So, Miraj Sheikh is ‘not a victim of enforced disappearance’?
There are political ironies, and then there is Bangladesh’s Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed explaining the trauma of enforced disappearance while the family of a currently ‘missing’ man sits a few rows away, waiting for precisely the sort of phone call Salahuddin Ahmed once received.
Salahuddin knows this horror intimately. During Sheikh Hasina’s dictatorial rule, he was subjected to enforced disappearance by state forces before resurfacing across the border in India. He was then forced to live in exile there for more than a decade.
On Saturday, at an event organised by Mayer Daak ahead of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances (August 30), he recalled the emotion of his first telephone conversation with his family after his ordeal.
Miraj Sheikh’s family was in the audience. They are still waiting for their call.
That should have made what Salahuddin said next extraordinarily difficult. Instead, the home minister announced that an “independent investigation” had found no evidence that any security force was involved in Miraj’s disappearance. He suggested another possibility that rival pirate groups operate in the coastal region, and Miraj may have disappeared because of conflict among them.
It is possible, of course. Miraj may have had connections with criminals. He may have been involved with pirates. He may have been caught in a turf war. Every one of those propositions can be investigated. But none answers the central allegation that witnesses and Miraj’s family say he was taken by Coast Guard personnel.
Human Rights Watch has cited eyewitness accounts saying Miraj was last seen in Coast Guard custody and described his case as the first known alleged enforced disappearance since the July 2024 uprising.
Nur Khan Liton, the veteran rights activist who recently travelled to Mongla, has said that the eyewitness accounts and other evidence point towards Coast Guard involvement. He has also accused Coast Guard personnel of intimidating potential witnesses.
This is precisely why the Miraj affair matters beyond one missing fisherman in Mongla. Bangladesh’s new political order was built partly on the promise that the methods of the Hasina era would not survive Hasina.
Yet the first serious test of that promise has produced something distressingly familiar: question the character of the missing man, offer an alternative criminal narrative, allow institutions close to the allegation to participate in establishing what happened, and gradually turn the original question — where is he? — into a debate about whether he deserved our concern in the first place.
The Coast Guard’s handling of the affair has hardly helped.
The accused become the investigators
On August 11, Coast Guard officers questioned Miraj’s wife, mother and sister at Mongla police station as part of what police described as an “internal inquiry.” The absurdity barely needs explaining. The family accusing a security force of taking their son was being questioned by officers of that same security force about whether it had taken their son.
The family later alleged that important details concerning the alleged detention were omitted from their written statements. It is difficult to devise a better practical demonstration of the central defect critics have identified in Bangladesh’s proposed Enforced Disappearance Prevention and Redress Act.
The government deserves credit for attempting to criminalise enforced disappearance as a distinct offence. The proposed law contains severe penalties, compensation mechanisms and deadlines for investigation and trial. But rights advocates have repeatedly warned about its investigative architecture: the police remain in a position to investigate allegations involving the police or fellow security institutions.
Former International Crimes Tribunal chief prosecutor Tajul Islam put the problem in rather older legal language: no man should be ‘judge’ in his own cause. Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem Arman, himself a survivor of enforced disappearance and now a lawmaker, was more memorable at Saturday’s event: if the right hand commits the crime, the left hand investigates it.
Miraj’s case shows it is happening already. There was even a ‘stranger’ episode.
The Dissent reported that journalists from two Bangladeshi media outlets travelled together to the Mongla area and produced reports casting doubt on the enforced-disappearance allegation. Its investigation documented connections between the reporting trip and Coast Guard facilitation, raising serious questions about an apparent attempt to establish an alternative narrative around Miraj.
There was this connection with “Choto Shumon,” a pirate leader who reportedly said he had given Miraj six lakh taka to distribute among other members of his group. Perhaps he did but notice what this changes. Almost nothing.
If Miraj worked with pirates, investigate him. If he handled stolen money, charge him. If he supplied criminal groups, prosecute him. Bangladesh has courts, prosecutors and prisons precisely because unpleasant people possess legal rights too.
The prohibition against enforced disappearance does not contain a good-character clause.
Indeed, portraying Miraj as a criminal associate risks reviving one of the oldest devices of extrajudicial policing in Bangladesh: colouring the victim. For years, inconvenient deaths and disappearances were accompanied by convenient biographies. The dead man was a drug dealer.
The missing activist was dangerous. The alleged victim was actually a criminal. Once sufficient mud had been applied, the public was invited to stop asking awkward questions about what state agents had done.
The relevant question is not whether Miraj was a good man. It is whether agents of the state took him and if they did, what happened next? And, also, where is he?
Posing more questions
There is another problem with the criminal-associate narrative. If Miraj was connected to Choto Shumon’s group, it could strengthen rather than weaken the proposition that security forces were interested in locating him.
Security forces had been intensifying operations against pirate groups in the Sundarbans. Shumon’s deputy Samad was reportedly caught shortly after Miraj disappeared, while Shumon himself later surrendered. The home minister himself referred on Saturday to major security operations against pirates and forest robbers, involving arrests, surrenders and weapons recoveries.
So establishing that Miraj belonged to the orbit of a targeted criminal network does not establish that the Coast Guard never detained him. It establishes a plausible reason why security personnel might have wanted to find him.
This is why witness intimidation allegations are so serious.
Some local witnesses have reportedly changed their accounts. That will inevitably be presented as evidence that the original allegations were fabricated. But witnesses in remote communities do not operate inside university debating societies. They live near the institutions and individuals they accuse. They have livelihoods, boats, families and children.
Their calculation is not merely whether something is true but what saying it publicly may cost them. The striking part about the early testimony from Mongla was precisely that ordinary villagers were prepared to speak.
There was something almost post-August 5 about it: the belief that perhaps Bangladesh had changed enough for a boatman or fisherman to tell journalists what he thought he had seen without spending the following months wondering who might knock on his door.
If that confidence is now disappearing, Bangladesh is losing something larger than evidence in one case. And that is what makes Salahuddin Ahmed’s position particularly painful.
The BNP government contains people who do not need lectures about enforced disappearance. Some experienced it themselves. Others spent years beside families who did not know whether their sons, fathers, brothers or husbands were alive. Their moral authority on this issue comes precisely from having opposed a state that routinely demanded trust while withholding answers.
That history creates a higher obligation, not a lower one. Salahuddin said Saturday that no enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing or political persecution had occurred during the BNP government’s first six months.
That is a remarkably confident claim for a government confronted with a missing man whose family says a state force took him, eyewitness allegations cited by Human Rights Watch, claims of witness intimidation and an investigative process whose independence is itself contested.
The government may ultimately be right. A genuinely independent investigation may establish that the Coast Guard did not disappear Miraj Sheikh.
If so, publish the evidence. Establish the timeline. Identify who last saw him. Explain the conflicting testimony. Investigate allegations of intimidation. Determine why Coast Guard personnel questioned the accusers. Examine the media operation described by The Dissent. Let investigators institutionally independent of both the police and Coast Guard do the work.
But declaring that no state force was involved while the structure capable of establishing that fact remains compromised is a conclusion searching for an investigation.
Bangladesh has already lived through the alternative.
—
Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa