July 36, 2024

Zyma Islam

“Once I am done burying my father’s body, if this government is still in power, I will yank it down myself,” yelled his young son. He did not need to. Even as Ishaq’s body lay on the floor, Hasina was on her way to the airport for her exit flight.

Blood dripping from Ishaq’s head seeped through the cloth stretcher and coagulated onto the floor of the intake ward for those brought dead. Someone had tried to mop up the pool of blood with a wad of cotton, but that effort was just as futile as the efforts to save him. Someone else—probably from the casualty ward of Dhaka Medical College Hospital—had tightly bound his head with gauze, frantically attempting to stem the gushing wound at the back of his head.

Throughout the day that pool of blood would get bigger even though Ishaq’s body had been whisked away by his family (sans autopsy) as soon as they managed an ambulance. In this empty spot would then come the body of Abdun Noor, a journalist of a local online portal from Jatrabari, also shot in the back of the head, also pouring blood onto the same spot.

The kind bystander who had brought Noor’s body to the hospital said that he was embedded among the protestors and was shot by the Jatrabari police. There was no need for an ECG machine, no need for a flatline on a paper report for Noor—with half of his head blown out, the thin man with a press card hung around his neck had quite evidently paid the journalist’s ultimate price. But this local reporter of an obscure portal would never make it to any media hall of fame.

His spot was replaced by that of 22-year-old Hamidur Rahman, with a chest devoid of bloodstains save for a small entry wound directly to his right lung, that he could be mistaken for sleeping. He looked so…not-manifestly-dead… that the nurses took out their defibrillators for a last-ditch effort. The clean edges of the perforation betrayed the fact that this young boy barely out of his teens was shot point-blank at close range. His friend Rafi too was in disbelief. He pumped his chest unsuccessfully, pouring all his strength into each pump, coaxing Hamidur to resurrect, before conceding defeat, breaking down and collapsing next to the dead body. “It was the Bangshal police. I convinced him to come out and join the protest. How do I go back to his parents without him?” Rafi spluttered between sobs.

Hamidur’s place was taken by 13-year-old Shaon. A bald, old emaciated man with a white beard launched himself at Shaon’s blood-soaked stretcher with a guttural howl. The man was his father—and judging by his looks, Shaon was the fulfilment of a wish late into life, now lying dead on the floor. Although the actual numbers are still unknown, one estimate, by an organisation called Human Rights Support Society calculated that approximately 107 children were killed in the massacre.

Another man lying on a blood-soaked sheet on the ground was strapped to the ECG machine. For the first time that day, the machine produced a zigzag line—signs of life. The nurse screamed, “This lash (dead body) is talking!” The rest swooped to get him off the floor and onto a bed.

Just as the man got a bed, Riton lost his. The heavily bandaged shopkeeper from Jatrabari with a gunshot wound to his neck that went out through the back of his head could not prove to the doctors that he was alive. In a state of complete denial, his brother Arifur burst into protests, as Riton’s body was shifted to the floor, “My brother could not study. He worked so that I could go to university. I was supposed to get a job and support us both! How can he be dead?” The shallow streaks of blood left by Riton’s body on the dark green plastic bed sheet looked eerily similar to the national flag.

The overstretched medical officers and ward attendants worked like machines from morning till late evening, with not a single moment to sit. Like clockwork, they repeated the motions, unfazed by the tears and the crying, the blood, and the stench of death: carry body in, check for signs of life, generate a body tag, deposit body onto the floors of the hall outside.

Shah Md Shahriar was the only patient in the room not dead. He sat upright on a bed in the corner, wired to an IV, a bandage to his right shoulder, a grim witness to the revolving door of corpses. “I got shot near Chankharpool by the Border Guard Bangladesh. If the bullet had been just a few inches below, I would have been on the floor with the rest of them,” he said, wincing through the pain.

By the end of the day, Ishaq’s spot on the floor and the space adjacent would be reoccupied 41 times. After nearly a month of protests, this day, zealously called July 36th, would mark itself as the bloodiest.

As many as 32 of those bodies came from in and around Jatrabari, making it the singular most violent hotspot in the city the day Hasina fell. By the time the bodies were brought into the hospital, a significant number of them had been lying dead on the street for three hours or more. They all bore gunshot wounds from live rounds. Much later, a video taken by someone from a window with a clear view of the street would surface on social media showing the horrifying scale of what can only be called a massacre.

The video, supposedly taken around 2pm, showed the police coming out in troops, hunting down protesters on the street and shooting them like birds, when they could have simply used less-lethal weapons to disperse the crowd.

Eye-witnesses would describe that as early as mid-day the police were shooting at protesters breaking curfew and trying to go to Shahbagh. When Hasina fell and Gono Bhaban was taken over, the protesters turned on the police. The police were armed—the protesters were not. Even though the government had fallen, they trooped out and shot everyone in sight.

Police and Armed Police Battallion wielding a combination of lethal and less-lethal weapons. PHOTO: Anisur Rahman

Back at the ward, a small-built teenager, not yet 18 years of age, sat next to the body of an unknown man he had carried into the hospital. The boy was among a group of protesters who had surrounded the police station and intended to occupy it.

“The police had been shooting at my brothers earlier in the day and we wanted to take over the station. An hour after zuhr prayers, we stormed the premises and some from the crowd set fire to the vehicles in the compound. They shot at us from inside the police station,” said the boy, gesticulating with hands stained red with blood.

Another eye-witness, Mojahidul Islam, who was hiding in a space behind the police station from 2:45 pm to nearly 5 pm, described, “I was heading towards Shahbagh to join the protests around 2:45 pm. The police cars outside the police station had been set ablaze. Suddenly I saw bullets bursting by my side. I ran and hid behind the station. There were police located on the roof of the building—they were sniping at anyone appearing on the street.”

The whole police station was engulfed in flames around 4:47 pm, he said. Many hours later, the charred bodies of five policemen—all juniors ranging from constables to assistant sub-inspectors—would be found from the premises. All of the senior officers had fled leaving them behind.

Even as the Hasina-regime came crashing down outside, the light did not reach the halls of the hospital where the fallen lay.

Outside the morgue, bodies packed the floor of the corridor like sardines in a can, lying in a mire of their blood and that of their brothers. They were the unlucky ones who had none to claim them yet. Flies feasted on the bodies, trampled upon by many feet and photographed and videoed by hundreds in their moment of perish.

Some wore Bangladeshi flags like shrouds, the vibrant red of the cheap synthetic turned several shades darker. Many had their shirts hitched up to their chests, revealing gunshot wounds in a defiant-in-death display of what a fascist government can do to its own people.

As I sidestepped rivulets of blood to count and document the bodies, I struggled to figure out a process to catalogue the ones unidentified, the ones tagged as “oggyatonama” followed by a make-believe age estimated by the doctor by looking at the body. Oggyatonama is literally translated as “unnamed,” and the bodies, just numbers, just casualty, just bodies to be dealt with by Anjuman Mufidul Islam and buried in unmarked graves.

There is no clear consensus on the number of “unnamed” bodies buried as such. By August 1, this newspaper had tracked down as many as 21 unidentified bodies from morgue registers, but this number is bound to have skyrocketed over August 5, the bloodiest day of the protests. A total of 19 bodies were booked as unidentified that day.

Arson at Karnafuli EPZ police range after the fall of Hasina. PHOTO: Star

Looking back, my notes from the day read like this: “Young body, teenager, from Jatrabari with a massive hole in the chest. Hands blackened. Clearly a mechanic worker. Probably minor.” “Body from Jatrabari with a beard and long hair. The bullet went through the side of his chest and got out through the other side.” “Bearded guy with chest shot.” “Yesterday’s Unnamed, 14 with an abdomen shot is Ashik, 14. Mother identified him.” “Unnamed from North Badda with pellet wounds.”

By this time, Hasina had abdicated her throne. The Gono Bhaban—the great-walled citadel which is quite literally named People’s Residence—had been reclaimed by the people.

Outside, the streets burst with jubilation.

The Shaheed Minar, from where a mammoth rally had tolled the death knell for the government just two days before, had now turned into a fairground for the victorious. After weeks of violence and state-imposed curfews, a shell-shocked citizenry wore their best shades of red and green and walked the freedom mile. The laughter of children—one of the most wonderful sounds in the world—could once again be heard on the streets which had for weeks swung between a cacophony of gunfire and human screams and the disquieting silence of nothingness. The street vendors crawled out of hiding, jhalmuriwalahs mixed Dhaka’s most beloved street snack with gusto, balloon sellers appeared carrying clouds of helium happiness, but if anyone made big bucks that day, it was the flag sellers. There were as many flags as people. Freed from the years of obnoxious politicisation and down-your-throat commercialisation of an abstract, dogmatic breed of Awami-League-defined patriotism, the people showed just how intensely they loved this big little country of ours.

Such an everlasting moment of phenomenal national unity would not come again in the weeks that followed. With the fall of Hasina, as people of all stripes rushed to reimagine the country of their dreams, hidden societal fault lines split open.

The seeds of this were sown in the first minutes of the newfound freedom, as mobs targeted the rage and grief of 15 years of deprivation and injustice towards those that had pulled the triggers. Even as the number of bodies of protesters streaming into hospitals thinned out, the march of the dead was far from over.

Bound to the statue at the central square in Chandpur and lynched to death. Stripped and hung upside down from a tree in Enayetpur police station a day before (August 4). Ten more bodies lying about in the precinct. Hindu homes attacked. Media houses ransacked. At least 24 guests burnt alive inside a hotel in Jashore. The vengeance, like a blanket purge, was barbaric.

The airport police station burned all night.

“I am inside a small shed behind the police station. They haven't found me yet,” a police officer's voice rasped over the phone, barely rising above a whisper. My stringer stood on the curb outside for hours watching the flames engulf the precinct.

“They beat three policemen to death just now in front of me. This mob listens to no one. No one inside will survive,” he said. Minutes later, photographic proof arrived: a cop stripped and hung upside down by the ankles and beaten like a piñata till his life went out.

As the revellers went home, leaving men with rods to patrol the streets, that night, the first night of a newly independent Bangladesh, was the first time I woke my father up and asked him to pick me up from work.

Zyma Islam is a senior reporter at The Daily Star.

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