In recent years with the advent of the beast named RAB in bangladesh, i have a lot of arguments with fellow bangladeshi's about the use of extra judicial killing and torture of people in custody. this two things can not and should not be acceptable in a civilized society. Some how most of the bangladeshi's I talked , all highly educated, were in favour of this tortue and killing. They seemed to forget the two most important basis of the rule of law—all accused will have access to a due process in a court law to defend him self and that the accused is treated as innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt in a court of law. When RAB started the process of extra judicial killing, terming them as cross fire, the whole principle of rule of law was violated and yet this was tolerated or even encouraged by the government party and the civil society. The people killed by RAB may be criminals but they did not had any access to the protection of the law. Besides this Bangladeshi police is famous for torturing people during remand. Creation of RAB also meant that the army were not confined in the barracks any more and they were out amongst the people which is never a good thing, particularly in a country like Bangladesh with a long history of military rule. This probably gave the scheming generals to their ground work and try to grab power in 1/11. In post 1/11 the army in the disguise of the caretaker government imposed emergency rule and curtailed basic human rights of bangladeshi’s for two years. The generals, following ershad, declared war on corruption and some part of our intellectuals, hailed them as our savior and guardian angel. Army rule is good for this portion of the society as it centers all powers in the city and they can share the spoils with the generals. Trying to prove that the army was trying cure the cancer of corruption from Bangladesh, they arrested high profile politicians and with in a few months these politicians seemed to get their spinal vertebra’s cracked and they started to say how bad they were and that they want to have a chance to be good. There was abdul jalil, obayedul karim from awami league, professors and students of DU, babar from bnp—most of whom were tortured with the aim of using them as a pawn in the minus two formula. However the civil servants, police were hardly mentioned in the crusade against corruption and army was never even mentioned. No corruption in the cantonment it seems. Today Xanthis posted the following comment regarding tareq zia’s torture in custody What place the almighty will grant us to keep our faces so that nobody other than a Bangladeshi can see those. There were a lot of allegations. There were a lot of rumors of thousands of millions of dollars smuggled here and there. There were a lot of rumors of earning millions of taka out of electric posts made of local wood god knows how those could leave opportunities of earning this much amount. These were pushed to courts and judges at gunpoint or out of gunpoint nobody found any of them evident yet. Nobody in Bangladesh, or out of Bangladesh never saw materials or evidences of these allegations directly or indirectly or anyways. None of anything was seen by people. But what finally came to everybody’s eyes are tormented face of him, his broken vertebral column and different part of the body covered with clean bandages. The following short movie has been re-posted from blog of Jingo. The movie is named We Won’t Forgo The Inhuman Torture on Tareq Rahman, made by something called Jingo Interactives. http://youtube.com/watch?v=FZBvBm0ZGtY Tareq zia may be a prime minister’s son, but he has the same right as the people that were killed during his mother’s rule by RAB and as he was a king maker during the last BNP term, tareq must also had some input in the formulation of cross fire policy. As the saying goes “if you dig a hole for some one else, you will fall in it” – khaleda zia started the process of torture and cross fire by creating RAB and killed sons of many mothers, so it is only appropriate that her own son gets a few broken vertebras by beast they helped to create. We should categorically denounce torture of people in custody without any regards to their religion, gender, or social standing and there is no scope for compromise in this.