Staff Reporter :
The diplomats could inform the government regarding the sanction on the RAB officials by the US treasury department, but experts believed that the government was solely responsible to handle the matter when the US authority and global rights groups continued to express concern over human rights violation by the Bangladesh’s elite force.
Within two years of RAB’s founding, international human rights organisations alleged that the RAB was engaged in unlawful killings and enforced disappearances. Reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International published in December 2006 and 2009 documented allegations and underscored the impunity enjoyed by the force.
In a 2010 court case in the United Kingdom, the British government faced challenges for its support of the RAB as leaked diplomatic cables revealed the involvement of the United States and United Kingdom in training the force. Calls for independent investigations into these allegations began in 2011, and in 2017 a UN body blasted the government for continued extra-judicial killings. Despite this, Dhaka continued denying the allegations while the incidences increased manifold.
Subsequently, some began to suggest that western countries should take punitive actions. In October 2020, ten US senators wrote a letter to then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of
Treasury Steven Mnuchin calling for sanctions against RAB officials. In the United Kingdom, the Guernica 37 Chambers law offices made a formal submission to the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in August 2021 recommending sanctions for 15 current and former senior RAB officers. On August 31, 2021, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission held a virtual hearing on enforced disappearances in Bangladesh where several witnesses suggested taking punitive action.
As a result, the US authority on December 10 last year imposed sanctions on RAB’s seven current and former top officials on the grounds of human rights abuses.
According to experts, the diplomats could do nothing in this regard as the US decision was made as per the report on Bangladesh’s worsening human rights situation.
Since the imposition of sanctions, the Bangladeshi government and the ruling party have been engaged in a habitual denial that the RAB has not violated human rights. The denial of blatant and ongoing human rights violations in the forms of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearance by state actors appeased the ruling party and its leaders, but it hardly convinced the international community, they observed.
They also said that sanction on RAB officials was a ‘political decision’ of the US government.
“Diplomat could play a role or inform the matter to the government. Extra-judicial killings or disappearance never happened without policy support. So, it is political decision to stop such human rights violation by an organised force,” M. Humayun Kabir, Bangladesh’s former ambassador to the United States of America told The New Nation yesterday.
Considering the importance, the diplomats should be more pro-active to shine the Bangladesh’s image abroad, he said.
Sanction on RAB officials have damaged the Bangladesh’s image abroad, SHUJAN secretary Badiul Alam Majumder said, adding that none can deny regarding disappearance and extra-judicial killings happened in Bangladesh.
“The USA has been publishing such reports every year on the basis of human rights situation in the country, so, diplomats responsibility was very little in this regard. But, the government has failed to address the global concern of rights violation in Bangladesh as well as failed to convince the US government to save the RAB officials from sanctioning,” Majumder said in reply to another query.
