BenarNews website unblocked in Bangladesh days after Hasina resigns as PM

BenarNews, a U.S. government-funded news portal that has been blocked in Bangladesh for more than four years, can now be read everywhere in the South Asian country, starting days after  Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister and fled the country. 

On Friday and again on Monday, BenarNews reporters and people they surveyed across the country were able to access the online site in almost every location, for the first time since April 2020. 

But current and former government officials told BenarNews they were not aware the site had blocked in 2020, or made accessible again this week.

“We are not aware of the block and reopening of BenarNews,” Aminul Haque, vice chairman of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), told BenarNews. 

The Bengali and English sites of BenarNews became inaccessible inside Bangladesh on April 2, 2020, amid an apparent crackdown on criticism of the Hasina government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Two days before that, BenarNews had reported on a leaked United Nations memo warning that up to 2 million people could perish in Bangladesh if the government did not take appropriate action to stem the spread of the virus in the densely populated country. 

The story went viral.

Back then, BenarNews contacted multiple ministries and agencies to request the censorship be lifted.

The telecommunications minister at that time, Mustafa Jabbar, and the chairman at the regulator,  Jahurul Haque, confirmed some websites had been blocked, allegedly for spreading rumors, but would not say which ones.

“Of course there is a reason for blocking sites. You better ask them to apply at the BTRC to be unblocked,”  Jabbar, the then-minister, told a BenarNews reporter in Bangladesh. 

Haque, at the BTRC, said such decisions were not made by the telecom regulator.

“We do not decide on our own to block sites. The government has a policy of blocking sites. When different agencies send requests, we block the sites. I cannot specifically say which sites are blocked,” Haque said.

BenarNews appealed again in the years following. Censorship was partially eased, then tightened again, during that time.

‘Right to access’

On Monday, exactly a week after Hasina quit as PM and fled, BenarNews contacted Jabbar, the former telecommunications minister, to ask if he could shed light on what happened in 2020. 

“I am not aware of it. I cannot say anything in this regard,” he said.

In the days following Hasina’s resignation, after a student protest that turned deadly and became a mass movement demanding she step down, BenarNews correspondents began to be contacted by Bangladeshis who said they could now read articles on both the Bengali and English sites. 

These citizens said they were able to access BenarNews sites without using a virtual private network (VPN) that shields users’ internet activity, or similar methods.

A Bangladeshi cyber security analyst, Tanvir Hassan Zoha, told BenarNews that when Jabbar was telecom minister he had initiated use of a technology that allowed pornography sites to be blocked.

“He procured the system through an open international tender to block sites from IGW or International Gateway,” Tanvir told BenarNews.

“Later, authorities used a back door to block many news sites without formally announcing it.”

Faruq Faisel of the human rights group Ain-O-Salish Kendra posited another theory – that the very people who made the BenarNews site inaccessible, unblocked it in an attempt to exculpate themselves.

“When they realized that they might be held accountable, they secretly unblocked these sites,” Faruq theorized.

“But reopening is not enough, we should ensure an environment that does not allow such undemocratic activities,” he said.

BenarNews is a unit of Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-government-funded media agency that provides uncensored and reliable news and information to audiences in Asia, while operating under a strict code of journalistic ethics. Benar reports on security, politics and human rights in Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Pacific islands.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.