It was last Saturday afternoon when I first started hearing some reports of unrest in the Mirpur area the night before. Apparently, there was some conflict between the local people and residents of a Bihari-majority part of Mirpur. To be honest, I did not try to get the details. When you live in Dhaka, keeping track of all the clashes around the city can be a full-time job, one that I have no intentions of taking on anytime soon.
Unfortunately, in this city and this country you cannot really shelter yourself too long from unpleasant incidents. So soon I started hearing how Bihari families were attacked, and reports of arson that claimed women and children as victims, women and children who were locked inside their houses and burnt to death.
Even this is not new in this city. We have already been desensitized to single deaths, or mere murders. Now to be worthy of our attention, an incident needs to involve mass murder, or brutal maiming, or some novel form of cruel torture. However, this incident probably captured a lot of attention due to the Bihari dynamic.
For those unfamiliar with the issue, the Bihari camps and their inhabitants have been a bone of contention in this country since the birth of Bangladesh. While all summarisation risks the omission of crucial information, let me try to outline the major points of the issue here. Biharis, who probably had more in common with the erstwhile West Pakistanis than with us, understandably were less than sympathetic to the cause of autonomy for East Pakistan, and even less so for the demand for the independent state of Bangladesh. While they did not pose any serious threat initially, in the months leading up to the war, they were often the cause of a number skirmishes all over the country with advocates of the Bengali Nationalist movement. In fact, even after December 1971 the Biharis kept up resistance in Mirpur among other areas.
During the actual war, the Pakistan Army formed Para-military units with the help of Bihari and Bengali collaborators. As we know today, these units were instrumental in a lot of the war crimes perpetrated against the newborn state of Bangladesh. In particular, the planned wipe out of the Bengali intelligentsia was largely executed by Bihari militia members, with the help from their Bengali counterparts.
Once the war ended, however, the Pakistan army once again proved that there is no honour among thieves. They were content to ensure their own safe passage back home, but did nothing to protect the militia they helped create and benefitted greatly from. Honestly, maybe there was little they could do to help the Bengali collaborators. However, with the Biharis what they could easily have done, indeed what they were expected to do for the first several years, was to take the necessary steps to accept these people as citizens of Pakistan, and arrange for them to be taken back to the country they chose to back during the war. Somehow though, this process never began and the Biharis were doomed to be refugees in Bangladesh, hated here for backing Pakistan, and denied by Pakistan for unknown reasons. Like the saying goes, there is no honour among thieves.
When I first heard about the Biharis trapped in Bangladesh, it was in a rather negative light. These were the monsters that helped the Pakistan army commit genocide in 1971. Pakistan had not taken them back, and now we had to put up with these people who were a burden on us. The Biharis were terrible people, somewhere between animals and humans when it came to developmental stages.
Yet over time, a different story emerged. A story told by the silence of the Bihari attendant in my father’s office. A story told by the generations of chefs and barbers the bihari camps seemed to spawn. While there were, and maybe still are, Biharis who considered all Bengalis scum and sworn enemies, the majority of them had a much sadder tale to share. These were people who were stuck between two nations, accepted by neither, looked down upon by both. In the lowest slums of this city, a Bengali child can at least nurture a dream of someday representing this country to the world. Yet for the longest time, even the right to a dream was denied to these people in the camps. They were resigned to being born, spend their whole lives, and then breathe their last, all within the confines of the camp.
From what I understand, over the last few years the general lot of Biharis in Bangladesh has improved somewhat. Nevertheless, one cannot help but have the feeling that these poor people still remain, at best, a vote bank that some political parties will leverage in whatever manner they feel most prudent. There are substantial reasons why I feel this way.
Since Saturday, a lot has been written in social networks and media about the incident. As always, there are two camps, one of which feels that the incident is really not that big a deal. Their rationale is that Biharis are, well, not really citizens of this country, that these same Biharis once killed our forefathers, and helped the Pakistan army. So, you know, these people deserve all the inhuman atrocities we can dish out.
There is just one thing wrong with that unassailable argument – the women and children that were murdered were not really born yet, in 1971. Common sense is enough to dictate that one cannot punish generations born forty years after an incident for crimes committed by the generation that was forty years ago. Further, as victims of one of the worst genocides in history, one would expect us to have a more empathetic view of such incidents.
But there is no point in presenting such arguments, because the people who commend the massacre of Biharis are well aware of them. Those people will use these very arguments to criticise Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, to denounce America’s attitude towards Arabs and Muslims. Like the saying goes in rural Bangladesh, you cannot wake up a man who is only pretending to sleep.
Before I can be accused of being a reconciliation-addict, let me clarify that I am the last person to get on the “forget the past and move on” wagon. However, when I say we demand justice, I mean exactly that we demand justice. We want to find out the people who were involved in war crimes, and put them through the due process. We do not want to murder en masse anyone belonging to a population subgroup. The Bihari war criminals must be tried, but not a single innocent Bihari individual should feel even the slightest bit threatened. Unless we can provide justice of that order, it will mean we as a nation are not ready for justice. The line must be drawn, clearly and unequivocally, between the due process of justice, and violence under the guise of justice.
For years we have kept these people trapped in purgatory, neither accepted by the ungrateful country their forefathers supported, nor allowed to make a life in this land that they are trapped in. For years Bihari kids have grown up landless, dreamless, and rootless. Steps are finally being taken to help them join the mainstream of this country, to give them an opportunity to make this their home, given how cruelly they have been denied by the country they always thought of as home. The time has passed when we could think of them as outcasts, as enemies. If there are any in these camps that are proven war criminals, they need to be driven out and tried for their crimes. If, on the other hand, we cannot find any such people, then we must accept that these people have just as much right to a peaceful life and the pursuit of their personal dreams and ambitions. When their children are locked in burnt alive, we should see the loss of human life. When the world judges us for something some terrorist did decades ago, we are outraged at the injustice. It is therefore incumbent on us to not subject someone else, no matter how weak and helpless, to that very same injustice.
The children that died on 14th June had the same hopes and dreams all children do. When facing imminent death, they had the same fears all children do. They must have reached for their mothers, like all children do. The mothers who died were not Biharis first, they were mothers first. They probably tried to save the children, the way all mothers do. When they realised that was not possible, they probably prayed that their children not suffer too much, the way all mothers do. The victims were just as human as you and me, their blood just as red. If we fail to see this, if we genuinely feel being Biharis means they deserved to be massacred, then maybe we should stop talking about 1971 and genocide, stop playing the victim card. Because if we look in the mirror, we might realise that in 2014, the monsters of 25th March are back. They are just as cruel and remorseless, just as quick to deny all rights to anyone who is different, and worst of all, they are among us, one of us. We have become the monsters, and it only took 43 years.
Source: Bd news24
