THE defence affairs adviser to the prime minister, Tarique Ahmed Siddique, could be said to have played to the script when he said on Thursday that some newspapers were writing too much on Limon Hossain, who was shot by a member of the Rapid Action Battalion on March 23 and subsequently had to have his left leg amputated. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Friday, the retired major general of the army went on the offensive in his defence of the Rapid Action Battalion, the so-called elite law-enforcement unit, which is credited with more than 700 extrajudicial murders since its inception on March 26, 2004 and was earlier this month described by the United States-based Human Rights Watch as a 'death squad' whose 'murderous practices' the Awami League-Jatiya Party government was failing to control. However, as has usually been the case with every official attempt at defending RAB actions thus far, his defence of the battalion is also premised on twisted logic, tenuous argument and, above all, factual misrepresentation.
Siddique claims that he is '100 per cent sure' that Limon Hossain was not the battalion's target and that the teenager 'was trying to run away', which was why 'RAB shot in his leg.' Perhaps, the defence adviser has chosen to forget that the battalion has over the years come to be synonymous with terror and that almost everyone would be overcome with the impulse to run the moment they see any RAB team; after all, it has killed people, old and young, who were not even accused of perpetrating any crime. Moreover, even if Limon 'was trying to run away', as the defence adviser says he was, under what authority did the battalion open fire? Siddique also claims that Limon and his father had 'close ties' with Morshed Jamaddar, the crime suspect that the battalion was supposedly after, as if suggesting that they were criminals by association. The question is: since when has acquaintance or even association with criminals become a crime?
What, perhaps, trumps everything is the defence adviser's claim that he can say with conviction that the battalion did not shoot anyone after detaining him. Needless to say, such a claim does not even add up to the official account of 'crossfire', 'shootout', 'encounter', 'gunfight', etc that the battalion routinely churns out after every incident of extrajudicial murder. In most cases, the victim either died in custody or after he had been taken by the battalion to arrest his so-called 'associates' or recover 'arms'. Overall, the claims and arguments that the defence adviser has made are both self-contradictory and thus self-defeating. As for Limon's case, his attempted defence of the battalion seems simply tenuous; after all, ever since the teenager was shot, the police, the battalion and even the government has thus far contradicted each other and even themselves.
Be that as it may, the defence adviser needs to appreciate the fact that it is the because of the intense coverage by a section of the media that the battalion and some other law enforcement agencies have not degenerated into full-fledged 'death squads'. Hence, while he should refrain from trying to demonise the media and instead advise the government for effective steps to rein in the trigger-happy law enforcers, the media should keep up its good work and call the spade a spade even if under pressure from powerful quarters.
Source: New Age
