In the past four days alone, at least five members of opposition parties BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami have been brutally murdered while in custody of law enforcement agencies. Each of these victims were murdered by the police force shortly after they were arrested on falsified charges. Police forces repeatedly have stated that these men were “killed in the cross-fire” as a justification for their horrific and untimely deaths at the hands of the state.
16-year-old BICS activist Abu Hanif was shot dead by the joint-force while in police custody. Tarique Mohammad Saiful Islam, who has Assistant Secretary of Meherpur district’s Jamaat-e-Islaami branch, was shot by police after having been arrested; the police claim that he was killed as a result of a gun-fight during a police operation on Monday (though he had been arrested the day before, on Sunday). 22-year-old BICS General Secretary Mosharaf Hossain’s dead body was found strewn beside the Chittagong Highway with a bullet hole in the head; he had been taken into police custody the day before, his unjust arrest witnessed by his family. Sathkira Jamaat member Anwarul Islam was shot to death by the joint-force while working in his fishery; his brutal murder was witnessed by his brother Rabiul, who was also injured in the shooting.
There are countless more stories like this – young victims whose names have been purposefully erased from our political discourse and narrative by the state, and whose courage to stand up against the state has been branded as ‘terrorism’, ‘slander’ or whatever else the Awami League uses as a justification to censure and oppress criticism of its regime. Their voices have been obliterated by the state, and their faces forgotten by a public unwilling to stand up to the state lest they meet the same fate. In the last five years of the Awami League’s rule, about 22,000 people were killed in different incidents by law enforcement agencies; the majority of the victims were Opposition party members. This averages to about 12 homicides a day at the hands of the state during the Awami League’s reign.
Laws such as the ICT(A), the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Mobile Court Act, have all been manipulated and utilized as tools by the reigning government to brutally repress dissenting opinions and voices. Under the Awami League’s regime, courts have handed out guilty verdicts and death sentences in the absence of due process and other adequate investigate and judicial matters. Those held in police custody are routinely tortured – last year alone there were over 80 deaths from custodial torture – in order to extract information, create false testimony, elicit monetary bribes and/or simply just to punish these victims for their lack of obedience to the regime.
Looking at the faces and stories of these innocent young civilians, inhumanely slaughtered at the hands of state forces and under the order of the current regime, we have to ask ourselves – who is the real terrorist?
