The sitting Awami League government has hanged the 5 individuals convicted of assassinating President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975.
The executions came some 14 hours after the Appelate Division of the Supreme Court rejected a review of the Supreme Court verdict.
Quite apart for the normatively retrograde administration of capital punishment in Bangladesh, The Daily Star has reported at great length and vivid, quite discomfiting, description a step-by-step narrative of the executions. I’ll leave the content of that description to my reader’s imagination or her own brave run through the article linked above. The write up is heavy stuff, nearly pornographic in its treatment of the hangman’s impending work for the day.
It seems though that the news of the imminent executions was raw enough that the government reinforced public security in certain hotspots like the Dhaka Central Jail. Road traffic was strictly curtailed around the jail gate. One might be remiss to think that the government was preparing for broad civil unrest propagated by the opposition, mainly one imagines, in this case by attempting to free the prisoners. The executions are the final reckoning of the birthing pains of this young country. And though both the opposition and the ruling party smell blood, the law have prevailed.
The executions, per se, were not conducted with strains of populism. The hangings followed the correct lines of conduct after the Appellate Court determined that the Supreme Court decision was faultless. The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court rejected the review of the Supreme Court decision because the convicts did not present any argument that their rights were violated and that the proper procedures were not followed. Nevertheless, this whole process seems to have played out in tune with some novelistic send up of a musty tale of public and, indeed, national revenge.
The only journalistic principle behind the treatment of the news can only be that the people still feel the bullets and wounds of that night as lived memory. To a great extent that is more likely true in a way that no western commentator could fathom. Consider that as the body of one of the hanged convicts was taken away in an ambulance, people hurled shoes. The currents of populism that have long parted the monsoon swept seas of political change in Bangladesh are still now; or so one hopes.
