Rebuilding Bangladesh
	A nation long plagued by natural disasters, poverty, corruption and violence may finally be on the verge of a happier future
	By Alex Perry

	SHAHIDUL ALAM—DRIK FOR TIME FIREBRAND: Zia has cracked down on Bangladesh's militants

Posted Monday, April 3, 2006; 20:00 HKT
As Lutfozzaman Babar, Bangladesh's Home Minister, tells it, the call he'd been awaiting for months came at 3 a.m. on March 6 while he was grabbing some sleep in a Singapore hotel during a whistle-stop tour of Asia. "It's him, it's Bangla Bhai," came the voice of a commander in the Rapid Action Battalion (R.A.B.), Bangladesh's élite antiterror squad. "He's surrounded." Babar, the leader of a government drive to rein in Islamic militancy, was instantly awake. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" he urged. "We need him alive. We need to know what he knows."

Bhai, whose real name is Siddiqul Islam, was the prime target in the government's crackdown on terrorism. A veteran of the mujahedin war against the Soviets in Afghanistan who later drifted through the Middle East as a nightclub bouncer, Bhai had returned to Bangladesh to help found two extremist groups. Over the past three years, he was believed to be a central figure behind a host of bombings, assassinations and suicide attacks that culminated last Aug. 17 in 500 near-simultaneous explosions across the country. It wasn't a surprise, then, to find that Bhai had no intention of meekly surrendering. When an R.A.B. officer opened the door of the house where Bhai was hiding in the northeastern village of Rampur, Bhai opened fire with a pistol, grazing the man's temple. Then, with the house surrounded, Bhai detonated a bomb inside, apparently hoping to kill himself and his assailants; he succeeded only in setting fire to the house. Looking charred and raw-skinned, he was led out of the burning building and pushed into a waiting truck.

Babar put in a triumphant call to the secure red phone in Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's office. "She was very excited," he recalls. She still is. In an interview with TIME, Zia purrs over how the war against radical Islamists is going. "We've broken their back," she says. "We will catch all of them. They'll get life sentences, or death."

Zia can be forgiven for a little crowing. At the best of times, governing Bangladesh is one of the toughest political challenges on earth. Its 144 million people are crammed into a country the size of New York State, with 70 million of them living on less than $1 a day. As the world's biggest delta, Bangladesh is also plagued by floods and cyclones, and by the steady poisoning of tens of millions of people who drink water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic.

Continued...

	State Of Disgrace [Apr. 5, 2004] Bangladesh is reeling from violence, corruption and political turmoil. Inside Asia's most dysfunctional country Reining in the Radicals [Feb. 28, 2005] Bangladesh is finally starting to crack down on Islamic extremism. But is it doing enough? Hanging by a Thread [Oct. 25, 2004] Textile factories throughout Asia face extinction as a long-standing global trade pact is set to expire A Democracy is Shaken [Aug. 30, 2004] In a divided nation, an attack against Bangladesh's opposition party leader marks a new low More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine