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GLOBAL
VIEW Meet Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. As these lines are being written,
Mr. Choudhury, a gadfly Bangladeshi journalist, is running for his life.
Assuming he survives till Thursday, he will face charges of blasphemy,
sedition, treason and espionage in a Dhaka courtroom. His crime is to have
tried to attend a writers' conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can
foster world peace. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Welcome to Bangladesh, a country the State Department's Richard Boucher
recently portrayed in congressional testimony as "a traditionally moderate
and tolerant country" that shares America's "commitment to democracy,
human rights and the rule of law." That's an interesting way to describe a
country that is regularly ranked as the world's most corrupt by
Transparency International and whose governing coalition, in addition to
the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia,
includes two fundamentalist Islamic parties that advocate the imposition
of Shariah law. There are an estimated 64,000 madrassas (religious
schools) in Bangladesh. The Ministry of Industries is in the hands of
Motiur Rahman Nizami, a radical Islamist with a reputation of a violent
past. In March the Peace Corps was forced to leave the country for fear of
terrorist attacks. Seven other journalists have also been brought up on
sedition charges by Ms. Zia's government, most of them for attempting to
document Bangladesh's repression of religious minorities.
But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that
Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury's. "When I began my newspaper
[the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the
well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and
especially against Israel," he says in the first of several telephone
interviews in recent days. "In Bangladesh and especially during Friday
prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and
Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those
words but to look at the world's realities."
By then, Mr. Choudhury's case had come to the attention of Congressman
Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), who intervened with Bangladesh's ambassador to
the U.S. to secure Mr. Choudhury's release on bail, though the charges
were never formally dropped. Help also came from Richard Benkin, a
Chicago-area activist who has taken up Mr. Choudhury's cause, and the
American Jewish Committee, which invited Mr. Choudhury to the U.S. in May
to receive its Moral Courage Award. But Mr. Choudhury says he decided to
forgo the trip after a government minister warned him, "If you go, it will
not be good for you."
In July, the offices of the Weekly Blitz were bombed by Islamic
militants. In September, a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case
continued, despite the government's reluctance to prosecute, on the
grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising
Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide. Last
week, the police detail that had been posted to the Blitz's offices since
the July bombing mysteriously vanished. The next day the offices were
ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people.
Over the weekend he lodged a formal complaint with the police, who
responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him. Now he's on the run,
fearing torture or worse if he's taken into custody.
Here's an answer: Bangladesh does not mean much strategically to the
U.S., except for the fact that it is home to some 120 million Muslims,
many of them desperately poor and increasingly under the sway of violent
religious notions imported from Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration,
which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh, has made a
priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and
cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified
himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the
run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the
administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what
America expects of its "moderate and tolerant" friends?
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.
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But that wasn't
the sentence meted to Mr. Choudhury. Following his arrest he was taken
into police custody and, as he tells it, blindfolded, beaten and
interrogated almost incessantly for 10 days in an attempt to extract a
confession that he was spying for Israel. He refused to offer one. He
spent the next 16 months in solitary confinement in a Dhaka jail, where he
was denied medical treatment for his glaucoma.
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