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Editorial

Coming of the masked men

Ominous signals that we cannot overlook
11 October 2010, 18:00 PM
EDITORIAL
No sooner had we condemned the dastardly murder of Boraigram upazila chairman Sanaullah Noor Babu in the hands of some ruling party goons, there we saw an instance of outrageous gun-running between feuding armed Juba Dal groups in Comilla. The pictures carried by this newspaper as by so many others yesterday of masked men totting guns, some of which appears to be of prohibited bore, are enough to send chills down one's spine. They are youths, we are told, belonging to the youth wing of the BNP. And they were after, as reported, another section of the Jubo Dal, having fallen apart due to intra-party feud. Two feuding groups of Jubo Dal literally turned a portion of Comilla town into a battle zone where bombs, cocktails and weapons of different kinds were used with indiscriminate ferocity. Public life was brought to a stand still and about thirty people were injured including students and policemen. And all this happened because one faction of the district Jubo Dal wanted to disrupt a programme of the other faction. While the culture of political intolerance has appeared with a repulsive tone, made worse by its association with aggressiveness, what is disconcerting is that such differences manifest not only between two different political parties but also within a political party, particularly within its appendages. And what we were presented with was a horrendous spectacle of rotten polity eating into the entrails of politics. So far we have had the misfortune of witnessing various feuding factions of the Awami League going after each other; it seems that the BNP followers do not want to be outdone in such acts. While the environment of political intolerance must be abhorred there are several things that worry us. What is equally disconcerting in this matter, if not more, is the deliberate effort to hide the identity of the feuding youths behind masks. It indicates that these people were expecting a fight and had prepared well in advance for it. And thus the use of masks, so that they cannot be identified. But the most distressing aspect is that they had armed themselves with lethal weapons and did not hesitate to make use of those. How came people with hostile intent manage to flaunt weapons in public? We wonder why they were not anticipated by the law enforcing agencies and stopped before they could do damage to life and property. And it was for quite sometime that they had gone about with their belligerent acts. The government would be remiss to see the matter as merely a manifestation of intra-party rivalry. The matter is indicative of a deep seated malady that of intolerance mixed with hostility and backed by lethal weapons, a combination that no country can endure.

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