islami came into existence in 1975 and promotes the thinking of Islamist ideologue Maulana Maududi that calls for the replacement of all insufficiently Islamic governments with Islamic theocracies.
Hasina’s replacement, Muhammad Yunus, has deep ties to the Democratic Party and leveraged them for his own personal and political gain in the past. Yunus served as the BNP nominee in 1996 in a non-partisan interim government.
He met Monday with Jamaat-e-Islami representatives and discussed bringing justice or retribution against the former government.
Bangladesh’s anti-corruption agency indicted Yunus in June on charges of misusing funds from the worker’s welfare fund at Grameen Telecom, an organization he ran, and with money laundering.
Yunus has a long rivalry with his predecessor. Yunus won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microcredit and microfinance through Grameen Bank.
Yunus’s financial institution received significant funding from billionaire George Soros, according to the Yunus Centre. Grameen Foundation USA, the American branch of Yunus’s enterprise, received significant funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from former President Barack Obama in 2009.
Hasina formed the “Grameen Bank Commission” on May 16, 2012. It looked into Grameen Bank’s relationship with the Soros Economic Development Fund and also examined possible money laundering among Yunus-controlled entities. She accused him of “sucking blood from the poor.” Critics suspected that Hasina targeted Yunus due to jealousy and vengeance because he won the Nobel Peace Prize instead of her and he had attempted to get the Bangladeshi military to banish her. Yunus received the prize in part due to lobbying on his behalf by former President Bill Clinton.
Sen. Charles Grassley alleged in a 2017 letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Yunus’s companies had donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative and between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Grameen Bank began working with the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005.
Yunus had powerful friends in the U.S. government during the Obama administration. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressured Hasina and the Bangladeshi government to end its investigation into Yunus’s finances, not unlike President Joe Biden’s work to pressure the Ukrainian government to end its investigation of Burisma. Yunus’s businesses received $13 million in taxpayer funding from the State Department during Clinton’s tenure.
Hasina’s son, Sajeed Wazed, told congressional investigators that high-level State Department officials including USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah; U.S. Ambassadors to Bangladesh James Moriarty and Dan Mozena; and Deputy Chief Mission Jon Danilowicz had pressured him to get end the investigations into Yunus. Danilowicz threatened Wazed with an IRS audit unless he used his
Obama Secretary of State John Kerry sponsored legislation when he was a senator in 2007 to give Yunus the Congressional Gold Medal. Kerry protested the Bangladeshi government’s then reported effort to remove Yunus from his position at Grameen Bank in a Mar. 3, 2011 press release.
Hasina suspected prior to her ouster that the Biden administration planned to have Yunus replace her before she was forced out. It put pressure on Bangladesh to end corruption investigations into Yunus looking into alleged money laundering and tax issues. Democrats including former President Barack Obama called on Hasina to leave Yunus alone.
Just as during the Arab Spring, Yunus faces a situation where he enjoys weak domestic political backing. Like the caretaker governments during the Arab Spring, the interim government could give way to hardline Islamists such as those of Jamaat-e-Islami.
Geopolitically, Hasina’s fall strengthens China and weakens India.