Bangladesh is often portrayed as a place where women are victimised and subordinated by Islam. Fundamentalist outrage against writer Tasleema Nasreen has reinforced this image. But Bangladesh also has a very vibrant and strong women's movement.
Investigators suspect that some delegates of foreign Islamic organisations while visiting Bangladesh at different times in the past provided Islamist militants with financial and logistic supports without any government body monitoring their activities.
A WLUML networker comments that this is, step by step, what happened in Algeria with GIA forbidding music, etc..., GIA armed groups taking 'taxes' from villagers, controlling whole areas and ... scaring the official army and police.
Deep-rooted social conventions and a rise in Islamic extremism resulted in the deaths of thousands of women and children last year in Bangladesh, according to WLUML networkers.
Greater notice needs to be taken in the region of the creeping inroads being made by fanaticism in Bangladesh. Some recent developments there have an eerie resemblance to events in Pakistan.
The mayhem being perpetrated by Islamist extremists in Bangladesh is so widespread, and the threat of worse to come so real, that there is now a sense of crisis in the air. And it is time too.
