Before parliament was prorogued on September 2, the house saw heated discussions about the politics of impunity in Bangladesh. The small number of BNP lawmakers emphatically tried to shift the blame away from their party regarding indemnity politics.
Harun-ur-Rashid, MP said he was a schoolboy at the time of the assassination of Bangabandhu. He alluded to the spate of enforced disappearances taking place in Bangladesh today. He repeated the BNP’s claim that it was members of the Awami League which passed the indemnity law in 1975.
This claim deserves scrutiny. The Indemnity Ordinance was promulgated on September 26, 1975. It was signed by the usurper Khandakar Mushtaq Ahmed who presided over a martial law regime.
Martial law denotes the dominance of the military. The army chief at the time was Ziaur Rahman, who was appointed as the head of the Bangladesh Army following the coup of August 15, 1975.
The law remained untouched until 1979. When martial law gave way to the restoration of the constitution, all ordinances had to be approved by parliament in order to become law again.
The parliament in 1979 was dominated by the newly formed Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The BNP had the choice to not approve the Indemnity Ordinance. It had the choice to bring the assassins of Bangabandhu to justice. Ziaur Rahman showed no mercy for other coup plotters, including the radical socialist Colonel Taher and renegade officers of the Bangladesh Air Force.
The BNP chose to pass the Indemnity Act 1979. For an apparently democratically elected party to claim that it was justified in approving an indemnity law for murderers is truly without precedent. The assassins continued to roam about freely within and outside the country. They even boasted about their role in the assassination on television.
The Indemnity Act remained untouched until 1996 when parliament passed the Indemnity (Repeal) Act 1996. Many years later, the high court of Bangladesh ruled that the process of approving martial law ordinances was in itself illegal as per the principles of the constitution.
It is true that many leaders in between also kept the law untouched, including President Sattar, President Ahsanullah, President Ershad, President Shahabuddin, and President Biswas. As Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia also had a chance to repeal the black law during her first term.
Why did the nation have to wait for the daughter of a murder victim to gain power in order to file a case to bring the murderers to court? This reflects the polarization of Bangladeshi politics.
Today, we are a much different and better off nation. The nation deserves a clean break from the past. The BNP chose to be associated with an indemnity law for murderers. How can a political party justify murder and codify impunity for murderers through a parliamentary statute? No other political party in Bangladesh or in any democratic country has made such an express choice.
Now more than ever, we are in a position to start afresh. Let the history and deeds of the BNP influence our judgment, instead of their cynical and opportunistic tryst with idealism.