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The prisoner of Dhaka
This illegal incarceration should be a global cause celebre, but
instead there is a shameful silence
By John Pilger
13/03/08 "ICH" -- - -There is a decent, brave man sitting in a
dungeon in a country where the British empire began - a country
of poets, singers, artists, free thinkers and petty tyrants. I
have known him since a moonless night in 1971 when he led me
clandestinely into what was then East Pakistan and is now
Bangladesh, past villages the Pakistani army had raped and
razed. His name is Moudud Ahmed and he was then a young lawyer
who had defended the Bengali independence leader Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman.
"Why have you come when even crows are afraid to fly over our
house," said Begum Mujib, the sheikh's wife. This was typical of
Moudud, whose tumultuous life carries more than a hint of Tom
Paine.
As a schoolboy, Moudud wet his shirt with the blood of a young
man killed demonstrating against the imposition of "Urdu and
only Urdu" as the official language of Bangla-speaking East
Pakistan. When the British attacked Egypt in 1956, he tried to
haul down the union flag at the British consulate in Dhaka, and
was bayoneted by police: a wound he still suffers.
When Bangladesh - free Bengal - was declared in 1971, Moudud
brought a rally to its feet when he held up the front page of
the Daily Mirror, which carried my report beneath the headline,
BIRTH OF A NATION. "We are alive, but we are not yet free," he
said, prophetically.
Once in power, Sheikh Mujib turned on his own democrats and held
show trials at which Moudud was their indefatigable defender
until he himself was arrested.
Assassination, coup and counter coup eventually led to a
parliamentary period headed by Zia ur-Rahman, a liberation
general with whom Moudud agreed to serve as deputy prime
minister on condition Zia resigned from the army. Together they
formed a grassroots party, but when Moudud insisted that it must
be democratic, he was sacked.
Whenever he came to London he would phone those of us who had
reported the liberation of Bangladesh and we would meet for a
curry. His pinstriped suit and inns-of-court manner belied his
own enduring struggle and that of his homeland: recurring floods
and the conflict between feudalists and democrats and, later,
fundamentalists.
"I am the prime minister now," he once said, as if we had not
heard. Outspoken about his people's "right to social and
economic justice", especially women, he was duly arrested again,
then won his parliamentary seat from prison.
On April 12 last year, late at night, 25 soldiers smashed into
Moudud's house in Dhaka. They had no warrant. They stripped his
home and "rendered" him, blindfolded, to a place known only as
"the black hole". There, he was interrogated and tortured and
forced to sign a confession. He was finally charged with the
possession of alcohol - a few bottles of wine and cans of beer
had been found. The supreme court declared his prosecution and
detention illegal. This was ignored by the government, which
calls itself a "caretaker" administration, but is a front for a
military dictatorship.
Moudud is suffering from a pituitary tumour and has been denied
medication for six months. He is terribly ill, says his wife,
the poet Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud. "Thousands of people have been
detained for being activists, or just supporters," she says.
"The country is a prison, and the world must know."
There are striking similarities between Moudud's case and that
of the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who this week
all but overturned the old, autocratic regime. Both were framed
in order to silence them. The difference is that Anwar Ibrahim's
case became an international cause celebre, whereas there is
only silence for Moudud Ahmed, locked in his cell, ill, without
charge or trial.
In the next few days, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed, the "chief adviser"
to the caretaker government - in effect, the head of
Bangladesh's government - will visit London. He is said to have
a meeting arranged at 10 Downing Street. I and others have
written to Dr Fakhruddin, asking him to comply with the supreme
court's ruling and to release Moudud. He has not replied. If
Gordon Brown's recent pronouncements on liberty have a shred of
meaning, it is the question he must ask.
www.johnpilger.com
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