The whole conspiracy tale remains untold
WE have been informed that the Bangladesh government will take action against Khairuzzaman, the soldier turned diplomat till recently the country's high commissioner in Malaysia. The man's offence is that despite repeated reminders to return home he has chosen to stay away, perhaps out of suspicion that the old charges of his complicity in the death of four incarcerated national leaders in November 1975 might come up again now that the Awami League is in power.
Now, what makes the matter so intriguing is why Khairuzzaman should refuse to come back home when it was the judiciary which acquitted him of the charges we speak of in the days of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-Jamaat government. From the perspective of the law and of logic, therefore, he ought to have no reason to fear that things might go wrong for him. But, of course, if there are yet things relating to November 1975 we as a nation remain unaware of, it is a different matter altogether.
Which brings us to the bigger theme of what has not been done about unearthing the broad conspiracy to murder Bangabandhu and the four national leaders in 1975. Some of the military officers charged with having caused the mayhem of August 1975 are in prison, certainly; but there are others who are still on the run. There was a good chance for the first Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina between 1996 and 2001 to expend all efforts into getting fugitives such as Shariful Haq Dalim and Abdur Rashid nabbed abroad and broad back home. That job was not done. Or you could say the paperwork done on tracking these assassins was weak at best and non-existent at worst.
And then came the regressive period of Khaleda Zia's government, where all sorts of machinations went into making sure that not enough judges were around to see the entire judicial process of the Bangabandhu murder case through. No matter how men like Moudud Ahmed defend themselves, the bizarre and glaring truth is that it was on their watch that Bangabandhu's murderers, both those in jail and those absconding, got a breather. It was a curious case of a government deliberately defaulting on its responsibilities. It was natural too, because that government, in association with a clutch of academics ready to use the machete against history, was too busy trying to manufacture its blinkered version of the story of Bangladesh's liberation.
All of that is history and is well comprehended by the nation. But now that an elected government symbolised once again by the Awami League is once more in office, it becomes the responsibility of the state to plumb the depths of the vast conspiracy that led to August and November 1975. It was all right to bring the killer majors and colonels to trial. It will be even better to go purposefully into the business of hunting down the absconding ones. That will call for appropriate and priority-based coordination with countries within which the rest of Bangabandhu's killers may at present be residing.
And then comes a broadening of the idea. The question remains, to this day, why Khondokar Moshtaq Ahmed was never charged with conspiracy to assassinate Bangabandhu and the Mujibnagar leaders and foist an unconstitutional regime on the state. Moshtaq, in one of those quixotic workings of fate, died barely three months before Sheikh Hasina took office as prime minister in June 1996. He was, in that sense, fortunate. But that has never been any reason for the country to absolve him of involvement in the bloodletting of 1975.
Under the law and in terms of morality, it ought to have been for the government to file charges of murder and conspiracy against Moshtaq, posthumously, as a way of plumbing the depths of the planning that had gone into the overthrow of Bangabandhu's government. To suggest, as some did in the late 1990s, that death frees a man of guilt is an absurdity. Add to the Moshtaq question the matter of the role played by the likes of Mahbub Alam Chashi in August 1975.
And now that declassified documents on Bangladesh's politics in the early 1970s have been made available by the Americans, a whole new picture of the conspiracy patently appears to be unfolding. It all calls for new investigation into the tragedy. It is plainly inconceivable that Bangabandhu's murder, followed by the elimination of Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, M. Mansoor Ali and AHM Quamruzzaman, could have come about merely through the action of a handful of army officers with guns in their hands. A wider network of insidious intent was at work, one which now must be unravelled if the cause of justice is to be served.
No Bengali can rest easy with all the questions that have assailed him for the last thirty-four years. Why did senior army officers not move against the men who had already murdered the Father of the Nation? If Colonel Jamiluddin Ahmed could rush to save Bangabandhu and die in the process, what prevented his peers from taking similar action?
How did men so sycophantically loyal to Bangabandhu till the late hours of August 14 suddenly turn up at dawn on August 15 as Moshtaq's cohorts? Why did General Zia send off the assassins to diplomatic jobs and on what convoluted grounds of morality did the countries they were sent to accept them, knowing full well that they had killed -- and killed in savage manner?
The full tale of the intrigue against Bangabandhu remains untold. Healing cannot begin unless until that cobweb of conspiracy is broken through.
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