| Govt should heed call for all-party JS probe into BDR carnage THERE is a growing demand for an all-party parliamentary probe into the appalling massacre of the BDR commanders for both immediate and long-term political and security interests of the nation. The demand – no longer the one raised by a few democratically oriented members of intelligentsia – has been voiced by many social and political forces, including the main opposition party and the components of the ruling coalition on the treasury bench in Jatiya Sangsad. Even the deputy speaker, an experienced politician voted to parliament on the ticket of the ruling Awami League, is in favour of a parliamentary probe, 'provided the parties concerned agree'.
We believe the government, and the treasury bench as well, should seriously consider the proposal, for the murderous revolt at the Bangladesh Rifles headquarters has not only revealed the horrific level of jawans' hatred for their commanders, which is unquestionably unsound, but also exposed a worrisome level of indiscipline in a supposedly disciplined paramilitary force assigned to guard the borders against any infiltration of 'enemies' from beyond the borders, which is dangerous. The incident has, understandably, shattered the people's confidence in the force's ability to guard the borders and, hence, involves the matter of our territorial sovereignty, which is primarily a serious political issue and needs to be dealt with politically by the politicians concerned. The most important issue at hand now is to stop recurrence of such a severe breach of discipline in a 'disciplined' force, not to mention trial of, and punishment for, the perpetrators.
In a democratic dispensation, it is the people who are sovereign, and in a parliamentary democracy the sovereignty is exercised indirectly by the elected representatives of the people that constitute the parliament, while the government remains collectively responsible to the parliament for all the duties entrusted to it by the constitution of the state, which is, again, supposed to be the embodiment of the general will of the people. Therefore, when the issue of sovereignty is at stake, the parliament that represents the sovereign has the greatest responsibility to identify the perpetrators of the anti-state massacre.
Moreover, it is the political responsibility of the parliament to identify the reasons behind such a grisly incident, examine alleged grievances among the BDR jawans that apparently helped the masterminds to woo many of them to carry out the massacre, find out whether there was prior intelligence hinting at such an incident – if there was any, why the government and other agencies concerned did not act upon the information, and, if there was none, why the intelligence agencies concerned had failed to gather such vital intelligence.
There are even other angles, especially when speculations have it that the massacre was a result of conspiracies hatched outside the BDR, even beyond our borders. Thorough investigations, political and technical, and consequent findings are important to stop recurrence of such a gruesome incident, and such a breach of discipline in any disciplined force responsible for guarding territorial sovereignty. This is, indeed, a matter of our existence as a nation state. The ruling party's slogan that 'the parliament is the centre of all national activity' will have no meaning, if the parliament is not allowed to go deep into this issue of immense national importance.
Two probe committees, comprising military and civil bureaucrats, have already been formed. We believe the committees, besides identifying the perpetrators, would be able to provide the nation with valuable information about the lapses responsible for the carnage, and technical as well as strategic insight, which would help deter recurrence of such an anti-state incident. But an all-party parliamentary probe would be able to come up with, apart from looking into other issues, a political perspective to the entire episode. State, sovereignty, national security, etc, after all, are political issues that involve the lives of the people at large. No parochial partisan outlook of the government, and the governing parties in the parliament, should allow the parliament as a people's institution to fail its political duty in this regard.
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