Md Akmal
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THE PEELKHANA MUTINY AND MASSACRE
3. The Cover-Up
Next day, the 27th, official search parties were allowed in. Ambulances kept ferrying the dead and the injured. Neither the anxious BDR kith and kin waiting at Peelkhanas main entrance gate, nor their loved ones inside were allowed to go in or come out. The bewildered and grief stricken people saw nothing sinister in any of this. To them, it appeared entirely reasonable to keep the killing field out of bound until the victims, dead or alive, were taken out with due decorum and the search for the killers and the evidence of their crime was completed. Hardly anyone thought of the possibility of the involve-ment of their government and armys topmost leadership in the massacre. Moreover, they were faced with an additional tension because of the news of restlessness among a number of BDR units across the country.
But what the unsuspecting public did not realise at the time is that in addition to their privileged position, this gave the involved great and good of the country an enormous advantage in covering up their treachery. How it was done is as ugly and yet fascinating as the planning and execution of the massacre were.
On the same 27th February, when the second mass grave was discovered and the enormity of the mutineers crime and savagery begun to emerge, Jahangir Kabir Nanak proposed to Brigadier General Mamun Khaled (Director CIB, DGFI) to handover the mutilated and decomposed bodies to their families immediately without media coverage and state funeral. The motive behind Nanaks sly proposal did not go remiss with the other army officers present. An officer of the Engineering Corps got so furious that he went to hit Nanak. Other army officers on duty had to restrain him. To avoid any flare up, Nanak quickly left the scene.
In the GHQ the waiting DG BDR, Brigadier General Moinul Islam, was also active. He assembled a group of officers and discussed the Peelkhana incident with them. He told them that he personally thinks the government and the CAS had failed to handle the incident. Otherwise the death of so many officers and humiliation of their families could have been prevented. To support his view, he gave them his reasons. When the officers expressed their own mind, he told them to type down their points of concern and volunteered to take them up with the army high ups. He took the unflattering typed list to the sitting CGS Lieutenant General Aminul Karim, and requested him to discuss those with the CAS. Moinul also asked the officers to raise their points in an organised way during the next days scheduled CAS address at Senakunja. At that meeting officers severely criticised their chief at his face and a panick stricken CAS had to be assisted out of the meeting hall by the army security unit. He had to change his dress to attend the nama-e-janaza scheduled immediately after the meeting. Later Karim, not Moinul, was charged with instigating the officers against the government and failing to proper command. He was immediately sacked. With one honourable patriot removed from the armys top, Moinul went to take up his pre-agreed duty of reshaping the BDR.
On the day Karim had committed his make-belief crime of instigating army officers against the government, the government was also active in covering up, with the help of its other connivers in the army, its own Deputy Home Minister Sohel Tajs role in getting the hired foreign killers out of the country. Sohel was not seen either at his office or in public from the 18th February. Certain media reported that on the 25th and the 26th he was with his family in the USA. This was a lie. He went to India on the 18th and secretly came back two to three days later. Thereafter he kept out of sight in Dhaka and on the 25th night, as per the Plan, helped the hired killers to escape by air. On the evening of the 28th, Sohel was flown to Sylhet by an army aviation helicopter and the same night he left for the USA on a passenger plane from the Osmani Airport. The pilot of the army aviation helicopter that flew him to Sylhet was Lieutenant Colonel Shahid. A few days later Shahid was killed. He died, along with Major General Rafiqual Islam, GOC 55 Infantry Division, when the helicopter he was piloting crashed near Tangail. The helicopter was sabotaged. For making Sohel safe, not only innocent Shahid was killed. In the same stroke, another patriotic senior army officer was also removed.
Later on, Brigadier General Mamun Khaled of DGFI was tasked to prepare the list of the officers who had shown the courage of standing up to the CAS at the Senakunjo meeting. From this list of 50 odd officers, some have already been sacked and others sent on peripheral duties away from Dhaka.
Lieutenant Colonel Shams (CO 44 Rifle Battalion) was among the few officers who had come out alive from Peelkhana. He alone was shown in TV and became an instant celebrity to the public. In his media interviews he not only made a big song and dance about the torture and torment he and his brother officers had suffered, but also stated that all the officers were gunned down by 11 am of the 25th. His eyewitness account gave both the PM and the CAS a much needed justification for their policy of ending the mutiny without calling the army. For, by sending the army to quell the mutiny would not have saved the officers life, instead it would have cost more lives. Indeed, the PMs admirers lost no time in congratulating her for the sagacity of her judgement in handling the mutiny. Both the PM and the CAS quickly repaid their debt by releasing Shams to join the elite SSF.
But soon the army inquiry team began to have a different picture. They discovered that the core of the Peelkhana mutineers was from Shamss 44 Rifle Battalion and none of its commanding army officers, Shams, Major Mahbub and Major Ishtiaq, was killed. Nor their offices were ransacked like other officers. More revealingly, a few minutes after the mutiny had begun Shams was seen briefing a large group of BDR soldiers near gate 5. When some one shouted, Officer ra shoinik thekey alada hoye jaan (Officers stand apart from the soldiers), he hurriedly finished the briefing and went away. Some of the arrested soldiers of the 44 Rifle Battalion confessed their part in the killing. However, they insisted that Colonel Shams be asked about the planning, as they did not know its details. The Army Board of Inquiry asked for Shams statement and wanted to question him. But the PMs office refused permission.
Likewise, none of the officers of the Communication Unit of the BDR was killed. Its CO, Lieutenant Colonel Qamruzzaman, was also shielded from the investigation by the PMs office. During the initial stage of their inquiry, from the call records immediately before and after the mutiny young officers of the RAB started discovering important clues linking AL leaders with the massacre. The most significant of these call records showed Torab Ali regularly exchanging information about the planned mutiny with some one abroad. Without governments help the military board of inquiry could not find out the overseas telephone number and the recipients identity.
Another of its kind was the call record of the 204 minutes conversation between Nanak and DAD Towhid on the 24th February. Guided by this and other incriminating evidence, the Army Board of Inquiry wanted to interrogate Nanak to know his whereabouts on the 25th night, when the Home Minister Sahara Khatun was staging the drama of arms surrender at Peelkhana. Sensing trouble ahead, Nanak suddenly developed chest pain, got himself admitted into Labid Hospital and from there went to Singapore. Within a few days Indian Foreign Secretary Menon made an unscheduled visit to Dhaka and had urgent meetings with both the PM and the CAS. The PM refused the Army Board of Inquiry permission to interrogate Nanak. Moreover, Brigadier General Hasan Nasir who had pressed for Nanaks interrogation was removed from the inquiry board. Nanak came back confident that he would remain unquestioned and above the law. On the other hand, the diligent Nasir was made a target of vendetta. Lately the DGFI has circulated anonymous letter to many army officers defaming him. It is likely that he would soon be sent on retirement.
In another of the call records discovered by the RAB, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Mukim Sarkar (CO 25 Rifle Battalion, Panchagar), who was in Peelkhana attending the Darbar and survived unharmed, was heard telling his Subedar Major at 9:30 pm of the 25th, that is shortly after Taposhs announcement regarding the appoint-ment of DAD Towhid as the acting DG BDR: Amader nirdesh holo sainikder jatey kono khoti na hoy. Jara paliye geche to geche apnara DAD shaheb k niya valo thaken. Aar kono bahini jatey vitorey dhuktey na parey. DAD shaheb ke enader sathey kotha boltey bolben . (The order we have is to keep the soldiers out of harms way. Those who have fled have after all gone All of you keep well together with the respected DAD. [Stay alert] so that no other force could get in. Tell respected DAD to speak to them.) Obviously, Sarkar was involved in the conspiracy. But, whose order he was passing on? The fact that Lieutenant Colonel Sarkar, like Lieutenant Colonels Shams and Qamruzzaman, has remained untouched and unaccountable says it all.
During their initial investigation, the RAB officers also found out the tailor shop and the tailor who had made the fake BDR uniform worn and later left behind by the hired foreign killers. They were also able to gather information about the ambulances and microbuses used for extri-cating these killers from Peelkhana and delivering them to the Zia International airport. The micro-buses had fake number plates and their drivers and owners were difficult to trace out. Neverthe-less they were able to establish the fact that the Red Crescent Hospital managed by an AL sympathiser, and the medical clinic of the PMs personal physician provided the ambulances in question. None of these important leads was pursued.
When the truth about the Peelkhana massacre started unravelling, in a personal briefing Molla Fazle Akbar, the DG DGFI, pointedly asked his officers to lead the inquiry out of the AL connections. A few junior officers murmured. Those identified dissenting were swiftly posted out of the DGFI. To the rest, the message was not lost. From the early March DGFI teams under Brigadier General Mamun Khaled started working in all news papers and TV channels so that the unpalatable truth was not leaked out.
In the RAB, Liteutenant Colonel Majid and Major Hamid had gathered firm evidence of the ALs involvement in the mutiny and massacre. Major Azim, a close relative of the PMs cousin Sheikh Helal MP, was brought in as RABs Acting Director of Intelligence to replace Majid. Simultaneously, Hamid was also transferred out of the RAB. On taking charge Azim, who was deemed unsuitable for promotion to the next rank before, asked Major Atik to link the JMB, BNP or any other militant organisation with the Peelkhana massacre. Besides, he also destroyed all the incriminating evidence gathered by Majid and Hamid.
About this time, Nanaks formal boss, LGRD minister Syed Ashraful Islam publicly denounced the Army Board of Inquiry for their failure to find out any JMB or anti-liberation force connection with the mutiny. The RAB intellig-ence under Azim followed suit. Suddenly Maulana Abdus Subhan was taken into custody and put in a RAB safe house. Commerce Minister Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Faruk, whom the PM has given the task of coordinating the inquiries, quickly claimed that some Islamic terrorists were involved in the mutiny. Azims plan was to force Abdus Subhan to make a false statement disclosing Islamic militants involvement in the massacre. But a Dhaka daily in its investigative report produced lots of facts and figures disproving the ministers claim. That report was stunningly true. It forced the government to abandon the idea of making a false Islamic militant link to the massacre. Abdus Subhan was then allowed to leave the safe house. After a few days he, along with his few other party members, met the PM and expressed their solidarity with the government. To complete the drive to cover-up, Abdul Kahhar Akhand was brought back from LPR as the head of the CIDs investigation team. He is a renowned fan of the PM. He had the rare achievement of conjuring up the FIR and eyewitnesses in the case of the PMs fathers assassination by young army officers more than two decades after the incident. So much so, in the general election he applied for the AL nomination for a parliamentary seat. But, since he was in LPR he could not stand. Obviously no one could surpass his impeccable partisan standing and supernatural skills as an investigator. His given task in regards to the Peelkhana massacre was simple: countermand all potentially damaging evidence that might slip through the already substantially gagged military investigation with creative evidence. Given the scale of pre-mediated policies and ploys of the government the Army Board of Inquiry could hardly be expected to do justice to their task. The only honourable thing they could do was to resign in protest. But that would have put the country in a grave crisis and the members of the inquiry board in a no win situation, especially when many of their powerful colleagues were themselves guilty of connivance. Although the head of the inquiry board, Lieutenant General Jahagir Alam Choudhury (QMG GHQ) is known for his honesty and integrity, he is also a cautious man. It is not a surprise that Jahangir and his board members have decided not to shake the bad apples as thoroughly as they should have. Even then that report is unlikely to be made available to us, the Joe public. Speaking personally, I however regret Jahangir and his board members failure to stand by the truth and justice. After all, we the army officers are oath bound to stand by our country and nation and, when required, make supreme sacrifice. I am afraid, unless we are willing to confront our enemies come what may, we as a nation is doomed. 4. The Prize It is most likely that a score or two BDR soldiers would be put on trial before some kind of court other than the military tribunal on the selective evidence of Abdul Kahhar Akhand and his CID team. A few of them may even be hanged. But all the major culprits involved in the planning and execution of the massacre from our PM onward would get away scotch free.
To our PM and her son and their associates in the crime the utter perversion of justice is, first and foremost, an existential necessity: a matter of sheer self-preservation. To the foreign schemers of the Peelkhana massacre, on the other hand, saving their Bangladeshi assets from the reach of justice is a functional necessity. This they have to ensure in order not to give away their game and to achieve the aims and objectives for which they have, in the first place, orchestrated the massacre. Of course, it hardly needs saying that the PM and her son and their associates have no objection in seeing those objectives being materialised. Other-wise they would not have agreed, in the first place, to become the local enablers of the foreign schemers. But, what are the foreign schemers objectives?
Since the Indian RAW is the main schemer, in analysing the aims and objectives of the foreign schemers I shall begin with its discernible objectives in staging the Peelkhana massacre. In considering the RAWs objectives, readers should not forget that the destruction of the BDR and the plan to reconstruct it in a shape and form suiting the need of the Indian BSF is part of a much larger design with multiple, yet interconnected, objectives.
During the mutiny, the PMs son Sajeeb Wajed Joy told the world press that it was due to the corruption of army officers. But judging by the mutineers demands it is apparent that they were moved, not so much by their distaste for corruption, but by their desire for material gains, including larger illicit earning and enhanced career prospect. It is also apparent that at the alter of the latter urge, the most significant of the mutineers demand, that is, the withdrawal of army officers from BDRs command, was sold to them by the schemers. The evil intention behind this became all the more apparent from the fact that after the mutiny the proposition to de-link the reshaped border force from the army was resold to the country by Moinul Islam on an altogether new ground: to erase the infamy of the BDR soldiers from our collective memory. Clearly, the first and foremost objective of those who have orchestrated the mutiny was to reconstitute our countrys border force without army officers at its command. To make the demand bold and deter their colleagues from accepting posting in the border force, army officers were slaughtered and their wives and daughters were tortured. The question is, what for?
Any one familiar with the functions of the BDR would know that this paramilitary force of ours is expected to
(1) Keep cross border smuggling in check and(2) Deter any intrusion of or encroachment on our international border by neighbouring countries.
Of these two primary duties, it shares the first with the Ansar and the second with the army; and in both the functions they are to be the forward guard. Primarily because of its latter duty, from its very inception all its command positions were assigned to army officers. In this the BDR is not an exception. Army officers also command its closest parallel and frequent adversary, the Indian BSF.
The merit of this arrangement is not difficult to recognise. Has any Bangladeshi ever heard anyone inside or outside the BSF proposing withdrawal of army officers from its command positions? Least any one wants to counter this by saying that we need not follow an Indian example regardless of our own need and experience, let the readers be reminded that whenever the BDR soldiers were ambushed or attacked by the BSF or the Shanti Bahini in the Hill Tracts, in the absence of their commanding army officers, often they left their weapons and run away. Yet, when led by army officers the same soldiers stood their ground and fought. To verify this, ask the local people and they would tell you the same. If any one still wants to ignore this truth, let him or her be reminded of Padua and Roumari where in 2001 the BDR soldiers fought under army officers and routed the BSF, who were sent to capture the BDR camps inside Bangladesh territory. In both the cases the aggressors were not only repulsed, many of the attackers were killed. In the latter instance, four army officers one major and three captains led the counter attack and the BDR soldiers ran havoc on the the BSF invaders. In the case of Padua 15 and in the case of Roumari 150 BSF personnel were killed. In Roumari 128 bodies were handed over to the local BSF and the remaining 22 bodies were handed over from Dhaka amid the glare of TV cameras. I still remember ETVs Shupon Roys coverage.
The differences in the BDR soldiers performances in all these encounters amply illustrates the hard fact that our paramilitary border force cannot protect our border camps and defend our border from hostile trespassers such as the Indian BSF without army officers at their command. This is not because the BDR soldiers lack courage. What the commanding army offers provide is the art and skills in organising attack or counter attack as well as the battlefield leadership required in meeting an organised armed incursion. It is only the military officers with their elaborate training and skills have the equipage to give such battlefield leadership. To expect this from civil servants is either mindless-ness or mischief mongering.
To recognise the inanity of the proposal, one may consider another fact. If we were to have a border force without the capability to stand their ground in the face of any organised armed attack from across the border, that border force would have no better capability than the Ansar force we already have. So why not send Ansars to guard our border? Without army officers at its command positions, the Ansar force fits the bill perfectly. To follow our new DG BDRs logic, that would erase the infamy of the mutineers completely. The quislings would not propose that because it would give away their machination. Even those of our countrymen who are not particularly interested in such intricate issues could see the utter baloney of the proposal. To keep our sleeping folks in slumber, the quislings foreign godfathers have devised the sly plan of placing a clone of the toothless Ansar force at our borders with a different name.
At this point it may be asked: Why the RAW want Bangladesh to have a toothless border force? Their decipherable motive is not one, but several.
What was remarkable that instead of honouring the fallen officers and soldiers for their supreme sacrifice and commending their DG for his diligence in looking after the countrys borders, our the then PM Sheikh Hasina telephoned her Indian counter-part to say sorry and handed over Padua, which by law no executive can. Moreover, she removed Fazlur Rahman from the BDR command and asked the GSO-1 of Operations of BDR, Lieutenant Colonel Rezanur, now Colonel and ADG RAB, to weed out the officers who had taken part in the Roumari operation. Is this the price dutiful army officers are to pay for defending the countrys border, for which they were put under oath before being commissioned?
However, to be fair to Sheikh Hasina, on becoming PM, Khaleda Zia also chose to forget Padua and Roumari and went a step further by prematurely retiring Fazlur Rahman from the army! Who and what made her to do so has still remained a mystery! You may call it diplomacy if you wish, but when an action by the principal holder of state power strikes a hammer blow to the countrys defenders pride, patriotism and professional diligence it cannot be a good thing for the country. Moreover, in silently condoning her predecessors illegal surrender of a piece of our territory, she too went beyond her remit. On a practical level, such a weak-knee posture makes us less safe, not more secured.
Whether intended by them or not, the message our patriotic army officers had had was that their fidelity to the country and its security might ruin their career. In no mean way the mindset of the conniving army officers of the Peelkhana massacre was shaped by that implicit message. Certainly, it also made the RAW bold in staging the mutiny and the massacre. For they knew, more they hit us hard, the more we would cave in.
In the recent years India had illegally been pushing about 167 items into Bangladesh, including clothing items, sugar, powder milk, Yaba tablet and phensidyl. Most of these are custom-produced for Bangladesh. When he was the DG BDR during the second term of Khaleda Zias premiership, the then Major General Jahangir Alam Chowdhury successfully brought this number down to 35. Obviously Indian strategists were displeased. This made them ever more sanguine to undermine the BDRs capa-bility. Ironically the success of Jahangir and his army officers gave the RAW a fertile ground of discontent within the BDR against army officers to make use of. With the declining smuggling, many corrupt soldiers illicit earning fell sharply. The ADs and DADs, who rise from the rank of soldier, were the worst sufferers. To them, it was obvious that under the new generation of army officers their future earning prospect is bleak. They were ready to join any move to end army officers presence in the BDR, regardless of its consequences.
When the new DG BDR was sent to New Delhi in the immediate aftermath of the Peel- khana massacre, we were told the purpose of his hasty trip was to thank the BSF for their magnanimity in looking after the borders for us. If the implied logic of it is to be followed, Bangladesh does not need a border force of its own; a helpful BSF should be enough. But, would it be?
After the independence, we allowed free cross -border trading on the strength of our perception of India as a genuine friend and benefactor. Our the then DG BDR Major General C.R. Datta and Food and Agriculture Minister Foni Majumdar were gaga about the wisdom of the arrangement. The former even gave us statistical proof of its success by claiming that smuggling had come down by 99 percent! Of course it would when trafficking goods across the border is officially allowed. The real question is: What an open border policy did to our economy?
It gave a hammer blow to our currency, utterly devastated our jute industry and completely denuded our food stock and brought about the unprecedented famine of 1974. It took nearly two decades for us to get back to the pre-1971 economic level!
This hard reality has not changed an iota. As reported by the Dhaka media, in March, that is less than a month after the Peelkhana massacre has left our border force in utter disarray, the sudden rise in the influx of Phensidyl forced our government to make a public call to India urging them to stop the Phensidyl factories alongside their borders west of Bangladesh. Before the 25th February, one bottle of Phensidyl was sold at Dhaka underworld market at Tk 1000/-. After that calamitous date its price came down to Tk. 100/-. How lucrative the Phensidyl business is can be seen from the fact that the production cost of a bottle of the addictive drink, including fixed overheads, stands some where between Rs. 6 and 8.50.
It is not just Phensidyl. India is also pushing other illicit drugs into Bangladesh in a bid to earn money and keep India free of drugs by re-routing most of her internally and externally produced drugs into Bangladesh. For instance, drugs arriving from the Golden Triangle are routed through Tripura into Bangladesh.
Similarly, on the 9th and 10th April 2009, Dhaka media showed our fresh milk vendors spilling out thousands of kg cow milk on the road. They were protesting because the big buyers were either not buying their fresh milk, or offering very low price. This happened not because the demand for milk product has suddenly gone down. It occurred because, with the border unguarded, the giant milk producers were getting low-cost powder milk from India. One can add more items to this list.
Through smuggling India is also taking away our costly imports such as fertilizer, diesel, petrol, electronic goods and gold. Bangladesh pays for them in dollars etc, India pays Bangladesh in killer drugs and other counter bands or low quality goods which no one else will buy from them. Either way Bangladesh is the net loser economically and otherwise.
For estimating our net loss through smuggling, even if we apply the yardstick of the formal trade, it cannot be less than 11: 1. With an ineffective border force this is bound to grow further.
India is not simply after flooding Bangladesh with its smuggled drugs and low-quality and low-cost consumer goods. It is also undermining our law and order by facilitating smuggling of illicit arms and sheltering criminals. If you have any relative who was/is in the RAB, ask him about the sources of arms that were/are recovered from criminals. He will tell you, they have invariably been from India. Ask them about the source of the JMB explosives, detonators, gunpowder and dice for ammunition that were/are recovered, and the answer will be the same. If you wish to have material proof, you may rewind and watch the close-ups of TV coverage on explosives captured recently from suspected JMB operatives. You will find they have printed label as being made in India.
With barbed wire fencing all along the India side of the border, it is India -- not Bangladesh -- who decides what goes in or out of its territory. For ensuring the safe entry and exit of smugglers and subversives working as per the Indian design, the BSF wants scope to roam our border areas unchallenged. A comparative study of media reports of incidents of trespassing and/or killing of civilians inside India by the BDR and inside Bangladesh by the BSF will reveal the strength of the latters urge.
As if this was not enough to show their fang, since the Peelkhana massacre the BSF have increased their killing of innocent Bangladeshi civilians throughout our border areas. On the 19th May alone they have killed two Bangladeshi civilians near the Roumari border and another two at Bholaghat. Neither the DG BDR, nor the government of Bangladesh cared to utter a single word of protest against such killing. On the contrary, the Bangladesh government is now actively considering taking help from India for reorganising our border force. Our enemy will help us reorganise our paramilitary force, which is to guard us, day in and day out, from the same enemy. What a farce! Either they are living in cloudland or they wish to put our nation in cloudiness.
It had been a longstanding army practice to take out an officer rumoured to be indulging in corruption out of the BDR. Those officers against whom evidence of corruption was available were put on trail before military tribunal without right of appeal in civil court. Since there was no scope to take out a BDR soldier on suspicion of corruption, they were tried in BDR tribunal and were dismissed only when found guilty. The process had to be transparent and rigorous, since the BDR soldiers, unlike army personnel, enjoyed the right to appeal in civil court. During 1991-95 about 1100 dismissed BDR soldiers brought their appeal before civil court. Of them less than 25 got back their jobs. As against this, between 1996-2001 a total of over 2000 sacked BDR soldiers managed to get them reinstated, thanks to the intervention of the then AL government of Sheikh Hasina. It was not a surprise that these reinstated soldiers and their disciples shouted Joy Bangla on the 25th February at Peelkhana in support of the mutiny.
The irony is that while busy selling their design for reshaping the BDR under a new name, with new uniform and insignia on the ground of erasing the horrible ignominy of the mutineers, the government is again planning to reinstate 2000-3000 sacked corrupt soldiers of 2001-2008 who either did not have any leg to appeal or have failed in appeal court to get their dismissal overturned. The government plans to do this on two supercilious grounds:
(1) They are the victims of the BNP-Jamat governments partisanship; and (2) Their experience would be invaluable to the reshaped border force!
However, the real motive is not all that difficult to decipher. Even if Bangladesh itself is smuggled out to India, these reinstated soldiers and their disciples could be relied upon to shout Joy Bangla alongside the AL. In this they would serve as a counter pause to the army, which the now disbanded infamous Rakki Bahini was intended to do for the AL government of 1971-75.
As far as I am able to gather, a list of about 200-300 BCS candidates from the 27th BCS has been kept ready for induction into the reshaped border force. However, being unsure about the possible reaction of the army officers in general, the government is in two minds. With the departure of General Moeen they have lost the self-motivated gatekeeper to keep a tab. Never-theless, it is likely that their foreign godfathers would put them back on track.
The CSCs selection process is not designed to pick up suitable candidates for the active battlefield leadership required of officers of a border force like ours. The would-be officers must have certain inherent physical and mental abilities, which CSCs written examination and interview can hardly identify with any degree of confidence. Moreover, to carry the task of commanding in skirmishes they need thorough physical fitness as well as the knowledge and skills of military tactics and weapon handling. In case, anyone is tempted to argue that the CSC recruited officers could be specially trained to have those knowledge and skills, he/she may take the trouble of revisiting the tale of what happened to the ASPs in similar training situation during the late 80s. Faced with the rising phenomenon of organised armed criminal gangs, President Ershad decided to train these newly recruited police officers for 1 year in the Bangladesh Military Academy. But the selected trainees could not endure the mental and physical hardship and the idea had to be abandoned. Eventually, to meet the challenge paused by the armed criminals, the RAB had to be created. Has anyone ever suggested de-linking RAB from the army or handing over RABs task to either the police or the Ansar?
The design is clear. To make our
(1) Border force politicised and (2) Ineffective in the borders; (3) Turn it into a counter force against the army, and (4) At the same time make the army dispirited and dysfunctional.
An ineffective border force promises an enormous monetary gain for India. To her the cross-border smuggling is currently worth about 6 billion US dollar a year, with the surety of year-on-year expansion. To this add another 3 billion US dollar from the formal trade. It would be a frightening loss for Bangladesh, if the indirect costs of law and order and drug addiction were added to it. It would
(1) Complete the Indian-isation of our domestic market;(2) Strangulate our economic growth; and (3) Totally cripple our ability to defy Indian wishes, even if we want to; (4) With a demoralised and diminished army with a scattering of real or potential traitors among its senior officers, even the thought of defying Indian wishes will start fading out; and (5) Our very independence will be made meaningless to our own citizens.
We fought a bloody war in 1971 to make ourselves free to harness our energy for attaining Sonar Bangla of our dream. Like all dreams of its kind, the dream of Sonar Bangla may have been a utopia. Nonetheless, a reasonably prosperous Bangladesh, at least similar to Malaysia, was certainly within our reach. Why what Malaysia could, we could not achieve? Ask any knowledgeable Malaysian, and he will tell you, as I was told by a senior Malaysian diplomat, that his country did not have a neighbour called India, which we have.
From the day one of our independence, our feigned friend and imperious neighbour India started working towards an opposite end. It is not without meaning that the very first person who stood firm against Indias asset stripping of the newly independent Bangladesh was an army officer: the late Major Jalil. For his guts his career in the army was brought to an end at the behest of our Indian godfathers. Brave Jalil was made an example so that no army officer could think of defying Indian wish. Yet Jalils had been not short in supply. Even before we had our independence, the Indian strategists understood it very well that left to itself it is but natural for Bangladesh to have a reasonably strong patriotic army, which would not take its machination kindly. That is why they wanted us to have at best a nominal army and that too, together with the potential civilian challengers to its designs, be kept under check by the Rakki Bahini recruited from the Indophile AL partisans.
Whatever progress India was able to make in ensnaring Bangladesh during the early years of our independence received a hammer blow in 1975. Despite the set back, Indian schemers never gave up their evil design. With the aid and abetment of their Bangladeshi quislings, the RAW persisted in its efforts. With time, our patriotic masses also became complacent and off-guard. They again started believing the quislings.
While this was happening, the RAW set its eye again on neutering the army. As has been mentioned before, since the 1990s it was actively working towards this end. Over the period, several retired army intelligence chiefs of Bangladesh have publicly spoken about it being the most urgent objective of the RAW. By and large their warnings went remiss with, and unheeded by, our political classes. They became preoccupied with their own self-aggrandisement.
The result is where we are now: in the words of the former Indian army chief Tapan Roy-Choudhury firmly locked in the Indian radar. The BDR massacre was first and foremost aimed at making the lock firmer. By getting away with their crime the RAW schemers and their Bangla-deshi assets have every reason to be embolden.
With their tail up, the RAW schemers and their Bangladeshi assets would try to go further in their drive to dispirit and dissuade the patriotic army officers in order to reduce our army to a level of absolute subservient. In that case Indias need to deploy its army on the Bangladesh front would be substantially reduced, which in turn would allow it to deploy more troops on the Chinese and Pakistani fronts. Moreover, if the army could be tamed, it would become far easier for the Indian whispers to tame our nation, too.
To tie our nation down and put our state in their strategic straight-jacket, Indian political masters are also working hard to materialise their other designs such as transit, port facilities, link canal and diversion of river water to name only a few. The signs are they are also trying to create hostilities between Bangladesh and Myanmar so that we have no friendly neighbour left. God forbid if they succeed, we would become geo-politically tied down and corralled. If it happens, there will be not much left for us to do, except ending up like Goa or Sikkim.
That would also give the Israeli MOSSAD much satisfaction. One less Muslim majority state is one less Muslim voice in the community of nations against their oppress-ion of the Palestinians.
But more importantly for both the Indians and the Israelis this would also be a huge step forward in their dream of creating a strategic barrier against China that would increase their value to the West, especially to the USA.
5. Epilogue
In the preface I have stressed that what I have been able to gather from my well-placed friends from the civil service, the army and the police gives us not the whole truth but only the bare bone of the truth about the Peelkhana mutiny and massacre. I have also said that when we have the whole truth, I expect my findings corroborated. I am confident about this, because I have confid-ence in the intrigity and reliability of my sources. Having said that, I am also fully conscious that however confident I may feel about the authen-ticity of the truth that I have uncovered, I am not in a position to demonstrate its reliability and validity. Despite the fact that under the given context I have strong mitigating grounds, readers are still within their right to have a degree of scepticism. I would be the last person to find fault with them on this count. But such a healthy scepticism, I think, also obliges us all to be active in seeking to know the whole truth.
But having seen the governments obstructive ploys, do we have a reasonable hope of getting all the facts? I am afraid I do not think we have even a slimmest chance. To be candid, I do not think our PM is going to allow any inconvenient truth about herself or her friends and colleagues to come out. The reasons for her reticence are there in the story of the mutiny and massacre. As far as she is concerned, the success of her politics critically rests on covering-up, not on the fidelity to truth and justice and duty to the nation.
Frankly speaking, I have also doubt about our opposition leaders for a different reason. Once in power, they might also find it convenient to be diplomatic and allow the unsavoury facts about the mutiny and massacre to be left on the wayside. Surely, there is a place for diplomacy in dealing with foreign countries. But to extend it to internal traitors and murderers because it would displease a foreign power or two is down right appeasement at the expense of debilitating our nation and undermining our peoples confidence in our state. In the past, on occasions, we have seen them acting in this thoughtless manner. Still, it is my earnest hope that about the Peelkhana mutiny and massacre they will not repeat the same.
Entertaining such a hope will not be enough; we must raise our voice demanding a credible open-ended public inquiry on all aspects of the mutiny without any let or hindrance from any quarter, including the government. Only such a transparent inquiry by a competent and well respected public figure or figures will help us find the unbarnished truth, identify the culprits and uproot the conspirators and their connivers. Nothing short of this will satisfy the martyars soul or their families anguish and at the same time meet the all important security need of our beloved country.
To make this happen, the least we can do is to start writing to our MPs together with our friends and family members and send its copy to all the important national media. Spending a few takas on this will be our sadqa for the sake of our nation. Let us all do it without waiting for others to do it first. Has not Allah, the Almighty commanded us to compete with each other in doing good deeds?
This old man will certainly do his part. You can be rest assured about it. Among your demand letters my letter will also be there
3. The Cover-Up
Next day, the 27th, official search parties were allowed in. Ambulances kept ferrying the dead and the injured. Neither the anxious BDR kith and kin waiting at Peelkhanas main entrance gate, nor their loved ones inside were allowed to go in or come out. The bewildered and grief stricken people saw nothing sinister in any of this. To them, it appeared entirely reasonable to keep the killing field out of bound until the victims, dead or alive, were taken out with due decorum and the search for the killers and the evidence of their crime was completed. Hardly anyone thought of the possibility of the involve-ment of their government and armys topmost leadership in the massacre. Moreover, they were faced with an additional tension because of the news of restlessness among a number of BDR units across the country.
But what the unsuspecting public did not realise at the time is that in addition to their privileged position, this gave the involved great and good of the country an enormous advantage in covering up their treachery. How it was done is as ugly and yet fascinating as the planning and execution of the massacre were.
On the same 27th February, when the second mass grave was discovered and the enormity of the mutineers crime and savagery begun to emerge, Jahangir Kabir Nanak proposed to Brigadier General Mamun Khaled (Director CIB, DGFI) to handover the mutilated and decomposed bodies to their families immediately without media coverage and state funeral. The motive behind Nanaks sly proposal did not go remiss with the other army officers present. An officer of the Engineering Corps got so furious that he went to hit Nanak. Other army officers on duty had to restrain him. To avoid any flare up, Nanak quickly left the scene.
In the GHQ the waiting DG BDR, Brigadier General Moinul Islam, was also active. He assembled a group of officers and discussed the Peelkhana incident with them. He told them that he personally thinks the government and the CAS had failed to handle the incident. Otherwise the death of so many officers and humiliation of their families could have been prevented. To support his view, he gave them his reasons. When the officers expressed their own mind, he told them to type down their points of concern and volunteered to take them up with the army high ups. He took the unflattering typed list to the sitting CGS Lieutenant General Aminul Karim, and requested him to discuss those with the CAS. Moinul also asked the officers to raise their points in an organised way during the next days scheduled CAS address at Senakunja. At that meeting officers severely criticised their chief at his face and a panick stricken CAS had to be assisted out of the meeting hall by the army security unit. He had to change his dress to attend the nama-e-janaza scheduled immediately after the meeting. Later Karim, not Moinul, was charged with instigating the officers against the government and failing to proper command. He was immediately sacked. With one honourable patriot removed from the armys top, Moinul went to take up his pre-agreed duty of reshaping the BDR.
On the day Karim had committed his make-belief crime of instigating army officers against the government, the government was also active in covering up, with the help of its other connivers in the army, its own Deputy Home Minister Sohel Tajs role in getting the hired foreign killers out of the country. Sohel was not seen either at his office or in public from the 18th February. Certain media reported that on the 25th and the 26th he was with his family in the USA. This was a lie. He went to India on the 18th and secretly came back two to three days later. Thereafter he kept out of sight in Dhaka and on the 25th night, as per the Plan, helped the hired killers to escape by air. On the evening of the 28th, Sohel was flown to Sylhet by an army aviation helicopter and the same night he left for the USA on a passenger plane from the Osmani Airport. The pilot of the army aviation helicopter that flew him to Sylhet was Lieutenant Colonel Shahid. A few days later Shahid was killed. He died, along with Major General Rafiqual Islam, GOC 55 Infantry Division, when the helicopter he was piloting crashed near Tangail. The helicopter was sabotaged. For making Sohel safe, not only innocent Shahid was killed. In the same stroke, another patriotic senior army officer was also removed.
Later on, Brigadier General Mamun Khaled of DGFI was tasked to prepare the list of the officers who had shown the courage of standing up to the CAS at the Senakunjo meeting. From this list of 50 odd officers, some have already been sacked and others sent on peripheral duties away from Dhaka.
Lieutenant Colonel Shams (CO 44 Rifle Battalion) was among the few officers who had come out alive from Peelkhana. He alone was shown in TV and became an instant celebrity to the public. In his media interviews he not only made a big song and dance about the torture and torment he and his brother officers had suffered, but also stated that all the officers were gunned down by 11 am of the 25th. His eyewitness account gave both the PM and the CAS a much needed justification for their policy of ending the mutiny without calling the army. For, by sending the army to quell the mutiny would not have saved the officers life, instead it would have cost more lives. Indeed, the PMs admirers lost no time in congratulating her for the sagacity of her judgement in handling the mutiny. Both the PM and the CAS quickly repaid their debt by releasing Shams to join the elite SSF.
But soon the army inquiry team began to have a different picture. They discovered that the core of the Peelkhana mutineers was from Shamss 44 Rifle Battalion and none of its commanding army officers, Shams, Major Mahbub and Major Ishtiaq, was killed. Nor their offices were ransacked like other officers. More revealingly, a few minutes after the mutiny had begun Shams was seen briefing a large group of BDR soldiers near gate 5. When some one shouted, Officer ra shoinik thekey alada hoye jaan (Officers stand apart from the soldiers), he hurriedly finished the briefing and went away. Some of the arrested soldiers of the 44 Rifle Battalion confessed their part in the killing. However, they insisted that Colonel Shams be asked about the planning, as they did not know its details. The Army Board of Inquiry asked for Shams statement and wanted to question him. But the PMs office refused permission.
Likewise, none of the officers of the Communication Unit of the BDR was killed. Its CO, Lieutenant Colonel Qamruzzaman, was also shielded from the investigation by the PMs office. During the initial stage of their inquiry, from the call records immediately before and after the mutiny young officers of the RAB started discovering important clues linking AL leaders with the massacre. The most significant of these call records showed Torab Ali regularly exchanging information about the planned mutiny with some one abroad. Without governments help the military board of inquiry could not find out the overseas telephone number and the recipients identity.
Another of its kind was the call record of the 204 minutes conversation between Nanak and DAD Towhid on the 24th February. Guided by this and other incriminating evidence, the Army Board of Inquiry wanted to interrogate Nanak to know his whereabouts on the 25th night, when the Home Minister Sahara Khatun was staging the drama of arms surrender at Peelkhana. Sensing trouble ahead, Nanak suddenly developed chest pain, got himself admitted into Labid Hospital and from there went to Singapore. Within a few days Indian Foreign Secretary Menon made an unscheduled visit to Dhaka and had urgent meetings with both the PM and the CAS. The PM refused the Army Board of Inquiry permission to interrogate Nanak. Moreover, Brigadier General Hasan Nasir who had pressed for Nanaks interrogation was removed from the inquiry board. Nanak came back confident that he would remain unquestioned and above the law. On the other hand, the diligent Nasir was made a target of vendetta. Lately the DGFI has circulated anonymous letter to many army officers defaming him. It is likely that he would soon be sent on retirement.
In another of the call records discovered by the RAB, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Mukim Sarkar (CO 25 Rifle Battalion, Panchagar), who was in Peelkhana attending the Darbar and survived unharmed, was heard telling his Subedar Major at 9:30 pm of the 25th, that is shortly after Taposhs announcement regarding the appoint-ment of DAD Towhid as the acting DG BDR: Amader nirdesh holo sainikder jatey kono khoti na hoy. Jara paliye geche to geche apnara DAD shaheb k niya valo thaken. Aar kono bahini jatey vitorey dhuktey na parey. DAD shaheb ke enader sathey kotha boltey bolben . (The order we have is to keep the soldiers out of harms way. Those who have fled have after all gone All of you keep well together with the respected DAD. [Stay alert] so that no other force could get in. Tell respected DAD to speak to them.) Obviously, Sarkar was involved in the conspiracy. But, whose order he was passing on? The fact that Lieutenant Colonel Sarkar, like Lieutenant Colonels Shams and Qamruzzaman, has remained untouched and unaccountable says it all.
During their initial investigation, the RAB officers also found out the tailor shop and the tailor who had made the fake BDR uniform worn and later left behind by the hired foreign killers. They were also able to gather information about the ambulances and microbuses used for extri-cating these killers from Peelkhana and delivering them to the Zia International airport. The micro-buses had fake number plates and their drivers and owners were difficult to trace out. Neverthe-less they were able to establish the fact that the Red Crescent Hospital managed by an AL sympathiser, and the medical clinic of the PMs personal physician provided the ambulances in question. None of these important leads was pursued.
When the truth about the Peelkhana massacre started unravelling, in a personal briefing Molla Fazle Akbar, the DG DGFI, pointedly asked his officers to lead the inquiry out of the AL connections. A few junior officers murmured. Those identified dissenting were swiftly posted out of the DGFI. To the rest, the message was not lost. From the early March DGFI teams under Brigadier General Mamun Khaled started working in all news papers and TV channels so that the unpalatable truth was not leaked out.
In the RAB, Liteutenant Colonel Majid and Major Hamid had gathered firm evidence of the ALs involvement in the mutiny and massacre. Major Azim, a close relative of the PMs cousin Sheikh Helal MP, was brought in as RABs Acting Director of Intelligence to replace Majid. Simultaneously, Hamid was also transferred out of the RAB. On taking charge Azim, who was deemed unsuitable for promotion to the next rank before, asked Major Atik to link the JMB, BNP or any other militant organisation with the Peelkhana massacre. Besides, he also destroyed all the incriminating evidence gathered by Majid and Hamid.
About this time, Nanaks formal boss, LGRD minister Syed Ashraful Islam publicly denounced the Army Board of Inquiry for their failure to find out any JMB or anti-liberation force connection with the mutiny. The RAB intellig-ence under Azim followed suit. Suddenly Maulana Abdus Subhan was taken into custody and put in a RAB safe house. Commerce Minister Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Faruk, whom the PM has given the task of coordinating the inquiries, quickly claimed that some Islamic terrorists were involved in the mutiny. Azims plan was to force Abdus Subhan to make a false statement disclosing Islamic militants involvement in the massacre. But a Dhaka daily in its investigative report produced lots of facts and figures disproving the ministers claim. That report was stunningly true. It forced the government to abandon the idea of making a false Islamic militant link to the massacre. Abdus Subhan was then allowed to leave the safe house. After a few days he, along with his few other party members, met the PM and expressed their solidarity with the government. To complete the drive to cover-up, Abdul Kahhar Akhand was brought back from LPR as the head of the CIDs investigation team. He is a renowned fan of the PM. He had the rare achievement of conjuring up the FIR and eyewitnesses in the case of the PMs fathers assassination by young army officers more than two decades after the incident. So much so, in the general election he applied for the AL nomination for a parliamentary seat. But, since he was in LPR he could not stand. Obviously no one could surpass his impeccable partisan standing and supernatural skills as an investigator. His given task in regards to the Peelkhana massacre was simple: countermand all potentially damaging evidence that might slip through the already substantially gagged military investigation with creative evidence. Given the scale of pre-mediated policies and ploys of the government the Army Board of Inquiry could hardly be expected to do justice to their task. The only honourable thing they could do was to resign in protest. But that would have put the country in a grave crisis and the members of the inquiry board in a no win situation, especially when many of their powerful colleagues were themselves guilty of connivance. Although the head of the inquiry board, Lieutenant General Jahagir Alam Choudhury (QMG GHQ) is known for his honesty and integrity, he is also a cautious man. It is not a surprise that Jahangir and his board members have decided not to shake the bad apples as thoroughly as they should have. Even then that report is unlikely to be made available to us, the Joe public. Speaking personally, I however regret Jahangir and his board members failure to stand by the truth and justice. After all, we the army officers are oath bound to stand by our country and nation and, when required, make supreme sacrifice. I am afraid, unless we are willing to confront our enemies come what may, we as a nation is doomed. 4. The Prize It is most likely that a score or two BDR soldiers would be put on trial before some kind of court other than the military tribunal on the selective evidence of Abdul Kahhar Akhand and his CID team. A few of them may even be hanged. But all the major culprits involved in the planning and execution of the massacre from our PM onward would get away scotch free.
To our PM and her son and their associates in the crime the utter perversion of justice is, first and foremost, an existential necessity: a matter of sheer self-preservation. To the foreign schemers of the Peelkhana massacre, on the other hand, saving their Bangladeshi assets from the reach of justice is a functional necessity. This they have to ensure in order not to give away their game and to achieve the aims and objectives for which they have, in the first place, orchestrated the massacre. Of course, it hardly needs saying that the PM and her son and their associates have no objection in seeing those objectives being materialised. Other-wise they would not have agreed, in the first place, to become the local enablers of the foreign schemers. But, what are the foreign schemers objectives?
Since the Indian RAW is the main schemer, in analysing the aims and objectives of the foreign schemers I shall begin with its discernible objectives in staging the Peelkhana massacre. In considering the RAWs objectives, readers should not forget that the destruction of the BDR and the plan to reconstruct it in a shape and form suiting the need of the Indian BSF is part of a much larger design with multiple, yet interconnected, objectives.
During the mutiny, the PMs son Sajeeb Wajed Joy told the world press that it was due to the corruption of army officers. But judging by the mutineers demands it is apparent that they were moved, not so much by their distaste for corruption, but by their desire for material gains, including larger illicit earning and enhanced career prospect. It is also apparent that at the alter of the latter urge, the most significant of the mutineers demand, that is, the withdrawal of army officers from BDRs command, was sold to them by the schemers. The evil intention behind this became all the more apparent from the fact that after the mutiny the proposition to de-link the reshaped border force from the army was resold to the country by Moinul Islam on an altogether new ground: to erase the infamy of the BDR soldiers from our collective memory. Clearly, the first and foremost objective of those who have orchestrated the mutiny was to reconstitute our countrys border force without army officers at its command. To make the demand bold and deter their colleagues from accepting posting in the border force, army officers were slaughtered and their wives and daughters were tortured. The question is, what for?
Any one familiar with the functions of the BDR would know that this paramilitary force of ours is expected to
(1) Keep cross border smuggling in check and(2) Deter any intrusion of or encroachment on our international border by neighbouring countries.
Of these two primary duties, it shares the first with the Ansar and the second with the army; and in both the functions they are to be the forward guard. Primarily because of its latter duty, from its very inception all its command positions were assigned to army officers. In this the BDR is not an exception. Army officers also command its closest parallel and frequent adversary, the Indian BSF.
The merit of this arrangement is not difficult to recognise. Has any Bangladeshi ever heard anyone inside or outside the BSF proposing withdrawal of army officers from its command positions? Least any one wants to counter this by saying that we need not follow an Indian example regardless of our own need and experience, let the readers be reminded that whenever the BDR soldiers were ambushed or attacked by the BSF or the Shanti Bahini in the Hill Tracts, in the absence of their commanding army officers, often they left their weapons and run away. Yet, when led by army officers the same soldiers stood their ground and fought. To verify this, ask the local people and they would tell you the same. If any one still wants to ignore this truth, let him or her be reminded of Padua and Roumari where in 2001 the BDR soldiers fought under army officers and routed the BSF, who were sent to capture the BDR camps inside Bangladesh territory. In both the cases the aggressors were not only repulsed, many of the attackers were killed. In the latter instance, four army officers one major and three captains led the counter attack and the BDR soldiers ran havoc on the the BSF invaders. In the case of Padua 15 and in the case of Roumari 150 BSF personnel were killed. In Roumari 128 bodies were handed over to the local BSF and the remaining 22 bodies were handed over from Dhaka amid the glare of TV cameras. I still remember ETVs Shupon Roys coverage.
The differences in the BDR soldiers performances in all these encounters amply illustrates the hard fact that our paramilitary border force cannot protect our border camps and defend our border from hostile trespassers such as the Indian BSF without army officers at their command. This is not because the BDR soldiers lack courage. What the commanding army offers provide is the art and skills in organising attack or counter attack as well as the battlefield leadership required in meeting an organised armed incursion. It is only the military officers with their elaborate training and skills have the equipage to give such battlefield leadership. To expect this from civil servants is either mindless-ness or mischief mongering.
To recognise the inanity of the proposal, one may consider another fact. If we were to have a border force without the capability to stand their ground in the face of any organised armed attack from across the border, that border force would have no better capability than the Ansar force we already have. So why not send Ansars to guard our border? Without army officers at its command positions, the Ansar force fits the bill perfectly. To follow our new DG BDRs logic, that would erase the infamy of the mutineers completely. The quislings would not propose that because it would give away their machination. Even those of our countrymen who are not particularly interested in such intricate issues could see the utter baloney of the proposal. To keep our sleeping folks in slumber, the quislings foreign godfathers have devised the sly plan of placing a clone of the toothless Ansar force at our borders with a different name.
At this point it may be asked: Why the RAW want Bangladesh to have a toothless border force? Their decipherable motive is not one, but several.
What was remarkable that instead of honouring the fallen officers and soldiers for their supreme sacrifice and commending their DG for his diligence in looking after the countrys borders, our the then PM Sheikh Hasina telephoned her Indian counter-part to say sorry and handed over Padua, which by law no executive can. Moreover, she removed Fazlur Rahman from the BDR command and asked the GSO-1 of Operations of BDR, Lieutenant Colonel Rezanur, now Colonel and ADG RAB, to weed out the officers who had taken part in the Roumari operation. Is this the price dutiful army officers are to pay for defending the countrys border, for which they were put under oath before being commissioned?
However, to be fair to Sheikh Hasina, on becoming PM, Khaleda Zia also chose to forget Padua and Roumari and went a step further by prematurely retiring Fazlur Rahman from the army! Who and what made her to do so has still remained a mystery! You may call it diplomacy if you wish, but when an action by the principal holder of state power strikes a hammer blow to the countrys defenders pride, patriotism and professional diligence it cannot be a good thing for the country. Moreover, in silently condoning her predecessors illegal surrender of a piece of our territory, she too went beyond her remit. On a practical level, such a weak-knee posture makes us less safe, not more secured.
Whether intended by them or not, the message our patriotic army officers had had was that their fidelity to the country and its security might ruin their career. In no mean way the mindset of the conniving army officers of the Peelkhana massacre was shaped by that implicit message. Certainly, it also made the RAW bold in staging the mutiny and the massacre. For they knew, more they hit us hard, the more we would cave in.
In the recent years India had illegally been pushing about 167 items into Bangladesh, including clothing items, sugar, powder milk, Yaba tablet and phensidyl. Most of these are custom-produced for Bangladesh. When he was the DG BDR during the second term of Khaleda Zias premiership, the then Major General Jahangir Alam Chowdhury successfully brought this number down to 35. Obviously Indian strategists were displeased. This made them ever more sanguine to undermine the BDRs capa-bility. Ironically the success of Jahangir and his army officers gave the RAW a fertile ground of discontent within the BDR against army officers to make use of. With the declining smuggling, many corrupt soldiers illicit earning fell sharply. The ADs and DADs, who rise from the rank of soldier, were the worst sufferers. To them, it was obvious that under the new generation of army officers their future earning prospect is bleak. They were ready to join any move to end army officers presence in the BDR, regardless of its consequences.
When the new DG BDR was sent to New Delhi in the immediate aftermath of the Peel- khana massacre, we were told the purpose of his hasty trip was to thank the BSF for their magnanimity in looking after the borders for us. If the implied logic of it is to be followed, Bangladesh does not need a border force of its own; a helpful BSF should be enough. But, would it be?
After the independence, we allowed free cross -border trading on the strength of our perception of India as a genuine friend and benefactor. Our the then DG BDR Major General C.R. Datta and Food and Agriculture Minister Foni Majumdar were gaga about the wisdom of the arrangement. The former even gave us statistical proof of its success by claiming that smuggling had come down by 99 percent! Of course it would when trafficking goods across the border is officially allowed. The real question is: What an open border policy did to our economy?
It gave a hammer blow to our currency, utterly devastated our jute industry and completely denuded our food stock and brought about the unprecedented famine of 1974. It took nearly two decades for us to get back to the pre-1971 economic level!
This hard reality has not changed an iota. As reported by the Dhaka media, in March, that is less than a month after the Peelkhana massacre has left our border force in utter disarray, the sudden rise in the influx of Phensidyl forced our government to make a public call to India urging them to stop the Phensidyl factories alongside their borders west of Bangladesh. Before the 25th February, one bottle of Phensidyl was sold at Dhaka underworld market at Tk 1000/-. After that calamitous date its price came down to Tk. 100/-. How lucrative the Phensidyl business is can be seen from the fact that the production cost of a bottle of the addictive drink, including fixed overheads, stands some where between Rs. 6 and 8.50.
It is not just Phensidyl. India is also pushing other illicit drugs into Bangladesh in a bid to earn money and keep India free of drugs by re-routing most of her internally and externally produced drugs into Bangladesh. For instance, drugs arriving from the Golden Triangle are routed through Tripura into Bangladesh.
Similarly, on the 9th and 10th April 2009, Dhaka media showed our fresh milk vendors spilling out thousands of kg cow milk on the road. They were protesting because the big buyers were either not buying their fresh milk, or offering very low price. This happened not because the demand for milk product has suddenly gone down. It occurred because, with the border unguarded, the giant milk producers were getting low-cost powder milk from India. One can add more items to this list.
Through smuggling India is also taking away our costly imports such as fertilizer, diesel, petrol, electronic goods and gold. Bangladesh pays for them in dollars etc, India pays Bangladesh in killer drugs and other counter bands or low quality goods which no one else will buy from them. Either way Bangladesh is the net loser economically and otherwise.
For estimating our net loss through smuggling, even if we apply the yardstick of the formal trade, it cannot be less than 11: 1. With an ineffective border force this is bound to grow further.
India is not simply after flooding Bangladesh with its smuggled drugs and low-quality and low-cost consumer goods. It is also undermining our law and order by facilitating smuggling of illicit arms and sheltering criminals. If you have any relative who was/is in the RAB, ask him about the sources of arms that were/are recovered from criminals. He will tell you, they have invariably been from India. Ask them about the source of the JMB explosives, detonators, gunpowder and dice for ammunition that were/are recovered, and the answer will be the same. If you wish to have material proof, you may rewind and watch the close-ups of TV coverage on explosives captured recently from suspected JMB operatives. You will find they have printed label as being made in India.
With barbed wire fencing all along the India side of the border, it is India -- not Bangladesh -- who decides what goes in or out of its territory. For ensuring the safe entry and exit of smugglers and subversives working as per the Indian design, the BSF wants scope to roam our border areas unchallenged. A comparative study of media reports of incidents of trespassing and/or killing of civilians inside India by the BDR and inside Bangladesh by the BSF will reveal the strength of the latters urge.
As if this was not enough to show their fang, since the Peelkhana massacre the BSF have increased their killing of innocent Bangladeshi civilians throughout our border areas. On the 19th May alone they have killed two Bangladeshi civilians near the Roumari border and another two at Bholaghat. Neither the DG BDR, nor the government of Bangladesh cared to utter a single word of protest against such killing. On the contrary, the Bangladesh government is now actively considering taking help from India for reorganising our border force. Our enemy will help us reorganise our paramilitary force, which is to guard us, day in and day out, from the same enemy. What a farce! Either they are living in cloudland or they wish to put our nation in cloudiness.
It had been a longstanding army practice to take out an officer rumoured to be indulging in corruption out of the BDR. Those officers against whom evidence of corruption was available were put on trail before military tribunal without right of appeal in civil court. Since there was no scope to take out a BDR soldier on suspicion of corruption, they were tried in BDR tribunal and were dismissed only when found guilty. The process had to be transparent and rigorous, since the BDR soldiers, unlike army personnel, enjoyed the right to appeal in civil court. During 1991-95 about 1100 dismissed BDR soldiers brought their appeal before civil court. Of them less than 25 got back their jobs. As against this, between 1996-2001 a total of over 2000 sacked BDR soldiers managed to get them reinstated, thanks to the intervention of the then AL government of Sheikh Hasina. It was not a surprise that these reinstated soldiers and their disciples shouted Joy Bangla on the 25th February at Peelkhana in support of the mutiny.
The irony is that while busy selling their design for reshaping the BDR under a new name, with new uniform and insignia on the ground of erasing the horrible ignominy of the mutineers, the government is again planning to reinstate 2000-3000 sacked corrupt soldiers of 2001-2008 who either did not have any leg to appeal or have failed in appeal court to get their dismissal overturned. The government plans to do this on two supercilious grounds:
(1) They are the victims of the BNP-Jamat governments partisanship; and (2) Their experience would be invaluable to the reshaped border force!
However, the real motive is not all that difficult to decipher. Even if Bangladesh itself is smuggled out to India, these reinstated soldiers and their disciples could be relied upon to shout Joy Bangla alongside the AL. In this they would serve as a counter pause to the army, which the now disbanded infamous Rakki Bahini was intended to do for the AL government of 1971-75.
As far as I am able to gather, a list of about 200-300 BCS candidates from the 27th BCS has been kept ready for induction into the reshaped border force. However, being unsure about the possible reaction of the army officers in general, the government is in two minds. With the departure of General Moeen they have lost the self-motivated gatekeeper to keep a tab. Never-theless, it is likely that their foreign godfathers would put them back on track.
The CSCs selection process is not designed to pick up suitable candidates for the active battlefield leadership required of officers of a border force like ours. The would-be officers must have certain inherent physical and mental abilities, which CSCs written examination and interview can hardly identify with any degree of confidence. Moreover, to carry the task of commanding in skirmishes they need thorough physical fitness as well as the knowledge and skills of military tactics and weapon handling. In case, anyone is tempted to argue that the CSC recruited officers could be specially trained to have those knowledge and skills, he/she may take the trouble of revisiting the tale of what happened to the ASPs in similar training situation during the late 80s. Faced with the rising phenomenon of organised armed criminal gangs, President Ershad decided to train these newly recruited police officers for 1 year in the Bangladesh Military Academy. But the selected trainees could not endure the mental and physical hardship and the idea had to be abandoned. Eventually, to meet the challenge paused by the armed criminals, the RAB had to be created. Has anyone ever suggested de-linking RAB from the army or handing over RABs task to either the police or the Ansar?
The design is clear. To make our
(1) Border force politicised and (2) Ineffective in the borders; (3) Turn it into a counter force against the army, and (4) At the same time make the army dispirited and dysfunctional.
An ineffective border force promises an enormous monetary gain for India. To her the cross-border smuggling is currently worth about 6 billion US dollar a year, with the surety of year-on-year expansion. To this add another 3 billion US dollar from the formal trade. It would be a frightening loss for Bangladesh, if the indirect costs of law and order and drug addiction were added to it. It would
(1) Complete the Indian-isation of our domestic market;(2) Strangulate our economic growth; and (3) Totally cripple our ability to defy Indian wishes, even if we want to; (4) With a demoralised and diminished army with a scattering of real or potential traitors among its senior officers, even the thought of defying Indian wishes will start fading out; and (5) Our very independence will be made meaningless to our own citizens.
We fought a bloody war in 1971 to make ourselves free to harness our energy for attaining Sonar Bangla of our dream. Like all dreams of its kind, the dream of Sonar Bangla may have been a utopia. Nonetheless, a reasonably prosperous Bangladesh, at least similar to Malaysia, was certainly within our reach. Why what Malaysia could, we could not achieve? Ask any knowledgeable Malaysian, and he will tell you, as I was told by a senior Malaysian diplomat, that his country did not have a neighbour called India, which we have.
From the day one of our independence, our feigned friend and imperious neighbour India started working towards an opposite end. It is not without meaning that the very first person who stood firm against Indias asset stripping of the newly independent Bangladesh was an army officer: the late Major Jalil. For his guts his career in the army was brought to an end at the behest of our Indian godfathers. Brave Jalil was made an example so that no army officer could think of defying Indian wish. Yet Jalils had been not short in supply. Even before we had our independence, the Indian strategists understood it very well that left to itself it is but natural for Bangladesh to have a reasonably strong patriotic army, which would not take its machination kindly. That is why they wanted us to have at best a nominal army and that too, together with the potential civilian challengers to its designs, be kept under check by the Rakki Bahini recruited from the Indophile AL partisans.
Whatever progress India was able to make in ensnaring Bangladesh during the early years of our independence received a hammer blow in 1975. Despite the set back, Indian schemers never gave up their evil design. With the aid and abetment of their Bangladeshi quislings, the RAW persisted in its efforts. With time, our patriotic masses also became complacent and off-guard. They again started believing the quislings.
While this was happening, the RAW set its eye again on neutering the army. As has been mentioned before, since the 1990s it was actively working towards this end. Over the period, several retired army intelligence chiefs of Bangladesh have publicly spoken about it being the most urgent objective of the RAW. By and large their warnings went remiss with, and unheeded by, our political classes. They became preoccupied with their own self-aggrandisement.
The result is where we are now: in the words of the former Indian army chief Tapan Roy-Choudhury firmly locked in the Indian radar. The BDR massacre was first and foremost aimed at making the lock firmer. By getting away with their crime the RAW schemers and their Bangla-deshi assets have every reason to be embolden.
With their tail up, the RAW schemers and their Bangladeshi assets would try to go further in their drive to dispirit and dissuade the patriotic army officers in order to reduce our army to a level of absolute subservient. In that case Indias need to deploy its army on the Bangladesh front would be substantially reduced, which in turn would allow it to deploy more troops on the Chinese and Pakistani fronts. Moreover, if the army could be tamed, it would become far easier for the Indian whispers to tame our nation, too.
To tie our nation down and put our state in their strategic straight-jacket, Indian political masters are also working hard to materialise their other designs such as transit, port facilities, link canal and diversion of river water to name only a few. The signs are they are also trying to create hostilities between Bangladesh and Myanmar so that we have no friendly neighbour left. God forbid if they succeed, we would become geo-politically tied down and corralled. If it happens, there will be not much left for us to do, except ending up like Goa or Sikkim.
That would also give the Israeli MOSSAD much satisfaction. One less Muslim majority state is one less Muslim voice in the community of nations against their oppress-ion of the Palestinians.
But more importantly for both the Indians and the Israelis this would also be a huge step forward in their dream of creating a strategic barrier against China that would increase their value to the West, especially to the USA.
5. Epilogue
In the preface I have stressed that what I have been able to gather from my well-placed friends from the civil service, the army and the police gives us not the whole truth but only the bare bone of the truth about the Peelkhana mutiny and massacre. I have also said that when we have the whole truth, I expect my findings corroborated. I am confident about this, because I have confid-ence in the intrigity and reliability of my sources. Having said that, I am also fully conscious that however confident I may feel about the authen-ticity of the truth that I have uncovered, I am not in a position to demonstrate its reliability and validity. Despite the fact that under the given context I have strong mitigating grounds, readers are still within their right to have a degree of scepticism. I would be the last person to find fault with them on this count. But such a healthy scepticism, I think, also obliges us all to be active in seeking to know the whole truth.
But having seen the governments obstructive ploys, do we have a reasonable hope of getting all the facts? I am afraid I do not think we have even a slimmest chance. To be candid, I do not think our PM is going to allow any inconvenient truth about herself or her friends and colleagues to come out. The reasons for her reticence are there in the story of the mutiny and massacre. As far as she is concerned, the success of her politics critically rests on covering-up, not on the fidelity to truth and justice and duty to the nation.
Frankly speaking, I have also doubt about our opposition leaders for a different reason. Once in power, they might also find it convenient to be diplomatic and allow the unsavoury facts about the mutiny and massacre to be left on the wayside. Surely, there is a place for diplomacy in dealing with foreign countries. But to extend it to internal traitors and murderers because it would displease a foreign power or two is down right appeasement at the expense of debilitating our nation and undermining our peoples confidence in our state. In the past, on occasions, we have seen them acting in this thoughtless manner. Still, it is my earnest hope that about the Peelkhana mutiny and massacre they will not repeat the same.
Entertaining such a hope will not be enough; we must raise our voice demanding a credible open-ended public inquiry on all aspects of the mutiny without any let or hindrance from any quarter, including the government. Only such a transparent inquiry by a competent and well respected public figure or figures will help us find the unbarnished truth, identify the culprits and uproot the conspirators and their connivers. Nothing short of this will satisfy the martyars soul or their families anguish and at the same time meet the all important security need of our beloved country.
To make this happen, the least we can do is to start writing to our MPs together with our friends and family members and send its copy to all the important national media. Spending a few takas on this will be our sadqa for the sake of our nation. Let us all do it without waiting for others to do it first. Has not Allah, the Almighty commanded us to compete with each other in doing good deeds?
This old man will certainly do his part. You can be rest assured about it. Among your demand letters my letter will also be there
