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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: June 2007

Islamicist factions in Bangladesh fund insurgencies via poaching in northeast India

 

GUWAHATI, India--The May 27, 2007 arrest of alleged Naga poaching kingpin Lalkhang Go "revealed a nexus between the poachers and the militants across the region," reported Hindustan Times correspondent Rahul Karmakar.

Forestry department wildlife officer Surajit Dutta told Karmakar that a 12-member team tracked Go and two associates for three days in the Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary, 60 kilometers from Guwahati.
"With the help of local people," Karmakar wrote, "forest guards caught Go while he was trying to shoot a rhino in the sanctuary. His accomplices, however, managed to escape."

Said Dutta, "Go confessed to killing rhinos and other animals. He said he had received arms training from the National Socialist Council of Nagaland," a rebel force that has fougt the Indian government for 27 years, at cost of about 10,000 human lives.

Go's confession appeared to confirm the findings of Guardian reporters Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark in a comprehensive investigation of wildlife trafficking in Assam published on May 5, 2007.

"According to India's security services, police, intelligence analysts, local traders and forestry officials, Islamic militants affiliated with al-Qaida are sponsoring poaching" in India, Nepal, Burma, and Thailand," Levy and Scott-Clark wrote.

"These groups have established bases in the formerly moderate enclave of Bangladesh, and have agents operating all along Bangladesh's porous 2,500-mile border with India," Levy and Scott-Clark asserted. "They have gone into business with local animal trappers and organized crime syndicates in a quest for horns, ivory, pelts and other animal products with which to raise funds that they can move around the world invisibly."

Wildlife trafficking to support ideological militance is nothing new. Poaching sustained the legendary Robin Hood and his Merry Men, for example, in their early 13th century rebellion against high taxes imposed by King John to pay the debts incurred by his Crusader brother, Richard the Lionhearted.

The former apartheid regime in South Africa funded clandestine military operations in neighboring nations during the 1980s through covert trafficking in elephant ivory and rhino horn. After the South African operations were exposed and curtailed, the Lebanese-based Palestinian militia Hamas reputedly grabbed market share by outfitting poachers in several northern African nations.

Later, al-Qaida armed Somalia militias who have aggressively poached in neighboring Kenya.

Now, reported Levy and Scott-Clark, "Radical Islamists from Bangladesh have done what conservationists had long predicted and moved in on the endangered species
racket" in the wildlife-rich tongue of India that lies north of Bangladesh, west of Myanmar, and south of China.

"Religious men hold the purse strings now," one trafficker said. Remarked another, "This was a Chinese business, but now it's Bangladesh's business. It's become God's work. And, as you know, the Prophet, peace be upon his head, is irresistible."

Levy and Scott-Clark learned from the traffickers that representatives of two Bangladeshi militias assembled a meeting in a Siliguri madrassah in 2005 to organize the poaching industry as it is now structured.

Three sources told Levy and Scott-Clark that the instigator was Al Mujahideen, "an obscure jihadist umbrella organisation governing a panoply of militant groups that have sprung up in Bangladesh in recent years. Two in particular, both banned by the Bangladeshi government, were in need of money and eager to get into the racket," Levy and Clark-Scott wrote.

One was Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, "allegedly linked to al-Qaida; the second was Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, whose leader, Shaikh Abdur Rahman, had joined Bin Laden's World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders in 1998. He was captured in Bangladesh and in March 2007 was hanged for the killing of two Bangladeshi judges and for nationwide bombings in 2005."

Concluded Levy and Scott-Clark, "A senior Indian security source, based in the northeast, who has tracked the incursion into the trade by Bangladeshi militants, warns that the poaching has global consequences."

Said the source, "There is an environmental disaster in the offing here, but as pressing are the security ramifications," he says. "Only a minuscule percentage of the vast profits need to trickle back into a nascent Islamic insurgency in a country like Bangladesh to bring it to the boil. And then it can reach out around the world."