It is a day when we mourn the untimely passing of a good number of our compatriots. They were all done to death by men with murder in their dark hearts. On this day, these villains killed and pillaged, leaving a nation shocked beyond comprehension.
Twelve years ago today, 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 waging an armed struggle for national freedom.
This morning, more than a decade after the mutiny which took the lives of the 74 people 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 jawans of the BDR, in conspiracy whose roots remain as mysterious today as they did ten 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 made bereft of their fathers and, in some instances, of their mothers, are images we cannot live down.
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, indeed 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 more clear than they had been up to that point.
Those images of the jawans looting the armoury and searching 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, a decade 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 a decade after the tragedy came to pass. 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 now we have learnt to kill one another and not feel embarrassed about it at all. We killed in 1975; we killed again in 1981. And we killed in 2004. Collective guilt has been ours. Our sins have consistently clouded our future. This morning, we pray for those we lost twelve years ago. We pray for their families, for their spouses and children and siblings and parents. In our hearts burn candles, bright and glowing, in profound tribute to these brave people murdered through deep-rooted conspiracy.
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