Is Bangladesh now starting to secretly detain women?
[Update Thursday, November 12th, 2020, 3:45 pm, Bangladesh time: In its press conference, the CID claim that Tithy Sarkar went into hiding and faked her own abduction in order to create a diversion from the allegations against her. Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Jamil Ahmed of CID’s Cyber Police Centre claimed she went to Bagerhat with her boyfriend Shipu Mollik on October 25 where they got married. He said that they returned to Dhaka on November 9 and Shiplue was arrested from Gulistan and Tithy from Narsingdi on Wednesday night].
Bangladesh’s Central Investigative Department is holding a press conference later on Thursday (November 12th) where officer says they will provide details of the arrest on Wednesday evening of Jagannath University student, Tithy Sarkar for “making derogatory remarks about Islam and Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) on Facebook.”
It will be interesting to hear their story — since for the last two weeks, Tithy, a Hindu woman, has been missing, with many suspecting that she was picked up by law enforcement authorities and kept in secret state detention.
It is not uncommon for police to pretend that they have “arrested” someone — when that person has actually been in secret state detention for days, weeks or months earlier. “Formally” arresting a secretly detained person is the alternative to killing that person or just releasing him or her onto the street — and is in fact the most common conclusion to secret detentions in Bangladesh. Two high profile examples of this kind of state fabrication — which magistrates courts never question — were Tahmid Hasib Khan and Hasnat Reza Karim, who were both secretly detained for a month after the Holey Artisan militant attack, before being “released” and then “arrested”.
Tithy finds herself in this situation as she is accused of posting anti-islamic comments on Facebook. According to news reports, on October 24th, the day before she went missing, she had gone to the police and filed a complaint stating that her Facebook page had been hacked. Police officers later attended her house and asked her to go to the police station the following morning — however, her family were told the next day that she never arrived for the meeting. She has not been seen since.
If she has been secretly detained by a law enforcement agency, she would be one of very few woman who have been subject to this kind of human rights violation in Bangladesh.
Apart from Kalpana Chakma — an indigenous peoples activist picked up in Rangamati in 1996 by members of the local village Defence Party, an auxillary law enforcement force and never seen again — there have been very few, if any public reports of woman being disappeared in this manner.
The International Federation of Human Rights makes this point in their recent report on disappearances.
“It is important to consider that the crime of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh has a noteworthy gender dimension. According to statistics compiled by civil society organisations, men account for 503 of 507 (99.2%) of the victims of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh from January 2009 to December 2018.”
It explained this in the following way:
Civil society representatives, lawyers, and journalists who documented enforced disappearances in Bangladesh told FIDH that women were typically not subjected to enforced disappearance specifically because of the gender role they play in Bangladeshi society. This analysis is accompanied by a general belief that abducting women would be a “step too far” and that the government seeks to avoid creating unnecessary outcry, which interviewees believed would happen if women were in fact subjected to enforced disappearances.
Perhaps disappearing woman is no longer a “step too far” in Bangladesh in 2020.
//DB
