Bangladesh has become ‘one of the most dangerous places on Earth to suggest in public that gay people might have rights or that Islam might not have all the answers’, according to an article in The Economist.
The publication adds:
Bangladesh’s supposedly secular government seems keener to denounce the dead than to catch their killers.
Since April eight people deemed anti-Islamic have been slaughtered.
After the murder of Xulhaz Mannan, editor of Roopbaan, a gay-rights magazine, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, above, said:
Our society does not allow any movement that promotes unnatural sex.
Those who silence secular voices with steel are seldom caught. Liberals complain of a culture of impunity. A surviving colleague of Mannan said:
We are very worried about our lives. Things are not getting better. If the government doesn’t support us, naturally the police won’t support us, either.
On April 14, police prevented Mannan from organising a “rainbow rally” and arrested several of his supporters. Mannan had argued that if more gay people in Bangladesh were open about their sexuality, their neighbours would learn to accept them. Eleven days later half a dozen men posing as couriers knocked on his door, carrying a parcel full of machetes. They slashed him and a friend to death.
The killers are highly motivated and well organised. Some appear to have been inspired by the triumphal snuff videos of Islamic State. The government accuses opposition parties of being behind the campaign of terror, but offers little evidence to support this charge.
Other victims include Rezaul Karim Siddique, a professor who celebrated indigenous music and literature. He was all but beheaded on his way to work. Nazimuddin Samad, a young blogger who criticised Islamism, was hacked and shot to death on the street by men shouting “Allahu akbar!”
Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister, has likened slain bloggers’ writing to “porn”.
Maruf Rosul, a blogger and secular activist, says he gets death threats all the time. They say things like:
You are an atheist pig. We will kill you.
Those making the threats cannot be identified since they use fake Twitter accounts or make phone calls from encrypted sources over the internet.
Last night I got a threat on [my] mobile [phone] from a Middle East number. This is common.
Rosul admits to feeling afraid, but says he is determined to:
Keep fighting for a society based on pluralism and equal rights.