Lies, damn lies, and Bangladesh’s Washington embassy’s statement

In a desperate attempt to cover up the ongoing massacre carried out by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government, the Washington DC Embassy of Bangladesh has circulated two statements. Drafted by the country’s ministries of foreign affairs and information and broadcasting, respectively, the former undated and the latter dated July 21st, they bore clear similarities in making claims that do not reflect the facts on the ground.

To begin with, neither mentioned how more than 174 people died in a week at the hands of Sheikh Hasina’s loyal enforcers, the militant Chhatra League and Jubo League, working in conjunction with law enforcement and security agencies. Apart from shamelessly concealing this fact, the statements deliberately obscure the chronology of the events that snowballed into a massive protest and loss of innocent lives on the streets.

Both statements emphasised the point that the demands of the quota reform protesters and the government’s positions “were aligned” or “were not incompatible”. This was based on the fact that the government filed an appeal against the verdict that declared the government’s decision to abolish the quota system in 2018 illegal.

This statement is a half-truth. Although the state, represented by the office of attorney general, appealed against the decision, it was not an extraordinary effort — instead, this is standard operating procedure for the Awami League government, dating back to the case of the Fifth Amendment of the constitution, when it first came to power in 2009.

While the 2005 high court verdict that declared said amendment illegal, making the rule of Ziaur Rahman, the founder of its arch-rival BNP, unconstitutional, was in line with Sheikh Hasina and her party’s thinking, Hasina’s government continued with the appeal against the judgement. It is important to note that the judiciary at the time was far more independent than it is now, with the changes brought in 2012 severely restricting the court’s powers by bringing it under the government rather than allowing it to operate independently of the government. 

In the present matter, when the court’s verdict restored the quota system, the government ministers, including the prime minister, defended the restoration. On July 14th, during a press conference, Sheikh Hasina expressed her support for the system. Apparently expressing regret for her 2018 decision to abolish quotas, from which the case stemmed, she said, “What happens when the quotas are cancelled? Only two female candidates have secured the foreign service, and four the police service.” Since all parts of the country are yet to be “developed equally”, she argued that the residents of the country’s less developed parts also have the right to be recruited for government jobs. 

Before that, on July 11th, the general secretary of her party, Obaidul Quader, claimed that the women and minority communities had been left behind since 2018 after abolishing the quota system; hence, the system needs to be restored to “eliminate discrimination”. 

The message relayed from the highest levels of the government was clear: the government wanted to restore the system to continue its cronyism, and the positions of the government and the protesters were incompatible.

Incidentally, the women and indigenous minorities have been worst affected by the Appellate Division’s guidelines. Quota for women has been abolished and quota for indigenous minorities has been reduced to 1%, whereas the freedom fighters’ descendants retained a 5% quota, despite the protests specifically not targeting affirmative action for women and minorities and arising out of the disproportionate quantities reserved for freedom fighters and their descendants. At the very least, this exposes a nefarious game being played by the Awami League and shows how badly the judiciary is compromised, explanations for which are not given in the statements. 

To prove the seriousness of the government in meeting the demands of the protesters, the statements cited how the hearing at the appellate division had been brought forward from August 7th to July 20th. However, they deliberately concealed the fact that the government only took the step on July 18th, by which time the government and its loyalists had already killed dozens of protesters, and the country had been brought to a standstill by the ongoing massacre of protesters. 

Regarding the crackdown, the foreign ministry’s statement made no mention of the internet blackout, while the information and broadcasting ministry’s statement laid the blame on an attack “on the national data centre […] which resulted in the country losing internet connectivity with the rest of the world.” This either shows a distinct lack of knowledge at the ministry regarding how the internet works or is a deliberate lie to mislead the public. In fact, at the time of the nationwide internet blackout, this purported attack had not taken place, whereas the Awami League government has a history of disconnecting the internet for political convenience. The blackout exceeded the use of this ploy in Egypt during the Arab Spring.

In defence of the government’s “openness” to reform, the statements cited how quota protesters were allowed to submit a memorandum to the president. This is yet another instance of standard procedural norms being observed. It misleads readers while overlooking the fact that the president did not lift a finger after receiving the memorandum for more than a week.

“[T]he prime minister, through her address to the nation, as well as the concerned ministers in her cabinet, have repeatedly emphasized dialogue to resolve any issues”, the statement said. This is a completely false claim.

Sheikh Hasina’s address to the nation did not emphasise any dialogue to resolve the matter. Instead, she stressed that the government had nothing to do with it and that it would be resolved in the courts, urging protesters to keep faith in the judiciary, on July 17th. Before that, on July 15th, Obaidul Quader termed it a sub-judice matter that was not open for dialogue and threatened that the notorious student wing of the party, Chhatra League, would respond against the protesters’ “audacity”.

Both statements rehash the Awami League’s standard domestic talking points, accusing the opposition parties of using the student movement as a shield to perpetrate violence. As has become the norm for this government, such claims were made without offering a shred of evidence. In addition to pushing a narrative that paints the Awami League government as hapless defenders of extremism, it falsifies the chronology of events. At the time of the deployment of the Chhatra League cadres alongside law enforcement, following the repeated incitement of violence from the Awami League — which included Sheikh Hasina referring to the protesters as “progenies of razakars” — there was no involvement of opposition parties in the protests, not least since the student protesters had excluded them. 

In the next few paragraphs, the statements explained how three ministers, under the direction of the prime minister, had congenial talks with the protesters to resolve the issue. Of the three, one was the education minister, whose role in the brutal assault on the students is an important context about his true allegiance, missing from the section titled “The Context” in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s statement. Additionally, the state minister for Information and Broadcasting gave a belligerent press conference on the same day as his ministry’s statement, which identified him as one of the three ministers who met the students. His position as a threatening figure for the protesters is only made worse by his ministry releasing a statement on a matter where his personal involvement put him in a position to refute the contents of said statement. 

At this “satisfactory discussion” with two coordinators and a deputy coordinator in the early hours of July 20th after imposing a curfew, one of the coordinators present was a pro-government student leader and card-carrying member of the Chhatra League — the militant organisation that has played an active role in brutally suppressing the protests. At least one of the other negotiators was forced to join the dialogue, his fellow protesters alleged. 

While the so-called dialogue was going on at the State Guest House, the security agencies picked up one of the key coordinators of the protest, Nahid Islam, and tortured him in their custody, he alleged, showing the torture marks. Some of the chief coordinators are still missing after these agencies picked them up, according to their fellow protesters.

The foreign ministry’s statement barely mentioned the loss of innocent lives in great numbers. The only mention of it in the information and broadcasting ministry’s statement was about the prime minister’s mourning of the loss and her assurances of justice and compensation. 

However, it failed to acknowledge that these assurances were made almost a week back when the death toll was six, and despite the assurance, the number of people killed by Sheikh Hasina’s forces and loyalists had exceeded 174 by the time the statement was issued. Furthermore, the general secretary of her party had instructed law enforcement to enforce a “shoot-at-sight” policy during the government-imposed curfew.

The biggest irony of the information and broadcasting ministry’s statement lies in “The Violence” part of it, where the government provided a list of establishments and properties that were vandalised or torched while completely ignoring the biggest asset of the nation, the hundreds of youth who died during the brutal crackdown since July 18th, orchestrated by loyalists of the government along with its security forces.

The statement and its inconsistency with the facts on the ground demonstrate how the entire state machinery in Bangladesh is plagued by despotism, where the lives and welfare of the people hold no value to a government intent on holding on to power.●

Aaqib Md Shatil is a researcher and a contributor to Netra News.