Families of those who disappeared allegedly at the hands of law enforcing agencies have urged the Prime Minister to ensure justice over the incidents.
They made the appeal during a conference titled “Pain of relatives: Stop disappearance, murder and torture” organised by the Fundamental Rights Protection Committee at the National Press Club in Dhaka on Saturday, in observance of the International Enforced Disappearance Protection Day.
At the first session of the conference, 20 victims’ families expressed their feelings of pain. Audience could not hold their tears back as the relatives of the victims narrated the incidents of abductions. Many of the relatives broke down in tears and some of them tumbled down on the floor.
The relatives who found bodies of the victims felt themselves more ‘lucky’ than the families of the victims who are still missing. Besides, the relatives who are yet to find bodies of the victims have demanded that the whereabouts of the victims to be made public. “The government should give pressure to the authorities concern to reveal the status of their loved ones, who disappeared after being alleged arrest by the law enforcing agencies,” they added.
Sanzida Islam, sister of missing Sazedul Islam, said, they have been knocking at the doors of RAB, DB police and police stations for the trace of their near and dear ones, but they have failed give any satisfactory answer regarding whereabouts of the abducted persons.
None of the agencies enquires about their well-being, she added.
Most of the participants attended the programme holding up the portraits of their missing relatives.
Daughter of ward councillor Chowdhury Alam, who remains missing for several years, said that she received only one phone call from the BNP office just on the day when her father was abducted and there was no further enquiry from the party.
Ain O Shalish Kendra (Centre for Law and Arbitration) official Noor Khan Liton conducted the programme. In his speech, he slammed State Minister for Home Asaduzzaaman Khan for his comment that there was no incident of enforced disappearance in the country.
Meanwhile, speakers at the conference underscored the need for removing the politics of impunity from the process of justice.
“The security of life and property is a constitutional right and all need to be vocal to realise that,” said noted jurist Dr Kamal Hossain while speaking at the conference.
“We don’t want to compromise without justice…we’ll have to come out from such state of affairs…the politics of impunity has to be removed,” he said.
Dr Kamal, also the president of Gonoforum, alleged that the incidents of enforced disappearance would not have taken place if the country’s law enforcers had remained unbiased. “There has been somehow a gap in the executive to control the law enforcers, which is not a good sign,” he added.
He demanded that all the inquiry reports on all kinds of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances be made public.
Dr Shahdeen Malik, who presided over the conference, said, “We won’t return home without the trial of the enforced disappearances and subsequent killings.”
He claimed that the incidents of enforced disappearance cannot take place without the state patronage. “If the government doesn’t respond, we’ll move, if necessary, to the international court,” he said.
Nagarik Oikya convener Mahmudur Rahman Manna, journalist Syed Abul Moksud and Dhaka University teacher Asif Nazrul, among others, spoke on the occasion.
