Rule of law sounds a mockery in
times of blanket arrests The total number of people detained by the military-controlled interim government as part of its mass-arrest operations across the country has now topped 14,000 in five days, implying that the average number of arrests has been roughly 3,000 daily since Sunday. While the political parties and the media have identified this move as a tactic of political repression and intimidation, home adviser MA Matin has claimed bona fide intentions only, describing it as a drive against miscreants and criminals. And yet, the inspector general of police, Noor Mohammad, has claimed vociferously that there has been no evidence of a slide in the law and order situation of the country. If such is really the case, how can the government justify such an elaborate detention campaign?
In fact, these contradictory statements from the adviser and the police chief give lie to the government's purported political innocence in this matter. We see that a majority of those arrested are principally grass roots political leaders and activists, and though the media has repeatedly drawn the targeted nature of these arrests to attention, the government has ignored our calls. On the basis of this and other evidence that has piled up over the past four days, we believe the political parties are right in describing this operation as political repression.
In the way that the incumbents have enforced their policy of blanket arrests, they have run roughshod on the rule of law, and civil and political rights, arbitrarily applying the emergency power rules to serve what we can only suspect to be a crude political end. Mass arrests make a mockery of the democratic norms and values. In fact, in the view of this paper, the current repression is a manifestation of this military-controlled interim government's inherent fear of, or disdain for, the people, worsened by its unravelling failure to resolve the ongoing political crisis primarily of its own making.
We observed similar pathological instincts when over 90,000 people were charge-sheeted for the Dhaka University protests that erupted last August, and with more than 30,000 people charge sheeted when clashes broke out in Sadarghat in May this year. Such mass arrests have been routinely abused by successive governments of the past, to serve their own crude political ends, but back then, the accused still had recourse to legal relief in the form of bail and interventions by higher courts to check such abuse. Under emergency power rules, the government is under no compulsion to produce the detained before a magistrate within 48 hours, nor can the accused petition for bail. Given this abysmal state of civil and political rights that this government is using as a weapon, we hear a travesty of democracy and the rule of law, when we hear these concepts propounded and thrown about by the incumbents http://www.newagebd.com/edit.html
অদক্ষ তত্ববধায়কদের জন্য দেশের প্রতিদিনের ক্ষতি কত কোটি টাকা? |