The India Today newspaper has reported how Bangladesh’s opposition platform ‘Maayer Daak’ betrayed victims’ families to help BNP win western support.
For Shafiq Ullah Monaem's father, finding the whereabouts of his son, missing for over 15 years, is still a futile but compulsive exercise.
The teary-eyed man told India Today he has had enough of the rights platform 'Mayeer Daak' and that he is no longer counting on them to deliver.
Mayeer Daak, named after Argentina's popular platform Mothers' Call formed in 1960 to help families come to terms with enforced disappearances, has been asking the families to show up at opposition rallies to demand the ouster of the Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina-led government.
The agenda is obvious - leveraging the tragedy of families like Monayem to push the agenda of a regime change, alleged by a number of family members who parted with the platform.
According to rights experts, even a single incident of disappearances is deplorable but at times, the cases are blown out of proportions or misused for opposition propaganda.
When a leader of the Bangladesh Chhatra League’s Barishal unit, Monaem, went missing in 2007, the country was ruled by a military-backed caretaker government which enjoyed active backing from a number of western countries known for efforts to depoliticise the country and politicize the human rights issue as weapons for regime change.
With top political leaders locked up by the caretaker government, the army even botched up an effort to help the country’s not-so-celebrated Nobel laureate, Dr Mohammad Yunus, make a run for power after the latter announced his decision to float a new political front.
But in the face of outright public rejection, that plan fell apart.
The Awami League's return to power in Jan 2009, thanks to an overwhelming majority, did not help Monaem’s family very much, but the emergence of Maayer Daak’ in 2013 rekindled some hope for him.
His father joined the platform with several other victims' families, hoping to finally hold the perpetrators to account.
Renaming the platform after the Argentine Mother's Call seemingly sharpened the focus on tracing the missing victims.
A band of so-called “impartial” rights activists like Nur Khan Liton, Adilur Rahman Khan Shuvro, Barrister Sara Hossain, Prof Asif Nazrul and Prof CR Abrar, among others, turned out for the Maayer Dak and pledged to help find the victims.
The case of another aged mother whose son, Moazzem Hossain Tapu, went missing from the capital years later, also unfolded in a similar way -- of starting off with efforts to trace the victims but ending up using them just as tools of regime change.
Likewise, hope was also noticed in the family of another youth, who has been missing from Northern Bangladesh for over eight years now.
“But all such commitments to keep the platform out of party politics soon fell flat on the face”, added the brother of another victim from Northern Bangladesh.
Much to their surprise, the victims' families found that the in-news and much-applauded platform was more like a “news-hogging front in the opposition's efforts to weaponise the human rights issue in Bangladesh.”
Those of them who joined the Maayer Dak rallies found the stage usurped by Opposition leaders and pro-Opposition notables to attack the Sheikh Hasina government and blame it for all disappearances, enforced or otherwise.
The frustration seeped in thick and fast. Of the 80 such families who started the platform in 2014, a handful of 19 are left now to hold aloft the Mayeer Daak banner. Their numbers are often beefed up during rallies by opposition activists to make the public events look big enough for notice.
But those carefully tracing the emergence of Mayer Dak can see through the hoax.
“Every single incident needs to be investigated by law enforcers so that no one remains missing or those falling victim to enforced disappearances deserves justice”, says Prof Mizanur Rahman, who teaches law in country’s top public university.
In response to the fate of Moname’s father, Prof Mizan, who also headed the national human rights commission in the past, deplored the opposition party’s bid to grab power, capitalizing on the emotions of the victims' families still in pursuit to find their near ones.
“As a rights activist, it is an irony to see that one’s rights issues can be used as a pretext to serve a political agenda... no parties should play with the emotions of families who lost their near ones at the hands of state or non-state actors,” added Prof Mizan.
Hazera Khatun founded Mayer Daak in August 2014 to create a platform for the family members of the victims of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh.
Her son Sajedul Islam Shumon was a well-known BNP leader from Dhaka and was picked up, along with five others, on December 4, 2013 allegedly by the RAB.
Shumon’s sister, Sanjida Islam, has been leading the platform and has been accused of allowing the platform a stage for opposition leaders to announce even ouster of the government.
Even a careful analysis on the videos of earlier events arranged by Mayer Daak revealed opposition leaders raised the demand of ouster of the government to put an end to the menace of disappearance, some even squarely blamed it on state actor.
But a sordid track record of faking cases of human rights by the BNP, as exposed by a number of national outlets, coupled with convenient ignorance over ruthless killings including execution of 1000 war heroes from armed forces and the rehabilitation of war criminals and embracing assassins who gunned down the country’s founding-father sheikh Mujibur Rahman with 19 family members under BNP’s founder Gen Ziaur Rahman lend further credence to allegations of political motive raised by families who left Maayer Daak.
“Under the façade of a rights body, their obvious goal is to draw sympathy from the international audience and mislead the world with wholesale blame against the government centering on the fate of those who went missing for years. They are very selective in projecting cases of abduction..Cases of abduction are plenty when BNP Jamaat led alliance took over the power and other administration also, let alone AL, but this organisation conveniently ignores such instances," said Monaem’s father.
Echoing a similar view, Tapu’s mother exposed her reason that led her to maintain a distance from the platform though she stood under the banner at the initial stages.
“They (organisers) asked us to attend different programmes held by the BNP. But I declined and did not comply with their insistence”, added Tapu’s mother.