A 'black chapter' closes in Bangladesh
By Farid Ahmed
DHAKA - Bangladesh has vowed to bring to justice the fugitive killers of the
country's founder president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, now that five of his
assassins have been executed 35 years since his murder.
Six of the killers who were tried in absentia are still on the run and hiding
out in other countries, a top police officer in Dhaka told local media. Another
had previously died in Zimbabwe.
Around midnight on Thursday at the Dhaka central jail, five of the 12 former
army officers who killed Sheikh Mujib - as the country's founding father is
popularly known - were hanged. The charismatic leader was killed in a military
coup staged by the junior officers on August 15, 1975.
"The absconding convicts will face the same fate," declared Law
Minister Shafique Ahmed over the weekend, even as he guaranteed that they were
entitled to appeal their case - as did the five others.
"The six condemned convicts [who remain alive] will be brought back home for
execution," said Ahmed. "Six convicts are hiding in Canada, Libya and other
countries," he said, adding that the Bangladeshi government was coordinating
with these countries' governments and had sought the help of Interpol, the
world's largest police organization.
On hearing of the execution of five of the convicted killers of Mujib, hundreds
of cheering people thronged the streets of the capital to celebrate the
long-awaited moment.
"We heave a sigh of relief as the perpetrators have finally been brought to
book ... It's a milestone for the nation ... the black chapter is over ... the
rule of law has been established," Salauddin Ahmed, a businessman, told Inter
Press Service as he joined the street celebration early on Thursday.
Mujib, who led Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971, was
murdered by a group of military officers in 1975, or three-and-a-half years
after the South Asian nation gained its independence. At least 20 others were
killed in the military putsch, including Mujib's wife, sons and
daughters-in-law. His two daughters were in Germany at the time.
One of them, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, is now the country's prime minister.
"After 35 years, the nation today has been purged of its stains or vile creed
that sought to justify the killings and disrupted the trial process for years,"
said Dhaka University student Abul Hasem, who was among the hundreds of people
who jammed the streets of the capital, near Dhanmondi, Mujib's residence (now a
museum), where he was killed.
"The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the slain Mujib,
has a political obligation to meet," said Nurul Kabir, editor of the leading
English-language national daily New Age, adding that she had repeatedly claimed
in the past that the extrajudicial murder of Mujibur Rahman initiated the
politics of murder and vengeance in this country.
He added that the failure of the state in the past to hold the perpetrators of
Mujib's death to account for their crime "had stood in the way of the
establishment of the rule of law" in Bangladesh.
"Now that the trial has ended and the murderers executed, it is Hasina's turn
to take political moves that will effectively help put an end to such politics
and establish the rule of law in the genuine sense of the democratic ideal,"
Kabir said.
Bangladesh has endured a succession of army-run regimes and dysfunctional
democratic rules marred by corruption and partisan bickering since the
assassination of Mujib.
After leading Bangladesh's war of secession from Pakistan in 1971, the
popularity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as Bangabandhu (meaning "a
friend of Bengal"), waned, owing to what analysts described his "failure" to
resolve perennial political and economic crises and curb corruption.
Mujib had expressed deep concern over the extent of corruption plaguing the
country, saying he had been "surrounded by thieves".
Less than a year before he was killed, Mujib, having grown impatient over
plodding progress and growing anarchy, pushed parliament to pass a law
authorizing a shift to a presidential system, which would have given him
enlarged powers.
He consequently abolished the parliamentary system and installed himself as an
absolute ruler, suspending all political parties, right or left, except his
own. The move surprised some and saddened others.
"True, the one-party autocratic rule was not the people's objective when they
fought the liberation war, but the extra-judicial murder of Mujib and the
extra-constitutional takeover of power by Mujib's old political comrade,
Khandaker Mushtaque Ahmed, did not facilitate democracy in the country," Kabir
said.
"Rather, it paved the way for a series of martial law regimes that ruled the
country, with the fundamental rights of the citizens remaining suspended for
years - regimes that distorted the country's political process in many ways,"
he said. This, among others, allowed the lateral entry of businessmen, civil
and military bureaucrats into various rungs of the political ladder, the
journalist added.
"The experience proves, once again, that democratic resistance, with people's
active political participation in it, remains the only constructive solution to
autocratic governance of any ideological orientation," Kabir continued.
Mushtaque Ahmed's government, installed after the 1975 coup, issued an
Indemnity Ordinance granting impunity to the killers of Mujib. Lieutenant
General Ziaur Rahman, Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad and Khaleda
Zia, who were successively in power from 1975 up to 1996, made no attempt to
bring the slain leader's killers to trial.
When Hasina Wajed assumed the post of prime minister in 1996, she scrapped the
Indemnity Ordinance, paving the way for the trial of her father's assassins. A
Dhaka court handed down the verdict in 1998, imposing death sentences to 15
individuals, three of whom were later acquitted by a high court.
The trial process was again disrupted and remained almost suspended when Hasina
Wajed's party, the Bangladesh Awami League, lost in the 2001 polls. It resumed
when the Awami League won a landslide victory in the 2008 general elections.
On January 27, the Supreme Court rejected the petition of the convicted
criminals for a review of their death sentences. On the same day, too,
President Zillur Rahman dismissed their appeals for clemency, effectively
removing all stumbling blocks to the execution of the five assassins.
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