And you thought that USAID was all about distributing rice, beans, and medicine, didn’t you?
Well, not quite. There’s also fomenting “color revolutions,” funding Hamas, al Qaeda, ISIS, and the censorship complex.
Oh, and destabilizing Romania, and…how about a coup in Bangladesh? Nothing like a good coup to brighten your day.
All credit here to @TheGrayzoneNews for obtaining these internal files and their excellent detailed report here:https://t.co/lrVNlygRsf
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 7, 2025
I don’t know much about Bangladeshi politics outside the fact that Bangladeshis seem to be fond of raping young English girls, but apparently the US government wasn’t so pleased with Prime Minister, so they spent months fomenting a revolution to replace her.
Leaked docs reveal that prior to the toppling of Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina, the US govt-funded International Republican Institute trained an army of activists including rappers and “LGBTQI people,” even hosting “transgender dance performances,” to achieve a national “power shift.” Institute staff said the activists “would cooperate with IRI to destabilize Bangladesh’s politics.”
On August 5, months of violent street protests finally toppled Bangladesh’s elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. When the military seized power and announced the imposition of a so-called “interim administration,” video footage showed Hasina fleeing to India aboard a helicopter. As vast swarms of student protesters overran the presidential palace, Western media outlets and many of their progressive-leaning consumers cheered the rebellion, framing it as a decisive defeat of fascism and the restoration of democratic rule.
Hasina’s replacement, Muhammad Yunus, is a longtime Clinton Global Initiative fellow granted a Nobel Prize for pioneering the dubious practice of micro-lending. While Yunus has hailed the “meticulously-designed” protest movement that thrust him into power, Hasina personally accused Washington of working to remove her from power over her alleged refusal to allow a US military base on Bangladeshi territory. The State Department has dismissed allegations of US meddling as “laughable,” with spokesman Vedant Patel telling reporters that “any implication that the United States was involved in Sheikh Hasina’s resignation is absolutely false.”
But now, leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone confirm the State Department was informed of efforts by the International Republican Institute (IRI) to advance an explicitly stated mission to “destabilize Bangladesh’s politics.” The documents are marked as “confidential and/or privileged.”
IRI is a Republican Party-run subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, which has fueled an array of regime change operations across the globe since it was conceived in the office of CIA Director William Casey over forty years ago.
The newly-uncovered files reveal how IRI spent millions in the lead-up to Hasina’s overthrow covertly coaching opposition parties and establishing a regime change network concentrated among the country’s urban youth. Among the GOP-run Institute’s front line foot soldiers were rappers, ethnic minority leaders, LGBT activists hosting “transgender dance performances” in the presence of US embassy officials – all groomed to facilitate what the US intelligence cutout called a “power shift” in Bangladesh.
I’m not sure how Republicans (the beneficiary of the USAID funding that toppled Hasina is led by Republicans) decided that funding LGBT activists and transgender dance performances, but there it is.
Irony of irony, Democratic Senator Chris Murphey, who is screaming the loudest to defend USAID, was the Congressional contact who oversaw the operation. I guess regime change is fun, and he wants to keep his fingers in the pie.
Bangladesh Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus shares the stage with former U.S. President Bill Clinton at the 2024 Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York on Tuesday, September 24, 2024. pic.twitter.com/qFwnwC1azP
— Chief Adviser of the Government of Bangladesh (@ChiefAdviserGoB) September 24, 2024
It’s all one big happy family, isn’t it? Democrats get to choose who to depose in one country, Republicans in another.
More than 250 people were killed in the violence that “destabilizing Bangladesh’s politics” brought about, but at least a Clinton Global Initiative guy got into power, so we’ve got that going for us.
IRI has operated in Dhaka since 2003, ostensibly “to help political parties, government officials, civil society, and marginalized groups in their advocacy for greater rights and representation.”
In reality, as the documents make abundantly clear, IRI has funded and trained a wide-ranging shadow political structure, comprising NGOs, activist groups, politicians, and even musical and visual artists, which can be deployed to stir up unrest if Bangladesh’s government refuses to act as required.
The student protests of 2018, and the overwhelming electoral victory by Hasina’s Awami League in December of that same year, appear to have inspired the IRI’s regime change aspirations. In 2019, the Institute began conducting research to inform its “baseline assessment” of the country, which consisted of “48 group interviews and 13 individual interviews with 304 key informants.” In the end, “IRI staff… identified over 170 democratic activists who would cooperate with IRI to destabilize Bangladesh’s politics,” according to an IRI report which was submitted to the State Department.
I love the smell of regime change in the morning.
And, have you noticed, the tactics used here seem remarkably similar to what the transnational elite did in the runup to the 2020 election? Is that why USAID was funneling funds to BLM?
Of course, it is. We got a “summer of love” and regime change right here at home.
The report, which documented the IRI’s activities in the country between March 2019 and December 2020, shows the US government’s regime change campaign ramped up significantly after Hasina’s “lopsided victory.” Her administration, they declared, had become “entrenched,” and their “political position” had “solidified.”
Meanwhile, the IRI concluded that the BNP opposition had “failed to successfully mobilize” its supporters. The party’s attempts to “foment street movements” had floundered, and it remained “marginal,” leaving the Awami League’s “power… undiminished.” Nonetheless, IRI considered BNP to be “still the most possible party to drive a power shift in the future.”
The idea that this political change might be achieved via the ballot box, however, didn’t appear to be up for consideration. With BNP apparently too “violent, insular, rigid, and hierarchical” to win an election, IRI instead proposed a “broad-based social empowerment project that fostered and expanded citizen-centered, local and non-traditional forums for political engagement.” In other words, street mobilizations.
Much of the IRI’s fascination with street protests and online communication is spelled out in a separate internal report titled, “Social Media, Protest, and Reform in Bangladesh’s Digital Era,” which declared that Bangladeshi students “have again led the country’s most vibrant protest movements, with the help of a tool their predecessors didn’t have: the internet.”
“Moving forward, IRI intends to expand its work with college students across the country,” the report declared.
Ah, yes. Your violent, insular, rigid and hierarchical friends can’t win an election, so mobilize the students to do the job.
Have you noticed a lot of student protests anywhere closer to home funded by USAID partner the Tides Foundation? I think I have heard of a few.
“LGBTI people” as US regime change shock troops
The IRI also supported a variety of “socially conscious artists,” which it called “an underutilized actor” for regime change purposes. “While traditional [civil society organizations] face constant pressure, individual artists and activists are harder to suppress and can often reach a wider audience with their democratic and reformational messages,” the Institute pointed out.
But Washington’s propaganda efforts weren’t just left to individual artists. The IRI also wrote that it had identified three “marginalized communities” to serve as shock troops on wedge issues – “Biharis, plainland ethnic groups and LGBTI people.”
In total, between 2019 and 2020, “IRI issued 11 advocacy grants to artists, musicians, performers or organizations that created 225 art products addressing political and social issues,” which it claimed were “viewed nearly 400,000 times.” Additionally, the Institute bragged that it “supported three civil society organizations (CSOs) from LGBTI, Bihari and ethnic communities to train 77 activists and engage 326 citizens to develop 43 specific policy demands,” which were apparently “proposed before 65 government officials.”
Between October and December of 2020, the IRI hosted three separate “transgender dance performances” across the country. Per the report, “the goal of the performance was to build self-esteem in the transgender community and raise awareness on transgender issues among the local community and government officials.” At the final performance, in Dhaka City, the US Embassy sent its “deputy consul general and deputy director of the Office for Democracy, Rights and Governance” to participate.
Mobilizing transgender activists for regime change. FFS. Sounds familiar again…
You should go read the report both because it is enraging on its face and especially enraging because all the tactics they describe are mirrored by things happening here in the United States.
Read the full report here. And weep for our country.
