Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 22
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka sent officers implicated in torture and killings as UN peacekeepers, DW, Netra News, and Süddeutsche Zeitung reveal in a new investigation. And the UN is seemingly turning a blind eye.
At first glance, the photo is an innocuous one: Taken on a sunny day in 2022, a cheerful group of twelve men and women are huddled together, posing for a selfie. They’re all dressed in military fatigues — their badges identify them as Egyptian, Indonesian and Bangladeshi officers. One man is wearing the light blue beret of a UN peacekeeper: The group has just finished their induction course for their stint at MONUSCO, the UN’s mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Innocuous, that is, but for a bald man with glasses in the center of the photo; his arm casually draped around the shoulder of an Indonesian officer. A military source shared the picture pulled from social media with DW, Sweden-based investigative outlet Netra News, and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Before the officer was deployed to the UN mission, he was deputy director of the Intelligence Wing of an elite force in Bangladesh: The Rapid Action Battalion, RAB.
In an investigation published last year, DW and Netra News revealed that RAB commits torture, murder, and abductions – and goes to great lengths to cover up its crimes. Its targets: alleged criminals, opposition activists, and human rights defenders.
Its members seemingly operate with complicity from the highest political level in Bangladesh, according to two whistleblowers. A claim the government rejected as “baseless and untrue.”
RAB members sent to UN missions
A year after those revelations, DW, Netra News and Süddeutsche Zeitung can reveal that members of this infamous unit are seemingly being sent on peacekeeping missions: The deputy intelligence chief turned peacekeeper was not, we found, the only man who came from the group that several of our sources referred to as “death squad.”
For months, DW and its partners conducted interviews with military and UN sources in Bangladesh and beyond; trawled through classified military files, deployment lists and painstakingly identified officers through Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook.
One man’s UN deployment was corroborated with the help of his daily running routes uploaded on a jogging app: for months, the avid jogger ran around Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the seat of the UN’s MINUSCA mission. In another picture, he posed for a selfie outside RAB’s headquarters in Dhaka.
Two deputy heads of unit that runs torture cells among the peacekeepers
We found more than 100 RAB officers who went on peacekeeping missions, 40 of them within the last five years alone.
While we don’t have evidence that every single officer was implicated in crimes, at least three of them — Nayeem A., Hasan T. and Masud R. — worked for RAB’s infamous Intelligence Wing, two as deputy directors. According to several sources, it is this unit that runs a secret network of torture cells across Bangladesh, some of them located in safe houses, others hidden deep inside RAB’s compounds. Survivors and military sources told DW and Netra News of beatings, mock executions, waterboarding and electric shocks.
“We have all the available tools,” one former member of RAB explained.
The torture cells, another source said agreed, are “where they get information from civilians.”
A source in RAB told DW, Netra News and Süddeutsche Zeitung that both of the two deputy directors were implicated in crimes, such as torture and executions.
While the claim cannot be corroborated independently, several other sources confirmed that it was likely that deputy directors with command responsibility would have signed off on what was happening in the torture cells, or at the very least known what was happening.
And yet, they were later tasked, as peacekeepers, to protect vulnerable civilian communities.
Source: DW
