Low points of 2007

The moments that made us cringe, avert our eyes with shame, or furiously wish that things were different in Bangladesh:

10. Moeen promotes himself to General: When is the last time in the history of Bangladesh someone decided to promote himself, and destabilize the country’s entire command structure, just for the sake of facilitating a power-grab? Appointed a Lieutenant General in 2005, Moeen U Ahmed’s retirement date would have been June 2008. Fearful of whether he would be extract himself out of the mess he had created, he made himself a full General in 2007, giving him until the middle of 2010 in army service. This also allowed him to promote his more trusted subordinates to Lieutenant General, and try to strengthen his control over the army. However, he also had to promote the Chief of Naval Staff to Vice Admiral and Chief of Air Staff to Air Marshal. The result now, is that we have an army with three Lieutenant Generals and a general, but with no corp formations, a navy with a Vice Admiral, and about two frigates in workable condition and no fleet to speak of, and an air force with an Air Marshal, that does not even have enough fighter groups to justify having an Air Commodore. Our military force, and its men and women, have been made the laughing stock of the defense world, due to the insatiable greed of one man. Moeen became the Grinch who stole his promotions.

9. Geetiara Safiya Chowdhury’s property grab: Remember the bad old days of our democracy when ministers and members of parliament would go around stealing tin and relief material, only to be exposed by our fearless guardians of truth and propriety, Daily Star and Prothom Alo? Well, these are brave new days, and we don’t have those pesky elected representatives any more. We have advisors now, and they’re much more hands-on; they see a Gulshan property they like, they just occupy it, refuse to vacate it, and break the legs of the landlord. Hallelujah, my brothers, this is indeed the promised land of shushil civility.

8. Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan channels Mir Jafar: When Barrister Abdul Salam Talukdar, BNP’s valiant secretary-general resigned after the party’s electoral defeat in 1996, Begum Zia brought in Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan, thought to a safe and non-controversial politician to steer the party through five years of opposition. When BNP won power in 2001 however, Bhuiyan’s ambitions undertook a steep increase; he was not satisfied any more merely with being the second among equals, and he would not let Tareq Rahman, a much younger and lass-experienced politician, become BNP chief ahead of him. What followed, unfortunately, were five years of betrayal and collusion, ending with the January 2007 military coup. Mannan Bhuiyan remains the military junta’s most trusted political water-carrier; he ended the year by opining that even though the BNP chief, more than a quarter of the standing committee, and more than two hundred thousand workers and leaders were languishing in jail now, he saw no reason to launch any street agitations against the military regime. 2007 saw Mannan Bhuiyan’s public loyalty to his party and to democracy vanishing at an even faster rate than his eyebrows.

7. Sheikh Hasina jostled in Court: Sheikh Hasina is a sixty-year old politician and an ex-Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She had just defied a government embargo to return to Bangladesh. So why would she be arrested even before her trial proceeded? Why would her bail be revoked? Does anyone believe she would flee Bangladesh? While her abrasive style of operation has provoked political confrontations in the past, is proved to be just what our country needed in 2007, as she emerged as the most vocal and consistent of this military government’s critics. The government responded in its usual fashion of course, surrounding her house in a pre-dawn raid, sending in army personnel dressed in police uniforms to arrest her, and then purposefully jostling her in the courtroom steps. While these images were flashed around the world, we had confirmation, for anyone who needed it, that political decorum had no place in Bangladesh today.

6. Professors forced to apologize in court: This is not the Pakistani Army, we were told; those bad, old days are over us. While we believe that this is indeed not the Pakistani Army, it seems that the ghost of some Pakistani generals have taken over some of our top military commanders. What else explains the brutal incursions into the university campus at the dead of night, rounding up professors, keeping them in undisclosed locations, and torturing them? What explains the rigid necessity of convicting people for what everyone knows they have not done? When two professors of Dhaka University were made to stand outside the court room and tell the assembled newspapermen how sorry they were, the military brass just earned themselves a whole generation of Bangladeshis as enemies.

5. In Moeen we Trust: It was supposed to be a triumphant visit when Moeen would play the valiant savior to the millions of Non-resident Bangladeshis in the United States. Instead, the sordid details of theft, embezzling, and nepotism emerged. Not only is General Moeen the keeper of our nation’s democracy, we learned that he is also his brothers’ keeper. All six of them, apparently, including the one who harbors his son in Florida. As tales of earlier financial irregularity also slowly emerge, we hold our breaths to see how much of our country is left by the time democracy is returned to us.

4. Out of sight, but very much in our mind: The details are known to everyone: more than four hundred thousand people jailed without any charges against them or the right to apply for habeas corpus, laws enabling the military junta to seize a person’s property even before any charges have been proved against him in court, and illegal detentions and emergency-power tribunals competing against each other to hand out the harshest possible punishment. Nothing symbolizes the plight of our judiciary and the lack of basic freedoms better than the imprisonment of Arifur Rahman, in prison for more than three months now for drawing a cartoon. Yes, drawing a cartoon. No charges have been pressed, no justifications have been given.

3. The life and death of Cholesh Ritchil: Cholesh Ritchil was returning from a wedding. Twenty-four hours later, he was a mangled ,deformed dead body. Twenty-four hours of torture had killed him; his indomitable spirit, so long defiant and active in the cause of our people, and in the defense of our nature, had finally escaped from the coils of this tired world into the great unknown. His death was one of the earliest indications of what the military junta had in mind for the rest of us. In these troubled times, Cholesh Ritchil will be missed, his sense of justice and courage to stand up for what is right would have been priceless. Or maybe worth around Taka One Lakh, which, along with a sewing machine, is what an army officer handed over to Ritchil’s widow ten months after his death as way of compensation.

2. A building bleeds: When the government decided to halt relief operations in Rangs Bhaban with more than fifteen people trapped inside it, some possibly alive but in grievous torment; we, all of us, paused for a collective moment to gather our senses, and to check if what we thought was happening was really happening. I mean, we know dictatorship means democracy now, and elections mean bad governance, and economic stagnation equals tremendous growth, and media censorship is the new freedom of the press, but would any sane, normal group of men and women desert fellow human beings to death so callously, without a second thought? And then set off on a pilgrimage? They wouldn’t, right? To our eternal shame and sorrow, it turns out they would.

1. Aziz Supermarket Slaughter: The parallels are too easy; the scars, though thirty-six years old, are still there for everyone to see. When in response to the August student protests, military personnel invaded a university housing complex, took aside all the young men, bound them hand and feet, and beat them senseless in front of their parents and guardians, it was as if we were, for a moment seeing double, surely this was the beginning of the end for our military government, but also, was it 1971 again, and our bravest and best gathered to be led to their slaughter at the alter of a new nation? The sheer brutality and thoughtless violence of this crackdown left us speechless, but it was also a sign, if ever one was needed, that the pretenders currently running Bangladesh were beginning to understand the consequences of their actions; that they had embarked on a course of actions from which it would be extremely difficult to extract themselves with their lives and honor intact. Thus the mindlessly barbaric response to the first signs of protest, thus the consolidation of resolve to eject this bunch of thugs and have an elected government as soon as possible.