Student leaders of different political ideologies including some victims of the August 2007 campus violence on Thursday blamed squarely the then chief adviser to the caretaker government Fakhruddin Ahmed and the then army chief Moeen U Ahmed for the incident in Dhaka University.
The student leaders at a meeting with the parliamentary subcommittee set up to investigate the incident also placed common 10-point recommendations to avoid recurrence of such incident, sources attending the meeting said.
Sources said that 19 former and present student leaders of different political ideologies including the Chhatra League, Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal, Bangladesh Students Union, Bangladesh Student League (JSD) and Chhatra Moitri in their statements to the committee held the army and the then interim government responsible for the clashes.
They also talked about the inhuman torture they faced in jail during interrogation
as the law enforcers forced them to make statements against political leaders.
'Most of the leaders in their statements said that the army and the then caretaker administration were fully responsible for the incident,' the chief of the four-member subcommittee, Rashed Khan Menon, told New Age after the meeting.
He also said that they had demanded exemplary punishment of the persons responsible so that such incidents cannot take place again.
The sources said that the student leaders told the committee that the law enforcers had tried to force them to say that leaders of different political parties had paid them to wage a movement to tarnish the image of the then caretaker government.
They said that they had to face physical torture as they refused to make statement as asked by the law enforcers. 'I told the committee what barbaric torture I faced during my detention,' Jahidul Islam Biplob, a student who was injured in the clash and was arrested, told New Age after the meeting.
The student leaders said that they had placed common 10-point recommendations before the committee.
The recommendations include consideration of the student protests as a normal movement against repression, exemplary punishment of the army personnel and the law enforcers involved in repression, withdrawal of all cases filed against students after the clashes, proper treatment of the injured teachers and students who were yet to recover, compensation to the families which incurred financial losses, regular elections to the students' unions in all universities and an end to ill motives to use the students by intelligence agencies or political parties to create conflict.
'We placed common recommendations that we had worked out at a meeting of all the 19 representatives on Friday,' former Chhatra Union president Shamsul Alam told New Age after the meeting.
Violence broke on August 20, 2007 when a few army men beat up three students and insulted a teacher during a football match in the Dhaka University playground.
Thousands of DU students on the day took to the streets protesting at the incident and demanding withdrawal of the army camp from the playground. There had been pitched battles between students and the law enforcers for the next two days, in which more than 250 people, mostly students, were injured.
As the violence spilled over to all educational institutions in the capital and outside, the government imposed a curfew on the divisional headquarters and closed universities and colleges on August 22.
Four teachers and eight students were arrested and kept behind bars for about five months while thousand others were allegedly tortured on the campus and also in other places across.
The parliamentary standing committee on the education ministry on August 20, 2010 set up the subcommittee headed by Menon to investigate the incident to ensure punishment of the people responsible and make recommendations to avoid recurrence of such incidents.
The committee earlier collected statements of a number of persons including advisers to the interim government and army officials.
Most of them blamed the army and an intelligence agency for the incident while army officials said that everything had happened at the directives of the former caretaker chief and the army chief.
The subcommittee on March 29 sent letters to Fakhruddin Ahmed and Moeen U Ahmed asking them to appear before it and give their depositions on April 18.
They, however, did not appear before the committee and sent written statements.
The subcommittee rejected their written statements and asked them again to be appear before it on June 5.
Source: New Age
