Bangladesh calls on US to reconsider sanctions against elite police force

By Md. Kamruzzaman

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA) - Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen called on the US to withdraw its sanctions on the country's elite force of police, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB).

Momen made the appeal during a meeting in Washington on Monday with his US counterpart Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of bilateral ties between the two countries.

Momen said RAB was established at a time when terrorism was the main concern for Bangladesh. Since then, it has been doing an outstanding job against terrorism, which is also a concern of the US

However, he admitted there are some excesses committed by RAB at times.

“But there is an accountability system in the force and even 12 RAB members were executed for their offences.”

On Dec. 10 last year, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued sanctions against RAB and six top individual officials including the force’s current and former heads on charges of gross human rights abuses.

Citing reports of non-governmental organizations and other sources, the office reported that RAB and other Bangladeshi law enforcement agencies are responsible for more than 600 disappearances since 2009, nearly 600 extrajudicial killings since 2018 and torture.

Bangladesh, however, denied the charges and labeled the US move as one-sided and politically motivated.

Earlier, addressing RAB as a “notoriously abusive paramilitary force,” 12 international human rights organizations in November last year also wrote to the UN Department of Peace Operations to ban the force from UN peacekeeping missions.

RAB is a joint task force founded in 2004 and composed of members of the police, army, navy, air force and border guards with the mandate to maintain internal security, intelligence gathering related to criminal activities and government-directed investigations.