The explosions which swiftly put an end to the lives of 24 people at a rally of the Awami League in Dhaka seven years ago continues to haunt our collective public conscience.
For those deaths, and with them the injuries which left scores of others traumatised and even maimed, were but a bleak reflection of the thousand and one heartbreaks we as a people have suffered from since the mid-1970s. The grenades which exploded on August 21, 2004 left in our lives a gaping wound that has only festered during all this time, owing principally to the failure of the then government, and of the caretaker one that followed it, to search for and nab the criminals responsible for the misdeed.
Even today, with governmental authority now being exercised by the very leadership whose obliteration or liquidation was the aim of those behind the blasts, the families of those who died, of those who were injured, of a nation wanting to put it all behind it wait for justice to be done.
The mayhem and tragedy of August 2004 ought never to have happened. But when it did happen, it should have been the foremost responsibility of the then BNP-Jamaat coalition government to get to the bottom of the tragedy and convince the nation that the law enforcers were fully equipped to handle it, that the scales of justice were at work, and to let us in on the thought that the perpetrators of the misdeed would not go unpunished.
That did not happen. What did happen was the shaping of a tale wrapped in irony. Suspicions of involvement of the mighty and the powerful, and of efforts being made to push the investigations into directions sinister and dark began to be voiced. The constitution of a one-man commission of inquiry, meaning a single High Court judge doing the rounds of questioning that lacked credibility, only reinforced the public belief that a cover-up was what the authorities were engaged in.
Indeed, the cover-up had begun soon after the explosions, when all evidence of the carnage perpetrated -- body parts making their macabre presence known, marks of blood making a carpet of the street, sandals and shoes scattered around and unexploded grenades lying there --- was swiftly done away with. The government found a scapegoat in Joj Mia. Nothing could have been more farcical, more a playing out of a gory comedy in a situation calling for the highest degree of probity and dedication to the task of unearthing the truth, than having an innocent man agree to bear the burden of guilt for those who had actually committed the crime. In the days and weeks and months that followed, police investigation officers played for time, went out on a limb to present a truth that was but an undermining of the truth.
Seven years on, new inquiries into the explosions are at work. Charges have been filed against as many as 30 people, some of them influential government functionaries at the time of the tragedy. A new set of law enforcers has gone busily about trying to dig out the facts. If compulsions of justice and the necessity for truth are behind these efforts; if a fair, impartial and thorough inquiry is the purpose here, the nation will not complain. It is a message that should go out loud and clear to the government, indeed to people in this country and beyond it. Let those behind the planning and execution of the tragedy be unmasked. Let those who patronised those killings be hauled before the law and let a comprehensive, foolproof and therefore credible trial and judgement be arrived at.
Meanwhile, we tell ourselves that we have not forgotten those dead and those wounded; that their sacrifices were but a reinforcing of our faith in the power of democracy to hold at bay and then neutralise the very elements -- and others like them -- who have sought to exercise power through deceit and a surfeit of murder. We tell ourselves that justice will be done, that the spectre of death will be replaced by a renewed belief in the sanctity of life.
We remember. And we tell ourselves: Never again!
Source : The Daily Star
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