25/07/2024
"the fear of truth"
Article on the NEW Age (a Bangladeshi newspaper)
Dated 24 July, 2024
TRUTH is defiant. It finds its way to be in public circulation. Sometimes quietly. That has been the case since July 18, when the government suspended all internet services in Bangladesh apparently to ‘contain violence surrounding the student protest for quota reform’. Public, however, thinks otherwise. Words on the streets are that the government has disrupted the internet communication to stop circulation of images and stories of unprecedented violence. It assumed, as any repressive regime would, that the viral video footage of the brutal killing of Abu Sayeed (the first martyr of this movement) would spread fear. Circumventing the logic of repression, more students took to streets chanting, ‘we are all Abu Sayeed’. Public support for the student movement grew stronger. Citizens reporting on social media became a concern for the government. Fear of truth among the ruling party Awami League became palpable. The internet lockdown was inevitable.
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Ordinary people know better. People know that remembering is critical to fight against a regime that has consistently manipulated history, twisted truth, relied on disinformation campaign to legitimise their incumbency. The denied access to social media platforms did not stop people from recording and sharing images and stories of death. On July 19, a friend came across a photograph of a photograph. The original photograph was taken the same day, possibly around noon. Bodies of two young boys are lying on the ground in front of the BEPZA building in Banglamotor area in Dhaka. One of them is checking the pulse and the rest are obsessively taking photograph. My friend took the photo from a man who was there on the site. The man told her, earlier that afternoon, seven bodies were taken to the Green Life Hospital.
II
On July 21, another friend of mine came to visit me at work. He was visibly distressed. Barely managing to hide his tears said, ‘I saw and heard stories of many children being killed. Children from working class families.’ To show his support to the student movement, he stayed on the roads, in places where students put up a strong resistance against the police brutality. As I was scrolling through his photo gallery, I stopped when I came across a photograph of a tree. The photo was taken around Town Hall bazar in Mohammadpur. It showed no immediate sign of violence. There was no dead body. Only when I looked closely, I saw a pool of blood at its base. He tells me the story behind the photograph, when police opened fire at the protesters, a 7/8-year-old boy took shelter behind the tree, as he peaked from behind the tree, a bullet hit the boy. My friend was not an eye-witness to the killing, but he saw the blood on the ground. He took a photograph of the tree, wrote down the name of the boy and audio-recorded the detail account of the killing the way locals related to him. Grief-stricken and shocked at the horror that the government has unleashed on its own people, he shows another photograph from the Dhaka Medical College Hospital Morgue. Another 7/8-year-old boy, Hussain. His mother, a garment worker and father, a street vendor cluelessly navigating the hospital bureaucracy to get their son’s bullet-hit body released. He had three photographs of the morgue, I try to count the number of dead bodies in the photos.
III
A photojournalist friend has been covering the student protest from July 15. He bore minor injury from pellet gun shots. Alongside covering the movement, he has been collecting bullet shells, tear gas canisters and sound gr***de shells. As he displays his collection of ammunition that he collected from the streets, I asked him, why he is collecting shards of ammunitions and carrying them around. He sounded resolved, ‘Someday these ruins and remnants will aid the investigation in the courts. I will carry them with me, so I never forget.’ And, I thought, the criminal liability of the government is in people’s mind. The ruling party Awami Legaue's moves — imposing curfew, declaring general holiday and suspending internet — are shortsighted. They are focused on erasing the massacre like violence from public memory. But ordinary people are quietly thinking of justice. Justice in the long term.
IV
On July 19, I joined a human chain in front of the Jatiya Sangshad Bhaban in Dhaka. Cultural activists, journalists and educationists, among others, joined the programme protesting against the killing of students. Protesters held placards that reads, ‘we are all Abu Sayeed’, ‘autocratic rule must end now’, ‘why are the students killed in an independent country’. Protesters asked members of law enforcement to ‘put down your badge, take off your uniform, take a stand against the undemocratic rule, stop betraying the people, history will remember, history will not forgive you’. The law enforcement agencies were uncomfortable, but they did not respond. They were busy reporting to their top-brass. A young man from outside the human chain was quietly recording the surrounding sound — protest songs, slogans and noise from the walkie-talkies of the law enforcers. Police informed the organisers of the event, the protesters must disperse in 10 minutes. The young man recorded that instruction too. A few protesters became concerned about his presence, quickly approached him, when he said, ‘I am an artist, I work with sound, I am here recording what I hear. I recorded the sounds of gun fire, helicopters throwing tear gas from the sky.’ The auditory record is creating student’s narrative of the movement. What he said, essentially means, the sound of bullets must reverberate to dispel the government’s disinformation campaign that termed the protesting students as ‘miscreants’.
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It is uncertain when the internet connection will be restored. Some speculate that the government will go China style — internet access will be there barring the access to social media platforms. Some say that the access to slow speed internet without the capacity to upload large video or image file may be granted soon. Officials at government hospitals refused information about deaths and injuries. Denial of information does not stop the grieving public. They keep count. Images of death and massacre remain in circulation and will speak and haunt the ruling Awami League in the days to come.
