The bodies were always found the same way.

Dumped on deserted dirt roads, splayed in muddy rice paddies, or left under the harsh glare of rural highway roadlights. The official police reports invariably read like bad fiction.

There was a midnight patrol, a sudden ambush by unnamed miscreants, a frantic gunfight, and then the inevitable result. A generic “criminal” or “militant” lay dead, while the elite black-clad officers of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) escaped unscathed.

For two decades, the word “crossfire” served as a state-sanctioned euphemism for execution.

Now, following the collapse of ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic regime, and an interim technocratic administration, the new BNP-led government appears determined to perform a familiar ritual of cosmetic reform.

Facing immense pressure from international donors, rights groups and a traumatized public, officials have floated proposals for sweeping legal overhauls and even a complete rebranding of the notorious paramilitary force.

But changing the signboard on the gate will not dismantle the machinery of terror behind it.

The rot inside RAB was essentially the deliberate manifestation of a state philosophy that traded constitutional policing for militarized control, civilian accountability for operational impunity, and the rule of law for political survival.

The architectural flaw that created Bangladesh’s most feared institution dates back to 2004 under the coalition government of Khaleda Zia and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Facing a genuine crisis of spiraling urban crime, rampant extortion networks and the rise of Islamist militancy, particularly from groups like Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), the BNP government made a Faustian bargain of efficiency in exchange for accountability.

To create an “elite” force, the government amended the Armed Police Battalion Act, allowing civilian law enforcement to absorb personnel on secondment from the military and intelligence services.

This structural blurring of boundaries was the unit’s original sin.

Although RAB technically operated under the police on paper, in reality it became a mechanism for permanently deploying military personnel into civilian affairs.

Soldiers, naval officers and air force officers entered domestic law enforcement while retaining the institutional orientation of the armed forces. Armies are trained to neutralize enemies on battlefields.

Police, at least in theory, are trained to protect citizens under constitutional restraint. The distinction matters enormously in any republic claiming to be governed by civilian law.

There is a reason armies are ordinarily confined to cantonments in functioning democracies. Military doctrine is not designed for managing ordinary civic life.

Embedding combat-trained officers into neighborhoods, universities, opposition politics and public protests was the slow militarization of civilian governance itself.

The consequences emerged almost immediately. Under the BNP administration, human-rights organizations documented more than 350 extrajudicial killings carried out under the guise of “crossfire” before the party lost power in 2006.

Yet because RAB proved effective against violent extremist networks, particularly JMB, much of the political class tolerated the growing abuses. Bangladesh convinced itself that authoritarian methods could remain temporary and targeted.

States almost always tell themselves this before repression becomes permanent.

Unleashing impunity

If the BNP built the weapon, Sheikh Hasina perfected its use.

After returning to power in 2009, her Awami League government transformed RAB from an aggressive anti-crime squad into a highly weaponized apparatus for regime protection.

The targets gradually shifted away from bomb-makers and organized criminals toward opposition activists, independent journalists, dissidents, businessmen, student organizers and civil society figures.

Under Hasina’s 15-year rule, the terror became almost bureaucratically clinical.

Human-rights groups documented more than 2,500 extrajudicial killings and over 600 enforced disappearances during this period.

It was also during these years that a chilling new term entered Bangladesh’s political vocabulary: Aynaghar, or the “House of Mirrors”. These clandestine military-run detention facilities operated entirely outside the judicial system.

Inside soundproofed, windowless cells, detainees were held in prolonged isolation, interrogated, tortured and sometimes disappeared for years while families were told the state possessed no record of any arrest.

Under the RAB banner, police and military personnel disappeared civilians, conducted illegal surveillance, held detainees indefinitely without trial and operated with extraordinary indemnity from judicial scrutiny.

Hasina did not merely weaken Bangladesh’s courts; she simultaneously created controlled channels through which security actors could exercise arbitrary force without meaningful accountability.

This culture of impunity soon became institutionalized. Officers understood that loyalty to political power mattered more than adherence to law. The state normalized deniability.

Media intimidation became routine. Activists and journalists who investigated disappearances found themselves harassed, threatened or publicly smeared. Security agencies learned to weaponize sections of the media ecosystem against critics.

In Bangladesh, where parts of the activist and journalistic class have long been vulnerable to political patronage and coercion, such tactics proved devastatingly effective for years.

Yet the façade finally cracked in December 2021 when the United States imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on RAB and several of its top officials, including former police chief Benazir Ahmed, over allegations of gross human-rights abuses.

Almost overnight after the sanctions, enforced disappearances and “crossfire” killings dropped dramatically. The implication was devastatingly simple: the state had always possessed the ability to restrain the force.

It had simply chosen not to until diplomatic and financial costs became unbearable.

That reality should shape today’s debate over reform. Bangladesh’s current political establishment speaks of new laws, revised ordinances and administrative restructuring. But the central problem was never merely legal wording. RAB itself was the manifestation of a deeper contradiction: the deployment of military logic into civilian governance.

Even now, policymakers appear reluctant to confront this directly. The proposed reforms largely preserve the same structural arrangements that allowed abuse to flourish in the first place. Military secondments remain intact. Broad intelligence powers survive.

The same legal loopholes through which security actors constructed an empire of impunity remain largely untouched.

The rot beneath

The challenge of dismantling RAB is complicated further by a deeper institutional crisis: the immense economic power of Bangladesh’s military establishment.

Bangladesh’s security apparatus today functions as a sprawling corporate empire. Military-linked conglomerates possess financial stakes across commercial banking, insurance, construction, transport, telecommunications, software development, manufacturing and large-scale infrastructure projects.

Army-linked business networks produce everything from flour to software. In much of the democratic world, such arrangements would appear deeply abnormal. Comparable models are found less in liberal democracies than in states like Pakistan, where military-commercial interests have become deeply embedded in political power.

This fusion of coercive authority and corporate wealth creates an extraordinarily dangerous political economy.

When armed institutions possess both guns and major economic interests, the temptation to intervene in civilian governance becomes almost unavoidable.

Bringing military-trained structures out of cantonments and permanently embedding them within civilian affairs is like smoking beside a mountain of cotton every day and hoping nothing catches fire. Severe conflicts of interest become inevitable.

Bangladesh has already witnessed public concern whenever military intelligence agencies such as the DGFI step beyond traditional intelligence work and interfere in civilian life.

Yet somehow the far larger problem of stationing army-led battalions across civilian spaces has been normalized for two decades.

The tragedy is that Bangladesh already possessed a legal framework designed to prevent exactly this type of militarized policing.

The colonial-era Police Act of 1861 and the Criminal Procedure Code, despite their many flaws, were constructed around layered civilian oversight. Police were designed to operate closely under district administration structures.

Even the use of firearms was heavily regulated. Authorization procedures, escalation protocols and restrictions on lethal force existed precisely to ensure that civilian policing remained restrained by law rather than driven by battlefield instincts.

In principle, police confronting civilians were expected to de-escalate. Even when threatened, warning shots and non-lethal restraint formed part of the legal philosophy governing force. Chest-level “brushfire” tactics belong to armies fighting enemies, not police operating among citizens.

RAB shattered that distinction entirely.

By combining paramilitary culture, intelligence operations and political protection inside one institution, Bangladesh effectively built a force operating simultaneously as a police unit, intelligence service and domestic military actor.

Once such a structure emerged, abuse became less an aberration than a predictable institutional outcome.

The downfall of Hasina ultimately exposed another uncomfortable truth: security-heavy governance fails even on its own terms.

In July, 2024, Bangladesh’s combined apparatus of police, Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), RAB and military intelligence could terrorize individuals, suppress isolated dissent and disappear critics.

But when confronted by a broad-based student-led mass uprising, the machinery of fear began collapsing under its own contradictions. These institutions knew how to pulverize crowds with military tactics.

They did not know how to understand civil society, negotiate political legitimacy or manage democratic dissent.

Their answer to unrest remained the same blunt instruments: internet shutdowns, propaganda campaigns, intimidation and lethal force.

Yet despite all their firepower, they could not save the regime they were built to protect.

That failure carries an important lesson for Bangladesh’s incoming rulers. Surrendering civilian governance to militarized institutions does not create stability; it merely postpones instability while making the eventual collapse more violent.

Even Sheikh Hasina, after years of empowering the security apparatus, ultimately discovered that coercive institutions possess loyalties to power itself rather than to any individual ruler.

Bangladesh now faces a defining choice.

It can continue repainting patrol vehicles, rewriting ordinances and renaming battalions while preserving the militarized foundations of domestic governance. Or it can fundamentally rebuild civilian policing around constitutional restraint, judicial accountability and genuine democratic oversight.

A renamed RAB may temporarily calm headlines and reassure foreign diplomats. But institutions do not change because governments alter logos or draft fresh legislation. They change only when the incentives sustaining abuse are dismantled completely.

Until Bangladesh confronts the militarization of civilian governance itself, the culture of the black site will survive any public-relations exercise intact.

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Asif Shahriyar Sushmit is an engineer and activist. He was the chief coordinator of the taskforce formed during the interim government to investigate irregularities and corruption in various projects under the Information and  Communication Technology sector during the Hasina regime.