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When death stalked the land of the free

Syed Badrul Ahsan retraces tragedy, through two works of seminal importance
IN the final days of his life, M. Mansoor Ali was a prisoner in the country he went all the way to free from Pakistani colonial rule. He was part of the Mujibnagar provisional government between April and December 1971, one of the many inspirational voices in what would turn out to be an annus mirabilis for the Bengali nation. He was part of the team that organized, in the absence of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (by then a prisoner in an undisclosed location in Pakistan) the guerrilla war which in nine months would lead to the emergence of Bangladesh as a free socialist, secular republic. As finance minister in Mujibnagar, it was a difficult job he was compelled to carry out. In post-liberation Bangladesh, his mettle was sorely tested when, as home minister, he was expected to handle law and order in a society where the disorder that follows a revolution was soon to manifest itself. He proved equal to the task. And in early 1975, as Bangabandhu took the country into the Baksal political system, Mansoor Ali took charge as prime minister.
It was a heart-breaking year, 1975. For within a space of three months between August and November, the Bengali nation lost all the five pivotal figures who had guided it, through slow and patient degrees, out of Pakistan and back into its heritage as a cultured, independent society. In effect, the assassination of Bangabandhu and most of his family on 15 August was a clear sign of what the conspirators led by Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed were out to do. Within the spaces of this excellent work, compiled some years ago, the story of Mansoor Ali rapidly turns into a tale of the entire long tragedy that was to push Bangladesh down the road to disaster. Ali wept at dawn on 15 August when the murderers went on radio to proclaim eerily and arrogantly that they had just done away with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family. A couple of days later (and this story is related once more through eye witness accounts), K.M. Obaidur Rahman accompanied, on Moshtaque's instructions, Mansoor Ali to Bangabhavan. A desperate Moshtaque needed the support of his fellow Awami Leaguers to have his illegal regime come by legitimacy of some sort. Tajuddin Ahmed was out of the question. Syed Nazrul Islam had refused an offer to be part of Moshtaque’s cabal with contempt. Even the soft-spoken A.H.M. Quamruzzaman had said no. Moshtaque's last hope was Mansoor Ali. Would Ali agree to be prime minis -ter?That was the usurper's question. Ali made no response. He only stared at the long-time Bangabandhu associate
who had ended up murdering Bangabandhu. 'Why are you looking at me like that?' Moshtaque asked. Ali opened up. 'I am looking at you and thinking of Bangabandhu. How could you kill him?' And that was it. An irritated Obaidur Rahman (about whose role in 1975, especially in the jail killings, questions have never gone away) conducted Mansoor Ali out of Moshtaque's presence.
On 3 November of that sad year, Mansoor Ali was surprised, as were his three detained colleagues, to see his cell being opened in the witching hours of the night. Tajuddin /Mimed, Syed Nazrul Islam andAH.M. Quamruzzaman, he was told, wanted to meet him. 'A meeting at such an hour?' Ali wondered aloud. He did his ablution, put his skullcap on his head and had his prayer beads in his hand as he walked out of his cell toward Tajuddin's. He had a premonition, as did the three other leaders, that life was fast coming to an end forthem. Within minutes, all four men --- towering figures in the war against Pakistan -—lay dead in their own blood. Mansoor Ali, as witnesses have testified over the years, did not die instantly despite the bullet wounds. He faintly asked for water. That prompted one of the prison guards to run back to the exiting killer squad, to inform its bloodthirsty men that Ali was still alive. The murderers came back, to bayonet this illustrious man to death. The three others had already gone lifeless.
It is a book that touches your heart, in that hugely painful way. Of course, the events and incidents of August and November 1975 have been repeated over the years. That does little to mitigate the national pain and the collective sense of loss that have always been there. The work is a compilation of news reports, statements and eye witness accounts of the tragedy. Mansoor Ali's children, two of whom would eventually go into politics, speak of their father with feeling. Dr. Mohammad Selim, one of the finest and most decent of politicians in post-1975 Bangladesh, slipped into his room when news reached him of the jail tragedy and wept quietly without informing his mother. Begum Amina Mansur speaks (and she does so fifteen years after the murders) of her husband with pathos. And. of course, jail officials at the time, now all in superannuation, recount the horrors that they, and with them an entire nation, went through on that sinister night long ago. The scars have remained, probably never to heal.
ZAHIR Raihan's end remains a national ordeal. He disappeared on 30 January 1972. Note that it was a month and a half after the liberation of Bangladesh. One would have thought by that time security would improve and the defeated enemies of the new state would have lost themselves into the crowd or slipped into oblivion. But the truth is always stranger than all the tales you can weave about the trauma of war and the euphoria engendered by victory.
Raihan's contribution to cinema, indeed to Bengali nationalist politics, is a matter of record. It is all there, preserved in the movies he made. As an active participant in the War of Liberation, he brought home to people around the world, through such documentaries as Stop Genocide, the enormity of Bengali suffering at the hands of the Pakistan occupation army as well as the resolve of a captive nation towards driving the murderous foreign army into the sea. In that war, every Bengali was marked out for death, be it in occupied Bangladesh or in the refugee camps in India. And, obviously, Zahir Raihan was one individual in clear sight of the Pakistanis and their local quislings. And he did die at the hands of those quislings, as this admirable collage of reports, interviews and articles from Julfikar Ali Manik makes clear.
The message comes through loud and clear: on 30 January 1972, Zahir Raihan did not disappear. He died in a hail of gunfire when a large group of Biharis, all of whom had collaborated with the Pakistani military in 1971. pounced on him and on the soldiers of a fledgling Bangladesh army. A freak accident? It most certainly was not, for those marauding Biharis knew Raihan only too well to leave him unscathed. With the filmmaker died a whole lot of others. And, mystifyingly enough, by the time Bengali forces reclaimed the place of horror in Mirpur, all the bodies had disappeared. Not one was traced. Zahir Raihan, a foremost intellectual who had gone to Mirpur along with a platoon of Bengali soldiers in the hope that he would be recovering his kidnapped brother Shahidullah Kaiser (who had already been murdered by al-Badr goons on the eve of liberation), was destined to go missing as well. He had earlier received information that Kaiser was alive. And it
was hope that made him link up with some freedom fighters, such as Lieutenant Syed Muhammad Ibrahim (subsequently to retire as a major general and form a political party, the objective being to ride with them to Mirpur where he presumed, or was given to believe, that his brother was yet alive.
Manik's narration of events, set off by a discovery of human remains inside the compound of a mosque in Mirpur in the late 1990s, is hair-raising reading. For those who have remembered the monstrosity of the tragedy perpetrated by the Pakistanis as also those who, born after the war, have heard of the multi-faceted dimensions of the tragedy, Ronangon is a living testament to the collective triumph and individual travails Bengalis went through in 1971. Former soldiers recount the horrendous happenings of the day. One of them, a survivor, has his memory clear enough to take readers to the spot where he saw Raihan collapse to the ground after being hit. As he tells the story, immediately after the massacre had taken place, a body of Urdu-speaking men, all Biharis, turned up and dragged the bodies away. His narration of events is corroborated by others. What remains inexplicable, though, is how such a large body of Pakistan supporters remained active in a part of the nation's capital for so many weeks after liberation. Bangabandhu had returned home by that time; his government was at work and elements of the Bangladesh army as well as the Mukti Bahini were very much around.
The work is an impressive recounting of the tragedy of 30 January 1972. It is conclusive evidence, despite some of the cynics still around, of how Zahir Raihan met his end. Ibrahim, Moinul Husain Chowdhury (today a retired military officer) and a number of other individuals leave the reader in little doubt about the facts behind the mystery of Raihan's sudden disappearance. And yet the questions keep piling up. Why was security in Mirpur so lax on the day as to allow a group of armed thugs to pounce on an army
platoon? And why was no effort made to dissuade Zahir Raihan, in such a risk-prone situation, from setting off with the soldiers to Mirpur? Finally, why were there no purposeful investigations into the killing of Zahir Raihan and of those others who perished with him?
The questions keep coming. Perhaps some of the answers will emerge from the pages of this book. Perhaps.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.