Bangladesh's Paramilitary Problem Cannot Be Rebranded

That ambiguity was by design. Although nominally placed under the Ministry of Home Affairs, RAB was built by amending the Armed Police Battalion Act to allow the secondment of personnel from the military and intelligence services.

Soldiers from army, navy and airforce entered civilian law enforcement without shedding their martial culture. This was the original sin. Armies are trained to neutralize enemies; police are trained to manage citizens under constitutional restraint.

When Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League took power in 2009, they perfected the machinery. Over her 15-year rule, RAB ceased to be an anti-crime unit and became a sophisticated apparatus for political survival.

Under the guise of a“war on drugs” and counterterrorism, the force systematically targeted the political opposition, journalists, dissenters and even random people from the civil society.

The statistics of the Hasina era are grimly precise. Between 2009 and her ouster in August 2024, human rights groups documented over 600 enforced disappearances and more than 2,500 extrajudicial killings by security forces.

RAB was the primary executioner. A terrifying new vocabulary entered the Bangladeshi lexicon. Foremost was Aynaghar (the“House of Mirrors”), a network of clandestine military and paramalitary-run black sites where dissidents were subjected to prolonged isolation and waterboarding, sometimes for years, completely cut off from the legal system.

The force operated with absolute impunity until December 2021, when the United States imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on RAB and six of its top commanders, including Benazir Ahmed, the former RAB chief and later Inspector General of Police.

The subsequent shift exposed the central myth of Dhaka's security discourse: that such abuses were tragic necessities of national security. Following the sanctions, extrajudicial killings and disappearances dropped precipitously overnight.

The state had always possessed the capacity to restrain the force. It simply chose not to until external pressure altered the cost-benefit calculation.

This is why cosmetic reforms inspire little confidence. Bangladesh's current Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government again approaches the issue administratively rather than structurally, debating new ordinances while avoiding the fundamental question: Should a military-trained institution be embedded in civilian governance at all?

The danger is amplified because Bangladesh's military establishment is a sprawling corporate conglomerate. Military-linked enterprises dominate banking, insurance, construction and telecommunications.

This fusion of coercive authority and economic interest creates a combustible political economy. When security-linked networks become entrenched across civilian sectors, the temptation to influence civilian politics grows irresistible.

RAB became the blunt instrument through which this institutional creep occurred.