Drishtipat Blog

Did any of the 56 accused people have direct involvement in the six barbaric killings that took place in open day light, in front of journalists and camera crew…?

[photo: Daily Star]
Bangladesh police issued chargesheet against Hasina and 45 other leaders of former 14 party coalition holding them responsible for the violence that erupted in Paltan, Dhaka on Oct 28, 2006 that claimed at least six lives.

Also charged in the murder cases are Jamati leaders including Nizami based on the complaint filed by the workers’ party. The court has till April 22 to decide whether to accept the charges or not.

People died on Oct 28, 2006. It’s horrible, and the people responsible for the brutal crimes need to be punished. But did those being accused actually commit the murders?
The political turmoil that had been brewing for a while got really bad really fast when K M Hassan declined to be the Chief Adviser (CA) of a Caretaker Government (CG) at the end of BNP govt’s tenure on Oct 29, 2006, at the face of mounting allegations by the opposition leaders that Hassan had bias towards BNP alliance. The uncertainty in the political future of Bangladesh alarmed everybody. People had this premonition that something aweful was about to happen - and it did.

The eye of the storm had been the upcoming parliamentary election. Election Commission headed by M A Aziz during BNP regime had been marred with blatant corruption allegations. Aziz reportedly spent crores of taka manufacturing a faulty voter list disobeying court directives. The opposition demanded ousting of Aziz and reform of EC, and subsequently producing an updated voters’ list.
The generals-secretary of BNP and AL appeared to have a farcical dialogue session
to talk about the election reforms in the early days of October, yielding absolutely no results.

Two days before the mayhem happened, one of the founding member of BNP Oli Ahmed left BNP to join B Chowdhury, and formed a new party LDP. Many people hoped a third force would diffuse the polarization inflicted by the two major forces, others were not so hopeful about LDP’s effectiveness. The split in BNP high ups made the supporters nervous and put pressure on the 4-party to push for the scheduled election.

The day before the Paltan carnage occurred, on October 27: CA-designate K M Hassan was no-show for oath, citing illness. There were reports that 3 people were killed in a clash between BNP alliance and AL alliance in their effort to claim supremacy (!?) in Dhaka locality. Speculation flew that army was about to be deployed to maintain law and order, while some people vouched that army was not dumb or ambitious to try to take over governance, and they would surely not jeopardize their reputation as the peace keepers in the UN missions. Then came October 28, the fateful and tragic day.

And army finally intervened on 1/11, and CAS and the advisers vowed to “clean” up the “system”. It seems the army backed CG is now on a mission to poke holes in both the major parties’ structures. They want to accomplish it by detaining people in jails under the emergency ordinance and arresting people for murders committed by violent mobs. And now this murder charges appear to be a tactic by the army to intimidate the leaders, who might want to go on exile, leaving the political areana open to the new comers.

Note that, at the same time the CG had not taken any action against the atrocities committed by a handful of police officials on adibashis . No investigations had been underway to investigate why people in RAB’s custody seem to repeatedly die in “crossfire”.