Meddling by foreign intel a threat to security: Osmani
Experts on security and strategy have stated that foreign intelligence agencies, taking advantage of weak governance, institutional weakness and inadequate budget, are doing things inside Bangladesh that are posing a serious security threat for the country.
'The foreign intelligence agencies are pouring a lot of money here and are distributing it among almost all the segments of the society,' said a leading security and strategy expert, Mufleh R Osmani, on Wednesday. He expressed his apprehension that attempts to destabilise Bangladesh would be made by certain quarters in the country.
He added that the recipients of the money paid by foreign agencies include a section of the so-called civil society, NGOs and collective bargaining agents. Osmani, the chairman of the board of directors of the state-run Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies, was speaking at the launching of Bangladesh Human Security Survey 2007 in the institute's conference room, jointly organised by the institute and Safer World, a Britain-based organisation working on security issues.]
The report, based on survey of households, said the majority of Bangladeshis perceive 'freedom from want issues' as having the largest impact on their daily security.
'Poverty and unemployment are seen as being the two most important motivators of crime and injustice,' revealed the survey, conducted in 2007, of 2,000 households on a random basis across the country.
Colonel Kazi Fakhruddin Ahmed, one of the research directors of the institute, raised the question of how Bangladesh's agencies have been dealing with the counter-intelligence department of foreign agencies. He said a lot of foreign intelligence agencies — the Central Investigation Authority of the United States, MI-16 of Britain, Research and Analysis Wing of India, Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan — are operating in Bangladesh. 'Nobody is asking them what they are doing here. I think the matter should be discussed elaborately,' suggested the military officer, now on deputation to the institution.
Intelligence insiders said the country has mainly three intelligence agencies to monitor a wide range of matters from political developments to telephone tapping of private citizens.
But officials said most of the Bangladeshi agencies lag behind in their capacities in comparison to the foreign agencies working in Bangladesh. Officials in the intelligence agencies said that they are burdened with many limitations which decrease their ability to neutralise the aliens' bid to interfere in the internal affairs.
The survey said political insecurity lies at the heart of many human security challenges in this impoverished country. It said the current situation — featuring an emergency civil government controlled by the military waiting for transition to democracy at the year's end — is extremely unusual and is unlikely to be representative of long-term trends.
'Without political leadership, long-term reforms will remain difficult, if not impossible,' said the report presented by Larry Attree, the Safer World team leader in Asia, indicating a considerable risk of instability in the period before the elections scheduled to be conducted by December 2008.
The DFID's deputy country director in Dhaka, Sarah Sanyahumbi, who spoke on the occasion, assured the attendees that the UK would support Bangladesh to ensure human security.
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