Submission of government committee report on BDR tragedy

THE inquiry committee set up by the government to probe the tragic happenings at BDR headquarters in February this year has finally submitted a 309-page report to the authorities. The seven-page summary of the report handed out to journalists unfortunately does not present a clear picture of the entire nature of the carnage perpetrated on February 25 and 26. What is surprising is that the committee itself acknowledges its inability to identify the powerful forces behind the elements who perpetrated the tragedy at Pilkhana. Although there is some fingerpointing in the report, the overall position is that the report is rather inconclusive. However, we thank the government for sharing the report, howsoever partially, with the public. No other government has done so before, especially on such a sensitive matter.

A number of probable reasons have been cited by the Anisuzzaman committee to explain the sad happenings at BDR. Among those reasons are the pent-up grievances of the BDR jawans, whose feeling that all was not well in the paramilitary force was instrumental in the mutiny's taking place. Now, to what extent these reasons, as mentioned in the report, are credible or can be taken at face value is something only experts on security matters and the like will be able to judge. As far as we are able to make any assessment of the findings of the report, we strongly believe that there are quite a few big gaps in it. However, with the army having finalized its own report (it has not been made public so far) and the CID moving ahead towards preparing its own report, we think the inadequacies in the government inquiry committee report might be filled to a significant degree. In other words, the army and CID inquiries should be shedding some additional light on the circumstances that led to the gruesome killings at Pilkhana.

We note that the report has made some short term as well as long term suggestions relating to crisis management in future. One of the suggestions speaks of the immediate necessity of constituting a national crisis management committee. Another concerns the setting up of a central intelligence coordination committee as part of a reallocation and streamlining of work among the various intelligence agencies in the country. We believe that in principle these suggestions are proper and timely. However, before one can go into an elaborate discussion on them, more details should be made available on them. But we strongly register our disapproval of the idea of a code of conduct for the media in the name of national security. Indeed, such an idea is but a reflection of the uninformed, unenlightened and myopic assessment of the media on the part of some people in authority. While we do agree that some aberrations may have been there in the media coverage of the BDR tragedy, on the whole the way in which the media focused on the tragedy, the subsequent handling of it by the government and bringing it all to public notice is fully deserving of credit.