Sadeq Khan and ‘Battle for Bangladesh’

We’re saddened, grieved and traumatized by the sudden demise of our peer journalist and columnist, Sadeq Khan, who had attained the stature of an immutable icon in journalism, and of the Weekly Holiday, since the paper’s inception in the 1960s.

We pray for his departed soul to rest in peace while our mission to dig up truths and analyze them shall continue; more so in deference to the memories of the deceased Enayetullah and Sadeq Khans, the veritable siblings and the duo who had catapulted the English language journalism in Bangladesh to its existential commendable height.

Amidst these hours of mourning, we find how realistically Sadeq Khan’s last article, Battle for Bangladesh (in last issue of Holiday), is playing out in all fronts. This is a battle for the soul of this nation; for democracy, good governance, rule of law and human rights. This is also a battle to uplift the fates of over forty millions adrift, dispossessed Bangladeshis languishing in the fringe to subsist and survive.

Sadeq Khan’s favourite theme for decades has centered on the fear of autocracy within, and intervention from without, that he feared would eat up the mosses of democratic aspirations and the embedded values of this 165 million-strong nationhood.

The latest melodrama relating to the arrest on May 15 of BNP’s joint secretary general, Aslam Chowdhury, is a perfect illustration of how mendacity, deflection, obfuscation and deception had combined to shape up the political landscape of Bangladesh into a hotbed of contention between regional and global powers.

The ongoing episodes constitute the theoretical constructs and the variables that are indispensible to sustaining any authoritarian regime. As the mass must be hoodwinked into believing what in reality is false, such a stratagem will keep playing out in coming days too.

The battle for Bangladesh is not for secularism or Islam per se; it’s about holding onto power by using such idioms, fluid perceptions, and dogmatic sensationalism as the pretexts to annihilate all forms of opposition against an un-representative, corrupt regime that is scared of undiluted public opinion to be the source of all political powers.

That’s why each damning story of the regime’s ill-doings has to be camouflaged by cooked up ill-doings of its perceived and real contestants for power. The latest saga of an Israeli-BNP collusion to upstage the government is no exception, as our investigation reveals.

The ruling AL was already stitching up deals with Israel long before Aslam Chowdhury’s visit to India and his picture-posed ‘conspiracy’ with a little known Likud party activist, Mendi Safadi, whose political profile didn’t transcend the bounds of being only an assistant/aide to a deputy minister of the Israeli cabinet.

Our investigation reveals Mendi Safadi is a former aide to a Druze Likud deputy cabinet minister, Ayoub Kara, and he does not hold any portfolio in the Likud party. Besides, for years now, Delhi has become the gateway to Bangladesh. It’s not a coincidence that Chowdhury was framed and invited to travel to India where the global Zionist apparatuses have entrenched interest and operational outlets. As per the blue print, Chowdhury was seduced and entrapped for a photo-op that could be propagated as BNP’s budding collusion with Israel’s secret service, Mossad, to overthrow an otherwise unrepresentative regime in Bangladesh.

The conspiratorial attribute of the theory, that aims to unseat the Hasina regime, is much more problematic. Israel being a solid democracy, the theory is flawed at the seams if not tagged to the desire of the Zionist nation to install democracy in Bangladesh, for which they have little interest.

Yet, such an unethical and deceptive stratagem was much needed to deflect a real story of the incumbent AL regime buying huge IT operation technology from a US-based Israeli firm, Verint, the market value for which is estimated to exceed US$2 billion.

The deal came to the attention of other global spy operatives in late 2015, and, according to Jimmy Johnson of global research.ca., the deal fashioned with the Israeli firm “aimed at enabling Bangladesh government to indulge in mass wire-tapping by using Unit 8200, which is the technology division of the Israeli military’s Intelligence Corps.”

A former Unit 8200 member, Idan Tendler, claimed in March 2015 that, “Instead of relying on outside research and development, the 8200’s technologists work directly with their ‘customers’ (the intelligence officers). All of the unit’s technology systems, from analytics to data mining, intercept and intelligence management, are designed and built in-house. Technologists sit side by side with their users on a daily basis to ensure that their ‘products’ meet the intelligence officers’ specific requirements.”

The above narrative not only exposes the unexpected opening up by the ruling AL of Bangladesh’s national security secrets to an Israeli firm, the project’s implementation requires military to military collaborations with the Israeli military.

More than one source had confirmed to the Holiday that the deal with the Israeli firm was brokered by the IT adviser to the government, on behalf of the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre (NTMC) that came into existence in 2010.

According to another source, the AL government had expanded its mass wire-tapping capability from 5,000 in 2010 to 50,000 by 2013, and wants to triple that capacity by using the Verint technology.

Although Verint had sold similar mass telecom surveillance systems to India, Mexico and to the USA, the firm was implicated in the USA, along with another Israeli firm, in the latest National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping scandal.

“In order to deflect public attention from this ongoing AL-Israel business and intelligence collaborations, Indian intelligence outfit R&AW arranged BNP leader Aslam Chowdhury’s visit and meeting in India with a Likud party operative and offered the Israeli and other media outlets the pictures taken of that meeting,” claimed a reliable source.

Such a conspiracy theory earned more credence when  a ruling party MP, Abdul Mannan, wrote in the Daily Sun on-May 14, only a day before Mr. Chowdhury’s arrest, that, “Mossad would very much like to enter Bangladesh with the help of Bangladesh’s leading political party BNP, and to this end a number of meetings were held between one of the Joint Secretaries of BNP, Aslam Chowdhury, in Calcutta, Delhi and London with a covert operative of Mossad, Mendi N Safadi, (who’s)a senior member of Israel’s Likud Party who overtly holds the post of the CEO of International Diplomacy and Public Relations in Israel with strong ties with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Mannan added, “Mossad’s two Bangladeshi agents, Shipan Kumar Basu and journalist Sanjib Chowdhury, who formerly worked with BNP mouthpiece the daily ‘Amar Desh’ and a private TV channel owned by a senior BNP leader were also present in these meetings. Basu is alleged to be a fulltime operative of Mossad in Bangladesh. In the meetings it was agreed that Mossad would help overthrow the present government of Sk. Hasina and once their government of choice is installed Bangladesh will open its doors for Israel and Mossad.”

This and other recent incidents show how alarmingly the battle for Bangladesh is shaping up and how clandestinely the battle lines are being drawn.  Had Sadeq Khan been alive today, he would have found a lot more interest in researching such a story, which is intrinsically related to Bangladesh’s national security; a subject he loved the most to dig up and disseminate to his beloved readers. This helpless nation will miss you, Sadeq Bhai.

Source: Weekly Holiday