Ground Realities
The general and the lessons of history
General Moeen U. Ahmed has basically echoed the feelings of an entire country through speaking of the disfavour with which the modern world looks upon military rule. Or change that to martial law. The point here is that Bangladesh's army chief, busy playing a key role in reshaping political realities in the country, has expressed sentiments that soldier-officers in our part of the world have not, for years together.
Imagine General Hussein Muhammad Ershad telling us, back in the days after Justice Abdus Sattar assumed charge as the nation's elected president in 1981, that the army would resolutely support the growth of democracy. He did not. Indeed, if memory serves us all right, he went on needling the government, through newspaper interviews and the lot, on the need for the military to be accommodated in a power-sharing deal he euphemistically called the national security council. And then came an improbable dawn when the general simply forced the president out of Bangabhaban at gunpoint.
Our political legacy, where the imposition and operation of martial law is concerned, remains a story we would rather not remember. And if you were to cast around for similar tales around the world, you would bump into plenty to build your theories on why martial law or military rule has only pushed societies to extremes of despair, politically as well as economically.
It was clearly such ramifications of military rule that the people of India had in mind when they rounded on Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw, by then a retired, celebrated war hero, over the garrulity of his comments regarding what he could have done as a soldier. Had he wanted (said he), any time after the 1971 war, to stage a coup d'etat and seize power in India, he could easily have done so.
Not so fast, said the Indian masses, politicians and plebeians alike. He had, said they, absolutely no right to think that battlefield bravery could graduate into political adventurism. Manekshaw learned his lesson. He sealed his lips. And that is the beauty of democracy.
As the late lamented Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said in his twilight moments, in that eerie space when his days hovered between the reality of increasingly feeble life and the lengthening shadows of oncoming death, the din and chaos of their democracy had kept the Indians going.
It is such democratic din and chaos that has all too often not been permitted to dig roots in vast regions of the globe. Bangladesh ought to have turned out a political proposition different from what Pakistan has always been.
A major thought, once the Bengalis stood liberated in 1971, was that the new country had turned its back on any possibility of an extra-constitutional seizure of power by the armed forces or, for that matter, by any other organised force. The chilling coup of August 15, 1975 put paid to such idealism.
Indeed, the majors and colonels who, with Khondokar Moshtaque, seized power on that dawn of shame not only forced an elected government out of office but also hugely improved on the old Pakistani idea of how to go about imposing military rule on a society. They engaged in widespread murder and mayhem, an act that none of the two generals who had put Pakistan through military rule till that point of time, Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, had indulged in.
Over the next three months, more precious lives would be lost in the growing struggle for power that would be waged between colonels and major generals and then between different groups of major generals in Bangladesh.
The leaders of the Mujibnagar government, which government was truly a seminal point in our modern history, were the casualties in that sordid struggle, as were some of the finest of Bengalis ever to rise in defence of the nation in 1971. Khaled Musharraf and his friends, all brave men of the Mukti Bahini, were lost to us for all time.
Now that General Moeen reiterates what the rest of us have repeatedly asserted over the decades in this unfortunate country, we cannot but wish that General Ziaur Rahman had been possessed of similar wisdom in his times. The general elections promised for February 1977 should have been allowed to go on.
Zia would have done the edifying had he not compelled President Sayem to hand over power to him and had he resisted the temptation of ruling, in the old Pakistani fashion, through a command structure where he as chief martial law administrator, with all those deputy chief martial law administrators around him, would be primus inter pares. We will not repeat the old stories. But we surely remember that every instance of military rule anywhere has left unimaginable and yet predictable stagnation behind.
Democratic institutions have been left maimed, through the rise and predominance of an overly grasping civilian bureaucracy that has parasitically based its survival on attaching itself to the soldiers running the roost. Ayub Khan had his Altaf Gauhar. Yahya Khan had his Roedad Khan. Ziaur Rahman had his Shafiul Azam. And, of course, the legions of Ershad loyalists in the civil administration will forever remain a blot on our collective memory.
Military rule in Indonesia quickly led to the rise of a kleptocracy. The multinationals looted the country and General Suharto robbed his fellow citizens. General Mobutu and his thieving family licked away the cream and then the whole cake in Congo, leaving only the crumbs for a citizenry that had never known peace since the days of the murdered Patrice Lumumba.
In Nigeria, the coup that killed Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in 1966 would lead to a long night of fear. Chile's Augusto Pinochet Ugarte dispensed with Salvador Allende before abducting thousands of civilians and having them disappear. It is a stultified society in Myanmar today, has been since the day General Ne Win seized power in 1962. It only grows worse, with even priests getting mown down by the power of the state. The stories are endless. And endless too are the other realities thrown up by military rule.
A period of martial law quickly produces political sycophancy. And the sycophants are those politicians whose credibility with their people has regularly been at rock bottom. Such hollow men and women, with little prospect of gaining elective office on their own, had packed the Convention Muslim League of Ayub Khan, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Ziaur Rahman, the Jatiyo Party of Hussein Muhammad Ershad and the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) of Pervez Musharraf.
A bunch of rightwing, unelectable Bengali politicians gleefully went to the United Nations in September 1971, to argue that the Pakistan army was doing nothing wrong in what they still saw as East Pakistan.
Military regimes have often left the reputations of perfectly good men in bad shape, one reason of course being the misplaced belief in those men that they could guide the generals and with them the country back into a valley of democratic luminosity.
Manzur Quader, a suave lawyer, lost his bearings once he linked up with Ayub Khan. Mohammad Ali Bogra ought not to have joined the Ayub government. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada has been known to be a friend of every military regime that has seized the state of Pakistan and so has alienated himself from Pakistan's masses.
In Bangladesh, Ataur Rahman Khan, Korban Ali and Abdul Halim Chowdhury lost their shine when they joined the rickety Ershad bandwagon.
It is all part of history, every bit of it a slice of collective experience in our times. It is what we have lived through, what General Moeen U. Ahmed has lived through. Which is why our faith in the ability of democracy to power us into the future endures, and assumes refreshing new light.
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