His aunt’s regime “disappeared” people; So why did Starmer make her a minister?

When Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem was kidnapped by gunmen one night from his home in Bangladesh, his four-year-old daughter was too young to understand what was happening.

“They dragged me, I was barefoot,” he tells me, sobbing. “My youngest daughter was running after me with my shoes saying ‘take me, father,’ as if she thought I was leaving.”

He was held in solitary confinement for eight years, handcuffed and blindfolded, but he still doesn’t know where or why.

The 40-year-old British-trained lawyer is one of The so-called “disappeared” of Bangladesh. They were critics of Sheikh Hasina, the country’s prime minister for more than 20 years, for two terms, until she was dismissed last August.

Hasina’s regime ruled during the worst violence Bangladesh has seen since its war of independence in 1971, in which hundreds of people were killed, including at least 90 people, while she He clung to power on his last day in office.

Controversial in her own right, Hasina is also the aunt of Labor MP Tulip Siddiq – who resigned as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-corruption minister last week after a series of corruption allegations which she denied.

These included allegations that Siddiq’s family embezzled up to £3.9bn of infrastructure spending in Bangladesh and that she used properties in London linked to her aunt’s allies.

The government’s ethics watchdog later found that she did not violate the ministerial code, but Siddiq quit anyway.

However, that is not necessarily the end of the matter.

The episode raises disturbing questions about Starmer’s trial and Labour’s approach to courting the votes of people of Bangladeshi descent.

Now questions arise about why Labor didn’t see this cominggiven that the party has long been aware of Siddiq’s links to his scandal-hit aunt. Period 2016 when the Bin Quasem case was first brought up to him.

He and other “disappeared” Bangladeshis have represented an uncomfortable tension with Siddiq’s publicly expressed views on human rights in the years since.

she a lot campaigned for the release of his constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from Iranfor example, while showing apparent comparative indifference in his public statements to the suffering and extrajudicial killings under his aunt’s regime in Bangladesh.

Siddiq also previously appeared alongside his aunt at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and appeared on BBC television as a spokesperson for the Awami League, the political party Hasina has led since 1981.

Siddiq also thanked Awami League members for helping her get elected as a Labor MP in 2015. Two pages from her website from 2008 and 2009 establishing her links to the party were later removed.

However, once in Parliament, Siddiq told reporters that he had “no ability or desire to influence politics in Bangladesh.”

So these links were not a secret, but perhaps they were not seen as a bad thing within the Labor Party, especially since it has shown few signs of distancing itself from the Awami League in recent years.

Labor MP Jim Fitzpatrick told the House of Commons in 2012 that they were “sister organisations”, a warmth shared by many of his colleagues.

And Starmer, who entered Parliament in 2015 at the same time as Siddiq in his neighboring seat, met Hasina several times.

This included in 2022, when the then Bangladeshi prime minister was in London for the queen’s funeral, a meeting Bin Quasem calls “heartbreaking and shocking.”

A Starmer ally maintains that it is “perfectly legitimate” for him to have met Hasina and that it does not amount to an endorsement of her policies.

The Labor Party’s apparent attempts over the years to keep Bangladesh on its side could reflect the political reality here in the UK, especially in parts of the capital.

“You can’t be successful in east London without understanding the Bangladeshi vote,” explains a seasoned Labor activist.

However, those who do not appreciate the country’s divided and volatile politics may end up offending those they try to seduce. “It is necessary to carefully balance what is said and done,” says the activist. “If you are too open for a (Bangladeshi) party, they will criticize you.”

Monetary Occasions analysis suggests there are at least 17 UK constituencies where the Bangladeshi voting-age population is larger than the Labor majority.

Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency has at least 6,000 adult residents of Bangladeshi origin.

Could this mix of warmth and political pragmatism have clouded Starmer’s judgment in the face of a possible storm of corruption on the horizon when, shortly after winning the election in July, he appointed Siddiq as treasury minister? responsible for leading Britain’s anti-corruption efforts?

“Starmer has blind spots with his friends and political allies,” says a Labor source. “It’s not new.”

Investigative journalist David Bergman, who has been shedding light on Siddiq’s connections to Bangladeshi politics for a decade, points out that context is everything. “This was not a major story until Labor came to power, Tulip Siddiq became a minister and the Awami League government fell,” he says.

He maintains that someone in the party should have raised his concerns many years earlier. “At first there was a blind spot about Tulip Siddiq’s lack of response to enforced disappearances in Bangladesh,” Bergman maintains.

“Then there was a blind spot about how linked she was to the UK Awami League.”

When I put this to a Labor MP, he responded that the UK media, as well as Labour, has had a blind spot in Bangladesh.

“There are about 600,000 people in the British Bengali diaspora,” they say. “It is a country with the eighth largest population on Earth and we have yet to hear a peep (from the UK media) since the events of August 5.”

Corruption investigations into Hasina are likely to continue for some time, potentially raising further issues for Starmer’s senior team to address in the coming months while Siddiq remains a Labor MP.

For Bin Quemem, he overthrow of the Hasina regime I saw him abruptly awakened in his cell, put into a car and thrown into a ditch, before he was finally allowed to return home to his two daughters.

Little children when he last saw them in 2016, they are now young women. “I couldn’t really recognize them, and they couldn’t recognize me,” she tells me through tears.

“Sometimes it’s hard to digest the fact that I never got to see my daughters grow up.

“I missed the best part of life. “I missed his childhood.”