7am, 28 January 2005. The local news is on TV, the foreign ones in Financial Times, and Daily Star from home. The last one has a cover story reading:
Kibria, 4 AL men killed in grenade attacks
I sit there for a while, my tea getting cold. I think about calling my parents, but decide against it — it’s middle of the night there, why wake them up. Why wake them up to the fact that the country was sleepwalking to a disaster?
Or did they need waking up at all? A few months earlier, I received SMS messages from friends and family: Dhaka is hot again, murder attempts on Hasina, we’re safe, don’t worry. For much of the following years, I’d receive more such messages: bomb attacks etc, but we’re safe, don’t worry. Things got so bad that in October 2006, when someone rang my cellphone and started: Have you heard the news? Dr Yunus… my first thought was the sentence would end in … has been assassinated.
Seemingly, Bangladesh has turned the corner since, since we haven’t had assassinations and grenade attacks for a while.
But have we really turned the corner? Five years later, the Kibria case is still unsolved. And for three of these five years, Bangladesh has been ruled by non-BNP governments (at the very least, local BNP men are implicated in the assassination, and there is a belief that BNP high ups were involved). Forget Kibria, three months on, we still don’t know who tried to kill Fazl-e-Noor Tapash.
Have we really turned the corner? Perhaps not.
Even as we mourn him, and demand justice, we should also celebrate SAMS Kibria’s life and achievements. We need more people like him in Bangladesh, particularly in politics.
Drishtipat Australia and Bangla Academy Australia organised a seminar on ‘Bangalit-to: otit, bortoman o bhobish-shot’ at the Australian National University in Canberra on 30 August 2009. The speakers were Professor Anisuzzaman, Professor Emeritus, Dhaka University, Bangladesh and Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty, Professor of History, Chicago University, USA.