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Those twenty one years

Syed Badrul Ahsan
BEGUM Khaleda Zia has warned that the next time the Awami League goes out of power, it will be in the woods for forty two years. She was simply doubling the figure of twenty one years, the period in which the party behind the liberation of Bangladesh was last forced to stay on the fringes of politics. And what exactly did the country go through in those twenty one years between 1975 and 1996? Observe:
Bangabandhu, most of his family and the leading lights ofthe Mujibnagar government were murdered.
In a series of coups and counter-coups, Khaled Musharraf and other valiant soldiers of freedom were assassinated in cold blood.
The August-November 1975 assassins were not only granted immunity from prosecution through an Indemnity Ordinance but also sent abroad as diplomats at various Bangladesh missions.
As many as eighteen abortive coups between 1975 and 1981 led to the summary executions and disappearances of hundreds of soldiers and airmen.
The country lurched to the right, with Khondokar Moshtaque, Ziaur Rahman and Hussein Muhammad Ershad destroying the secular spirit of the constitution and the War of Liberation.
General Zia knifed secularism and socialism out of the constitution. General Ershad imposed Islam on the state as its official religion.
The two military rulers formed, while in power, their own political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jatiya Party. Ershad, in the early 1980s, sanctioned the formation of a political party, the Freedom Party, by leading assassins of the Father of the Nation.
General Zia had his comeuppance when he was killed in an abortive coup on May 30, 1981. Two days later, the valiant freedom fighter General Manzur was murdered in questionable circumstances.
Colonel AbuTaher was murdered through a sham of a trial in 1976. General Manzur was bumped off to silence him on the happenings of end-May 1981.
Following the August 1975 coup, a pro-Pakistani Bengali air force officer was brought back from his home in Germany and appointed chief of the air force. General Zia, in 1979, imposed Shah Azizur Rahman, leader of the Pakistan delegation to the UN General Assembly in September 1971, on the nation as Bangladesh's prime minister. Razakars made it into Zia's regime.
In his time, Ershad had the 1971 Bengali chiefofthe East Pakistan Red Cross become his vice president. Later, he had a Bengali who served as Pakistan's ambassador abroad till 1977 become speaker of Bangladesh's Jatiya Sangsad. Notorious collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army became ministers in his government.
In those twenty one years, Bangladesh was put to shame. In forty two years, it just mightseethelifegoingoutofit.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com