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Representatives of the military-backed government had declared in public that they had been considering releasing the university professors with dignity whatever the verdict of the trials. At last, the government showed its "respect" for the university teachers by granting a presidential pardon to the "convicted" teachers, although the academics did not appeal for any mercy from the government.
Since the beginning of the unrest in Bangladeshi universities on Aug. 20, 2007, soldiers and police have lodged dozens of complaints in many police stations, accusing about 90,000 unidentified people of breaking the emergency laws, including university students and professors as well as common citizens.
In this process, the government exposed its obstinacy and vindictiveness toward the university communities by making arrests at midnight on Aug. 23, 2007. The government had no intention of allowing these people to walk free. The teachers from the universities of Dhaka and Rajshahi were charged with "conspiring in secret meetings and invoking people to breach emergency rules," although none of the detained professors took part in any violent actions on their respective campuses.
According to public speeches by the teachers on Jan. 23, especially that of Prof. Anwar Hossina, the general secretary of the Dhaka University Teachers Association, the four men were blindfolded and tortured for about 12 days. They were told by the military that they had plunged into a "black hole."
The defense counsels commented after the verdicts that, although similar evidence was placed before the courts in the four cases, three teachers -- Prof. Md. Anwar Hossain, Prof. Harun-or-Rashid and Prof. Sadrul Amin -- were convicted in the second case but acquitted in the first, while Prof. Neem Chandra Bhoumik was acquitted of all charges.
It should also be recalled that the one-member commission headed by a retired justice, Habibur Rahman Khan, stated in a report released to the media that the DU teachers had been sincere in their attempts to resolve the problems of the university related to the clash between the armed forces and the students. However, the government did not disclose the specific contents of the report after a period of about three months or place it before the courts.
The people of Bangladesh still do not know what the key points in the commission's report were or why the report has been concealed even from the courts. Was this episode not just another spurious initiative like so many other similar pretensions that the rulers are accustomed to foisting on the people?
If the charges were so serious, why were the cases only heard in magistrate courts? Naturally, at least part of the answer can be found in the police investigation reports on which the charges against the teachers and students were brought before these lower courts. This conclusion raises yet more questions regarding the investigation, prosecution and trial as well as the intentions of the military-backed government.
Why, for instance, did the prosecution fail to prove the charges against the teachers in the first case before the court? Why were not the others convicted at all in any of the cases when approximately 90,000 people were implicated in about five dozen cases?
One of the four teachers of Dhaka University, Prof. Neem Chandra Bhoumik, was not convicted in any of the cases although he was detained in Dhaka Central Jail for about 127 days from Sept. 18, 2007, to Jan. 22, 2008. At last, he was acquitted of all charges. Now that the nation is asking the government to give these 127 days back to the professor, what will the military-backed government do? Can it bring these days back? Was not the true intent behind the arrest and detention of the professors to intentionally humiliate them?
It had already been declared that the teachers were going to challenge the verdict of the magistrate's court in the higher courts. If the convicted teachers were acquitted by the higher judiciary, what would happen to them and the government?
Setting the teachers free by a presidential pardon does not confer any "respect" for the teachers on the part of the government. Rather, it is a reflection of the fear of the country's militarized rulers, who have an inferiority complex and envy the liberty of independent institutions, fear that creates the maladies that the armed forces spread throughout Bangladesh to increase the suffering of the nation.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
