Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who lost power on August 5 following month-long violent street protests in Bangladesh, formulated her foreign policy based on her instincts and perceptions rather than sound diplomatic analyses. On her team, there had been hardly anyone whom she could rely on, especially regarding her dealings with America. Her understanding of how things work in Washington came mostly from decades-old views prevalent in the region and her interactions with Americans and Bengalis living in the United States.
Among her senior advisers with knowledge of inner workings of the United States was Gowher Rizvi, who taught at Harvard, worked as an academic administrator at the University of Virginia and for the Ford Foundation in India. But he remained busy tending to Hasina's top foreign affairs priority – keeping India in good humour.
The prime minister appointed Rizvi her international affairs adviser to keep a direct link with India bypassing the foreign office where her wishes got buried in bureaucratic logjam. Before visiting New Delhi in 2010, Hasina asked him to open a separate channel to the giant neighbour. This “prime ministerial channel” was unknown to anyone in Bangladesh outside the prime minister's office. Bangladesh's foreign ministry was unaware of Rizvi's activities, as was the Indian High Commission in Dhaka.
As for the United States, Hasina remained suspicious of its intentions. She perceived America to be hostile to her. Her suspicion dated to her father's assassination in 1975 in a bloody coup. She believed deep down that Washington was involved in the killing of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's founder. During a two-hour talk in 1991, she aired her views to then US ambassador William Milam. She was then opposition leader and wanted to improve her image with Americans. She asked Milam whether America would oppose her becoming Bangladesh's prime minister.
Milam wanted to discuss the presence of the US Peace Corps in Bangladesh, in light of a pending visit of the Peace Corps director, Paul Coverdell, to Dhaka. In 1978, a Peace Corps agreement was signed by the Ziaur Rahman government, but a Peace Corps programme was never created, because of the negative reaction of the opposition parties, including Hasina's Awami League.
Hasina avoided the Peace Corps issue. Instead, she asked whether America was against her, noting there were rumours in Bangladesh that Washington opposed her or her party's coming to power.
The envoy replied that America did not take sides among political parties in any country. America would work positively with any government elected by the people of Bangladesh. Milam felt irritated by Hasina's comment. He fumed there were small elements of her party and of the leftist parties with which the Awami League was aligned had a penchant “toward a knee-jerk anti-Americanism.”
She responded that there was still a feeling among some members of her party's cadre that the United States was somehow implicated in the assassination of her father. Hasina said she had taken a great risk when she visited the United States for the first time in the mid-1980s. She had been criticised loudly by many members of her party as well as other parties for doing business with Americans. She said the United States should have worked harder to rebut these allegations in the early years after they occurred.
She mentioned that in part the anti-American cast of some Awami League workers might also stem from Washington's perceived proclivity to work with anti-democratic forces, such as the previous regime in Bangladesh. Hasina continually threw the Ziaur Rahman government into the anti-democratic forces.
Towards the end of the meeting, the envoy suggested that if Hasina were to become prime minister America would work closely with her. When he said that she might be prime minister, she lifted her eyes to the ceiling and said, “God help me,” implying very strongly that she was perfectly prepared.
Hasina felt misled by US
There had been yet another event that caused Hasina to question US intentions towards her. Back in the mid-1980s, neither the Awami League nor the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the two major opposition parties, wished to take part in an election or to do anything that might give legitimacy to the military regime of General H.M. Ershad, who assumed power in 1982. Ershad was mounting efforts to return to constitutional government under him.
The Unites States was interested in fostering constitutional government. So the US embassy in Dhaka urged all political parties to participate in the political process. Ambassador Howard Schaffer had a trusting relationship between the embassy and the government as well as the embassy and the opposition parties. Both the major opposition parties, however, thought the Americans were in Ershad’s camp.
“In addition, the leader of the Awami League believed that the US government was particularly opposed to her party. Indeed, some times in her darker moments, Hasina felt that the assassination of her father in 1975 was in part due to our involvement,” according to Schaffer, who was in Dhaka until 1987.
Still he managed to develop personal relationships with both Khaleda Zia, chief of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and Hasina, leader of the Awami League. This helped him persuade them that the US government was not favouring Ershad, despite carrying on proper diplomatic contacts with him.
One of the things the envoy did to support a return to constitutional processes was to persuade the Awami League to participate in the parliamentary elections in 1986. Schaffer proceeded with this very quietly against the advice of his political counsellor, who thought that the ambassador was taking too active a role.
He never cleared his intentions with the State Department; he felt that, given the trust the Awami League had in him and his knowledge of the political situation in Bangladesh, he could quietly lobby for its participation in the elections. The Awami League did participate in the polls, although the BNP did not.
The 1986 elections were seriously marred by fraud, giving rise to a very interesting situation on election day. As election results began to come in from the districts to the Election Commission headquarters, early indications were that the opposition was doing very well. Then, all of a sudden, the commission suspended counting for 24 hours. When counting resumed, the tide turned in favour of the ruling party. Hasina angrily made public her party’s displeasure.
Hasina expressed her dissatisfaction to Schaffer and asked him to do something about it. He could do nothing to get the election results changed. He urged her to make the best of it and to participate in parliament. After his departure, the Awami League withdrew from parliament. Hasina felt the United States had betrayed her.
Hasina's displeasure with America resurfaced many times since then. On September 29, 2005, she proposed a “regional anti-American alliance” during a meeting with India's opposition leader, L.K. Advani, in New Delhi. Hasina called for unity among India, Pakistan and Bangladesh so that “they could effectively prevent the US from dictating policies of developing countries.”
Since her release from prison in June 2008, however, Hasina had been uniformly positive and reflected her desire to forge strong ties with the United States before her return to power for the second time. She had been saying all the right things to America. When Hasina returned to power in 2009, things started to roll in different directions.
Soon after she began her second term, she faced a brutal rebellion by the paramilitary border guards, the Bangladesh Rifles. Her handling of the insurrection, which resulted in killings of many ranking military officers, generated a strong reaction within the military.
To ease the tension she announced massive initiatives to develop the military as a modern force and spelled out government plans to further expand the armed forces and increase the numbers of officers. She opened up the purse strings for military spending, making Bangladesh the second largest arms importers in Asia after India.
On January 30, 2014, judges sentenced to death 14 people, including Motiur Rahman Nizami, a leader of the theocratic Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party and former cabinet member under Khaleda Zia. He had been accused of smuggling arms to the United Liberation Front of Assam, a separatist outfit seeking to turn the northeastern Indian state into a sovereign nation through an armed struggle, in 2004. Nizami was also sentenced for crimes committed during Bangladesh's independence war in 1971. He was among the several top pro-Islamic leaders condemned to death for war-related atrocities.
These death sentences were part of the government’s bid to maintain India’s support for the Awami League. Hasina was dismayed by the prominence of Islamist groups in providing educational and social safety nets for the poor. Bangladesh's acute political violence and a dysfunctional political system gave a disproportionate influence to Islamist groups allied to the BNP. She felt it was time to crush the pro-BNP theocratic parties. In these efforts, she had a strong backer, India, which had been on its toes because of what it believed to a rise in Islamic extremism.
New Delhi, which regarded the BNP as anti-Indian and pro-Chinese, was backing Hasina against international and domestic criticism. China did not want to strain relations with Bangladesh. It had also accepted the Awami League administration as legitimate.
The United States, however, had been applying concerted pressure on Hasina. In 2014, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Nisha Desai Biswal, the assistant secretary of state, reiterated Washington’s call for new elections in Bangladesh. Biswal depicted the United States as worried about the plight of garment workers. Hasina dismissed Washington's concerns as political moves intended to punish her.
Washington had no concern for garment workers or democracy. As Biswal indicated in her speech, Bangladesh was of “strategic importance” to the United States. Washington wanted to undermine Dhaka’s economic, trade and defence relations with China, as part the Obama administration’s “rebalancing” to Asia to isolate and militarily encircle China.
Bangla-US relations turned really sour after 2009. Ambassador Dan Mozena told reporters in Dhaka: “The US interaction with the sitting government is not business as usual.” This was exacerbated by Washington’s efforts to exploit the turmoil for its own purposes as it sought to curb China’s influence in the region.
World Bank, Padma Bridge saga
Added to all this was the Padma Bridge loan controversy. Bangladesh had been working for years to build a bridge over the river Padma to link Dhaka with the southern part of the country. The World Bank had agreed to lend $2 billion toward its construction. When Hasina was busy with her fight against Grameen Bank chief Muhammad Yunus, now de facto prime minister of Bangladesh, the World Bank cancelled the loan, alleging a bribery scandal involving her family members.
Hasina said Yunus influenced the bank. “He (Yunus) and the editor of a renowned newspaper in our country went to meet the World Bank president,” she told parliament. “The World Bank stopped funding the Padma Bridge after all of them, including America's foreign secretary Hillary Clinton, lobbied for it.” Both Yunus and editor Mafuz Anam of The Daily Star denied the charge.
Hasina might be justified in her belief that Washington opposed her. In February 2019, a bipartisan group of six influential US congressmen asked the Trump administration to address “threats to democracy” in Bangladesh. They urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “take action.” Earlier, a top Pentagon commander said Hasina “is trying to achieve a de-facto one-party rule.”
Washington considered Bangladesh strategically important. US Indo-Pacific Command chief Admiral Philip S. Davidson told a House Armed Services Committee on February 12, 2019: “Military-to-military engagement with Bangladesh fits into a broader strategy and commitment to uphold an international, rules-based order in the vital Indo-Pacific region and contributes to building a regional security framework.”
The lingering suspicion of the US role in Mujib's assassination, coupled with continual pressure on Hasina to accommodate the BNP and Washington's support for Yunus, convinced the prime minister that America remained intrinsically hostile to her. She bowed to the US diktat during her initial years as Bangladesh's ruler, but since India put its weight behind her defying Washington, Hasina felt safe enough to ignore America.
(This is an excerpt from B.Z. Khasru's upcoming book, One Eleven, Minus Two, Prime Minister Hasina's War on Yunus and America, which will be published shortly by Rupa Publications, New Delhi. A US-based journalist, Khasru is the author of Myths and Facts Bangladesh Liberation War: How India, US, China and USSR Shaped the Outcome, and The Bangladesh Military Coup and the CIA Link.)