Month: April 2018

My Friends Are Alive Today

This is the story of one man, describing in his own words the peril he faced for years as a secular activist in Bangladesh, the danger posed to his family, and how CFI’s Secular Rescue helped him navigate a path to safety. We are withholding his identity for his protection. This has been very slightly edited for clarity due to language differences. Since the murder of my friend Ahmed Rajib Haider during the wake of the Shahbag movement in 2013, the air in the entire country changed to a point that many would not dare to identify even as secular, let alone a secular humanist. I along with many bloggers and colleagues of mine knew then that we could no longer stay in our homes, and we knew that this fear were legitimate well before 2015. I rarely stayed in my own home or places where I am supposed to reside due to continued fear of the overwhelming flow of threats of a very public nature. Facebook, our personal emails, and even the news media …