To All Concerned Worldwide Regarding the Bloodshed in Bangladesh

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From: Dr Q M Jalal Khan

Dear All,

As you may already know, Bangladesh finds itself reeling in a state of unprecedented bloodshed and violence since 18 July 2024 with hardly any news leaked in the state - controlled mass media in the police and prison state. The recent spate of bloody chaos and turmoil -- inhuman, shivering and heartbreaking as it was - - started when ordinary college and university students demanded that the extremely biased, unfair and discriminatory job quota mainly intended for govt’s loyalist party men and women be done away with so that the graduated students' get fair share of jobs and job opportunities based on merit could be ensured. But the call for their more than just cause fell on the deaf ears of the hooded and horrible govt.

The autocrat govt has entirely destroyed all kinds of human rights, constitutional rights and individual rights, there being no freedom of speech, no democratic and electoral culture and no opposition politics whatsoever. The virtual one-party rule of nepotism, favoritism, cronyism, division, bondage, and state terrorism has had no limits for the last 16 years eliminating and annihilating the entire scope of social justice and rule of law. To repeat after Fyodor Dostoevsky (in his The Brothers Karamazov), govt, in its gloating glee over its sole and absolute dictatorial authority and total grip on power, thinks when there is no God (in this case, absence of political opposition), everything nefarious and anarchical was possible. In its enormously gargantuan appetite for power and corruption, it thinks, like the French emperor Louis IV, I am the state.

The current round of hissing govt’s police-army oppression was unleashed on young protesting students of all levels, who suddenly lost their tender lives and got their blooming dreams nipped in the bud overnight. Their number was at least in hundreds, even if one goes by the most conservative estimate.

As you may have noticed, last few days, especially since 18 July 2024, were very dark and black and bloody in Bangladesh—perhaps some of the darkest and blackest and bloodiest days in the history of the nation with the entire country engulfed and immersed for about two days in the legitimate and loud protest cries that were abruptly quelled by live bullets and deafening sound grenades from armored vehicles of the police and the army descending on Dhaka streets. The country just witnessed a wild and beastly carnage of school children, college and university students, small boys and girls, and innocent men and women on their rooftops and by the side of their windows at home. That was the latest and ugliest manifestation of the govt’s iron rule behind the iron curtain it has established in Bangladesh since 2009.

The country was and is still bleeding from a brutal crackdown under the darkness of a nationwide curfew when there was a total internet shutdown and complete news blackout imposed by the unelected government killing hundreds of innocent unarmed student protesters and the supporting members of the public.

As you may well be aware, this govt has been clinging to power since 2009 by all tools and means available to it using all the state machinery—police, army, judiciary and the parliament. Govt’s foul, cynical and manipulative tactics found ways to bend and twist all those presumably position hungry "willing" offices and institutions to personal favor and self-serving whims and caprices. In addition to police and paramilitary forces, autocratic Govt has been letting its party cadres armed with lethal weapons to ruthlessly assault people in a deadly manner. By the force of its pure and unmixed authoritarian power, the govt held sham and shoddy and shadowy and ghostly “elections”-cum-selections again and again with the people indiscriminately killed and cowed down by the police, RAB and party hoodlums.

The govt had its intelligence, administration apparatus and "law enforcement" but actually lawless agents take away freedom of press and freedom of expression; do blanket detentions, widespread repression, and enforced disappearances; commit rampant human rights violations and indiscriminate murders, and file millions of fake and baseless and harassing court cases against dissenting leaders, activists, journalists, writers and thinkers, thus completely wiping out the whole range of democratic opposition consisting of numerous parties, big and small, major and minor. Never accountable to anyone, govt and its men are widely known to have been involved in massive loot and plunder from bank heists and foreign loans to mega projects and state budgets in the name of so-called development, a mirage for the majority facing a complete moral, political and educational decline and deterioration.

All this oppression and repression was done by the horribly authoritarian govt with the help of her blind puppets and flatterers employed and deployed in all branches of the government during the last 16 years and with the help of its dark and evil allies in the neighbouring country. All this was also possible to a great extent by the fact that there was no strong and effective challenge coming from the political opposition the major party of which, highly popular though, has been rendered weak, useless, hopeless, and worthless, primarily at the top level, due to the regime’s ongoing persecution and suppression, but also because, again, primarily the top ranks have been ideologically lost and divided suffering from leadership crisis and remaining ignorant, incompetent, compromising, uncommitted, opportunist, and hypocritical, widely rumored to be involved in demoralizing extortion scams and nomination and committee membership business at every level, from top to bottom.

As mentioned at the outset, this was how this government just recently suppressed, with a dastardly and despicably heavy-handedness, a great and just historic movement -- a movement of memorable “terrible beauty” (to borrow the immortal oxymoron from W B Yeats) -- by millions of students demanding that the very unjust and unfair quota system for government jobs be scrapped. In the quota system that was earlier introduced (until it was abolished only after this most unwanted mass slaughter) by this autocratic and unelected government—as totalitarian as one could imagine, rot to the core—, nearly 60% jobs were reserved for the government supporters and sycophants, their crooks and conmen and their dolts and dullards in the guise of different but deceiving, hoodwinking, dust-throwing and eye-washing categories with no true opportunities for merit and competition based selection process. As a result, millions of students found their future to be blank and bleak, and dark and dreary with no real hope and prospect for their dreams to come true.

As you may already know, the present Bangladesh government is utterly and extremely fetid and fascist. It has been intolerably and obnoxiously so since early 2009. Since then, thousands of people, including political leaders and activists and journalists, have been mercilessly killed and beaten and tortured to death. Since then, not to speak of those perpetrated before by the same party known for their notoriously nihilistic oppression, there have been brutal and beastly massacre after massacre after massacre – Arson attack on double decker public bus (4 June 2004); Logi Boitha (Boat Hook and Oar) massacre on 28 October 2006; BDR massacre (25-26 February 2009; Hefazat massacre (5 May 2013); Jamaat Shibir massacre (17 December 2013; and countless other killings by the regime throughout the last 16 years.

Since 2009, there have been thousands of premeditated political murders, killings, kidnappings and enforced disappearances by the police and party thugs in separate, yet connected incidents, which have become a regular phenomenon of repression made possible by direct state terrorism unleashed by the govt and its henchmen. Since then, there have been thousands and thousands of detentions, inhuman torture in remands and deadly beatings and incarceration in jail, many dying or critically injured due to police brutality while in custody or in open public places.

Last two weeks were no different with hundreds and thousands of protesting students and ordinary people joining them in solidarity being maimed, wounded, dismembered and killed with machetes and live bullets on the streets and even in their homes – bullets coming from the helicopters flying overhead and also the tanks and armored vehicles deceptively carrying the UN signs and logos.

You, all concerned, are requested to bring this plight and predicament of the people of Bangladesh to the attention of the freedom-loving international news and human rights organizations and ask your respective governments to take necessary punitive and punishing measures against the almost two decades-old regime that has brought the nation of 175 million people to its knees during the regime’s iron-fisted mafia rule of utterly malicious and malafide intent for that long duration. I also take the opportunity to personally and sincerely urge the democracy-loving international entities and authorities to take steps with the intention of forcing this utterly obnoxious regime headed by the PM to go.

Time is long overdue to force a regime change with the govt brought to justice and bring to power a third party of honest and committed people drawn from selected politicians, academics, journalists, political analysts and other professionals. We need the help of America and the West to achieve this democratic, patriotic and nationalist goal to save Bangladesh from the clutches of a ferociously autocratic regime!

(Dr Q M Jalal Khan, author, coauthor and lead editor of several political books on Bangladesh)