Columns

If the arrogant and egotistic leaders of developing countries do not learn a clear lesson from the disgraceful fall of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, they too will end up fleeing for their lives or in search of places of exile.

Our own Gotabaya Rajapaksa finally came home, probably because he was not welcome elsewhere for too long. If and when others are forced to flee, the single helicopter that Sheikh Hasina took to cross the border will hardly be enough to carry the load of the corrupt, the crooked and the swollen-headed.

In recent years our politicians have been praising the economic achievements of Bangladesh, which had far superseded our own, despite all the baloney of no queues and no waiting with which Sri Lanka’s leaders fed the people as though this spelled an economic El Dorado.

Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina did far, far better building an economy to be admired with proper macroeconomic management. But did that mitigate the wrath of a people given the corruption, nepotism, repression of political opponents, discrimination, and the use of security forces and her party militia in an orgy of suppression?

Her mistake was that she did what her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, did in his later years, suppressing democracy and its institutions. One cannot commit the follies of one’s father just as much as one cannot commit the horrendous grievances of a once powerful relative and get away with it unscathed.

It was the Mujibur Rahman of later years that brought about his assassination and that of 21 others of his family way back in August 1975.

Twenty years later I had dinner with a diplomat named Nur Chowdhury in Hong Kong, only to discover a year later that he was the alleged assassin of the founder of Bangladesh while others engaged in that military coup had killed the rest of his family, including a 10-year-old boy.

Hasina and her sister escaped because they were away in Germany then.

In the mid-1990s, I was still with the “Hong Kong Standard” newspaper and wearing several hats. One was as Diplomatic Editor. I had started a series of articles called “The Diplomats” in which I tried to recall their life stories.

Among those I interviewed was Nur Chowdhury, for I had heard he was also an artist. Nur invited my wife and me for dinner so that after the work was done and we had admired his paintings and sketches, we had a delicious Bangladeshi meal.

In the course of our conversation, I learned he had served in an army unit called the Bengal Lancers and later he was posted as a diplomat to missions in Brazil, Algeria and Iran before his posting as a consul general to Hong Kong.

But it all began to unravel one year later, in 1996, at a reception at the residence of the US Consul-General Richard Boucher. A group of us, if I remember correctly after all these years, including Thai Consul General Rathakit Manathat, Pakistani Consul-General Tariq Puri, Singapore Consul General Chan Heng Wing were in conversation when the Bangladesh Counsellor joined us.

I asked him whether Nur Chowdhury was present. He said Nur was on leave.

When we were about to leave the reception, Tariq Puri, the Pakistani CG said he would give me a lift and send the office car back. Tariq took me home for a chat and a drink. He told me the news that Nur Chowdhury had been recalled to Bangladesh but that he had not gone to Dhaka but had flown elsewhere that a couple of months earlier he had sent his wife away.

All he told me was that Sheikh Hasina had come to power in Bangladesh, and Nur Chowdhury feared he would be arrested for his part in the coup in which her father was killed.

The next morning I had a chat with the editor, saying I saw a big story brewing and we should start working on it. I asked him to have a reporter contact the Bangladesh foreign ministry in Dhaka while I worked the local angle.

With that, I called Hong Kong’s chief of protocol, Vivian Warrington, whom I knew well enough, and asked whether Nur Chowdhury had called on him recently and he knew whether Chowdhury had left town.

Warrington did tell me that Chowdhury in fact came to see him a couple of days earlier to say goodbye as he was returning to Bangladesh.

But he did not go home. He went to another country where he had already planned to go.

My sources—who said he did not want to be identified in anyway—told me that he had gone to Canada—because he feared being arrested and executed for his part in the coup. Asked what his part was, my source told me he was a Major in the Bengal Lancers and that he was the officer who shot Mujibur Rahman with his automatic weapon while the leader stood at the top of the stairs.

I had an American journalist friend in Hong Kong whose name I forget, who had been based in Dhaka for UPI and had written a book on the coup and the Mujibur assassination. He filled me in on some aspects of the story.

I was to discover then that the new military government that took power after the coup gave immunity to the killers of the Mujibur Rahman family and others, and at least four of them were posted as diplomats.

One of them quietly faded while abroad and was not heard of again.

The story I wrote that day was an exclusive and huge splash on the front page with my byline. The more established South China Morning Post picked up the pieces later, but I had broken the story. We received accolades from many, including Hong Kong-based correspondents.

We now know that some of those involved in the coup were tried, convicted and executed back in Dhaka. Our information that Nur Chowdhury has sought refuge in Canada proved to be spot on.

From the time Nur Chowdhury, quite an elegant figure, arrived in Hong Kong, it appeared that only a few knew his background. Later, when I discovered the truth, I could hardly believe that this was the man who pulled the trigger that ended the life of the Father of Bangladesh.

But I had heard much of the ongoing war of liberation from a colleague who was in our batch of 11 journalists who had been awarded the Jefferson Fellowship to engage in studies at the University of Hawaii in 1971.

His name was Abu Musa and he was the news editor of the Dhaka Observer. One day, he, like Nur Chowdhury, disappeared from Hawaii, and we all wondered what happened to him. He had flown back to Dhaka to be in the liberation struggle, as he told me later on our meeting in Colombo when he was working for the UN Environment Agency.

In 1998, when I was still in Hong Kong, Nur Chowdhury, the assassin of Mujibur, which he stoutly denies to this date, was sentenced to death by firing squad—in absentia—along with 14 others. He has been fighting attempts to have him deported, but the Canadian government has said it does not deport people to countries where they could face the death sentence.

Nur is said to be living in a condominium with his family in Etobicoke in the neighbourhood of Toronto, still fighting attempts by Bangladesh to bring him back to Dhaka.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)