The curse of a father

What Lifschultz has revealed after thirty years, was being already discussed in many forms. Eugene Booster was number one suspect on many people's list. Lifschultz has cleared his name. The CIA plot is perhaps common on everybody's list. Whether the CIA station chief could have done it without the knowledge and consent of the U.S. ambassador is a different kettle of fish. But some of these stories were out there, being churned out by the rumour mills. The Lifschultz version has put them in order like neatly stacking a deck of cards.

All said and done, the man deserves some credit. He has implicated a top-notch foreign affairs guru and the premier intelligence agency of his country. He has showed courage and he has showed conviction, recovering a crucial chapter of our history from near oblivion. Frankly speaking, in as much as we have lacked the political will to try those who were guilty, we have also lacked it to show that we ever wanted to hear the full story.

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Eli Wiesel, the Nobel laureate activist, once cautioned that to forget a holocaust was to kill twice. In that sense we have killed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the members of his family again and again since they were killed on the night of 15th August 1975. Somehow the tragedy has cut a deep swathe inside our heads, the right side of the brain being unable to connect with its left. It is scary business if we think. We, as a nation, have failed to agree even on the dead.

It must be said that Lawrence Lifschultz has left many of us in the dust. He has pieced it together before any of us, so be it after thirty long years. But we can understand why he waited, why he couldn't tell the story for as long as Eugene Booster lived. He was promise bound. It was decent for him to keep his promise.

What about us? Why couldn't one of us tell the story? For thirty years we have been struggling to cope with this tragedy, our nation living in the throes of conflict over how much to hide and how much to reveal. Perhaps history is risky business if something is done before its time. Iris Chang writes in The Rape of Nanking that it could be career-threatening and even life-threatening in Japan to give an opinion about the Sino-Japanese war or the Emperor. In 1990 a gunman shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Nagasaki, in the chest for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.

People don't tell a story for one of the two compelling reasons or both. One is the pervasive sense of danger inherent in the story. Another is perceived lack of interest in the target audience. That is when truth slips through cracks of opportunism as people tend to swing between conscience and convenience, each version of the story giving play to the compulsive imagination of one who tells it.

We have heard many versions of the story, all versions leading to the same despicable horror that the most popular leader of this country was eliminated in the middle of a night along with his kith and kin. On the face of it, it was a slaughter, a methodical killing of a powerful family that was viewed as good riddance by their trigger-happy killers. We are yet to know who had hatched the conspiracy. Did the killers approach the CIA or did the CIA approach them?

Perhaps we aren't going to get anywhere with that question. Perhaps nobody is going to tell us how it started. But we all know how it ended. The undisputed leader of the country was riddled with bullets, every identifiable member of his family hunted down like trapped animals. It didn't matter to the Americans all right, because they were used to assassination of one president roughly every 20 years. For us it was a new beginning, the first-ever cruelty factor in politics that showed that the quickest way to defeat a formidable enemy was to do away with him.

Those who killed Sheikh Mujib killed him with extreme prejudice because they didn't even spare his underage son, newly-wed daughter-in-laws, and everyone else related to him. Come to think of it, it flung open the doors of hell as crime, violence, deception and betrayal found a permanent place in our national life, our hearts seething with terrible rage that sublimates the horror of elusive justice.

It remains to be the original sin in our politics, which pervades like a curse and haunts the hope of political stability. It sits in our national psyche like a crisis of conscience, a kind of psychosis that has been running from generation to generation, some of us screaming for justice, others busy covering up. Thirty years later, the river of blood of a single night is still running to divide this nation. There are people rotting in jail, the trial is foot dragging, and the final closure on the longest-lasting mystery in our memorable history is yet to come.

Lawrence Lifschultz has told us the story. He has told us how it was plotted, how the wrath of a foreign diplomat found its way through conniving men in a newly independent country to wipe out its leader and his family. But someone needs to tell us the other side of the story, how those who opened fire on the most charismatic Bangladeshi of all times, found him that night, how he reacted when he saw that his gun-toting countrymen had come to take his life. What did he say to them? Could he believe his own eyes? Was he still smoking his pipe? What were his last words? Did he say anything before the assassin's bullets cut him down?

I am sure many of us would like to know what it was like in the last hours of a celebrated man, who was a great leader, may be not so much of a statesman. He had his failings in running a war-ravaged country, surrounded by greedy men who were toadies. He couldn't control his son, brother, nephew and other relatives, who were seeking power and fortune. He couldn't control many of his close associates. He was a man who believed that the same populist style which had brought him in power was also going to keep him in it.

Still it was wrong to kill him in the first place. It was more wrong to kill his family and relatives. But it was even worse not to bring to justice those who were responsible for one of the most heinous crimes in our political history. If we are facing escalating violence and bloodshed in politics today, it is the howling spirit of a moral crisis that was created on that fateful night, when the father of a nation was killed to settle political scores with him.

George Santayana has said what is crucial for us today: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Our problem is even worse. We remember and do nothing about it. It's the curse of a father, which has crippled us. We are condemned to do nothing and watch our children repeat it.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.