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Waiting for Allah’s ‘Bichar’ (Justice): A Despairing Note On Bangladesh’s
Politicized, Inept And Corrupt Criminal Justice System

By M. Adil Khan

08 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org

ABSTRACT

In recent times Bangladesh has witnessed a rising spate in cases of unsolved rape, murder, kidnapping, enforced disappearances of political opponents, extrajudicial killings, plunder of national assets etc. etc. As a result people have lost faith in the government in general and its criminal justice system in particular such that most now believe that police and the criminal justice system is more of a sourcethan solution to their safety and security. Given government’sstrong grip on power and the law enforcement agencies’ apron string firmly tied to it people are convinced that changes to the current situation are highly unlikely, at least not in the short run. Thus most are either seething in discontent, waiting to explode one day or have resigned to fatalism and believe that they have no option but to wait for Allah’s ‘bichar’ (judgement) on the ‘RojHashorer Din’ or ‘Yawm al-Qiyāmah’, the Final Day of Judgement when irrespective of caste, colour, creed and positions only HE will make the final and just determinations between the wrong and the wrongedand punish the guilty and reward the righteous.Either way, signs are ominous.

In Bangladesh people are seeing an alarming rise in the unsolved, poorly investigated and/or uninvestigatedcases of rape, murder, disappearances of political opponents, bank heist etc. etc. in recent times.

Most shocking among these is the case of recent murder of Tonu on March 20, a 17 year old college girl who was also a budding stage actor.It is alsosuspected that prior to her murder Tonu might have been raped as well. In this murder incident what is also quite puzzling is that Tonu’s family lives within the protected compound of Army cantonment in Comilla and this makes thismurder even more complex especially from the investigation point of view for the killers are likely to be residents of cantonment, who knows? As a matter of the lackluster if not diversionary tactics that are being employed in the investigation of the case is giving some meat to the suspicion as almost all vital evidences of the murder have already been removed from the murder scene and thus many tend to believe that this murder case will also face the fate of other similar cases of recent past, make it drag for a while until the whole thing gets forgotten and the case gets buried into the fading memory of a nation that seems to get more worked up by the International Cricket Council’s ban of their favourite cricket hero than gross lapses of their criminal justice system that allow murderers, rapists, plunderers walk the streets free, leaving the victims and victim’s near and dear ones grieving bereft of justice.

Reflecting on the questionable nature of Tonu’s murder investigation someone has recently observed in a newspaper that “Our police have little interest in rape and murder investigations. Theymake no credible effort to find the culprits for as we see in Tonu’s case that instead of focusing on and investigating and finding the perpetrator/s of this heinous crime the police have shown extraordinary zeal in taking the distraught parents of the murdered child to the police station at the middle of night where they were kept till early morning and were subjected to most aggressive interrogationsand what is worse some of the officers even had the gall to ask the grieving parents why have they not got Tonu, a young and attractive girl married off by then, implying that had they done so this rape and murder would not have happened.” Implicit in this police observation is the message that by allowing Tonu to pursue her study and letting her decide her own future including that of her marriage the parents in fact have contributed to her murder – how shockingly disgustingly insensitive could one get especially with grieving parents!

Indeed, the depth of moral degeneration of Bangladesh’s police and its criminal justice system has plunged so deep and ugly that it is not only difficult to fathom but horrifying to picture.

The other not-so-recent unsolved murder involves the double murder ofa well-known husband/wife journalist team,Sagar and Runiwho were stabbed to death in their own apartment on 11 February 2012 in Dhaka, the capital city.

Despite the promises, made by the Prime Minister herself, the Home Minister and the Police chief etc. albeit outwardly, no tangible progress have so far been made in identifyingand bringingthe murderersto justice and the fact that this murder happened at a time when the murdered journalists were investigating and preparing a TV documentary of an allegedcorruptionat the high level of the government makes it more intriguing and explains somewhat police’svisiblelack of enthusiasm in the case. What also makes the situation more tragic if not depressing is that when journalists at one time queried the Prime Minister why prominent journalists like Sagar/Runi that lived in a gated property in the capital city could not be safe in their own home, she arrogantly responded by saying that, “Government cannot give guarantee of safety of life to people in their bed rooms!” True government, for that matter, no government can ever give full guarantee of safety to anyone anywhere but for the Prime Minister of a country to come out with a statement such as this at a time when the entire nation were at a state of shock and grieving demonstrated how arrogantly insensitive she had been and how little she cared.

In thisparticular case of morbid scenario of Bangladesh’ dented criminal justice system the worst sufferer has beenSagar/Runi’sorphaned son who was then 5 and now 10 year old,in whose presence this gruesome double murder happened, who no doubt wonderswhat crime his parents did to deserve such a brutal and premature ends to their lives and how long more should he wait to get justice?

Similarly, the murder investigations of Dipon, Niloy, Avijit, Rajib - the atheist bloggers who were murdered by the extremists for their anti-religion bloggingsare also encountering familiar delays and distortions.Many suspect that nabbing, prosecution and punishment of these religious killer bigots risk shaking the political applecart and hence this calculated delay, perhaps.

Apart from these high profile murders cited above those that took place in Dhaka and a nearby city, murder, rape, extra-judicial killings etc. have become daily occurrences throughout the country over the last several years with virtually no proper investigation of and no effort made to nab and prosecute real culprits. Instead police is said to exploit these criminal acts toharass innocent people by arresting them as ‘suspects’on a mass scale to extractrent giving credence to the theory that Bangladesh’s law and order agencies may be callous but when it comes to organizing entrepreneurial projects around crimethey do not seem to lack in ideas.

Furthermore, ineptness if not outright collusion of the government (this is what many suspect) in cases relating to recent enforced disappearances of opposition political activists such as Illiyus Chowdhury and hundreds more,who by now are feared dead are examples of dangerous level of extent of absence of accountability that has reached Bangladesh’s criminal justice system at the present times.

Add to theseindividual cases of unlawful and unsolved murders the collective massacre of officers of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR,a paramilitary border force)by the mutinous soldiers in 2009 in the same year within few months the current government first came to power. Some claim that the entire carnage was a politically motivated occurrence,orchestrated from outside that led to the murder of 57 Army officers, some of Bangladesh’s finest. Two investigations of the massacre – one by the Army and the other by a civilian committee – were conducted, but only part of the civilian committee’s report has so far been made public and the one by the army never saw the light of the day and furthermore, the dubious manner in which trials of mutineers have since been conducted in camera has given rise to the theory that aspiration of justice and fairness especially in cases where political stakes are highis not only a futile ask but a risky proposition as well. In this context it may thus not be too irrelevant to considertwo interlinking outcomes of the BDR carnage – firstly, it has weakened the capacity as well as the morale of the army, as a contender of power and secondly, it has given the government rapacious hands in governance.

Let us also now shift our attention from murders etc.to another issue which is by no means is less important and this involves recent rise in rampant and glaring plunder of the public money. Take the case of Bangladesh stock market scam of 2011 that made hundreds and thousands of small investors destitute and the behind-the-scene manipulating robber-barons filthy rich overnight was duly investigatedand this is good news but the bad news was that the investigation report was never made publicand the reason? This is what the Finance Minister had said at the time, “The report has listed names thatare so highly placed [highly politically connected, that is] thatI do not darementioningthem”. That was the end of it – none of the scam scumbagshaveever been identified andnoneever punished.

Other cases of financial malfeasance of grand scale that include but not limited to are Hallmark, a trading company that stole millions from a nationalized bank through false documentations and influencing/bribing bank authorities; theBASIC Bank, Sonali Bank (both are public banks) heists where similar frauds and political connections were used to steal money;and lately, the Bangladesh Bank (the reserve bank of Bangladesh) heist from where millions of dollars got stolen. These cases of plunders that have been conducted under the very nose of and some allege in direct collusion with the powers-to-behas never been properly investigated nor as can be expected,any ofthe perpetrators brought to justiceever. On the contrary, asin the case of Bangladesh Bank (BB) heistwhich involved electronic theft of $100.00 million that happened in February this yearbutthe news of the heist was never disclosed by the Bank or anyone else in Bangladesh till late March when the media in Philippines where the bulk of the stolen money ended up made it known. This is how dangerously non-responsive Bangladesh’s public institutions have become.

However the most shocking aspect of the whole thing is that when aMr. Zoha, a young Bangladeshi digital security expert whoafter carrying out initial probe of the heistin BB raised few valid questions regarding security lapses at the Bank’s computer system and even hinted at and indirectly identified the guilty parties was not only not heeded to, butafter he made these observations public was abducted way homeby ‘unidentified’ people andreleased after a weekof unauthorized detention in an undisclosed location where he was most likelytorturedvisiblyshaken and now, gone has completely mute. Al Capone could learn a thing or two from Bangladesh’s murky world of financial scams.

The old saying that stealing is great if you can get away with it seems to have found itself a safe home and a fertile ground to breed and proliferate in Bangladesh. Many argue and with some justification that the sad state that Bangladesh’s criminal justice system has reached is mainly due to, inter alia, aggressive politicization of the public administration as a wholeandthe that of law enforcement agencies and the judiciary in particular where these agencies now operate as the cadre of the ruling party– some call it ‘partyarchy’ -with no obligation to adhere to or observe barest minimum of standards of integrity and accountability. In these circumstances asking for fairness, accountability and justice from these agencies or for that matter from the government itself would be likeasking Donald Trump to shun rude words.

Another sad aspect of increased politicization of Bangladesh’s institutions is the apathy and the partisanship of the civil society and the media. Some have become passive onlookers to injustices mainly out of fear of retribution and others aretacit endorsers of everything that the government does in exchange ofloyalty and patronage, respectively.

These are despairing moments for Bangladesh and given Bangladesh’s consistent poor record in accountability and given its predatory government’s firm grip on power that obliterates all possibilities of change in near future two very different dynamics have gripped the country, at one level there is seething discontent that is spawning extremism waiting to explode one day and at the other a sense of fatalism has descended upon its people and like the drowning man’s straw is prompting some to seek Allah’s bichar(judgement) on the ‘RojHashorer Din’ or the ‘Yawm al-Qiyāmah’, the Day of the Final Judgement, when according to Islam only HE irrespective of caste, colour, creed and positions of people would make the final and just determinations between the wrong and the wronged and punish the guilty and reward the righteous. Exactly which of the two groups will ultimately sway is difficult to predict at this stage but either way things look pretty grim for a country that has already seen enough violence, deaths and destructions in its 40 years’ existence.

The author is a Professor at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Australia and a former senior policy manager of the United Nations




 



 

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