A crazy, scary past week for Dhaka:
For about five hours, bullets whizzed over rooftops and the occasional thud of mortar rounds echoed along the strangely empty streets.
Dhaka is one of the most congested cities on the planet, but for once there were no traffic jams.
Instead the army had planted rows of anti-aircraft cannons at key junctions near the barracks, and heavily-armed policemen forced vehicles off the roads. MORE
The mutineers told us that things started as a disagreement over pay. But if so, why did the revolt become a massacre? WATCH
The question now is whether the crisis is over, or whether the seeds of a new conflict have just been planted. Anyone who has read Mascarenhas’ account of the first decade of Bangladesh’s independence, ”Legacy of Blood”, is hoping that history is not about to repeat itself.
6 Comments
March 6, 2009 at 1:36 pm
In fact, according to my opinion, that non-stop 33-hour bloody incident was never a Mutiny. That was just only a ‘tag’ which misled the nation along with the reporters/medias. I do think that the massacre was a pre-planned operation where some BDR jawans took part and showed a so-called “Reason” for that.
You were there on the spot as an international media’s reporter. What do you think about it? I think you should include some of your personal thoughts into the blog post instead of putting external BBC links only. That will make this one a real “blog”, you know.
March 6, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Thanks for your comment Aminul. To be honest after all the work I have done since the crisis started I have had no time or energy to write anything else!
March 9, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Oh, I understand. Anyways, thank you for replying. I didn’t think that BBC reporter will reply to a school-student’s comment
By the way, why are you so inactive in blogging? I come to your blog very regularly (twice or thrice a week) to read new posts but I get nothing new.
March 10, 2009 at 9:24 am
Hi Aminul – I’d love to update the blog more. Thanks for the encouragement, Mark
March 20, 2009 at 1:25 am
Indeed, it would be really interesting to hear some of your personal take on the situation. I don’t know many who buy the “mutiny” or “grievance” label. Killing, digging graves, mutilating are physically demanding – it seems highly unlikely from other conflicts we’ve seen (think Rwanda?) that these gruesome murders could really have taken place only in the first hour of the “mutiny.” Someone had to delegate diggers, move bodies – it seems to have been carried out with chilling efficiency. However the scale really does indicate time needed – and that seems like the crux of it. Time. Why did they get so much of it? How could this continue with ministers and “representatives of the BDR” coming and going for “negotiations.” Why did the PM’s speech come at midday on the second day and not at say 8am sharp? If the speech is what calmed them down, why wait so long to offer that ultimatum? These may never become completely clear and answers are likely to be elusive. But I haven’t seen many focus on the timings element or call the government on it?
March 20, 2009 at 11:41 am
Well of course everyone here is speculating about what happened and who might have been behind the revolt. Personally I’m waiting to hear from the different investigations before commenting. For now, what I think is particularly interesting about the conspiracy theories (at least for a foreigner – this is no great revelation for Bangladeshis I suspect) is what they tell us about Bangladesh i.e. in other countries (like the US after 9/11 or India after the Mumbai attacks) politicians, the media and society as a whole seem to come to together in the face of an appalling threat to their country. By contrast, the BDR revolt, to my mind at least, has just revealed how divided Bangladesh is.
Within a couple of days we heard people blaming India, blaming Pakistan, blaming the Islamists, blaming the army, blaming TV journalists, blaming the PM.
I would be interested to hear why you think that is so (or maybe you disagree?)
Anyway, I can recommend this blog (http://bdosintmonitors.blogspot.com/) as an interesting source of reports and comments on the mutiny – you’ll get far more from there than me,
Thanks
Mark