Three reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan
How to govern a nation, briefly . . .
Running a government, even if it is an interim one, is serious business. And writing about it is a good deal more, which is probably why not many who have had the chance of administering a government have generally opted to stay silent. In Bangladesh, where, constitutionally-ordained caretaker administrations have been the norm in pre-election times since 1990, Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed has clearly not been tempted to recount his experiences as head of the caretaker government following the fall of the Ershad regime in December 1990. But, yes, Justice Latifur Rahman, on whose watch the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-Jamaat e Islami combine triumphed at the October 2001 elections, did have his own story to relate. It did not make much of an impression. As for the future, one will simply need to wait for Fakhruddin Ahmed to enlighten the nation on the tumultuous times during which he presided over a return to parliamentary government in late 2008. Maybe he will come forth with his observations. Maybe he will not. It all depends.
But what we do have at this point is a rather penetrating account from Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman of his time as chief advisor of the caretaker government that presided over the political fortunes of the country in the run-up to the general elections of June 1996. There is that certain feeling that Rahman, given a choice, would not have accepted the role of the nation's chief executive. The task of presiding over an election is in itself a gigantic one. In Bangladesh, it tests the intellectual and physical endurance of the one constitutionally called upon to ensure a smooth passage to a fresh new phase of electoral democracy. And that is where Justice Rahman had no choice. As the last chief justice of the Supreme Court before the elections, he was the man who was expected to take charge. And he did, after a tumultuous few weeks which saw the ruling BNP organize a pointless election which nevertheless was instrumental in re-fashioning the concept of the caretaker government one thought had ended with the election of February 1991.
Habibur Rahman, a noted scholar beyond his professional calling, speaks in calm, detached manner of the way he went about shaping his three-month administration. He asked his friend Syed Ali Kabir to join his government. Kabir was unwilling, for in his view he would not be able to do justice to the job. But he did suggest that Wahiduddin Mahmud be inducted into the government. Habibur Rahman went along with the idea. The process was carried along, one that also included the search for a press secretary among the media. Eager to ensure a smooth transition to elected government, Rahman nevertheless could not avoid the pitfalls that came with governance. Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina, noting her worries about the security of the chief advisor, assured him that fifty thousand Awami League workers were ready to hit the streets to give him protection. Rahman politely and predictably declined the offer.
But where Hasina was guided by a sense of welfare relating to the chief advisor, Khaleda Zia demonstrated no such niceties when dealing with Justice Rahman. After the elections which saw the incarcerated Hussein Muhammad Ershad triumph from five constituencies, President Abdur Rahman Biswas sought Rahman's opinion about the former military ruler's freedom in order to allow him to join Parliament. Soon after their conversation, Begum Zia called the chief advisor, to tell him: 'Don't listen to the president.' Justice Rahman's response was in line with his constitutional obligations. He told the former prime minister, 'Why shouldn't I listen to the president? I listen to him all the time. We also consider the requests he makes.' That of course infuriated Begum Zia, whose response came in the form of a threat: 'If you do that, we will not let you stay at home and not even in the country.'
A major crisis the Habibur Rahman caretaker government ran into centred around the dismissal of two senior army officers by the president. That prompted an angry reaction from the army chief, General Nasim, who obviously wished to have the dismissal orders rescinded. With the president determined not to yield and with the general stubborn in his refusal to be seeing acquiescing to what he considered a wrong decision, the country teetered on the verge of political uncertainty. It remained for the chief advisor to reassure the nation as well as the outside world that the appearance of tanks on the streets of Dhaka was in no way a sign of an impending coup d'etat. And yet that was just the kind of fear in which citizens lived and that only weeks before the country was to go the polls. In the event, President Biswas prevailed. Nasim was sacked and swiftly replaced by General Mahbubur Rahman. The elections went ahead, producing a result that saw the Awami League ascend to power for the first time since the violent overthrow of the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975.
There are the snippets that come with the weightier aspects of Rahman's story. The chief advisor has the Chinese ambassador calling on him. He uses the opportunity of reading out to the envoy part of an English rendering of a poem by Mao Zedong. To his disappointment, however, Justice Rahman notes that the ambassador is more interested in trade exchanges between his country and Bangladesh. At a subsequent stage, it is the Bhutanese ambassador who meets the chief advisor, clearly in a state of great agitation. There are all the reasons why that should have been so. Only a few days earlier, BNP leader Khaleda Zia, momentarily unaware of the implications of any foreign-policy related pronouncement on her part, had warned her political rivals that her party would not let Bangladesh become another Bhutan. That could not have gone down well with Thimphu. Besides, Rahman notes, Bhutan was the second state, after India, to accord diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh --- on 7 December 1971.
The work is an enumeration of the travails which sometimes assail those who govern, no matter how brief the period of governance might be. A visitor tells Justice Habibur Rahman that a charge laid at his door is that someone from the land of Mir Jafar had taken over as chief advisor. Rahman hurls his own question at the visitor: 'Where was Mir Jafar born and what was his country?' The man is stumped for a response. And then Rahman tells him that Mir Jafar was born in Najaf in Iraq. End of conversation.
... Bengali diplomacy
SUPERANNUATED diplomats sometimes surprise us with their considered view of the profession they have been part of. Of course, there is that matter of distance. The farther you move away from your subject, the more discerning you will likely be in your assessment of a subject with which you have been closely involved. That, if you must know, is something former diplomats have done with a fair degree of regularity in the West. Where the East is concerned, writing on diplomacy or composing diplomatic memoirs is a fairly recent phenomenon. J.N. Dixit and others in India have done a good job of recording their assessments of the history of Indian foreign policy. In quite a few instances, Pakistan has produced a good number of its former diplomats willing to reflect on the times in which they have served the country. In recent weeks, Jamsheed Marker has come forth with his story, one he calls Quiet Diplomacy.
In Bangladesh, an early instance of a diplomatic record of events came from Fakhruddin Ahmed, twice foreign secretary and one of the earliest members in a band of former Bengalis in the Pakistan foreign service to forge a foreign policy for Bangladesh. He called his work Critical Times, which remains in many ways a significant account of where Bangladesh's diplomacy succeeded or stumbled, as the case may be, in the years after liberation. There is too Hemayetuddin's A Neighbourly Affair, an analysis of his years as Bangladesh's high commissioner in Delhi. And now comes this pretty serious account of the many dimensions of Bangladesh's foreign policy from one of its more senior and serious practitioners. Harun ur Rashid, again from the old school of diplomats beginning their careers in pre-1971 Pakistan, has since his retirement from service focused on writing for various journals and newspapers in Bangladesh. His interest remains, to a very large extent, diplomacy as it affects relations among the states of South Asia as also countries outside the region. Additionally, his opinions on national politics have demonstrated his grasp of themes and subjects one does not always associate with diplomats.
That sense of politics, or call it his understanding of history, is what Rashid brings to the fore in Bangladesh Foreign Policy. With the general view being that the younger crop of Bangladesh's diplomats has progressively been unable to project the political backdrop against which foreign policy has been shaped in the country, it is quite encouraging to have Rashid give over two entire chapters (and they provide the beginning of the work) to a presentation of Bangladesh's history. That should be rather useful to the reader, whether or not the reader intends to make a career of diplomacy. In a bigger sense, the detailed explanation of the economic and political realities of pre-1971 Pakistan the writer provides as a step toward the larger enumeration of foreign policy making and application in free Bangladesh serves as a composite picture of some of the realities we have lived with. The writer might be excused for sounding somewhat like a pedagogue in his definitions of foreign policy and the many aspects it covers. And the reader could be excused for skipping through these portions of the work, for beyond these come the major factors in the making and implementation of foreign policy in Bangladesh.
The formative years for Bangladesh's diplomacy were of course the times in which Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman symbolized the national spirit. And that is precisely the point where Rashid begins his exposition of the theme under his consideration, of course not before he has drawn attention to the War of Liberation which served as a defining moment for the country. Bengalis had little question as to who sympathized with their cause (in this case the Soviet Union and India) and who did not (read China and the United States). And that was a prime factor in a delineating of foreign policy perspectives once Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign state in late 1971. Once Bangladesh became a reality, however, there were some other realities that confronted the Mujib government. Rashid notes four issues that the government faced in 1972: repatriation of Bengali civilian and military officials from Pakistan; recognition from the international community; admission into the United Nations and trial of the 195 Pakistani military officers for wartime offences committed in 1971.
Foreign policy under Bangabandhu's government was affected, naturally, by the turbulence that the era typified. And yet it was a time when Bangladesh did succeed in some major diplomatic areas. The international community, with the exception of China and Saudi Arabia, was swift in according recognition to the new state. Membership of international bodies was attained in smooth manner. And by September 1974, once the Chinese had decided not to wield their veto against Bangladesh in the Security Council any more, the country found itself in the UN. There were other accomplishments as well. Bangladesh, besides involving itself actively in the Commonwealth, went cheerfully into the non-aligned movement. Bangabandhu's presence at the NAM summit in Algiers in 1973 was considered a pivotal moment for the new country. In February 1974, with Pakistan finally agreeing to recognize Bangladesh's independence, Mujib led his country into the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) at a summit in Lahore.
Diplomacy then took a wholly new turn. The catalyst was of course the assassination of the Father of the Nation in August 1975. Khondokar Moshtaque, in his role as 'president' following the massacre in Dhanmondi, quickly made it clear which course Bangladesh meant to take now that the right wing was in the ascendant. This rightward shift took an increasingly definitive turn in the Zia period, to be followed by a further shift away from the original principles of foreign policy under those who came after Zia. Harun ur Rashid focuses, however, on principles rather than personalities in his analyses of the trends Bangladesh has followed in a formulation and implementation of its foreign policy objectives. The sub-title of the book hints at the points Rashid makes. In his view, there are the realities, priorities and challenges that Bangladesh's diplomacy is confronted with.
Turn the pages. You will come by somewhat of an idea of foreign policy as forged and practised by a nation buffeted by gales on many fronts.
The tears of the lonely . . .
THERE are tears that never dry up. And there are the cracked hearts that will likely never heal. You do not need a book to tell you all this. Neither is there anything in philosophy or literature to instill in you the lesson that tragedy is part of life. Tragedy is what we have lived through, indeed might yet live through in the times to be, in Bangladesh. Begin with the beginning. The War of Liberation claimed the lives of 3,000,000 Bengalis. And then came a series of tragic events that were to push much of Bangladesh's political and military leadership to unnatural deaths. The murder of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the four leaders of the Mujibnagar government in 1975 left the country crippled. Whatever remained of idealism as it was shaped during the war came to quick confusion with the murder, over a period of time, of many of the military officers who had taken part in the War of Liberation.
Observed from such a perspective, the murder of seventy individuals, fifty seven of them senior and mid ranking army officers, through a mutiny at Bangladesh Rifles in February 2009 is but a continuation of the long tragic story that has defined life independent Bangladesh. And yet it was a tragedy different from all the other horrific tales that had come earlier. For one thing, these murdered officers did not lose their lives in a struggle normally waged for political supremacy or power. For another, the very fact that a well-organized conspiracy was afoot to dispense with their lives was never suspected, let alone apprehended, by the state. That the intelligence unit of the BDR itself was involved in the sinister act is reflective of the depths to which conspiracy could slide. It was not a mere mutiny or conspiracy that left the nation reeling in shock. It was patent, premeditated murder.
Recall the sheer cruelty of the men who went about murdering their commanding officers and then molesting the families of the dead. Those were scenes straight out of the past, a throwback to the Pakistani occupation in 1971. The difference was that where earlier it was foreign depredations that were doing Bengalis in, now it was Bengalis mercilessly snuffing the life out of other Bengalis. And then there were the graves, shallow and surreptitiously dug, even as the leaders of the mutiny were being escorted, improbably, to a meeting with the nation's prime minister, for the bodies to be dumped into.
Here, in this labour of love and tears, is remembrance of the fallen. The wives weep in fond memory of the young, energetic husbands they have lost to human insensitivity for all time. The children recall the faces of their fathers and will grow into youth and old age with scars that will not heal.
It is a tale that makes a nation remember. The tears will come again. The cracks in the heart get wider.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs/ Literary Editor, The Daily Star
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