Ground Realities
All those deaths . . . and all our questions
Photos: UN.int/banglades & Flickr
SYED Muhammad Ibrahim started it all. The former military officer let it be known a few days ago that former army chief and president Hussein Muhammad Ershad bore responsibility for the assassination of President Ziaur Rahman, and the murder a few days later of General M.A. Manzoor. Ibrahim was soon joined by another retired officer, Ayenuddin, who echoed the former's sentiments. And now the debate has been joined by one more superannuated officer (and a freedom fighter at that). Mir Shawkat Ali has not been ambivalent about his feelings at all. Ershad, says he, knew everything. To be fair to Ershad, though, the former military ruler has tried explaining his side of the story. In May 1981, says he, the responsibility for the provision of security to General Ziaur Rahman was not the army's because Zia was at the time a civilian, elected president of Bangladesh. It was not the business of the army to ensure his safety when he travelled to Chittagong on May 30. Ershad's point is obvious: when Zia was killed in a putsch the same night, it was a failure of normal security. The military had nothing to do with it. And there you have it. After all these years, we have a new, necessary issue before us that must be handled to the satisfaction of the country. General Zia, by any measure Bangladesh's first military dictator, survived eighteen attempted coups and was felled on the nineteenth. That was a tragedy, proof that the murderous politics that had been inaugurated through the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975 was not about to end any time soon. This truth came to pass within days of the Zia murder, when General Manzoor, ostensibly the principal figure behind the May 30 happenings, was shot and left dead by a roadside ditch in Chittagong. He had earlier been arrested while on the run by the police but was swiftly handed over to the army. That should have ensured his security; a proper inquiry could have been ensured and the truth would have emerged. Indeed, the fact that a legitimate civilian government under acting President Abdus Sattar was in place should have been enough for Manzoor to feel reassured about his security and a subsequent fair trial. That, of course, did not happen, which is why things have always remained murky about who did what in that period of darkness long ago. Who shot Manzoor and on whose instructions has remained a terrible secret. And the secret was certainly not unearthed by the court martial of the officers who were tried on charges of being complicit in the Zia assassination and eventually hanged. Those officers, with Brigadier Mohsinuddin at the head, were subjected to unspeakable humiliation in the course of their trial, which, of course, was conducted in camera. All these condemned officers protested their innocence, and Mohsinuddin is said to have written to his family wondering what crime he had been tried for and why he had been sentenced to death. All these men went to the gallows, and not a word was said about the manifest unfairness with which they were treated between their arrest and their liquidation. Now, all these years after the tragedy, it does become an imperative to ask the questions that have never been asked, to be given the answers that should have been made available long ago. Mir Shawkat Ali's query about why a freedom fighter should murder another freedom fighter takes on particular relevance. Beginning in November 1975, and continuing up to September 1981, it was a systematic elimination of freedom fighter officers in the armed forces that turned out to be something of a norm. A revolution consuming its own heroes, in that historical sense of the meaning? Keep the answer in abeyance, for now, and focus on all the things that should have happened, or should not have happened at all. In Algiers in 1973, Cuba's Fidel Castro was left stupefied when Bangabandhu informed him that all the military and civilian Bengali officers repatriated from Pakistan had been absorbed, without any screening, into the Bangladesh administration. Syed Najmuddin Hashim, a captive in post-1971 Pakistan, told anyone willing to listen to him (or read his revealing Bondishala Pakistan) that significant was the number of Bengali civilians outraged by the vivisection of Pakistan -- and yet a whole bunch of these officers would go on to command the heights of bureaucratic authority in Bangladesh once the symbols of national liberation had been swept off the national canvas. That is part of the story. There is the other part, where political fratricide comes in. Remember November 1975? Colonel Taher made that arduous journey all the way from Quetta, Pakistan, in 1971 to link up with the freedom struggle in Mujibnagar. In 1975, he faltered. His shining intellect collapsed when he chose, of his own volition, to undermine the change that General Khaled Musharraf had just brought about, through ejecting Khondokar Moshtaque and his murderous cabal from Bangabhavan. Taher moved to free Zia, which was a brave act. And then he did nothing to prevent Musharraf, Huda and Haider from being done to death by soldiers persuaded into thinking that the November 3 changeover had been a conspiracy against the country. No inquiry was ever instituted into the tragedy. No one knows who instigated those mutinous soldiers into murdering Musharraf and his fellow freedom fighters. It stands to reason to ask, at this remove in time, how many of the men involved in the so-called sepoy-janata revolution had been repatriated to Bangladesh from Pakistan between 1973 and 1974. And, therefore, it becomes quite legitimate to ask, today, about the whereabouts of the men who went into the odious job of murdering, almost in a rhythmic pattern, Khaled Musharraf and his fellow officers in 1975; and Manzoor in 1981. We need to ask, too, about the modalities employed in the court martial of the twelve officers sent to their deaths in the latter part of 1981. General Abdur Rahman presided over that sham of a trial. And then he died, in inexplicable circumstances, in Paris while on duty as the country's ambassador to France. That death too calls for an inquiry. Go back to 1976, to ask that a fresh inquiry be held into the secret trial and execution of Taher in July of the year. And that is not the end of the story. The haze that has surrounded the assassination of Ziaur Rahman, the identities of the men engaged in the conspiracy to kill him, the details of how the truth may have been hushed up must all be brought out into the light in the interest of history. And yet there is more to the story than an adherence to history. Far too many sinister men have taken hold of our lives than we could ever conceive of. Long stretches of darkness have claimed increasing swathes of our lives. It is these sinister men who must be brought to justice, and it is that old darkness which must be rolled back. Perhaps the wheel of justice will turn? Perhaps the cobwebs will be swept away and all those glaring truths, those that have been kept from us, will stand revealed? Perhaps a solemn rainbow moment will dawn, for us to be able to say with conviction -- Never again?
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