BANGLADESH has a long cultural heritage and the people of this country are proud of this century-old liberal culture. But sadly, over the last few years, a tendency to ignore the main traits of our traditional culture has developed in the country. The outrageous culture along with extremist practices is squashing the prospects of a society with sustainable peace and fraternity. As a result, values of social bond, fraternity among people, family ties and social commitment are disappearing. Especially, a section of the educated young generation is developing a relationship with Islamic-radicals and the rate is increasing reportedly due to massive use of social media through Internet, particularly Facebook. Morality of social culture is being thrown down the drain. Crime rates are increasing. At this stage, those people are losing control over their sense of judgement to distinguish between right and wrong. This is happening because there is no social resistance to deter them from this kind of malicious activities. Criminals in the guise of religious radicals are promoting and propagating their evil thoughts and ideas among the members of young generation by using the Internet, Facebook and different application such as, 3MA. They are also trying -- and have become successful to an extent -- to attract the attention of young girls. Some of the university authorities are having close contact with the banned militant outfit, for example, Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). Our law enforcement authority recently found that both North South University and Manarat University have regular connection with the Islamist terrorist group. It is very important that we had some basic conception of a person's pre-radicalisation behaviour. According to the PET model, radicalisation is categorised into four stages:
1. An interested person comes into contact with the person who is recruiting a person to be radicalised.
2. The concerned person has behavioral changes, such as changes in religious behavior and new communication habits (for example, excessive use of Internet and Facebook).
3. In the third stage, his social life becomes slowly limited only to like-minded people and he detaches himself from family and friends.
4. Finally, he becomes a radical with inflexible moral stand and involves himself in killing missions.
Considering the above four points, we can raise our social awareness to identify the Islamist radicals by recognising their behavioural changes, so that, we can reduce the chance of their doing harm to society.
We are thankful to our law enforcers for spotting the existence of radicals throughout the country, although eventually national security boundary and our social bonds have been breaking down. We should never lose our hearts and I am sure, we shall be able to restore our traditional values and social ties.
Abul Kalam Azad
PhD Research Student
Curtin University, Perth Australia
