NATIONAL dailies have reported that bodies are floating in rivers and ponds. On Monday alone there were at least 9 bodies found in Noakhali, Chittagong, Bagerhat and Khulna. What is extremely alarming is that many of the victims are political activists. The report said two of the floating five bodies recovered from a pond of Chatkhil and Meghna river in Hatiya district were of a Chhatra Dal activist and a Juba League man. Police recovered both the bodies having the marks of bullet wounds telling much about how they were killed.
The police also recovered two rotten bodies from the River Meghna on Monday after locals informed them that three bodies were floating in the river in Hatiya. In Bagerhat, police recovered the floating body of an unidentified young woman, aged about 23, from a shrimp enclosure at Noapara of Fakirhat upazila. Locals could not identify the victim and suspected that she might have been killed on Sunday and the body was left there around midnight. There were other stories of extra-judicial death while bodies were floating in rivers across the country.
The first question that arises in the public mind is whether the government or its party men can deny complicity in all or some of those killings? One may assume that some of these killings were nonpolitical and government agencies were not involved or all these were act of hard core criminals. But the overall ambience of impunity that the government has established through allowing extra-judicial killing is the first thing to be blamed for all these killings— whoever may be responsible for it. Moreover why the law enforcers can’t decisively handle the criminals who are letting lose a reign of terror throughout the country ? For the last five years a number of human rights organizations from home and abroad expressed their grave concern about the extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances but the government seems to have decided not to listen to any of the concerns.
The level of accountability is surely to be contended but it has to be accepted that this is a society not a valley of death. The Government must stop killing the people without due process of law by taking every step possible to ensure safety in public life. The government has to prove, elected or not, its competence as government. Only talking of liberation war or its history is not government.
