Gabriel Oppenheim: Bangladesh: The next terrorism 'gator'

When I was nine, I loved playing Wacky Gators, an arcade game featuring five plastic alligators and a padded mallet. You had to whack the gators, but only one popped its head out of the console at any given time. And as soon as you moved to clobber it, that gator slid back and another emerged.

You had to be quick, and you had to know that the enemy never stays in one place -- valuable lessons from a toy. But lately, I get the feeling our top administrators never played Wacky Gators. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has re-emerged in several areas since our Armed Forces turned their attention to Iraq. And in Bangladesh, a nation of 144 million, a gator of terrorism seems to be creeping out before our very eyes.

It started on August 17, when 430 bombs exploded across the country, killing two and injuring dozens. The bombings were blamed on Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, a banned group that wants to replace secular law with strict Islamic law in this 83-percent-Muslim democracy. Three months later, on November 29, Bangladesh suffered its first suicide bombings, when at least three people detonated themselves in front of and inside two court buildings.

That caught Osama's eyes. At least two arrested terrorists in Bangladesh have admitted to being sent by bin Laden (they were nabbed with $300,000). And Saudi Arabia noticed, too, beginning to send millions of dollars to the country's 64,000 madrassas, which preach radical Islam and are the only schools poor citizens can afford.

And the government?

Well, the ruling coalition contains two parties that support al Qaeda: Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote. Which means the question isn't whether Bangladesh is the next front on terror, but what our country can do, assuming that it is. Rightly or not, our military mallet is tied up bopping the sectarian strife gator in Iraq. And polls say Americans aren't up for another invasion anyway. So what's a scared United States to do?

Perhaps it's time to save a life.

The life of a Bangladeshi man who has fought for everything American foreign policy encourages -- from a democratic Middle East to Muslim-Jewish state relations. His name is Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury and he goes on trial on June 5 on charges of sedition, which carry a penalty of death in Bangladesh. His crime, in as much as it's a crime, was to write and edit a weekly newspaper that denounces Islamic fundamentalism and encourages Bangladesh not to shun Israel. Sadly, Bangladesh is the world's most corrupt government and the country with the most attacked and threatened journalists, according to Transparency International and Reporters Sans Frontieres, respectively.

And so, Choudhury was first arrested in November 2003, when he tried to board a plane in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. Choudhury was supposed to attend a conference in Tel Aviv called "Bridges Through Culture," where he was to give a lecture about the media's job in promoting peace. But he never made it.

Instead, the government accused him of passport violations and sent him to a maximum security prison, where he was tortured with electric shocks and beaten with field hockey sticks. Even once Choudhury's legs were broken, the government continued to deny him care, refusing him medicine for his glaucoma or leave to attend his mother's funeral. Eventually, the passport charges were dropped in favor of the sedition charges leveled in February 2004.

That could have been the end of the story, but Choudhury smuggled letters out of his jail cell, like a latter day Martin Luther King. "I would request you all to please raise your voice in your respective countries," Choudhury wrote. And so, one American did. Dr. Richard Benkin of Illinois read the letter and notified his local congressman, Mark Kirk. Kirk knew that the United States gives between $75 and $100 million to Bangladesh every year, so he raised the one mallet America still has -- that of diplomatic power -- and pressed for Choudhury's release on bail, which was granted in April 2005. The charges, however, were never dropped.

On June 5, Choudhury goes to court. Because the charge is sedition, there will be no jury, just a judge, in a closed session. And the man who represents America's hopes for the region on trial. I dare say it's time America grabbed the diplomatic mallet. Because Choudhury is alive right now, and Bangladesh is still a democracy, but that may be the case for only so long. And if the gator creeps out under our very eyes, years from now when they write the history of the war on terror, they'll have no one to blame but our nine-year-old selves.

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