Untold Facts

Anti-BKSAL coup leaders hanged

In course of the hearing of petition for leave to appeal against the High Court verdict on Moon Cinema Hall ownership case, wherein the Bench declared the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution void and illegal, Barrister Moudud Ahmed as the counsel for the petitioners avowing public interest was making some political arguments. The Chief Justice is reported to have thrown back a question to the counsel: �Can we accept marital law? Measures are needed to prevent martial law in the future.�

The political sentiment expressed from the Bench is well appreciated amongst discerning public, but murmurs are also heard that it is empty rhetoric. Martial Law by definition is illegal and when imposed, defies the Constitution by suspension or abrogation. It certainly does not seek the support of the judiciary, but commands it by force for the time being. Contemporary history of many nations (including post-war France, a permanent member of the security council) witness a variety of reasons for constitutional failure or suspension that did not impound the social contract, nor compromise the sovereignty of the respective nation-state. The circumstances that led to such extra-constitutional intervention were invariably compounded by political failures internally and Cold War machinations of �regime change� externally. In the post-Cold War world order, such syndromes have not gone away, but continue to be taken advantage of or even engineered by superpower cliques.

What legal measure can the high judiciary take against such extra-legal intervention? Some say, none whatsoever beyond recording resentful disapproval or post-facto condemnation of �past and closed� reality. Indeed, it is only an effective political system, responding to the particular needs of the nation-state and supported by the will of the people, that can act as a safeguard against any extra-constitutional intervention, whether fomented internally or engineered externally. The impugned verdict in the Moon Cinema Hall ownership case recorded that Martial Law is �unknown� to the Constitution. Some say, that statement is but a puerile banality. The Court was sitting on judgment not of Martial Law but of the consequences of Martial Law Regulations which were post-facto ratified by an elected parliament through an Act of Amendment in full conformity with constitutional provisions.

Meanwhile a long battle in law-courts to confiscate the lives of coup-leaders of August 15, 1975 that killed the founder-president of the nation-state, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family, has reached its logical conclusion. The accused did not get the benefit of consideration or mercy for daring to effect the recovery, albeit by merciless violence, of civil multiparty democracy from the stranglehold of one-party BKSAL rule and murderous Rakkhi Bahini repression of dissent. The recovery of multi-party democracy has been sustained by the Fifth Amendment. But five of the coup leaders have been hanged as �murderers� after what has been termed by the Delegation of the European Union as a �respectable� process of trial in a �political� case. It is an irony of history and a peculiarity of Bangladesh that at the time of occurrence of the coup, none in the political establishment of Bangladesh or in the machinery of the state came forward to mourn the fatality, and many publicly rejoiced. The �murderers� now hanged to death were at that time received publicly as heroes, and for some time they obtained the acquiescence of the entire state machinery. On the death row in prison they were, like the victims of their coup, abandoned by the entire political establishment of the country, the coup-beneficiaries and acquiescing losers alike.

Author: Sadeq Khan
Source: Weekly Holiday