Lieutenant General M Atiqur Rahman’s death at the age of ninety-four last week marked the end of a life lived in honour and in deep attachment to the country. In a state which from the mid-1970s and all the way to the first quarter of the 1980s experienced coups and counter-coups, with a good number of abortive coups thrown in between, General Atiqur Rahman made a difference.
As chief of staff of the Bangladesh army from 1986 to 1990, he demonstrated professionalism expected of a true soldier. Hardly anything of the negative was associated with his career. Not in his character was noted any hint of inordinate ambition, of the kind associated with some of his predecessors in the office of chief of staff.
In effect, Atiqur Rahman served the army well, and through doing that he let it be known that the institutions of the state, of which the armed forces were one, were there to uphold the rule of law, indeed the constitution, for that was their prime responsibility.
Where General Ziaur Rahman and General H.M. Ershad with alacrity seized power in earlier times, General Atiqur Rahman left for his successors the fundamental lesson that as a bulwark of national defence, the army was there to serve the people who formed the core of the republic. It was a commendable role he played, one which has had people come forth with an outpouring of tributes to him since his passing.
Atiqur Rahman’s career in the military commenced in 1954, when he joined the Pakistan army as a second lieutenant. It was an era when Bengalis did not have much of an opportunity to join the armed forces of Pakistan owing more to political discrimination than anything else. Atiqur Rahman was among the few Bengalis who made it into the army.
There were the others, such as Khalilur Rahman, Majidul Haq, Ziaur Rahman, Hussein Muhammad Ershad and Khaled Musharraf. Majidul Haq would go up to the rank of brigadier in the Pakistan army, a distinction for a Bengali. Atiqur Rahman was part of the 9th batch to graduate from the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in Kakul.
When Bangladesh’s War of Liberation began in 1971, leading to the eventual emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, Atiqur Rahman, by then a lieutenant colonel, found himself among the Bengali military and civil officials stranded in Pakistan. The times were fraught for Bengalis caught up in Pakistan.
While the Bangladesh government planned to place senior Pakistani army officers on trial over their role in the genocide committed between March-December 1971, the new Bhutto government in Islamabad threatened to place Bengali officers, civilian as well as military, on trial in Pakistan in retaliation.
Atiqur Rahman, along with other Bengali officers, served the time between December 1971 and his repatriation to Bangladesh in 1974 in Mandi Bahauddin camp in Pakistan.
The return of Bengali military officers from Pakistan was followed by the decision of Bangabandhu’s government to have them inducted into the Bangladesh army. It was a move which would lead to issues of freedom fighter officers versus repatriated officers, a common grievance being that in the Zia and Ershad period officers repatriated from Pakistan were in the ascendant even as freedom fighter officers were either sidelined or eliminated in a spate of coups d’etat and attempted coups d’etat.
The picture certainly did not look rosy, but despite that Atiqur Rahman carried out his responsibilities in professional manner. Questions linger, though, of the role he may have played in the seizure of power by General Ershad in March 1982 and the consequent ouster of Justice Abdus Sattar, the president elected to office only four months earlier.
But such questions were overshadowed by General Atiqur Rahman’s performance as chief of staff of the army, an office he assumed in 1986 once General Ershad chose to retire from the military and continue as president of the country. The four years in which Atiqur Rahman headed the army were a time when nationwide protests against the Ershad regime mounted, reaching a high point by the end of 1990.
Atiqur Rahman went into retirement before Ershad’s fall. In all his time as army chief, he demonstrated not the slightest inclination toward intervening in the gathering political crisis, an attitude that was to be emulated by his successor General Nuruddin, who made it clear that the army would have nothing to do in the matter of preventing the fall of the Ershad regime in a mass upsurge.
After his retirement from the army, General Atiqur Rahman led a quiet life, staying out of the limelight. His friends and colleagues recall his gentleness and his sense of humour both in and out of office.
As one of them noted, when it was suggested that as chief of staff he ought to make his residence the official home of the army chief --- General Ershad had not moved from the army chief’s residence despite his retirement --- General Atiqur Rahman let it be known that such a move would set a bad precedent: every successive chief of staff would be tempted to transform his place of residence into the official quarters of the army chief.
General Atiqur Rahman will be remembered for the stability he brought to the army after the many convulsions it went through before he took over as chief of staff. Basic honesty underlined his attitude to life, buttressed by his deep religiosity.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.