A River of Bangladeshi Blood
Abid Bahar
When Mujib the nonintellectual populist leader, once a fierce fighter for democracy but in 1975 established the one party BKSAL system, closed the opposition newspapers and had extrajudicial killings of his opponents by his Rakkhi Bahini, there at the mountain top of the Bangabhovan some Bangladeshis saw the beginning of a small stream of a river of blood where Mujib and his family also joined and joined further by others; Khalid Mosharaff, Taher, Zia, Rashid and many others today and the river of blood still flows and will perhaps continue to flow untill the AL stop seeing the Bengalis as better friends than its fellow Bangladeshi citizens from oppision political parties.
Mujib like many other Third World autocrat leaders could have escaped the massacre number 1: If he didn't live in Dhanmondhi and if Golam Mostafa didn't bring Dalim to Mujib's house, number 2: And most of all if Mujib didn't have his left eye ailment in High School and had to skip school for four years that eventually made him a politician with charisma but not a statesman.
Despite all the death due to the discontinuty in Sheikh dynasty, instead of Taher's people's army rule, in Bangladesh the multiparty democracy was restored and also the market economy revived surprisingly by a man as like some military leaders in USA politics (Isnhower) and UK (Churchill) came from military background but listened to people, that the country needed democracy. In this universal system, Hasina was also allowed to join as the opposition leader. President Zia also established a democratic opposition political party. In this whole episode people thought it was the country first before anything else (democracy). No one except people owns the country; abiding by this formula, the river of blood still flows.
I have expanded this idea further in my recently published book, "SEARCHING FOR BHASANI, CITIZEN OF THE WORLD." 2010. Available at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com
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