Burnt by hartal pickets, little Monir gives up on his desperate battle for life over last 3 days
Monir, the 14-year-old boy who was set on fire by pickets last Monday during the opposition-sponsored 60-hour hartal, breathed his last yesterday.
The boy of class-V with over ninety-five percent burns died a slow and painful death in the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
For a greater portion of his time in hospital, Monir was conscious and fully aware of the racking pain, courtesy of a group of pro-hartal rowdies who torched the covered van with the boy in it on Monday.
The skin all over his body had erupted and every breath had been causing unimaginable pain with his respiratory tract burned down.
Doctors had previously said it would be near impossible to save the boy.
His father Ramjan Ali, who had brought him to Dhaka on Saturday indulging his whims to see the city where he had never been before, stayed vigil beside the bed the whole time.
“Just the night before his death, he kept begging me to take him home,” said Ramjan.
“When I finally put him to sleep, he woke up in a few hours around 3:50am and asked for juice. While I was making juice, Monir suddenly started twitching and contorting. He tried to pull his tubes out and wanted to jump out of the bed and kept crying out. I calmed him down, and he laid his head on my chest.
“A minute later, his body went limp. I knew he was gone.”
The father had previously lost two children, one in a road accident and the other in infancy.
Monir’s mother Minuara had seen just one glimpse of her son after the accident. She fainted at the first sight on Tuesday night and could not be revived until an hour later. She was not allowed near Monir afterwards fearing further deterioration of her health.
At Monir’s home in Gazipur, family members and loved ones fumed with anger and horror, after the boy was brought in yesterday afternoon, our correspondent reported.
A question circulated in the air: “What do we do with such politics that takes away our son?”
Thousands of people attended his namaz-e-janaza.
His mother kept fainting again and again, unable to bear the loss — that too in such a gruesome way.
“I wanted to make my son a big officer one day, I had dreams for him. Who will bring my child back to me?” she wailed.
Last Monday when Monir first turned up at DMCH with his blackened body, The Daily Star contacted BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir to ask why the party is indulging in such politics that result in violence.
He replied they enforce hartal not out of joy, but to ensure people’s voting rights. “We don’t have alternative,” he said.
Yesterday, when he was contacted again to inform him about the death of Monir, he termed the case filed in this connection false.
Shawkat Hossain Babu, leader of Gazipur Jubo Dal, a pro-BNP organisation, and 83 others stand accused in the case.
Asked whether he would take an initiative to see whether the charges are true, Fakhrul said, “None of the activists affiliated with the party caused this. I know government agents are to blame for the death of Monir.”
The case, filed with Joydevpur Police station in Gazipur on Tuesday, led to the arrest of 12, although Shawkat, the prime accused, has not been caught yet.
Ruling Awami league stalwart Tofail Ahmed, who had aired Monir’s case in parliament on November 5, told The Daily Star yesterday, “I have been concerned about Monir’s case from the very beginning. It is heartrending the way he died. I have no language to condemn this, it touched my heart. While we who are not related to the boy are so affected by this case, it is difficult to imagine how the mother must be feeling now… she had lost three children, how can someone comfort her?”
He went on, “Khaleda Zia is a mother. Does she not feel when these happen? Is this politics? Hartal supporters have killed him, but they refuse to take responsibility. They must take the responsibility for such violent hartals. Hartal is a political program…it is not a license to kill.”
Yet Monir is only one of the seventy-six children affected in hartals throughout this year. Of them, two others have died, while many among the rest are blind or crippled for life.
Nadia Sultana, a frightened nine-year-old of Gazipur was crushed to death by a bus while running away from picketers chasing her during a Jamaat-enforced hartal in July.
Another child, an eighth grader by the name of Junaidul Islam, was standing in the balcony of his home in Kamalapur, when a stray bullet fired by police upon rioting picketers, killed him.
In one incident, sixty children in Lalmonirhat were beaten up by pro-hartal activists during a BNP enforced hartal on March 25 this year. The reason was that they had dared to come to school during a hartal that did not concern them in any way. Their school was vandalised, and three of their teachers were beaten up as well.
Source: The Daily Star
