The pain has lingered. The tears of the widows have not stopped flowing. The children without fathers are yet lost in their search for normality. A nation’s trauma does not end.

Thirteen years ago, 74 people were murdered in the premises of what was then known as Bangladesh Rifles in Peelkhana. Of those murdered in such a crude demonstration of brutality there were 57 army officers then serving at BDR. They were some of the finest of our officers. Not even during the War of Liberation did so many officers die while we waged an armed struggle for national freedom. These officers lost their lives in their free country. That breaks the heart. That has shame welling up in all of us, for we could not save them.

This morning and on every morning, all these years after the mutiny which took the lives of so many good, innocent compatriots of ours on this day, we remember. We do not forget, we have not forgotten and we will not forget the calamity which descended on Bangladesh when the mutineers of the BDR, in conspiracy the roots of which remain as mysterious today as they did thirteen years ago, pushed the country into what was clearly a bloodbath. Their act of murderous indiscipline left an entire country reeling, at a time when a new government had only been weeks in office.

The number of families whose lives were destroyed, the many widows left behind, the children suddenly bereft of their fathers and, in some instances, of their mothers, are images we cannot live down. The nightmare unleashed on 25 February destroyed the dreams of so many families. The killers did not stop at murdering the officers, among whom was the director general of the force. They attacked his residence, ransacked it and murdered his wife.

The mystery remains, the questions wait for satisfactory answers. Our sense of tragedy has deepened over time. At the time, the appearance of closed circuit television footage on what actually happened on 25 February 2009 (one does not have a composite picture, though) made matters a little clearer than they had been up to that point. Those images of the mutineers looting the armoury and on a rampage for officers to kill in their quarters remain chilling reminders of the gruesome tragedy that was perpetrated on the day.

One sits back, rubs one’s eyes in disbelief and asks oneself, thirteen years after all those good men died at the hands of these murderers, if one had not really been caught up in a bad dream. No, it was not a dream at all. It was a national nightmare; and its dark spectre promises to be a long and extended one, even though so many seasons have gone by since the tragedy came to pass. Ugly images of these killers filling our television screens, obscenely belting out their anger, are what we have not forgotten.

It will be our long tale of sadness because these good officers were our own. We knew them; and we related to them. That they would all die in an enactment of a modern-day Greek tragedy is a thought that never came to us. But they did die and today it is for us the living to make sure that those who did away with their lives do not escape justice.

Too many murderers in this land of unmitigated tragedy have gone free. Let that sordid story come to an end. The killers spared no one, from a major general to a captain. They have been tried and sentenced. And yet the nation grieves, for all the right reasons. Some scars do not heal.

Ours is one of the saddest countries on earth. Time was when the Pakistanis killed us, in all their pitilessness. And then we learnt to kill one another and not feel embarrassed about it at all. Our freedom leaders were killed in 1975 and so were some of our valiant freedom fighters. Again in 1981 our good military officers were murdered, in cold blood and on the gallows. Collective guilt has been ours.

Our sins have consistently clouded our future. Our criminals have largely gone unpunished. Assassins have served as diplomats abroad, to our lasting shame. Our present has always been an avalanche of profound sorrow, of unmitigated heartbreak, of an endless search for answers.

Our past continues to haunt us, in the manner of noisy ghosts arising from hollow graves in the night. Our future will elude us if all these questions we have carried for years do not come by the answers so necessary for closure, for turning over a new leaf.


Source: bdnews24.com