03/09/2021
Hasina’s Awami League convincingly won the December 2008 polls and has now presided over Bangladesh’s Golden Decade of Development.
But all through this decade, beginning with the World Bank’s dillydallying over financing the country’s mega infrastructure project, the Padma river railroad bridge, to rattling her regime on other counts, the US has been ill at ease with the present Bangladesh government.
Even as the western media lauds Hasina for her leadership in ensuring an amazing economic turnaround to promoting gender rights, inclusive distributive justice and fight against terrorism, the US has been less than supportive of the Hasina regime.
In 2013, as its envoy Dan Mozena openly advocated the need for a change of government, the US suspended GSP facility for Bangladesh exports to inconvenience the Hasina government. The list is long and US’ National Endowment for Democracy’s backing for overseas-based Bangladesh specific media outlets ceaselessly attacking the Hasina government with fake news is just one of them.
Jeff Richelson (US Intelligence Community) does expose on the NED as an US intelligence funded institution to ensure regime change. So the US deep state never quite gave up an attempt to topple Hasina.
The recent human rights stink by US Congressmen coincides, not accidentally, with Kamal Hossain’s call for an alliance to oust Sheikh Hasina. Interestingly, his son-in-law David Bergman’s Netranews is funded by the NED. The regime change architecture is well and truly in place.
Some Western or Bangladesh-based apologists conveniently overlook the ‘foreign element’ in backing local radical Islamist forces and cry wolf over tough policing as an unforgivable violation of human rights.
Even as the hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan paved the way for a Taliban takeover, some US Congressmen resumed needling of the Hasina government over ‘forced disappearances’ and ‘extra-judicial murders’ of regime opponents. The UK High Commissioner joined in by painting Bangladesh as a corrupt country where doing business was not easy.
The US and its allies, beacon light of Western democracy, sponsored the counter-revolution in both Afghanistan and Bangladesh in the 1970s to prevent a socialist takeover, ending up ruining one and failing to ruin the other
