FOR more than two decades, three letters have functioned as a shorthand for state-sponsored dread in the Bangladeshi psyche: RAB. The Rapid Action Battalion, birthed under the promise of restoring law and order, instead institutionalised a culture of fear, enforced through ‘crossfire’ narratives, systematic disappearances and windowless cells hidden from the reach of judicial oversight. Now, under the weight of mounting international pressure and the sting of sanctions-driven embarrassment, whispers of ‘rebranding’ have begun to circulate.
But let us be clear: a name change is not reform. It is cosmetic surgery performed on a blood-stained institution. If the objective were honesty rather than evasion, the state would abandon euphemism altogether. It would rename the force according to its lived function. Among the citizenry, RAB has for long been branded the ‘disappearing brutal force.’ Would a simple pivot to a new acronym, such as the proposed transition towards an SIF, Special Intervention Force, model or similar nomenclature, make a difference?
The proposed shift towards an ‘SIF’ has been framed as administrative reform, yet no public blueprint has been offered that alters command structure, legal accountability or detention transparency. History suggests that without a total dismantling of its internal culture, a new name is merely a new mask for the same executioner.
The history of RAB is not a story of policing, but of state-sanctioned elimination. Since its inception in 2004, the unit has steadily devolved from an elite anti-crime force into a blunt political instrument used to neutralise dissent and hollow out the opposition space. The statistics documented by rights organizations — Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and local observers — are not mere abstractions. They are forensic evidence of institutional decay. Thousands of extrajudicial killings and hundreds of enforced disappearances represent a pattern so repetitive that it became normalised. This testifies to an agency whose core operating logic was never public safety, but rather the maintenance of political control through the erasure of the ‘inconvenient.’
What distinguishes the Bangladeshi experience is not cruelty alone, but its meticulous systematisation. The emergence of ‘aynaghar,’ the so-called ‘house of mirrors,’ as a network of secret detention centres confirms this. These were not rogue holding cells or temporary lapses in judgement. They were architecturally designed spaces of disappearance, equipped with soundproofing, sophisticated isolation mechanisms and the infrastructure for indefinite detention. Survivors who surfaced after the August 2024 uprising did not recount rumours. They described a physical reality. When fear requires such high-level engineering, reform requires demolition, not a fresh coat of paint. To suggest that the personnel who operated the ‘house of mirrors’ can simply be folded into a ‘new’ force is to ignore the deep-seated institutional DNA of repression.
This phenomenon is not uniquely Bangladeshi. History offers a clear, sobering lesson: authoritarian security structures do not reform through renaming. In Argentina, intelligence units responsible for disappearances during the ‘dirty war’ were often folded into new agencies, but legitimacy only followed when those institutions were dismantled and their commanders prosecuted. In Egypt, the notorious State Security Investigations Service was renamed the ‘National Security Agency’ after the 2011 uprising; yet, torture and impunity continued unabated under the new banner. In Russia, the KGB did not vanish; it simply reproduced itself through successor agencies like the FSB, carrying forward the same institutional DNA of surveillance and repression. In each of these cases, when the command structures remain intact and the same officers occupy the same desks, the name becomes a mask. Bangladesh’s attempt to pivot to a new acronym is a textbook attempt at reputation laundering.
The ‘Narayanganj seven murder’ case tore away the final veil. It revealed that RAB officers were not merely abusing power in the name of the state, they were commodifying it, acting as paid executioners for politically connected clients. This was not a deviation from the norm; it was the institutional monetisation of violence. No organisation ‘accidentally’ becomes a murder-for-hire syndicate; it evolves into one through years of systematic impunity and a lack of civilian oversight. The disappeared are not statistics; they are biographies interrupted. The vanishing of M Ilias Ali in 2012 sent out a calibrated signal to the political class that visibility itself could be a liability. The eight-year disappearance of Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem exposed the cruelty of prolonged legal limbo, punishment without conviction, detention without record. These were not security operations; they were kidnappings conducted under the colour of law.
Under international human rights law, systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killing are not policy excesses but prosecutable crimes, regardless of the agency’s name or mandate.
The current push to rename the force is strategic — a calculated attempt to escape international sanctions. But sanctions target behaviour, not vocabulary. As long as military secondment dominates the command structure, as long as civilian prosecution remains structurally blocked and as long as detention sites remain opaque, the international community will see through the charade. There are counterexamples worth noting. In South Africa, abusive apartheid-era security units were not renamed but dismantled. Their archives were opened, their crimes documented and their legitimacy surrendered in exchange for truth and accountability. The process, while painful, demonstrated a crucial principle: democratic renewal begins with institutional rupture, not semantic repair.
Mothers of the disappeared, whose grief still echoes in the cries of Mayer Daak, understand this instinctively. For them, rebranding is a second erasure. First, their sons were taken; now the truth is being abducted. The name was never neutral; it was a blunt misnomer used to sanitise the unthinkable. We are often told that RAB has internal accountability mechanisms. But internal accountability in coercive institutions is a contradiction in terms. History, from Latin America to the Middle East, shows that self-policing agencies discipline optics, not power. Real reform requires the total dissolution of the existing RAB structure, the prosecution of senior command responsibility for crimes against humanity and unfettered civilian oversight with the power to inspect every detention facility, named or unnamed.
The leopard does not change its spots; it merely sheds a name. Bangladesh does not need a new acronym; it needs a new ethic rooted in the rule of law, absolute transparency and unquestioned civilian supremacy. Until the house of mirrors is fully exposed and until justice replaces fear as the organising principle of national security, any renamed force will remain exactly what it has always been: an engine of repression.
Dr Abdullah A Dewan, formerly a physicist and nuclear engineer at BAEC, is an emeritus professor of economics at Eastern Michigan University; and Humayun Kabir is a former senior official of the United Nations in New York.
