Untold Facts

In Praise of Sheikh Hasina’s BDR Crisis Management

In a Darbar (meeting) at the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) Headquarters at Peelkhana, Dhaka on March 3, 2010, its Director General Major General (DG) Moinul Islam said that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s handling of the BDR crises last year was the correct one. Thus, Hasina has a new admirer of her military prowess.

Last year on February 25-26, in the worst rampage—it was not a mutiny that some experts would like to coin—in our history that started at a similar Darbar, the BDR troops brutally killed their DG Major General Shakil Ahmed and 56 other senior officers. Wives, teenage daughters of the officers and lady-guests present in the compound were not spared of their wild attacks and carnal desires.

What surprised me from the comment of the DG that for the first time, I heard a senior military officer opining that the 33-hour long dilly-dallying approach by the Prime Minister and her political cohorts was the right one. Sorry, then army chief General Moeen U Ahmed, who earned a name to be both controversial and mischievous, was another exception.

So far, all military officers and defense experts, including Hasina’s Mohajote partner General H M Ershad, have said that the whole BDR crisis could have been sorted out within half an hour through swift military action, aided by equivocal para-droppings. Bangladesh army and air force had that capability. Pro-government elements and some pseudo experts differed on the ground that military action would have widened the crisis to the extent of a civil war and generated more fatalities. The army could have effectively sealed Peelkhana, thought located in a built-up area, within an hour or so and there was no scope of escaping by the culprits or widening the crisis. According to various reports, the DG was killed around 9 am on February 25 and the killing-raping spree, followed by an orgy of mutilating the dead bodies, continued for the next two days unchallenged. So, how the fatalities could go beyond perhaps a few if a swift military action for 30 minutes to an hour was taken, given the time and space? My plain belief was that it was a military crisis and it should have been handled militarily. On the same thumb rule, I believe political crisis needed political solution—-military solution could only be sought when all political avenues were exhausted.

Following the BDR crisis, three known Inquiry Commissions were formed. The military and the bureaucratic inquires were completed long time ago but their reports were never revealed in full to the public. The administrative investigation under a ‘recalled from retirement’ police officer, who is said to be a relative of the Prime Minister, was still going until the last report. Meanwhile, a number of detailed, full-throttle findings with ample and seemingly credible supportive evidences found their way in the press. Many bigwigs were named in those reports. As usually, the Awamis and their supporters have since been crying foul on those revelations. “Its all BNP/Jamaat and Pakistan’s INS propaganda,” they crowed.

Without pointing finger to any direction, I like to say, why the government does not challenge those revealing facts that have specific names, places, times and other minute details and come out clean. It is the public demand; they want the facts and the truth in the BDR carnage. They want to know why BDR witnesses were killed in the name of ‘heart attacks’ while in custody. Doling out charity to the victims’ family is not enough; people have the right to know the long and ugly hands, if any, of those that worked to disable Bangladesh’s border guards, and by extension, its military.

Author: Obaid Chowdhury
New York, USA