Nadira Begum holds up a photo of her missing husband, Ataur Rahman, in front of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) headquarters in Dhaka on Aug. 7. (Photo by Masum Billah)
DHAKA — On a December morning in 2011, Bangladesh’s feared Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) security force led politician Ataur Rahman away from a Dhaka restaurant. His family hasn’t seen him since.
“My daughter who has special needs keeps asking when her father will come home. My son grew up without ever knowing his father,” Rahman’s wife Nadira Begum told Nikkei Asia, her voice breaking. “If my husband has been killed, tell us. If he is alive, return him to us.”
Rahman — then 32 and a member of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) — is among hundreds of people who disappeared without a trace during former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule. A student-led uprising brought her leadership to an abrupt end in August.
This past weekend, a commission of inquiry set up by the country’s interim government released a preliminary report on disappearances and alleged abuses by security forces, cataloguing a litany of horrors including extrajudicial killings and torture such as genital electrocution and sewing prisoners’ lips together.
The probe found that Hasina, who fled to neighboring India as her government fell, was “prima facie responsible” for disappearances and other abuses committed by security forces including the RAB.
“Whilst the spectre of enforced disappearance has appeared in previous instances in Bangladesh’s history, the massive scale at which it was unleashed on the population during Sheikh Hasina’s regime is a novel phenomenon,” the report said.
The probe has recorded nearly 1,700 cases of forcible abductions, but it estimated that cases may actually exceed 3,500.
Bangladesh’s caretaker government, led by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, is moving to repatriate Hasina to face a string of charges, including crimes against humanity, over her government’s brutal crackdown on protesters, which resulted in hundreds of deaths. The 77-year-old and her top officials are also being investigated over allegations they looted billions of dollars from state coffers.
But the damning report went beyond this summer’s violence and corruption allegations, saying Hasina’s iron-fisted rule drew on a “calculated system” of abductions.
Family members of disappeared victims form a human chain in Dhaka after the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. (Photo by Masum Billah)Victims were routinely blindfolded after they were taken and operations — from abduction, detention, torture to elimination — were divided into separate teams to mask their activities, it found.
“Trained professionals deliberately designed the system of enforced disappearances over 15 years in a fashion calculated to avoid detection and attribution of responsibility,” the report said.
One young man, abducted in 2010, told the commission that his lips were sewn shut without anesthesia, comparing the experience to “stitching cowhide.” Another victim described having his genitals and ears electrocuted.
In other chilling testimony, a soldier said he was ordered to take a body to a railway line in the capital and dump it on the tracks. Officers waited nearby until a passing train dismembered the corpse.
Another testified that two victims were shot on a bridge in front of him during his initiation into the security force. One victim who attempted to escape by jumping into the river was seized and executed on the spot.
Victims were also pushed onto highways in front of oncoming cars and bodies were submerged in rivers with cement-filled bags tied to them. A RAB official described this as “standard procedure.” Various waterways around Dhaka were used as “killing and disposal” sites, the commission found.
Before his release from detention, abduction victim Hummam Quader Chowdhury was told, “You must refrain from politics, leave the country and return only when the situation improves. Understand that the Honorable Prime Minister is granting you a second chance in life.”
The interim report also pointed to Indian involvement in Bangladesh’s system of enforced disappearances, calling it “a matter of public record.”
Some victims abducted from Bangladesh later resurfaced in Indian jails, the report said, as it pressed for efforts to identify Bangladeshi citizens who “may still remain incarcerated in India.”
“What we have recorded already points to formal but clandestine coordination on captive exchange between the two countries’ security forces, including of victims who are killed afterwards,” said commission member Nabila Idris. “This is a shocking finding that is unacceptable on every level.”
The report called for the disbanding of the RAB, an organization with both military and law-enforcement members who dealt directly with the public.
“That is why, despite several forces being culpable in enforced disappearances, we recommend disbanding RAB in particular,” Idris said.
But a final decision wasn’t likely until the commission releases its final report, which could take up to a year due to the volume of cases.
Rights activist Michael Chakma, who vanished for five years and was among the few victims released after Hasina’s fall, said replacing the RAB with a new security force alone would achieve little.
“The commission must identify and investigate the perpetrators soon, or they will escape accountability,” he said.
source : asia.nikkei