The month of August is named after the Roman emperor Augustus, who was the son of Julius Caesar. Once a triumphant general who ruled Rome, Julius Caesar was assassinated due to the betrayal of his confidantes. Many centuries later, the assassination of Julius Caesar became the plot for a Shakespearean tragedy.
Bangladesh saw a great tragedy unfold in 1975 when its founder and most of his family were gunned down by elements within the country’s own government and military. This happened only five years after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led Bangladesh to its independence.
The killers of Bangabandhu openly admitted to their role in the murder. The fugitive Khandakar Abdur Rashid boasted about killing Bangabandhu in a television interview. The regime of Ziaur Rahman protected the killers and codified their impunity into the infamous Indemnity Ordinance.
Needless to say, an unjust law is no law at all.
It does not matter whether you support or oppose the Awami League. A murder was committed and the murderers have to be punished. That is the law.
This illegal indemnity given to the killers was finally repealed in 1996 when Sheikh Hasina was elected to office. The nation was finally slated to move on the path of justice for the murder of Bangabandhu and his wife, sons, daughters-in-law, and other relatives.
The subsequent elected government of Khaleda Zia had a moral and constitutional duty to proceed with the legal process and implement the verdict of the courts. To the utter dismay of many Bangladeshis, the following BNP government began to stall the legal process. No effort was made to extradite or detain the fugitive killers residing abroad.
The BNP’s obstruction of the Bangabandhu murder trial is unprecedented in the democratic world. No other political party in the world has gone to the lengths that the BNP has to protect self-confessed assassins.
A breakthrough was achieved when the military-backed caretaker government accepted the deportation of one of the fugitives from the United States in 2007. A national consensus should have emerged on bringing back Bangabandhu’s killers.
Instead, the BNP continued with its antics.
In a bizarre twist, the BNP’s chief spokesman Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir often accuses the Awami League of orchestrating the assassination. The BNP has never committed to national closure on the issue. The BNP has never pledged to hold Bangabandhu’s murderers to account for their crimes.
If the BNP was truly committed to democratic values, then it should commit to a national consensus on bringing back the killers of Bangabandhu. The party should commit itself to the extradition and deportation of these fugitives.
This cannot be a politicized issue.
This is about human rights. A family was murdered despite the right to life being protected by our constitution. The BNP’s policy of indemnity has no basis in national and international law. Will the BNP apologize for the Indemnity Ordinance enacted by its founder Ziaur Rahman?
The BNP’s policy of indemnity towards these self-confessed assassins is a festering and grave moral dilemma for Bangladeshi politics in the same measure as other moral issues like the integrity of our political system.
The right to life is enshrined in our legal system, as well as in international law -- Bangabandhu and his family were civilians who were killed in cold blood during peacetime.
If the BNP cannot change its stance on working to bring back the killers of Bangabandhu, then its legitimacy as a political party should be seriously called into question. If the BNP does not change, this moral dilemma will continue to hang over Bangladeshi politics.
Umran Chowdhury works in the legal field.
