Rebuilding Bangladesh

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.

Man hasn't done Bangladesh many favors either. The country was born from the ruins of East Pakistan 35 years ago after a war of independence in which India-backed nationalists—unhappy at being ruled from what was then West Pakistan—fought Islamists loyal to Islamabad. Three million people were slaughtered in eight months before the Pakistanis conceded. Those were the days before truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals, and the world left Bangladesh largely alone to heal and rebuild. Success has been limited. Democracy is strangled by a poisonous political war between Zia's right-of-center Bangladesh National Party (B.N.P.) and the left-leaning Awami League. Rejecting any notion of bipartisanship, both parties seem to keep the nation perpetually on the verge of chaos, alternating between state repression or crippling national strikes aimed at toppling the government, depending on who is in power. With politics often reduced to little more than a big brawl, violence infects much of daily life. Gangs armed with barbers' razors roam city streets, extortion is widespread, beatings are routine. A TIME reporter who traveled to Rajshahi to interview a lawyer found on arrival that the man had been murdered. Bangladesh's courts, police and bureaucracy, moreover, are so weak that the country has come last in Transparency International's world corruption index five years in a row. Zia's most popular initiative has been forming the R.A.B., a police force that draws support in part for its willingness to kill. "It's been a crazy few years since I've been here," says Larry Maramis, the U.N. Development Program's deputy resident representative. "The country could easily have fallen into being labeled a failed state."