Govt's seems keen on keeping Felani killing under wraps
New Age Editorial 6/3/11
THE Awami League-Jatiya Party government appears intent on smothering any attempt at sustaining public focus on, and thus condemnation against, the killing of Felani, a 15-year-old girl who was shot dead by the Border Security Force of India after she had got entangled in the barbed-wire fence on the Kurigram border on January 9, so suggests its repeated obstructions to programmes organised by Muktijuddha Prajanma. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Saturday, the government did not allow the organisation to hold a scheduled seminar at a city hotel on Friday, forcing it to move the programme to the National Press Club. In early February, Muktijuddha Prajanma met with similar obstruction from the government when it organised a visit of freedom fighters and intellectuals to Kurigram, to provide financial assistance to Felani's family. According to a report published in New Age on February 10, quoting people in the locality, the police did not allow the organisers and participants of the programme to leave the hotel where they were staying in Kurigram town and visit the village where Felani's family lives. Moreover, the local administration had to order a ban on gatherings in and around Felani's home at Nageshwari village in Kurigram for 11 hours starting at 7:00am on February 9 for fear of trouble as the local unit of the Awami League had also called for a programme at the same venue, a strategy the ruling party and its front organisations have employed time and again to foil opposition programmes. In such circumstances, the suggestion by some speakers at the Muktijuddha Prajanma seminar that the government was more interested to protect the interests of India than those of the people of Bangladesh.
Such a perception, needless to say, has been reinforced by the apparent failure of the incumbents to assertively raise with their Indian counterparts the issue of killings and atrocities perpetrated by the Border Security Force of India. What has, perhaps, been more frustrating is the government's apparent willingness to accept at face value whatever promise or assurance that New Delhi dishes out from time to time, although the latter has unfailingly defaulted on such promises and assurance. For example, in the joint communiqué issued at the end of the Bangladesh prime minister's visit to India in January 2010, which the AL-JP government would like the people to believe is a watershed document marking a new chapter in Bangladesh-India relations, New Delhi agreed to take steps towards an end to border killings; it did not translate into any effective steps. There have been talks in New Delhi of `a unilateral no-firing on the border for a year' and of `replacing the lethal weapons or bullets used by the border guards with arms that do not cause death'; these talks did not materialise into tangible actions, either. Meanwhile, killings and atrocities perpetrated by the Indian border guards continue; according to the Bangladeshi human rights organisation Odhikar, the BSF kills one Bangladesh national every four days.
Overall, it increasingly appears that the AL-JP government is unable to persuade its Indian counterparts into putting an end to the unabated killing of Bangladeshis by the BSF on the one hand and unwilling to let anyone mobilise public opinion against such monstrosities on the other. In such circumstances, it is imperative that the rights-conscious sections of society redouble their efforts to not only keep public condemnation of such killings alive but also reach out like-minded people in India so that they also create pressure on their government to rein in the trigger-happy BSF men.
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