Media Release
In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful Sheikh Hasina, the Repressor of Bangladesh, Visits Australia

The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, arrives in Australia today, ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) which begins in Perth tomorrow. She will be participating in the CHOGM program, one of the key themes of which is ‘human rights and democracy', as well as meeting the Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia makes the following points in this regard:

1. Sheikh Hasina presides over one of the most repressive regimes in Asia. Her ultra-secularist Awami League has been imposing their Kemalist version of secularism on the Muslims of Bangladesh by brute force. This has seen all Islamic political parties suppressed through bans, mass arrests, and torture in prison.

2. The notorious Bangladesh police, RAB and the Task Force for Interrogation (TFI) have been used ruthlessly by the Hasina regime to subject the members and activists of Islamic political parties such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jamaat e Islami, to torture using brutal means such as torture by electricity, squashing between slabs of ice for lengthy periods, blindfolding, stripping, hanging upside down, sleep deprivation and severe beating.

3. Hizb ut-Tahrir is known the world over to be a political party that adopts only intellectual and political means to carry out its work. Yet hundreds of its members are in jail in Bangladesh, and its Spokesperson, Mohiuddin Ahmed, has been under arrest since November 2009 without charge or trial. The leaders of Jamaat e Islami have also been the subject of a witch-hunt under the pretext of ‘war-crimes' charges related to the 1971 war, a farcical situation, noted as such by international human rights organisations.

4. The Australian Government's willingness to host and meet the leaders of such a regime shows once again their commitment not to ‘human rights' but to turning a blind eye to repression in the name of economic and political interests.

5. The same double standards were on display in the Arab Spring earlier this year, where, after propping up dictators for decades, Australia politicians sought to beguile people by their rhetoric of support for democracy and the rights of people in the Muslim World. In reality, it is a business as usual for a capitalist class than knows no other way than the worship of profits.

6. Whilst some concern has been feigned at CHOGM thus far about Sri Lanka and its human rights record, the reality is that the irrelevancy that is the Commonwealth, is, in the first instance, a collection of countries which regimes that have atrocious records. It is a union of two types of nations: strong nations that exploit weaker nations, or weak nations that exploit their own peoples. Not surprising perhaps from what is little more than a colonial legacy.

Contact: Uthman Badar, Media Representative

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