People ‘disappeared’ under his aunt’s rule – so why did Starmer make him minister?

When Mir Ahmed bin Qassem was abducted by armed men from his home in Bangladesh at night, his four-year-old daughter was too young to understand what was happening.

“They were dragging me, I was barefoot,” he tells me, crying. “My youngest daughter was running after me with my shoes and saying ‘Take them, Papa’, as if she thought I was leaving.”

He was kept in solitary confinement for eight years, handcuffed and blindfolded, yet he did not know where or why.

The 40-year-old British-trained barrister is one of them The so-called “disappeared” of BangladeshHe was critical of Sheikh Hasina, who served as the country’s prime minister for more than 20 years across two terms until her ouster last August.

Hasina’s rule saw the worst violence in Bangladesh since the 1971 independence war, with hundreds of people killed, including at least 90. Stayed connected to power on her last day in office,

Hasina’s aunt is also controversial in her own right. Labor MP Tulip Siddiqui – who resigned as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-corruption minister last week after denying multiple corruption allegations.

These include claims that Siddiq’s family embezzled up to £3.9 billion from infrastructure spending in Bangladesh – and that he used assets linked to his aunt’s associates in London.

The government’s ethics watchdog later found that he had not breached the ministerial code, but Siddiq resigned anyway,

However, the matter does not necessarily end here.

The episode raises troubling questions about Starmer’s decision and Labour’s approach to securing the votes of people of Bangladeshi heritage.

Why are the questions circling now? Labor failed to see it comingNoting that the party has been aware of Siddiq’s relations with the scam-hit aunt for a long time. It was 2016 when Bin Qassem’s case was first raised before him.

He and others among Bangladesh’s “disappeared” have represented a strange tension with Siddiq’s publicly expressed views on human rights over the years.

she is tall Campaigned for the release of his constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from IranFor example, by showing apparent comparative indifference in his public statements on the suffering and extrajudicial killings under his aunt’s rule in Bangladesh.

Siddiq has previously appeared with 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 him in his election as a Labor MP in 2015. Two pages on his website in 2008 and 2009 detailing his ties to the party were later removed.

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

So these connections were no secret, but perhaps they were not seen as a bad thing within Labour, not least because it has shown little sign of distancing itself from the Awami League in recent years.

Labor MP Jim Fitzpatrick told the Commons in 2012 that they were a “collaborative organisation”, a sentiment warmly shared by many of his colleagues.

And Starmer – who entered Parliament in 2015 from Sidiq’s neighboring seat – has met Hasina several times.

This also includes 2022 when the then Bangladeshi Prime Minister was in London for the queen’s funeral, a meeting which Bin Quasem called “heartbreaking and shocking”.

An aide to Starmer argues that it is “completely legitimate” for him to meet Hasina, and is not an endorsement of her policies.

Labor’s apparent efforts over the years to sideline Bangladesh may reflect the political reality in Britain, particularly in parts of the capital city.

“You can’t be successful in East London without understanding the Bangladeshi vote,” explains one experienced Labor campaigner.

However, those who fail to appreciate the country’s divided and volatile politics may end up angering the people they are trying to attract. “You need to carefully balance what you say and do,” says the publicist. “If you are too vocal for one (Bangladeshi) party, you will be criticized.”

The FT’s analysis shows there are at least 17 UK constituencies where the voting-age Bangladeshi population exceeds the Labor majority.

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

This mix of warmth and political pragmatism may have clouded Starmer’s judgment with the storm of potential corruption on the horizon when, soon after winning the election in July, he appointed Siddiq as Treasury minister. Responsible for leading Britain’s anti-corruption efforts,

“Starmer has blind spots for his friends and political allies,” says one Labor source. “This is not new.”

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

He argues that someone in the party should have raised concerns years ago. Bergman argues, “There was at first an ambiguity about Tulip Siddiq’s failure to respond to her enforced disappearance in Bangladesh.”

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

When I said this to a Labor MP, he replied that the UK media, as well as Labour, have not paid attention to Bangladesh.

“There are around 600,000 people in the British Bengali diaspora,” he says. “It is the eighth most populous country on earth, yet we have not heard a peep (from the UK media) since the events of August 5. “

The corruption investigation into Hasina is likely to continue for some time, posing further issues for Starmer’s top team in the coming months, while Sidiq remains a Labor MP.

For Bin Qasem, overthrow of Hasina’s regime Saw that he suddenly woke up in his cell, was bundled into a car and thrown into a ditch, before eventually being allowed to return home to his two daughters.

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

“Sometimes it is difficult 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.”