A LITTLE KNOWN STORY
A little known story
Neville de Silva considers the parallels and differences between protests in the two South Asian nations, and recalls his connection with a key player in Bangladesh’s history
When mass protests first erupted in Bangladesh in early July, demanding democratic governance and the rule of law and culminating in the August 20 ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, who fled the country, many in Sri Lanka felt a sense of déjà vu.
It was just two years earlier that Sri Lanka saw months of anti-government protests opposite the presidential secretariat, which finally led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country and resigning, with the Rajapaksa family-led government following their president and ending their political dominance.
But there were several differences between the two protest movements, Sri Lanka’s ‘Aragalaya’ (struggle) and the one that saw Sheikh Hasina seeking refuge in neighbouring India.
Clashes between Bangladeshi security forces and Hasina’s Awami League-led paramilitaries, and the country’s widening protest movement, left 400 or more dead, mostly civilians and students.
Conversely, the Sri Lanka Aragalaya was entirely peaceful until armed pro-government goons surged from the official residence of prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa – a former president and elder brother of Gotabaya – and attacked the protestors, destroying their tents, makeshift medical centres and temporary stages from which they articulated their grievances.
Police armed with tear gas and water cannon looked on unmoved as the lawless attacked the lawful. The protestors finally decided to withdraw and announced they would be gone by next afternoon.
But opposition party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, unexpectedly elevated as prime minister by a retreating Rajapaksa clan, ordered the army and police to drive away the protestors, which they did in the middle of the night as the demonstrators slept.
Still, the most significant difference between the two people’s movements needs reiteration. The Bangladesh uprising also saw minorities in the country, particularly the Hindu community and people from neighbouring India, under violent attack. Sri Lanka’s struggle saw an unprecedented cohesion of forces of multi-ethnic, multi-religious communities and socio-economic classes in a country that had experienced decades of ethnic war, religious clashes and class struggle.
Unlike the Bangladesh protests, the Sri Lanka Aragalaya was peaceful on the part of the demonstrators
It made the Sri Lankan people ask themselves why such unity of purpose, which brought a million or more people together over those troubled months, could not be permanently sealed as the country balanced precariously on the verge of economic collapse.
Yet it was not the contrasting people’s struggles to free themselves from blundering authoritarianism that drew me to the political upheaval in neighbouring Bangladesh. Rather, it was a personal connection that goes back to 1971, when I was still attached to the Ceylon Daily News in Colombo.
In January 1971 I found myself in Hawaii – having been awarded the coveted Jefferson Fellowship. the first Sri Lankan journalist to win it – along with ten journalists from other Asian countries to follow a four-month course of study at the East West Center and University of Hawaii. ,
Among the Jefferson Fellows was Abul Basher Mohamad Musa, News Editor of the Pakistan Observer, published in Decca, East Pakistan, as Pakistan then was divided in two, with India straddling the two halves.
Sri Lanka’s struggle saw an unprecedented cohesion of forces of multi-ethnic, multi-religious communities and socio-economic classes
As a political correspondent I was interested in the political developments in East Pakistan, where the regime in West Pakistan was tightening its grip on its eastern wing as anti-Pakistan rumblings were multiplying there.
I often talked to Musa about the developments and he briefed me on it. Then, on the night of March 25, the Pakistan military launched its attack on the eastern wing, starting the war that led to the liberation of East Pakistan and the emergence of independent Bangladesh.
Suddenly, we found that Musa was nowhere to be found, search as the authorities did. Musa, a committed Bengali, had secretly left Hawaii for the war zone at home, without a word to us. Looking back, he was not the only Bangladeshi who disappeared from my sights.
In September 1989, I was forced to leave Sri Lanka under threats from an armed insurrectionist group which had already killed several of my journalist friends and heads of media institutions. I was named in their death list.
Unaware of this, the editor of the Hong Kong Standard newspaper, Mike Lynch, called me to offer me a position on the paper. With a job already at hand, I left for Hong Kong in mid- September 1989.Over the years I wore many hats and in 1995, two years before Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty, I was, among other positions, assistant editor, political columnist and diplomatic editor of the paper.
As diplomatic editor I had started a series of interviews with selected Hong Kong-based diplomats retracing their lives and time spent and their various diplomatic posting.
Among them was the consul general of Bangladesh SHMB Nur Chowdhury, who I had heard was also an accomplished artist. During the interview he told me he had been a Major in the Bengal Lancers, and had served as a diplomat in Brazil, Algeria and Iran before his posting in Hong Kong.
I used to meet him frequently at diplomatic receptions and we became quite good friends. One year later, in 1996, I was at a reception hosted by the US consul-general Richard Boucher, if I remember correctly, and was with a small group of diplomats, including Thai consul general Rathakit Mana that, Pakistan consul general Tariq Puri, and Singapore consul general Chan Heng Wing, when the Bangladeshi Number 2 joined us. When I asked him whether Nur Chowdhury was present, he said Nur was on leave.
When we were leaving the reception, Pakistani consul general Puri asked me to join him for a chat. He took me to his residence and, over a drink, he told me that Nur Chowdhury had slipped out of Hong Kong.
He said the information circulating was that Sheikh Hasina, who had just come to power in Bangladesh, had ordered the recall of Nur Chowdhury and three other diplomats. They were accused of involvement in the military coup against her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh.
The story went that Nur Chowdhury was the officer who, with an automatic weapon, assassinated Mujibur Rahman in August 1975, as the Bangladeshi leader stood at the top of the stairs in his residence.
When the military took power in Bangladesh after the coup, four of the key officers supposedly involved in the killings of Mujibur Rahman’s entire extended family – except Sheikh Hasina and her younger sister, who were in Germany at the time – were given immunity and posted as diplomats abroad.
One of them was Nur Chowdhury, who had anticipated the possibility of Sheikh Hasina coming to power at the head of the Awami League and ordering Nur and others back to Dhaka to stand trial and face probable execution.
Most of this information I gathered through my sources in Hong Kong and elsewhere the next day after I discussed with my editor what I had learned the previous evening.
Determined to scoop the story, we had one of my colleagues call the Bangladesh foreign ministry is Dhaka and get what information she could while I worked the Hong Kong angle. My first call that morning was to Hong Kong’s Chief of Protocol, Vivian Warrington, who I knew well, to inquire whether Nur Chowdhury had called on him. He had indeed, two days earlier, to bid goodbye as he had been recalled to Dhaka.
But of course he never went to Bangladesh. He had left for a pre-planned destination – Canada – where he had sent his wife several months earlier.
When I broke the story with an exclusive front page splash of the disappearing diplomat, Hong Kong was taken by complete surprise and I received many congratulatory messages from diplomats and foreign journalists.
Nur Chowdhury’s fears of his planned execution were justified. I was still with The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong when I heard that he had been sentenced to death by firing squad (in absentia) on 8th November 1998, while 14 other alleged plotters of the assassination and coup suffered their fate.
Chowdhury now lives in Toronto Canada, still stoutly denying his involvement. While Bangladesh continues to demand his extradition, Canada refuses to deport him, fearing his death.
How was I to know in those early days that I had dined with and befriended an assassin, as many claim?
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London