Camelia Kamal’s Facebook inbox is inundated with dozens of messages everyday — most of them are rape threats and fundamentalists claiming they’d murder her. She has shared her phone number with just a handful of people and doesn’t check the messages in the inboxes of her social media accounts, unless she spots a familiar name while scrolling.
Kamal, is known to her readers, followers and haters as Foring Camelia, an atheist blogger who writes extensively on atheism, secularism, feminism, LGBT rights and free speech. She has more than 73,000 followers on Facebook.
Kamal, who had been receiving online threats since 2013, fled Bangladesh in 2015, along with her husband Subrata Adhikary who is better known as Subrata Shuvo, also a blogger who writes on atheism, following a spate of killings of atheist writers and intellectuals by Islamic fundamentalists in the country. Shuvo was in jail for 42 days, before he was released on bail, for ‘hurting religious sentiments’.
Kamal and Shuvo are both members of PEN International, a writers collective and mostly write for a living. They also work in separate Swedish organisations, details of which they did not wish to reveal in fear of their security and privacy being breached — it has happened a few times now. Though they have lived in Sweden for the past five years, the distance from Bangladesh has not made them feel safe. Emails and phone calls that claimed familiarity with their whereabouts made the couple move homes several times. “We try not to live in the same place for more than 6-7 months,” Kamal told HuffPost India.
“NOT SAFE ANYWHERE”
“We are not safe anywhere,” she said, “But we accept this hardship because we have to carry on the battle that we started. We have to realise the dreams of the ones who lost their lives. From exile, we are preparing the ground for the next level of the battle in Bangladesh,” said Camelia, who now works with an online educational project headed by Bonya Ahmed, wife of slain rationalist blogger Avijit Roy.
Ahmed, 51, who lives in the US, narrowly survived the same attack which killed her husband in Dhaka in 2015. The couple had returned to Dhaka to visit the annual book fair, defying threats from Islamic fundamentalists, and were attacked with machetes by several assailants on the streets of Dhaka on February 26. Roy died within a few hours of being taken to the hospital. Ahmed recovered. Since then, she has been running the rationalist blog Mukto-Mona (freethinker), which was founded by her husband and was one of the triggers of the battle between the rationalist and fundamentalist forces during 2011-12.
The battle Kamal referred to is the one between the secular-atheist forces and Islamic fundamentalist groups in Bangladesh. It claimed the lives of 10 atheist bloggers, professors, and publishers between 2013 and 2016, and forced dozens of bloggers to leave the country. They have taken refuge in countries like Germany, India, Nepal, Norway, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, to name a few.
“It claimed the lives of 10 atheist bloggers, professors, and publishers between 2013 and 2016, and forced dozens of bloggers to leave the country.”
From exile, the bloggers who managed to flee keep critiquing the fundamentalist forces, though their medium of writing has changed from blogger platforms to Facebook. Kamal’s posts on Facebook invite a flood of comment of conservatives and fundamentalists, several of which threaten sexual violence, graphically describing her body. Kamal told HuffPost India that she is not scared of the threats. So, often, she hits back. “Sometimes I speak to them in their own abusive language, even using expletives. That’s what they deserve,” she said.
For example, in June this year, she put up a post describing how her husband has never interfered with her personal space. She was bombarded with comments, as usual. While a majority of those who commented hailed the couple, there was a sizable section of people — mostly men — abused her, called her a prostitute, and as usual, issued graphic rape threats. Kamal told HuffPost India that when she wades into anything a little more political than her relationship with her husband — which she often does — a majority of the comments on her posts are horrible abuses.
In one of her posts, Kamal announced that if people’s religious sentiments are ‘hurt’ by her posts supporting rationalism and freedom, then such people should be prepared to get ‘hurt’ more often.
“The problem is not with people’s rationalist and scientific thinking. The problem is with the sentiments that get hurt so easily. So, the sentiments must get used to getting hurt,” she said.
Twenty-six-year-old Shammi Haque graduated in journalism from Berlin this year. Like Kamal, she too fled Bangladesh in 2015, when she was just 21. After years of fielding horrific rape and murder threats, the dozens of threats that land in her inbox almost as a routine now doesn’t shake her too much. Often, when she opens her Facebook account on her phone in the morning, there are a few rape and murder threats.
She started receiving those since 2013 but did not care much. However, things became scary when she found out, in August 2015, that she was being followed on the streets. Other bloggers like her, who spoke about atheism and criticised Islamic fundamentalism and were later murdered, had all complained to the police about being followed days before their death. This was the threat that forced Haque, then just 20 years old, to plan to flee her country.
Now, she looks over the threats that land in her social media inboxes, almost ‘listlessly’, and carries on with her daily chores.
“I have learned how to live with such threats. They don’t bother me anymore,” said Haque. Over the past five years, she has kept herself completely aloof from the Bengali community living in Germany, except for a few atheist bloggers who too are living in exile. Haque categorically refuses to talk about her family with HuffPost India, fearing she might endanger them.
“Religious fundamentalism has no borders. Their ideological brethren could be living next to me. I try to closely guard information related to my movements and whereabouts. I am not completely safe anywhere,” said Haque, who has been working with a German-language newspaper for the past two years.
Five years on, these bloggers see hardly any possibility of going back ever again.
“I will either be jailed by the government or killed by Islamic fundamentalists,” said Haque. “Democracy, secularism, and freethinking have died in Bangladesh. The government has struck a deal with fundamentalist forces.”
THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY?
Kamal points at two recent incidents to argue that the situation in Bangladesh is not conducive for bloggers to return.
On July 15, the police in Chittagong district registered a case against exiled blogger Asad Noor under the controversial Digital Security Act after he alleged a conspiracy against Buddhists by Islamic fundamentalist forces with political backing in a blog post.
Three days later, the police picked up six of his family members - his old parents, maternal uncle, two minor sisters and a cousin - from Chittagong in connection with a 2017 case against Noor.
Noor, who has been living in hiding outside Bangladesh since 2019 due to life threats and possible police persecution, got no news of his family’s whereabouts for two days, till he received a call from a friend informing him that his family members are being held at the local police station.
At the same time, several far-right Islamic organisations staged protests seeking Noor be hanged to death immediately. Noor’s persecution caught the eye of international humanitarian organisations and July 21, Amnesty International issued a statement, condemning the “harassment and intimidation of the parents of blogger Asad Noor.”
But that did not deter the extremists. Bangladesh’s largest religious organization Hefazat-e-Islam’s Narayanganj district unit president Abdul Awal said on July 24 at a gathering to offer namaaz, “We would have torn the atheists into pieces and soothed the pained hearts of the Muslims, only if we could reach them. Unfortunately, we are not being able to reach them at present.”
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Germany at present is home to some of the leading atheist bloggers of Bangladesh who could have got killed any day – Asif Mohiuddin, Mahmudul Haque Munshi ‘Bandhon’ and Ananya Azad. The bloggers’ own politics on capital punishment are at odds with liberal arguments that criticise death penalty as inhuman and unnecessary.
They played leading roles in the Shahbag movement (February-May 2013) that sought capital punishment for ‘war criminals’ – Islamists who sided with the Pakistan army during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1970-71.
“When we demanded capital punishment for the war criminals, the fundamentalists sought our capital punishment for blasphemy. But they did not stop at seeking punishment for us, they started killing us. And the government sided with them, echoing their allegations that the atheists were offending religious sentiments. This is not the Bangladesh that the freedom fighters wanted to see,” said Munshi.
Critics point out that Munsi, despite his ‘atheist’ politics, did not think twice before calling for the now famous gathering at Shahbag, Dhaka on February 5, 2013 where they demanded capital punishment for Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Molla. Mollah was finally sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in September 2013 and hanged on December 12, 2013. Munshi, however, earned many more enemies on October 24, 2014, when he threw a shoe at the hearse of Ghulam Azam, a former head of Jamaat-e-Islami leader who had been convicted of war crime and died in prison, during Azam’s funeral procession.
Under threat from Jamaat supporters, Munshi fled the country in 2015, alongwith his wife. Leaving the country led him to embrace new struggles – learning German and preparing himself for getting a job to sustain his life there.
According to Munshi’s estimate, 276 secular and atheist bloggers and activists are living in exile in countries across the globe.
The battle between secularism and fundamentalism in Bangladesh has its roots in the political history of the land. People inhabiting the eastern part of undivided Bengal in undivided India were fraught between the ideas of Bengali nationalism and Islamic separatism since the 1920s. In 1947, choosing religion over language, they separated from the Bengali-speaking Hindu-majority western Bengal (in India) and became East Pakistan.
But in 1970-71, a majority of them chose linguistic identity over the religious one – they fought for Bengali nationalism and coined the slogan Joy Bangla (Victory to Bengal) – and separated from Urdu-speaking Islamic nation of Pakistan through a bloody war.
However, in 1974, barely two years after Bangladesh adopted a secular constitution, poet Daud Haider had to leave the country after fundamentalist forces took to the streets accusing him of insulting Islam. Haider has been living in Germany since 1976. By 1979, ‘secularism’ was removed from Bangladesh’ original Constitution and ‘Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim’ (In the name of Allah, the beneficent and merciful) was incorporated in it. In 1988, Islam was declared the state religion.
The 1994 furor against poet-writer Taslima Nasreen that forced her to leave Bangladesh for good was more militant in nature than the protests of 1974. And in February 2004, eminent writer and Dhaka University professor Humayun Azad was attacked with daggers for a novel the excerpts of which had been published in a daily newspaper. He was found dead in his Munich apartment on August 12, 2004, just four days after landing in Germany with a scholarship under the PEN ‘writers in exile’ programme. The family refused to buy the official version that he died of a heart attack in his sleep. In Bangladesh, trial in the case of attack on him is yet to be concluded.
Humayun Azad’s son, Ananya, has been living in Germany since 2015. Azad describes himself as ‘anti-national,’ ‘anti-religion’, ‘anti-racist’ and ‘crusader for free speech, human rights, and equal right’. In Germany, he has been busy studying and writing. In July this year, he received a full scholarship for doing a one-year masters’ degree in human rights from the Central European University.
“My returning to my country will have only one consequence – death,” said Azad.
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