The Dawn

THE Border Security Force of India has yet again killed a Bangladesh national, needless to say, without any apparent reason. According to reports published in the media, the victim, a 13-year old girl, went to Kalo Dewanir Hat along the Roumari border in Kurigram, along with two other girls, to pluck flowers around 6:00pm on Friday when the Indian border guards opened fire on them. The killing has naturally touched off tension along the border, with the Bangladesh Rifles asking people of the bordering villages to shift to safer places. With the death of the teenager, the number of people killed in BSF firing over the past 10 months or so rose to 87 – i.e. just over eight persons a month.

The BDR, according to reports, was to send a letter of protest to the BSF; however, if past records were any indicator, it is unlikely to bring about changes in the BSF behaviour, let alone rein in the trigger-happy members of the Indian border guards. In July this year, at the end of a three-day director general-level conference in Dhaka, the BSF chief, while assuring to take stern action against Indian border guards for violation of human rights through killing of unarmed Bangladeshis, nonetheless claimed that ‘most of those killings, almost 85 per cent, took place at the dead of night when public movement across the border is prohibited under section 144.’ Surely, the killing of the 13-year old girl did not take place at the dead of night. One wonders what explanation the BSF top brass would come up with this time around.

Regardless of what the BSF authorities in particular and the Indian government in general would like to have us believe, the fact of the matter remains that most of the Bangladesh nationals killed by the Indian border guards over the years were poor and unarmed people. True, there may have been, and may still be, trespassing by Bangladesh nationals into the Indian territory and vice versa; however, it is often driven by reasons other than criminal intent. The people on the Bangladesh-India border share a long history and have come to be inter-dependent over not days or years but centuries. Many people in the border areas, while officially Indians or Bangladeshis, share the same family roots and often cross the border just to meet their relatives on the other side. Regarding such human impulse as criminal intent is inhumane and borders on the criminal.

As we have written in these columns before, the continuation of killings of Bangladesh nationals by the BSF despite repeated assurance from the BSF top brass, at flag meetings and biannual conferences, tends to underline the fact that the problem is beyond the BDR-BSF leaderships to resolve and requires political intervention by the governments of the two countries.

Hence, Dhaka needs to seek political resolution of the border problems at the summit-level talks with New Delhi. Dhaka needs to make New Delhi understand that unabated killings of Bangladeshis in BSF shooting only deepens resentment against India among the people of Bangladesh and that such resentment is detrimental not only to the relations between the two next-door neighbours but also to the greater peace and harmony of the region.Govt needs to raise BSF excesses with Delhi

http://www.newagebd.com/2009/nov/08/edit.html

Filed under: Bangladesh, India , Bangladesh, BSF