West pushing Bangladesh to Wahhabism

Dreadful conditions for workers in factories producing goods for the West, and plans for the US Seventh Fleet’s relocation make fertile ground for anti-Americanism in Bangladesh, which may see the country falling into the hands of radical Islamists.

The death toll has been rising in the world’s worst garment industry tragedy. I’ve been
thinking about the last time I was in Bangladesh, a nation that is
now the world’s second-largest clothing producer after China and
one also in the news for deadly Islamist protests.

Back then, I witnessed something that had seemed emblematic of the
neo-colonial status of Bangladesh. After a harrowing journey to the
countryside where the poverty was sub-Sub-Saharan, I found myself
on the top of an office building in the capital, Dacca. Garish U.S.
pop music was blaring out of the nightclub’s speakers and the
lounge area was packed with U.S. military servicemen, mostly U.S.
Navy. As a private went to get a Long Island Iced Tea, two giggling
Bangladeshi teenagers swiped the military walkie-talkie he left on
the sofa and ran off to the bathroom. Later they regaled me with
the story that they had screamed “All soldiers back to
base!” into the communication device, before dismantling it,
piece by piece. They may have liked the U.S. dollar injection into
the local economy but they didn’t like the presence of U.S.
servicemen. Americans have never really ever left Bangladesh
whether their presence be through crippling Bretton Woods
institutions based in Washington, multinational garment brands or
covert killing.

I was in Bangladesh in the 1990s, when the demonstrations in the
cities of this nation of around 150 million were held by the
Communist Party and trade unions, desperately looking for social
justice. Putting faces to appalling statistical human development
indicators was easy. To me, the slums of Mumbai looked rich after
Dacca. As for the fact that Bangladesh now beats India in some
development indicators – as the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has
noted – that fact only emphasises how badly India is run: not how
well Bangladesh is doing. You can tell things are bad in Bangladesh
because The Economist magazine and the World Bank have until very
recently been lauding governance there.

Things have changed in Bangladesh. For a start, the Communist Party
headquarters in Dacca has just been torched as a quarter of a
million Bangladeshis, around the country, marched against
secularism and around fifty were killed in the ensuing

This article originally appeared on : RT