Five days ago, a young woman by the name of Dewan Mahmuda Akhtar Lita was picked up by the Bangladeshi junta’s police in the port city of Chittagong and jailed. No arrest warrant, no trial, no defense lawyer; no verdict; just picked up in a truck (where the brave 30 year old showed a clenched fist as captured by a brave photographer) and put in jail. She didn’t murder anyone and robbed not a dime. Her crime? She criticized on Facebook the wholesale farce of the December 30 elections in Bangladesh and hence, according to the junta, ‘hurt the feelings of the masses.’ I wish this was a sarcastic joke; unfortunately it is true to the last word. When you hear the dictator’s cronies in the Western media talk about merely an ‘imperfect democracy’….remember that they probably thought Saddam was merely an ‘imperfect President’ too. Not surprisingly, most of Bangladesh’s kept media merely mentioned an ‘arrest’, and little more than that. This, then, is the ‘rule of law’ that the Bangladesh regime’s apologists talk about.
Published by DocEsam
A Bengali by ethnicity, a college administrator and teacher by profession, and a bibliophile by passion whose heart breaks watching the debasement of Bangladesh's once vibrant pluralist democracy into a one party, one family dictatorship since 2014. View more posts
তোফেল,রজ্জাকদের আমলে আন্দোলন যত সোজা ছিল তারা পরবর্তী প্রজন্মের জন্য অত সোজা রেখে যেতে পারেনি। এজন্য লজ্জিত হওয়া উচিৎ।
Wherever you find ‘laws’ that claim to ‘protect the feelings’ of masses/Muslims/Christians/chose-your-group, you can be pretty sure you are dealing with outright fascists, whatever politico-religious label they might give themselves.
Please G-d this young woman survives, because it is not a given.