The deposed government’s chief negotiator explains how Dhaka ended up in America’s crosshairs, in an exclusive interview with RT
The 2024 riots in Bangladesh, which led to the ousting of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, bear all the hallmarks of a foreign-funded, meticulously planned regime change operation, former cabinet minister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury has told RT in an exclusive interview.
What began as popular demand over public sector job quotas was hijacked by external actors who radicalized young protesters to reshape the country’s political orientation over their dead bodies, according to Chowdhury, who at the time acted as the government’s chief negotiator with the Gen Z protesters in Dhaka.
At the heart of the turmoil was a nexus of Western political families, US-linked NGOs, and domestic actors opposed to Hasina’s government, the former minister said. He singled out parts of the US establishment – “especially the Biden family, especially the Clintons, especially the Soroses” – alongside Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who he described as the central civilian figure in the interim regime.
Chowdhury accused organizations such as USAID and the International Republican Institute of funding clandestine activities and simultaneously bankrolling rappers, cultural figures, sections of the hijra (third gender) community, and even jihadists. The goal, he insisted, was to manufacture social chaos by pitting liberal and extremist elements against each other.
“These activities were going on for a long time. They weren’t very open, but funding of clandestine NGOs was going on… they were hellbent on changing the government in Bangladesh,” Chowdhury said.
Parts of the Bangladeshi military establishment also played a “questionable” role in the crisis, allowing armed groups to rampage through cities, attack police stations, and target government supporters, Chowdhury claimed. He added that mysterious trained snipers emerged once the protests spread beyond university campuses.
“So chaos was carefully planned with this money. And then the chaos turned into a big riot. In the riot, there were careful killings, assassinations, using sniper rifles,” he said, arguing that riot police in Bangladesh don’t use sniper rifles.
In the information space, Chowdhury pointed to what he described as a coordinated external effort to radicalize segments of Bangladesh’s youth via foreign media and embassies – including the US mission, which at the time of the crisis was posting images of Bangladeshi mosques every Friday.
“So this kind of scripted action does suggest that elements were firmly at play” behind the scenes, even if not every arm of the US government was involved, Chowdhury argued. The deepening unrest was neither spontaneous nor organic, but the execution of a “meticulous design” was openly acknowledged, he claimed, by Yunus and his allies after the fact.
Chowdhury linked the pressure on Dhaka to its refusal to align with the Western position on the Ukraine conflict and cut its longstanding strategic trade with Russia in critical areas such as defense, nuclear power, and fertilizers. Hasina’s government refused to burden its people with higher costs simply to satisfy geopolitical demands – and this independent stance “was not liked by certain countries,” and contributed to Bangladesh entering the crosshairs.
