Why is Bangladesh burning?
October 20, 2024: If you think you’ve been told everything that can be told about the crisis in Bangladesh during last summer, you need to read this report carefully. This is perhaps the only report that’ll tell you the real reason why Bangladesh was burning and continues to be in a state of quiet instability.
Here’s the root cause of the turmoil. The South Asian country is in a complete mess because it is caught in the crossfire of a major international war. It’s not a war being fought with bombs and bullets. It’s a strategic and territorial war involving three global superpowers – the US, China, and Russia.
The war between these three superpowers is not new. It’s been happening at various flashpoints around the world. What’s new is that they’ve targeted Bangladesh as the latest flashpoint – the latest battleground.
For the first time after months of chaos and uneasy silence, you’ll get in this report a clear picture of what really happened in Bangladesh. This article will clear the smoke once and for all. It will explain to you how the little country is being pulled apart by the three different global forces.
What you will read in this report is something you didn’t get from the mainstream media, from the so-called experts, and from government mouthpieces. So, let’s get started with what’s actually been going on in Bangladesh.
Dots to connect
Let me narrate to you a timeline of certain events. Events that appear to be unconnected. But once you connect the dots, a clear wider picture emerges.
We will start with the ongoing Ukraine War. You’re wondering what the Russia-Ukraine War has got to do with the Bangladesh crisis, right? Yes, it’s the war in Ukraine that lies at the root of what’s been tearing Bangladesh apart.
In February 2022, Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine to defy US hegemony, launching a bitter military war that is still raging. That was when the writing was on the wall for South Asia – especially Bangladesh, Myanmar, and India’s northeast region.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine signalled the arrival of a third major power on the global stage. Till that point, the world was caught in the crossfire of a strategic global war between the US and China, the two biggest empires of modern times. But with the Ukraine War, Russia jumped into the boxing ring as the third ambitious superpower of our times.
As Russia carried out the invasion of Ukraine, an ally of the US, the government in Moscow decided to step up its presence in South Asia as well. Already a diplomatic friend of India for a very long time, Russia now turned towards Bangladesh and decided to turn it into its new partner in South Asia.
Why Bangladesh?
Why did it start targeting Bangladesh? Because now that it was swelling in confidence, it wanted to counter the influence of both China and America right next to China’s belly in eastern South Asia. A typical hallmark of hegemonic and imperialist tendency.
Many people are under the wrong impression that China and Russia are dedicated allies. They’re actually not. On some fronts, they do work together, such as countering the US military and boycotting the American dollar in order to blunt US hegemony. But on many other fronts, Beijing and Moscow are bitter rivals, constantly plotting to bring each other down, diplomatically and economically.
So, after Russia successfully snubbed the US in its proxy war in Ukraine, it turned towards Bangladesh. The new Russian plan was simple – let’s turn Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina into our good friend. Moscow went ahead with that idea and forged a strong new friendship with the Awami League government led by Hasina. All this was happening since early 2023, a year after the Ukraine War started.
Hasina’s growing friendship with Russia since 2023 has only been covered mildly by the mainstream media. Her Awami League party, which was in power at that time, was starting to engage in multiple projects with Vladimir Putin’s government Moscow. In the build-up to the general election in Bangladesh in January 2024, Moscow had openly supported Awami League.
In October 2023, Russia announced that it will supply nuclear fuel for an atomic energy power plant in Rooppur area of Bangladesh. Soon after the development, the US government expressed anguish at the blossoming Dhaka-Moscow partnership. Around that time, the US government decided that it would start favouring Hasina’s political rival, Khaleda Zia, who headed the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party).
Hasina angered America in November 2023 as well. In a surprise development, a fleet of Russian warships arrived on the shores of Bangladesh and docked at Chittagong port at that time, sparking a buzz. It was clearly a signal to the US by both Bangladesh and Russia – that they were strong allies.
In fact, while Hasina is now in India, her party has been exploring the option of getting asylum for her in Russia. Awami League has been trying hard to work out such a deal even as a Bangladeshi court recently issued an arrest warrant against her.
Triangular tensions
This newfound Russia-Bangladesh friendship made both China and America extremely uneasy. China has already been struggling and battling, trying to keep the US out of its vicinity. South China Sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet – America has been trying to militarily surround and choke China for the past several years. The last thing China wants now is a fight with another superpower in its backyard, which is Russia.
So, for tactical reasons, Beijing decided to change its stance on Dhaka. The Chinese government decided it would no longer support Hasina as PM. Instead, it changed track and started favouring Khaleda Zia, Hasina’s rival. If you dig deep, you’ll find detailed accounts of Chinese agents collaborating with Pakistani intelligence to support the protests in Bangladesh.
What came next was China’s spectacular decision to publicly snap ties with Hasina. In recent months, Beijing started openly distancing itself from the Awami League government in Dhaka. China has generally been so upset with Hasina’s growing proximity towards Russia that it didn’t mind publicly shaming her during her last few months as Bangladesh PM.
In July, a month before the protests began in Dhaka, Hasina went to Beijing to beg for grants and loans. It is something that she shouldn’t have done as a country’s leader. Taking foreign loans means you’re signing away your country’s economic freedom to international players. So, Hasina went to Beijing begging for money with strings attached. But China unceremoniously cut short her trip and asked her to leave the country. She was openly humiliated.
It is important to note here Hasina and and her party, while being targeted, don’t deserve much sympathy either because of Awami League’s poor track record in managing Bangladeshi society and its economy.
America’s hawk eye
Let’s now move to the role of the US in this whole episode. As Bangladesh PM, Hasina used to repeatedly say that the Americans had been wanting to slice out a portion of Bangladesh. She said the US wants to create a new breakaway country in the trijunction of Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar.
After that, the US would plant a military base at that troubled trijunction, she explained. Why? So that the US military can have a strong land-based presence right next to China. Beijing will start sweating if the Pentagon builds a military base there on territory under its control.
But to get into that region east of India, the US first needs to create a vacuum – a zone of trouble and turmoil. It needs a large-scale mess there at all costs. So, that’s why the US intelligence had been looking for a trigger to cause unrest in Bangladesh.
Around that time, Hasina took a terrible decision on job quotas that angered the common people of Bangladesh. The US spotted the mistake and started investing in it. When anti-Hasina protests began to simmer, US players began supporting the protests in various ways, created disorder, and ensuring the domestic movement went on to topple Hasina’s Awami League regime.
Awami League, which is historically a corrupt and parasitic party, has been dead against the US plan to build a military base on St. Martin’s Island. St Martin’s Island on the Bay of Bengal is part of Bangladesh.
It’s no longer a secret in diplomatic circles that Washington DC has been hell-bent on removing Hasina from power since early 2023. That was since the time Hasina’s government was gravitating closer and closer towards Russia.
Target: Military foothold
The US simply wants a military foothold in South Asia. But the US military hasn’t been able to get a breakthrough. Elsewhere too, it had been failing to make a breakthrough. It couldn’t find a way to plant a military base in the Kashmir region. It got thrown out of Afghanistan and years of unlawful occupation. And its plot to help Tibet gain independence just hasn’t been working out.
In addition to that, Hasina more recently shot down the US request to turn St. Martin’s Island into an American military base. So, even before supporting the job quota protests, the US was constantly troubling Bangladesh diplomatically.
First, it imposed visa curbs on Hasina’s party workers. After that, it sanctioned officials of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion, citing human rights violations. The US also supported anti-Hasina movements such as National Unity Government and People’s Defence Forces. Then finally, the US escalated its meddling and supported the uprising in August, finally succeeding in getting Hasina’s government toppled.
After that, we saw two back-to-back developments that were expected. Both the developments clearly had the signature of the US. One was the move to install overhyped Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus as the head of the interim government in Dhaka. The other was the case of United Nations jumping into the picture, despite not being invited to do so.
Enter two puppets
Right after Hasina escaped to India, the US planted its blue-eyed boy Yunus in Dhaka. It was a clear case of diplomatic intervention. The US loves Yunus because he had once promoted the terrible culture of micro-loans among poor Bangladeshi people at the behest of Western economic spin doctors.
For promoting the trend of micro-loans, Yunus also became the poster boy of the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) – two prominent tentacles of Western hegemony. It’s no surprise that Yunus is a donor to the Clinton Foundation. Clearly, he’s a Western puppet posted in Dhaka to push the American agenda of controlling Bangladesh.
Soon after Yunus was airdropped in Dhaka, the UN announced that it was sending a fact-finding team to Bangladesh. It would be the first time since 1971 that a UN team will set foot on Bangladeshi soil.
Now the problem is, UN missions are generally sent to disturbed places always with a hidden agenda. They are sent to pave the way for Western powers to meddle and dictate terms. In front of the global press, UN mission teams pose as neutral peacekeepers. But what they actually do is to simply go in, intervene in domestic affairs, and push Western agenda, especially pro-US economic and diplomatic policies.
Plan A: Zogam
In fact, here are details of a secret US plan that the mainstream media has only touched upon lightly. For a long time, the US has been plotting to slice up Bangladesh and create a new country. According to the plan, the breakaway nation will be called ‘Zogam’ – homeland of the ‘Zo’ people, who are mostly Protestant Christians.
The Zogam project includes parts of Chittagong and Bandarban in Bangladesh, parts of northwestern Myanmar, and India’s Mizoram state. This region is inhabited by the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people.
This entire zone is connected by land and they are home to foreign-funded militancy by Kuki-Chin terror groups. In northwest Myanmar, the foreign-funded Chinland Joint Defence Committee is fighting a war against the national military. In Bandarban and Chittagong of Bangladesh, the foreign-backed Kuki-Chin National Front is carrying out terrorist activities.
The unrest has spilled over into the Indian state of Manipur. Kuki militants under the banners of Kuki National Army, Kuki National Front, and Kuki Liberation Army have been spreading terror and unrest.
Plan B: Zalengam
The US has a clever back-up plan as well. If the Zogam project fails, it wants to kick-start another movement. It’s for the creation of an autonomous region to be named ‘Zalengam’. The Zalengam project spans a wider area. It includes Zogam’s planned territory, plus the Indian state of Nagaland.
The hidden agenda of the US in carving out a separate country or autonomous region is to control it for future use. Once the breakaway zone becomes independent, the US can first send in a UN mission. The UN team would then slowly and strategically clear the path for a US military base to be built there.
These plans are not incredible because America has a long and dark history of foreign interventions. There’s a book called In Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War. In the book, author Lindsay O’Rourke says that from 1947 to 1989, the US tried to change other nations’ governments a staggering 72 times.
Among them, 66 attempts were covert operations and six were overt missions. US sponsorship of military coups has been highly effective. Nine out of 14 US-led coups were successful.
Similar disclosures have been made by John Perkins, a former economic hitman of the US government. And also by Wesley Clark, a retired US army officer. Both of them turned whistleblowers and revealed to the world how the US government, US corporations, US military, and the US intelligence community secretly carry out regime-change missions.
Once you look at the trail of US interventions, the Bangladesh break-up plan will make perfect sense to you. Connect the dots, and it will no longer seem like a conspiracy theory.
History of interventions
There’s the well-known regime change in Iran in 1953 in which the CIA toppled Mohammed Mossadeq’s government and installed the Shah of Iran in power. Then there’s the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 by US forces.
We’ve also seen repeated military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s a quick list of some countries where the US government, its military, its intelligence agencies, and its corporations have intervened in various ways during the last half a century.
Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Panama, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Ethiopia, Angola, DR Congo, Poland, former Yugoslavia – well, the list doesn’t end here; it’s longer.
The point here is not to sympathise with Hasina and her corrupt political party. In international politics, no one is clean. The purpose of this report is to make you aware that Bangladesh is sadly being pulled in three different directions – by Russia, China, and the US.
Which one of the three superpowers will have the last laugh? Only time will tell us who’ll win the strategic war. A war in which the last thing that all the sides care about is the Bangladeshi public. The only side that will suffer, no matter what happens, is the Bangladeshi public.
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