After Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country last week, many families are harboring fresh hope of finding their loved ones who became victims of enforced disappearance during her rule.
Hundreds of people, including opposition political activists, were abducted allegedly by government forces during Hasina’s 15-year rule, and around 150 of them remain unaccounted for.
As soon as Hasina lost power on August 5, members of Mayer Daak — a group supporting the families of the victims of enforced disappearance — swung into action with a fresh hunt for the victims, most of whom disappeared years ago.
A day after Hasina’s fall, Abdullahil Amaan Azmi, a suspended brigadier general, and Ahmad Bin Kashem, a Supreme Court lawyer, were freed. Both had gone missing in 2016. Political activist Michael Chakma, who had disappeared in 2019, was released from captivity the next day.
Sanjida Islam Tulee, co-founder of Mayer Daak, said the families of other enforced disappearance victims believe that their loved ones are being held in secret detention by security agencies and that they too will be released soon.
“Most of the enforced disappearance cases were supported by the regime of Sheikh Hasina. So, the police did not bother to investigate or solve the cases then,” Tulee told VOA.
“The protesting students who threw the [Hasina] government out of power are standing with us now. They have threatened to launch a new round of protests if the security authorities do not make any effort to release the enforced disappearance victims. We are highly hopeful that we will find out our brothers now.”
Years of accusations
Hasina, in office since 2009, was long accused of authoritarianism and corrupt tactics. Her party was accused of rigging the last three general elections, a charge she consistently denied.
Over the past 12 years, several global human rights groups issued reports accusing the nation’s police, army and paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) of involvement in extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of opposition political activists and other dissidents.
In December 2021, the United States imposed human rights-related sanctions on the RAB and six of its former and then current officers, holding them responsible for serious levels of human rights violations, including hundreds of enforced disappearances and killings.
Dhaka-based human rights group Odhikar, which has long been documenting human rights violations in the country, charged last week that around 3,000 people were killed extrajudicially and over 700 became victims of enforced disappearances during Hasina’s 15 years in office.
Among those who disappeared, some returned home alive while others were found dead. According to different rights groups, around 150 of the enforced disappearance victims remain untraced.
Top officials of the Hasina-led governments consistently denied the allegations.
When Michelle Bachelet, then U.N. high commissioner for human rights, visited Bangladesh in 2022, AK Abdul Momen, then the foreign minister of Bangladesh, told her that there were no cases of enforced disappearances or extrajudicial killings in the country.
Rights groups have long alleged that among others, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the military intelligence authority, operated several secret detention centers for the enforced disappearance victims.
Military acknowledges disappearances
According to Mayer Daak, the DGFI admitted to a group of its members last week that many people had become victims of enforced disappearances over the past 15 years.
“The DGFI officials told us last week that they were not holding any of the victims in captivity. They also said that there was a possibility of some victims being held in secret detention by some other security agencies,” Tulee told VOA on Monday.
In 2022, in a startling investigative report, a Sweden-based news portal focusing on Bangladesh revealed the possible location of a secret prison in which the victims of enforced disappearances were being kept in Bangladesh.
The report was based on on-the-record accounts of two victims of enforced disappearance. The two men said that they had been kept and tortured inside a DGFI-run secret prison in Dhaka named Aynaghar, meaning House of Mirrors.
Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, which has been documenting rights violations in Bangladesh for more than 15 years, said that Sheikh Hasina used the law-enforcement agencies as tools to force the disappearance of political opponents and other dissidents.
“The judiciary and the law-enforcement system collapsed under the Hasina regime to the extent that not a single case of enforced disappearance was investigated or accorded justice in over 15 years,” Ashrafuzzaman told VOA.
“Currently, the police, military, judicial, and civil administrative hierarchy in Bangladesh consist of officials recruited by the deposed regime on the basis of partisan loyalty to Sheikh Hasina.”
The institutions are incapable of conducting credible investigations into the cases of enforced disappearance and accord justice, he said.
“The given context warrants an immediate probe under the capacity of the United Nations’ independent experts for the sake of unearthing the truth behind the institutionalized enforced disappearances and other gross violation of human rights under the deposed regime,” he added.
‘Please return my father’
On Sunday, over 100 families of victims of enforced disappearance formed a human chain in Dhaka demanding information on the whereabouts of their loved ones. Many at the rally held photos of their missing husbands, fathers, sons and brothers, and broke down emotionally while describing their pain.
Ismail Hossain Baten went missing from Dhaka after RAB officers allegedly abducted him in 2019. Baten’s daughter Anisha Islam Insha, 17, who was part of Sunday’s human chain, told VOA that the ouster of Hasina rekindled her family’s hope that they would soon see her father released.
“Since my father was abducted, my mother and I have not slept for a night peacefully. Our family has been going through a very painful phase for the past five years,” Insha said. “This is my fervent appeal to the security authority — please return my father to us.”
