• by Farid Ahmed (dhaka)
• Monday, February 01, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Bangladesh has vowed to bring to justice the fugitive killers of the country’s founder president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, now that five of his assassins have been executed 35 years since his murder.

Six of the killers who were tried in absentia are still on the run and hiding out in foreign countries, a top police officer in Dhaka told the local media. Another had previously died in Zimbabwe.

Around midnight on Thursday at the Dhaka Central Jail, five of the 12 former army officers who killed Sheikh Mujib — as the country’s founding father is popularly known — were hanged to death. The charismatic leader was brutally killed in a military coup staged by the junior officers on August 15, 1975.

'The absconding convicts will face the same fate,' declared Law Minister Barrister Shafique Ahmed over the weekend even as he guaranteed that they are entitled to appeal their case as did the five others.

'The six condemned convicts (who remain alive) will be brought back home for execution,' said Ahmed. 'Six convicts are hiding in Canada, Libya and other countries,' he said, adding that the Bangladeshi government is coordinating with these countries’ governments and had sought the help of the Interpol, the world’s largest police organisation.

On hearing of the execution of five of the convicted killers of Mujib, hundreds of cheering people thronged the streets of the capital to celebrate the long-awaited moment.

'We heave a sigh of relief as the perpetrators have finally been brought to book … It’s a milestone for the nation … the black chapter is over … the rule of law has been established,' Salauddin Ahmed, a businessman, told IPS as he joined the street celebration early Thursday.

Mujib, who led Bangladesh’s fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971, was brutally murdered by a group of military officers in 1975, or three and a half years after the South Asian nation gained its independence. At least 20 others were killed in the military putsch, including Mujib’s wife, sons and daughters-in-law. His two daughters were in Germany at the time.

One of them, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, is now the country’s Prime Minister.

'After 35 years, the nation today has been purged of its stains or vile creed that sought to justify the killings and disrupted the trial process for years,' said Dhaka University student Abul Hasem, who was among the hundreds of people who jammed the streets of the capital, near Dhanmondi, Mujib’s residence (now a museum), where he was killed.

'The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the slain Mujib, has a political obligation to meet,' said Nurul Kabir, editor of the leading English-language national daily ‘New Age’, adding that she had repeatedly claimed in the past that the extrajudicial murder of Mujibur Rahman initiated the politics of murder and vengeance in this country.

He added that the failure of the state in the past to hold the perpetrators of Mujib’s death to account for their crime 'had stood in the way of the establishment of the rule of law' in Bangladesh.

'Now that the trial has ended and the murderers executed, it is (Prime Minister Sheikh) Hasina’s turn to take political moves that would effectively help put an end to such politics and establish the rule of law in the genuine sense of the democratic ideal,' Kabir said.

Bangladesh has endured a succession of army-run regimes and dysfunctional democratic rules marred by corruption and partisan bickering since the assassination of Mujib.

Since leading Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan in a war of independence in 1971, the popularity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, popularly known as ‘Bangabandhu’ (meaning ‘a friend of Bengal’), had waned owing to what analysts described as his 'failure' to resolve the country’s perennial political (and economic) crisis and curb widespread corruption.

In his speeches before his death, Mujib had expressed deep concern over the extent of corruption plaguing the country after it had gained its independence, saying he had been 'surrounded by thieves.'

Less than a year before he was killed, Mujib, having grown impatient over the country’s plodding progress and growing anarchy, pushed Parliament to pass a law authorising a shift to a presidential system, which would give him enlarged powers.

He consequently abolished the parliamentary system and installed himself as an absolute ruler, suspending all political parties, right or left, except his own. The move surprised some and saddened others.

'True, the one-party autocratic rule was not the people’s objective when they fought the liberation war, but the extra-judicial murder of Mujib and the extra-constitutional takeover of power by Mujib’s old political comrade, Khandaker Mushtaque Ahmed, did not facilitate democracy in the country,' Kabir said.

'Rather, it paved the way for a series of martial law regimes that ruled the country, with the fundamental rights of the citizens remaining suspended for years — regimes that distorted the country’s political process in many ways,' he said. This, among others, by allowing the lateral entry of businessmen, civil and military bureaucrats into various rungs of the political ladder, the journalist added.

'The experience proves, once again, that democratic resistance, with people’s active political participation in it, remains the only constructive solution to autocratic governance of any ideological orientation,' he continued. Mushtaque Ahmed’s government installed after the 1975 coup d’état issued an Indemnity Ordinance granting impunity to the killers of Mujib. Lt Gen Ziaur Rahman, Lt Gen Hussain Muhammad Ershad, and Khaleda Zia, who were successively in power from 1975 up to 1996, made no attempt to bring the slain leader’s killers to trial.

When Hasina Wajed assumed the post of prime minister in 1996, she scrapped the Indemnity Ordinance, paving the way for the trial of her father’s assassins. A Dhaka court handed down the verdict in 1998, imposing death sentences to 15 individuals, three of whom were later acquitted by the High Court.

The trial process was again disrupted and remained almost suspended when Hasina Wajed’s party, the Bangladesh Awami League, lost in the 2001 polls. It resumed when the Awami League won a landslide victory in the 2008 general elections.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected the petition of the convicted criminals for a review of their death sentences. On the same day, too, President Zillur Rahman dismissed their appeal for clemency, effectively removing all stumbling blocks to the execution of the five assassins.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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