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CROSS TALK

Getting to the bottom of BDR tragedy
***We we aren't looking for the killers because we have supposedly captured them. We aren't looking for the dead bodies either, because we found all of them but seven. Nor is this a case where the murder weapons are missing. What's missing instead is motive.***
ALL crimes are supposed to leave behind some clue, but we are helplessly clueless about the BDR carnage that shocked this country on February 25,2009. The trial of almost six thousand soldiers has failed to get us sufficient facts to stitch together the full account of what happened on that fateful day. There must be a black hole somewhere in this country. What goes into it never comes out.
What have the BDR members said during their trial? Have they given confessions? Have they given denials of their involvement in atrocities committed to officers and their families? Have they pleaded guilty or innocent? Somewhere in the court proceedings against so many men, has anybody been able to glean nothing but the whole truth?
There are two possibilities. One is that each of these guilty men was operating from his silo. He did what he was told, sort of like the apartment culture where everybody knows what’s happening inside his own apartment but nothing about rest of the building. Another possibility is that everybody knows everything and they are bound by a strict code of silence. When I say everybody I mean not only those who are being tried but also those who are trying.
Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin
philosophised that a single death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic. But for the families who lost their loved ones in the BDR mutiny, the statistic subdivides into many single deaths, fiftyseven to be precise not counting seven who went missing. The grief that comes to us in an annual rotation is a staple of their daily living.
How do these families handle this grief? How do they bear the burden of so many unaccounted deaths? We know the soldiers killed their officers and then descended on their living quarters like the
Visigoths who ransacked Rome. But did those soldiers act on their own? Who instigated such a massive madness? Who coordinated its abundant cruelty?
This nation has suffered from moral eclipse many times in its history. Political figures have been assassinated. People have been abducted. Men and women have been brutally murdered in their own homes. So many deaths have simply occurred but nobody tried to get to the bottom of things.
The BDR story should have been different. It happened over two days in broad daylight, right in the heart
of the nation's capital under the glare of television cameras, watchful eyes of an entire nation, the scrutinising scope of intelligence apparatus, and deliberations of government machineries. Here we aren't looking for the killers because we have supposedly captured them. We aren't looking for the dead bodies either, because we found all of them but seven. Nor is this a case where the murder weapons are missing.
What's missing instead is motive. Why were the soldiers so disgruntled or, for that matter, were they disgruntled at all? How could a disciplined force raise so many deranged
minds that they went on a killing spree with the psychosis of Genghis Khan? The Mongolian warrior boasted that the greatest happiness for him was to vanquish and chase his enemies, rob them of their wealth, see those dear to them bathed in tears and clasp to his bosom their wives and daughters. The similarities are so striking!
Four years later, people of this country are still struggling to grasp what motivated those killers to kill. Were there motivators who motivated them? If deprivation and discrimination were to make monsters out of people, BDR-like mayhem
should happen daily in our garments factories. It should also happen in our homes and streets as political and economic pressures are regularly pushing people to boiling point.
It's often said that the nightmare in Pilkhana was an intelligence failure. But nothing has happened to those who failed. If hordes of soldiers have been brought to the dock, why nobody from the intelligence side has been rapped on the knuckles?
We are not talking about scouring an ocean to find a toothpick. Thousands of soldiers conspired, organised and mobilised within the few square miles of a compound, and nobody could notice anything unusual. That was only possible if the intelligence guys were sleeping like babies.
After forty-two years, we are breaking out of the cycle of guilt and recompense in this country. We have tried the killers of the father of this nation and we are trying the war criminals of 1971. But the BDR killing might be a stumbling block to this healing process. If anybody finds it convenient to forget this terrible tragedy, it will return to seek its own revenge. The blood of the innocent will retrace its own trail, even if it takes another forty-two years to happen.
History repeats itself hoping that nations will learn from their mistakes.
The writer Is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrull51@yahoo.com