2005 REVIEW: A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 04 DHAKA 006251

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/20/2015
TAGS: PREL PGOV PTER KISL ETRD BG
SUBJECT: 2005 REVIEW: A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Classified By: A/DCM D.C. McCullough, reasons para 1.4 b, d.


1. (S) How Bangladesh looks depends on where you stand. For
many, the view is disturbing: the country's government is
unable or unwilling to cope with, and sometimes even
acknowledge, its many obvious sores. Politics are bitter,
parochial, and winner take all. But there's another
perspective. If Prime Minister Zia were asked to rate 2005,
she'd probably say it was pretty good, especially if the next
few months show that she has turned the corner on the
Jamaatul Mujahidin Bangladesh (JMB) terrorists. Zia's
outlook stems solely from the answer to the one question that
matters to her, her son Tarique, and their coterie: Are BNP's
prospects for the January 2007 election better now than they
were 12 months ago?

It's Good to be Queen
--------------


2. (S) For Zia, the good news is that the Awami League
continues to flounder as a serious threat because of its
extraordinary strategic and tactical myopia. Still haunted
by popular perceptions that the Awami League was brazenly
corrupt and arrogant when it ruled the country, the AL keeps
failing to exploit the BDG's many mis-steps and find an issue
to build political momentum. Instead, Hasina doggedly sticks
to an anachronistic tactic -- nationwide strikes -- that she
knows alienates the voters and that bounces off the BNP like
a rickshaw off a bus. Her objective -- early national
elections -- is packaged as an ultimatum that the BNP has no
reason to respect, and Hasina boxes herself into a corner by
threatening to boycott the election without radical changes
in the caretaker regime setup that she knows the BNP will
never accept. Making a virtue out of defeat, BNP leaders
have trumpeted the victory of the AL incumbent in the
hard-fought Chittagong mayoral contest and the shocking upset
by a Hindu independent of the Islamist favorite in the
Dinajpur by-election as evidence that the opposition doesn't
need electoral changes to beat the government.


3. (S) Equally critical for Zia is the continuing endurance
of her marriage of convenience to Jamaat Islami and the
Islamist umbrella group IOJ, which she thinks is vital for
winning marginal constituencies and repulsing AL power plays
in the streets.


4. (S) The economy, meanwhile, chugs on. The post-MFA crisis
turned out to be the biggest false alarm since Y2K, with
Bangladesh's garment shipments -- three quarters of its
exports -- actually showing huge increases in 2005. Surging
investment in its ready-made garment industry is creating ten
new factories and 5,000 jobs every month. Big companies from
India, the Gulf, the U.S., and Australia are knocking at
Zia's door for the privilege of making mega-investments in
what Goldman Sachs has just identified as one of the world's
top 11 up-and-coming economies. Even Bill Gates came, saw,
and paid tribute to Bangladesh's great potential.


5. (S) The international community, BNP leaders believe,
periodically gets spun up by Indian disinformation and the
Awami League, but it again showed in 2005 that it lacks the
appetite for political confrontation, whether the issue is
political violence, extra-judicial killings, Islamist
extremism, or the BDG's subordination of minority and worker
rights to the preservation of "national harmony."

Look at My Record...Really
--------------


6. (S) If Zia has truly dodged the JMB bullet, she can argue
that, unlike Hasina, she took on extremism and won. Left
unsaid would be her relief that she did it quickly enough to
avoid having to take politically painful decisions about
JMB-linked figures in her party, the cohesiveness of the
ruling coalition, and the BDG's broader approach to
counterterrorism and extremism. She could highlight the
leadership role in the JMB crackdown of the controversial but
popular Rapid Action Battalion, which she created. She won't
note that RAB has been so busy hunting the JMB that it only
had time to "cross-fire" a handful of criminals, and that RAB
showed it can, when it wants to, arrest and develop
information from bad guys and then act on it without killing
them in the middle of the night. She can reiterate her
conviction that Bangladesh is truly a moderate and falsely
maligned democracy.


7. (S) In Zia's mind, she can also cite with pride:

-- The relative lull in high-profile political violence in
Bangladesh since the January 28 murder of former AL Minister
AMS Kibria.

-- "Solving" the Kibria case by arresting "all" conspirators
after delivering (more or less) on her commitment to
cooperate with USG law enforcement experts assisting on the
investigation.

-- Prosecuting and convicting two dozen mostly BNP-linked
persons for the 2004 murder of AL MP Ahsanullah Master, the
first that time perpetrators of a major political attack were
brought to justice by this government.
-- Holding by-elections and mayoral elections generally
viewed as free and fair, in contrast to the infamous Dhaka 10
by-election in 2004.

-- Deploying Bangladeshi peacekeepers to Sudan and regaining
Bangladesh's ranking as the world's number-one peacekeeping
nation.

-- Adhering to nine more UN counterterrorism conventions,
bringing Bangladesh's total to 12.

-- Preserving communal and sectarian harmony by protecting
Hindus, particularly during religious holidays, and holding
the line against extremist demands to declare Ahmadiyyas
non-Muslims.

-- Her tolerance, as a sign of respect for democracy, of a
vigorously free press and the unsubstantiated allegations
against her of murder and sedition by the Awami League that
in many countries would have prompted arrests and
prosecutions for libel.

-- Her overcoming Indian and AL obstructionism to hold a
successful SAARC summit in Dhaka.

What's Next and What to Watch
--------------


8. (S) Even more than before, everything the BDG does in 2006
will be shaped through the shrinking prism of the upcoming
election. Millennium Challenge Account? Duty-free access to
the U.S. garment market? New IFI loans? A visibly strong
relationship with the USG? High-level visits?
Mega-investments? All these matter only as testimony to the
BNP's political credentials.


9. (S) Zia's natural inclination will be to conclude that all
she has to do in the last nine months of her administration
is to act cautiously to protect her pole position for the
upcoming election. While BNP's prospects look promising,
there are potential problems:

A) The JMB Wild Card: A resurgence of JMB violence could cost
her the election, especially if it is intense and active
during the campaign. The randomness of JMB violence sparked
hysteria among normally complacent Bangladeshis far beyond
the scale of the actual attacks. Some BNP backbenchers were
chaffing at the political fallout from the JMB campaign and
BNP's partnership with JI. Zia's refusal to punish four BNP
leaders linked to JMB underscored her aversion to admitting
such links and to risking fissures in the ruling coalition.
JMB leaders like Bangla Bhai could greatly embarrass the BNP
if they end up in the dock, as HUJI(B) commander Mufti Hanan
did after his arrest when he fingered his alleged BNP
protector.

The key question, though, is whether JMB will crumble after
its recent setbacks, or will it regroup and strike again?
Only the coming weeks and months will tell, but JMB has been
under-estimated before. In February, it shrugged off its new
outlaw status to launch five months later 503 coordinated
bomb blasts across Bangladesh that stunned the nation. Also,
JMB has shown a disturbing ability to change tactics and
targets to overcome police counter-measures. Brash
predictions by BNP leaders that JMB will soon be mopped up
are foolish and reminiscent of BNP assertions last year that
Bangla Bhai was just a media fabrication. On the other hand,
JMB prisoners seem to be spilling their guts with little
prompting, and virtually every day RAB is announcing
significant arrests and weapons recoveries.

Key questions, particularly as indicators of the BNP's
approach, include:

-- Does the BDG's crackdown relax as the violence abates?
Can it catch the other five fugitive senior JMB leaders?
Will t keep "just missing" JMB commander Abdur Rahman? Can
it beat back political interference and the insider tips that
have apparently impeded the hunt? Will it revert to saying
that Bangla Bhai and other Islamists have fled to India?
Does it keep maintaining that Islamist extremism is a mirage
manipulated by India and the Awami League, that Islam cannot
be a factor in JMB violence because violence is un-Islamic,
and that JMB's parenthood can be traced to India and the AL
because they are "the only people who benefit" from the
violence?

-- Are JMB suspects put on ice like Professor Galib or
brought to trial?

-- Will the BDG show any sign that it has been scared
straight on extremism? Will it scrutinize more closely the
annual Tablighi Jamaat mass convocation near Dhaka next
month, or will the few instances of JMB-Tablighi linkages be
dismissed as a coincidence? Will it keep capitulating,
sometimes pre-emptively, to Islamist pressure against
"un-Islamic" events, as it did two weeks ago when it canceled
a women's swim meet?

-- Will BDG law enforcement become more reticent in sharing
JMB case information with us?

B) Islamist Rivalries: Do BNP efforts falter to keep IOJ and
JI "inside the tent"? Does the acrimonious JI-IOJ split
widen or close? What happens to Ahle Hadith mosques and
madrassahs? Will the accounts of the Kuwait-based NGO, the
Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, be unfrozen, and will it
be business as usual at Ahle Hadith organizations? Is there
a truce between the warring JI and BNP student groups?

C) The Awami League: Does it continue to opt out of the
political process and threaten to boycott the election? Does
it try to provoke a crisis, either on the streets or by
resigning en masse from parliament to force multiple
by-elections or an early election? Does it continue to think
that it can replicate the "street power" of 1996 that ousted
BNP from office, or will it conclude that this time the BNP
-- backed by JI, JI's rabid student wing, and the steely
nerves of Tarique Rahman -- is too strong to be bullied? Can
the AL finally find an issue to rally the voters?
Critically, does the AL make headway in its determination to
break up the JI-BNP alliance? AL leaders understand the
election may hinge on this point, which is why they
relentlessly blame JI for BDG sins, from corruption and to
the JMB bombing campaign, even when supporting logic or
evidence is sparse.

D) General Ershad: In certain scenarios he could play a
limited role. The BNP could probably survive Ershad's
bolting to the AL because he and his Jatiya party are both in
terminal decline, even in their northern stronghold.
However, the BNP doesn't want to take any chances, so in
June, it orchestrated criminal charges against Ershad's
junior wife to abort her overtures to the AL. Ershad himself
is in no position to antagonize the BNP so long as it can
threaten to send him back to jail on the corruption charges
kept hanging over his head, but he would have more room for
maneuver once the caretaker regime takes office. Tarique
Rahman has encouraged Jatiya leaders to join BNP, but all BNP
really needs is to keep Ershad out of the opposition camp.
Ershad could prove useful to the BNP, and have his best shot
to become a player, as the back-up opposition if the Awami
League sticks to its boycott threat.

E) The Army: There would have to be a catastrophic collapse
in security or BNP confidence to persuade the military to
depose the BNP or defer elections. Political has-beens talk
about a "Musharraf" solution in hope of riding the military's
coat-tails to power, and some Awami League supporters mutter
about a military take-over to hype the extremist threat and
because of their obsession with ousting Zia at any cost.
However, there is no evidence that such talk is anything more
than motivated cocktail chatter. The USG must continue to
make it clear to everyone in Bangladesh, opposition and
government alike, that we would strongly oppose any
non-democratic change of authority.

F) The Integrity of the Electoral Process: BNP actions
strongly suggest that the BNP will do whatever it takes, and
can get away with, to win. But can it perpetuate fraud and
pressure on a large enough scale to change the outcome?
Ironically for a country bedeviled by weak institutions,
elections bring out the best in Bangladesh. In the past
three generally free and fair elections, the army provided
effective security at polling booths, the caretaker regime
ruled neutrally during the campaign, the courts offered
recourse to victims of foul play, and the Election Commission
ran the logistics. The AL argues that the BNP has
politicized these institutions to the point they are
electoral co-conspirators with the BNP, and it is true that
the BNP has tried to stack the deck, like by changing the
constitution to position a BNP-linked judge as the next chief
caretaker. However, it is far from clear that the fix will
actually work.

G) The Dark Prince: Tarique Rahman has the Zia name,
political cunning, and mountains of cash generated by his
Hahwa Bhaban's collection of tolls from businesses and BNP
political aspirants. However, he is also a uniquely
polarizing figure in Bangladeshi politics. He inspires fear
in many people, including BNP backbenchers, self-censoring
journalists, business rivals, and parts of the PMO, who see
him as ruthless, inexperienced, and unworldly. Tarique will
win his first seat in parliament the next election, but if
the maneuvering for him to succeed his mother becomes too
obvious or brutal, there could be a strong backlash, even
within BNP.

Conclusion
--------------


10. (S) Bangladeshi elections are expensive, hard fought, and
violent, with no government ever having overcome the South
Asian bias against incumbents to win re-election. The BNP,
however, is reasonably well placed to break that record if
the JMB wild card can be contained and the Awami League
continues to be its own worst enemy.
CHAMMAS