Bangladesh is a firm contributor to the United Nations Peace Keeping Forces (UNPKF). In Africa and now Haiti, soldiers from the Bangladesh Armed Forces have helped in whatever security and peace keeping issue that looms ahead for the more or less inert United Nations. Perhaps, though Bangladesh’s presence within the UNPKF is a simple move, a choice determined by elimination so that only those countries that have any incentive at all to put up security forces hitch up with the U.N. peace keeping. There is almost a whiff of the same kind of class politics that seems to run through any assertion of equal opportunity in U.S. military enlistment. Through it all, for years now, Bangladesh’s participation in U.N. peace keeping was a source of pride amongst Bangladeshis and the Bangladeshi military. The loss of over 60 soldiers that Bangladesh suffered over the years was drawn down by the thought that those who died gave their lives for the sake of peace. This source of pride is now under threat.
The BDR mutiny of last year turned that whiff of soldier’s desperation into a full-bodied stench of putrefaction. The Bangladesh Rifles mutiny of February 2009 reverberated through the Bangladesh Armed Forces, not only because a whole cadre of promising military officers were assassinated; rather, because the BDR are deputized members of the Bangladesh military. The mutineers claimed that their actions were motivated by immense disparity between military and rifles pay. The poor were getting the short end of the stick. And the mutineers claimed that at least they had had enough.
In March of 2009, Bangladesh Commerce Secretary, Lt. Col. (Retd) Faruk Khan requested that the members of Bangladeshi Armed Forces be returned to Bangladesh. The reason? That because there was some suspicion that the mutineers favored militant goals, therefore the Bangladeshi cadres in UNPKF must necessarily also have believers of the fundamentalist strain of contemporary Islam. This is a move that might suggest to those concerned that Bangladesh is a weak state unable to fend for the legitimate role its own defense forces play in urgent hot spots.
The government of Bangladesh must do all it can to solve this issue. Its source of pride must remain untainted. But this cannot be done by summarily sacking anyone who seems to have stronger beliefs and religious practices than others. Pay must be equalized across the Armed Forces so that only those who actually wish to participate in peacekeeping, with the attendant risk premium, wind up doing so. The gamble, then cannot be one of desperation but one of so-called duty, goosed up to be sure, but not coerced by circumstance.
