By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, October 2: Bangladesh’s police need urgent reform. The post-Hasina Muhammad Yunus government has to rid the police of unbridled politicisation, corruption and lawlessness imbibed under Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year autocratic rule.
When Bangladesh’s student movement suddenly forced the powerful Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit office and flee to India on August 5, all hell broke loose in the country. The masses, suppressed for 15 long years, gave vent to their accumulated anger against persons and institutions Hasina had used to suppress dissent.
Anticipating violent mass action against them, policemen fled for their lives. Most of the 213,000-strong police force abandoned its posts. 105,925 constables and 11,500 Sub Inspectors had been recruited during Hasina’s rule principally on the basis of loyalty to the Awami League, her party, rather than to the country. Their main task was to curb dissent, arrest or even kill Hasina’s opponents and critics.
The police played an big part in trying to quash the university students’ movement throughout July and up to August 5. Young men were arrested on “trumped up charges” and crowds were fired upon killing hundreds.
The police had been taken “to the brink of destruction” by ruling party politicians, said former IGP Nur Mohammad in an interview to the Bengali daily Prothom Alo: “Many police officers of different ranks have acted as party goons devoid of any sense of legal propriety. They were complicit in using excessive force while countering public protests, with some policemen stooping low enough to be branded by some as public enemies. The police hierarchy had been willing collaborators of their political masters.”
Mohammad further said: “ A single-minded pursuit of money has impoverished the minds and desiccated the hearts of many politicians, with whom an unholy nexuses had been built by reckless and corrupt police officials. Many senior officers had not used their statutory authority to advise, guide, and direct the public order operations.Those who created this situation must be brought to book.”
Police Brutality
One of the key issues to be addressed in post-Hasina Bangladesh is police brutality which includes “encounter killings” or the so-called ”cross fire killings”, in which alleged criminals or suspects were disposed of in staged encounters, writes Nazmul Ahasan, of the University of California, Berkeley in his 2022 article in Foreign Policy.
The elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a Bangladeshi police unit set up to fight terrorists and drug smugglers, had killed more than 1,100 people between 2004 and 2020. Very few RAB officials had ever been held accountable, Ahasan points out.
Extrajudicial executions in Bangladesh have long been justified by claiming they occurred “in the line of duty”. The authorities in Bangladesh argue that all these executions take place in “gunfights”.
Bangladesh police and security forces are given the majority of their powers from the Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP). In particular, Section 54 of this legislation grants a wide array of arrest powers with few barriers to use. Warrantless arrests and poor guidelines surrounding the need for reasonable suspicion are two enabling factors. ‘Reasonable suspicion’ and ‘credible information’ are both mentioned in Section 54, yet their utility parameters are not defined, leaving their use as subject to the interpretation of each enforcement officer or member of the judiciary.
These broad powers are supplemented by special powers found in other legislation, particularly the Special Power Act 1974 (SPA) and Evidence Act 1872 (EA). One provision of the SPA allows for the arrest, detainment and charging of an individual even if an offence has not been committed. This is predicated on the assumption, supported often by no evidence, that the individual has the intent of committing a crime that has not yet taken place. This assumption is based on similar parameters as the CCP, often at the discretion of the arresting officers.
Gross impunity ended on Dec. 10, 2021, when the US Treasury imposed unprecedented economic sanctions against current and former RAB leaders for gross human rights violations, including more than 1,000 extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances. The US State Department imposed a travel ban on two former RAB officials.
As expected, the Hasina government responded with denial and attacks against the US. Ministers pointed to America’s domestic human rights record and war crimes in the Middle East. Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen told Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “Police in the US kill roughly a thousand people a year. You call these casualties as damage done in the line of duty. But when people die in Bangladesh you call them extrajudicial executions.”
Conditions in US
The US undeniably has a police brutality problem, and its police departments have been guilty of countless murders—disproportionately targeting Black men.
But there is a crucial difference between police violence in the US and Bangladesh, Ahasan points out.
“When US policemen are accused of murder and do not face trial or conviction, there is extensive, critical, uncensored media coverage of the killings, and there are civil legal claims for monetary damages. Additionally, other cases are tried before juries in impartial courts, sometimes—though not always—resulting in convictions and long prison sentences for the officers who murdered innocent people as was the case for Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide protests in 2020.”
“The US government’s moral authority derives from the fact that it does not deny its own police killing problem and has sought to deal with it through an open and democratic process, a transparent legal system, and a robust press—none of which exist in today’s Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, there is no such scrutiny or impartial justice; there is only impunity,” Ahasan says.
”In the United States, even in cases when officers accused of murder are not convicted, the transcripts of 911 calls, dispatcher calls, descriptions of evidence collected, testimonies of witnesses and every police officer involved, body camera footage, toxicology and postmortem reports, and investigation reports are often made public.
But Bangladeshi police do not bother to collect evidence, nor does the country’s legal system demand it. No body camera footage, testimonies, or documentation are provided to support the police claim of self-defence.
In Bangladesh, family members have rarely been able to file lawsuits against involved officials or agencies. But in the US, city governments or police departments have often been forced to pay compensation to the family members of the victims. Citing an example, Ahasan says that in 2016, the city of Cleveland paid US$6 million to family members of Tamir Rice, a boy who had been shot and killed by the city’s police two years earlier, even though a grand jury had decided against charging the officers involved.
Corrective Measures
Former police chief, Nur Mohammad suggested that politicisation be curbed first. Police recruitment should be done by a non-government empowered body. The “open house” project where senior officers of respective units used to hear the grievances of the public on a monthly basis be resumed. This would create a climate of trust and help enlist public support for law and order maintenance.
Currently, the Bangladeshi police force has returned to normal. Only 187 policemen are absconding now. The Home Ministry advisor in the Council of Advisors has announced that those cops who are still absconding will be declared as criminals and proceeded against accordingly.
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