Alone at nighttime: The nightmare of Bangladesh’s secret underground jail | World Information

However not like many different political prisoners earlier than him in Bangladesh, Mir Ahmad Quasem Arman was not being taken to his dying and disposal. As a substitute, he stated, he was dropped off in a barren area on the sting of Dhaka, the capital.

Rather a lot had modified: new freeway overpasses, a lately opened subway system. However Arman was unaware of the newest and largest change of all. Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister who had dominated with an iron fist and vengeful designs for the previous 15 years, had fled the nation as protesters stormed her house.

Along with her exit on August 5 got here the reappearance of Arman and two different males lengthy confined within the secret jail.

Arman had been a spoiled and chubby-cheeked lawyer when he disappeared by the hands of paramilitary forces in 2016 — beneath no prison accusation himself, however seemingly held accountable for his father’s a long time as an Islamist activist and enterprise magnate.

Sanjida Islam Tulee, seated middle, a frontrunner of households of the victims of enforced disappearances, grieves with others upon listening to unverified reviews of her brother’s dying, in Dhaka. (The New York Occasions)

Years later, Arman stumbled again into the open as a shadow of his outdated self, skinny, with a wispy beard and thinning hair. The one factor that had saved him from spiraling into insanity throughout all these years alone within the blackness was the considered his spouse and two younger daughters, now 11 and 12.

“I prayed to God each time that ‘I couldn’t be with my household on this world, at the least maintain us collectively in heaven,’” Arman, 40, stated.

Whereas Hasina’s downfall has given her nation of 170 million folks a gap to chart a brand new future, it has additionally lifted the veil on a number of the worst abuses of Bangladesh’s latest previous. As soon as an embodiment of her nation’s democratic longings, Hasina descended over time into autocracy, paranoia and repression, marshaling the state equipment to neutralize any problem to her grip on energy.

Embedded in that effort’s deepest recesses was Hasina’s program of enforced disappearances. Tons of of individuals vanished with out a hint after being kidnapped by her safety forces, focused in some instances over the smallest of political actions: organizing an opposition rally, blocking a street in protest or simply posting an indignant message on social media.

Most of the victims have been killed and discarded. The remaining have been shut out of sight in an underground army detention middle, pushed to the sting of madness and dying — usually for years on finish — however assiduously prevented from dying itself.

That jail was code-named the Home of Mirrors.

The Occasions pieced collectively the story of Hasina’s secret detention program by way of interviews with greater than two dozen folks, together with Arman and one other man launched in August, in addition to survivors who had beforehand been compelled into silence, present and former authorities officers and safety chiefs, diplomats and human rights activists.

Babul Hawlader, whose son Sunny disappeared in 2013, demonstrates within the days after the autumn of Sheikh Hasina’s authorities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (The New York Occasions)

It’s a story of households destroyed — a kind of launched in August collapsed into repeated strokes after studying that his spouse had remarried, believing him lifeless; one other realized that his father had died after going door to door for years looking for clues to his disappearance.

Dozens of those that vanished stay unaccounted for, their family members disadvantaged of any sense of closure, even after braving years of presidency crackdowns and intimidation to carry vigils and protests. They need their sons and brothers to reappear, as the opposite three prisoners did. If that can’t occur, they need justice, to assist shut their very own wounds, and people of their nation.

“What we would like is a solution — what occurred?” stated Tasnim Shipraa, whose uncle Belal Hossain vanished in 2013. “It’s virtually like he by no means existed on this world.”

A torturous historical past

To the surface world, Bangladesh was one thing of an financial miracle, with a garment export business that lifted thousands and thousands out of poverty and received admiration for Hasina because the sturdy, regular hand on the wheel.

However darker currents ran beneath the floor, rooted within the traumatic historical past of a 50-year-old nation born of two bloody partitions — of Pakistan from India, then of Bangladesh from Pakistan — and caught ever since in a cycle of political violence and vengeance.

Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, helped information Bangladesh to independence in 1971, after the Pakistani army had waged a brutal marketing campaign in opposition to ethnic Bengalis that left a whole bunch of hundreds lifeless.

However as Sheikh Mujib led the nation within the years that adopted, he grew to become deeply paranoid, banning political events and unleashing a ruthless paramilitary pressure in opposition to his opponents. In 1975, he and far of his household have been killed in a army coup.

Shirin Akhtar asks troopers in Dhaka for assist finding her son, Mohamad Sayed, one of many a whole bunch who had disappeared over time, within the days after Sheikh Hasina had fled Bangladesh. (The New York Occasions)

Hasina, who was overseas on the time, went into exile. When she returned years later, she was a breath of contemporary air, ultimately serving to to finish army rule and turning into prime minister for the primary time in 1996.

Her defeat within the subsequent election despatched her to the sidelines for eight years. In 2004, she survived an assassination try through which grenade-hurling assailants killed two dozen folks. Throughout a later political disaster, she was detained on extortion expenses. When she returned to workplace in 2009, she was a modified chief, paranoid and heavy-handed like her father.

Hasina employed a variety of safety forces within the marketing campaign of repression that adopted. For the work of killing and disposing of opponents, she turned to elite police and paramilitary models. One in all them, the Speedy Motion Batallion, had began as a counterterrorism squadron with U.S. and British coaching however was remodeled by Hasina into what Human Rights Watch known as an “in-house dying squad.”

In a very ugly case, an official in Hasina’s occasion paid the battalion’s members to take out an adversary, in response to court docket paperwork. Once they went to select the person up in broad daylight, in addition they rounded up any witness to the crime. The officers sedated seven folks and strangled them, in response to court docket testimony. To arrange the our bodies to be dumped right into a river, their abdomens have been perforated to assist them sink, and sacks of bricks have been tied to them.

Every week later, the our bodies have been discovered floating on the river, a transparent signal that the Hasina regime’s brutality had taken on a lifetime of its personal.

Michael Chakma, a tribal rights activist who vanished for 5 years as a political prisoner of the earlier regime, revisits the spot the place he was pushed to and launched into the jungle in Chattogram, Bangladesh. (The New York Occasions)

Secret long-term detentions have been entrusted to the army’s intelligence wing. Greater than 700 folks have been forcibly disappeared from 2009 to this 12 months, in response to estimates by human rights organizations. The true rely is more than likely far greater, they are saying, as a result of frequent authorities harassment made it troublesome for them to totally doc the instances.

About 450 of the recognized disappeared turned up alive later, launched months or years after they have been hauled away and ordered to keep up strict silence, the rights teams say. For 80, the households acquired solely their lifeless our bodies. Roughly 150 victims stay unaccounted for.

The army did Hasina’s soiled work as she introduced it beneath her tight management. As if to clarify that she trusted nobody, she put one among her family — a retired military basic — in command of coordinating army affairs. She allowed the highest brass a free hand at earning profits to assist guarantee their loyalty.

Periodically, her intelligence outfits would current to her a listing of threats to defuse, with the completely different forces competing to impress her, officers with data of this system stated. If she nodded, the system did its work.

Now, the army’s function within the detentions is drawing questions. The Bangladeshi army has lengthy discovered status in being a high contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions overseas. After the nation’s establishments collapsed with Hasina’s departure, the army pitched itself as the one establishment with the credibility to carry Bangladesh collectively because it faces a troublesome street forward.

Military personnel guard a vandalized police station in Dhaka, Bangladesh after the ouster of Sheikh Hasina. (The New York Occasions)

That picture is more durable to keep up with every new story that emerges from the Home of Mirrors.

A glance inside

Abdullahil Amaan Azmi applies a grim math to the ceaseless struggling he endured.

Azmi, a adorned former military basic who was whisked away apparently as a result of his father had been a senior Islamist chief, was free of the army jail in August. He estimated that he had been blindfolded and handcuffed 41,000 occasions throughout his eight years in captivity.

“I didn’t see God’s sky, the solar, the grass, the moon, the bushes,” Azmi stated. To start with, he would attempt to catch a little bit of daylight by way of two small air flow openings. “However as soon as they discovered by way of the CCTV digital camera,” he stated, “they closed these off.”

The internment middle was a tightly run operation supposed to delay a life barely value dwelling. Medical checkups have been common and thorough. Haircuts: each 4 to 6 months. Direct bodily torture, if any, was saved to the early days, throughout interrogations.

The objective as a substitute was to torture the thoughts.

Requested by the Occasions to sketch the power, three of the previous detainees drew virtually equivalent blueprints: lengthy corridors with half a dozen rooms dealing with away from one another. There have been bogs at every finish, a standing one and a squatting one. Every cell had a big exhaust fan meant to each drown out the guards’ chatter and ship the prisoners into insanity.

“Let me present you,” stated Maroof Zaman, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam who spent 467 days within the jail earlier than re-emerging in 2019. He opened Google Maps and zoomed in on a army garrison in Dhaka, pinpointing the half now marked as Aynaghor — Bengali for Home of Mirrors, a code title first revealed in 2022 by Netra Information, a Bangladeshi information outlet operated in exile.

He and the opposite prisoners knew they have been at a army base not simply due to the self-discipline and precision of the guards, but in addition as a result of they might hear morning parades. They knew that officers’ residential quarters have been shut by, with regular life enjoying out simply above them.

“Each Friday, you could possibly hear the kids singing,” Zaman stated.

Throughout his interrogation, Zaman, who had been crucial of Hasina, significantly over her lodging of India, was hooded and punched repeatedly within the face, knocking out two enamel. His interrogators had printed all of his social media and weblog posts, questioning him on particular paragraphs.

“We spent a lot cash printing your posts. Your father will give us all this a refund?” one of many interrogators requested him.

Michael Chakma, a tribal rights activist, was let loose in a jungle in August after being pushed blindfolded for hours.

“It was the primary time I noticed daylight in 5 years,” Chakma stated. “As I used to be seeing this, I used to be attempting to double-check if I used to be simply imagining this mild or if it was actual.”

Family members of Sajedul Islam Sumon, one of many a whole bunch of Bangladeshis who have been kidnapped by state safety forces, weep after listening to unverified reviews of his dying in Dhaka on Aug. 12, 2024. (The New York Occasions)

He was kidnapped in 2019 as he entered a financial institution in Dhaka. He had been campaigning for self-governance for Bangladesh’s Indigenous hill peoples.

Contained in the jail, he saved asking his interrogators why he was there. The closest he might get to a solution was political retaliation: When Hasina had gone to the Chattogram Hill areas within the nation’s southeast to carry a rally for her occasion, the Awami League, the scholar wing of Chakma’s occasion blocked the street.

Hasina completed her speech on the rally with a risk — that she would see to those that had been behind the protest.

“That harm her,” Chakma stated. “I all the time requested them, ‘What’s my crime? What have I carried out? What am I responsible of?’ They usually’d say that I’ve ill-intentioned politics in relation to the Awami League authorities.”

Azmi, the previous army officer, stated that typically his massive blindfold was so tight that it might squeeze his nostril and make respiratory troublesome. He suffered eye ache, tooth decay and pores and skin sores.

However all of that paled compared to the fixed worry: that he may very well be taken out any night time and his physique dumped someplace, with the subsequent morning’s newspapers fed a narrative that he had died in “crossfire” with the police.

Azmi prayed for dignity in dying: “Please don’t let cats and canines eat my lifeless physique, please have them ship my physique to my household, my family members.”

“There isn’t a language through which I can clarify the humiliation and ache I felt,” he stated at a information convention.

Arman, the lawyer, was picked up in August 2016 as his spouse and 4-year-old daughter watched, seemingly singled out for actions that weren’t even his personal.

He was imprisoned shortly earlier than his father, Mir Quasem Ali, was to be hanged over what the Hasina authorities labeled struggle crimes relationship from 1971, when Ali was a teenage pupil chief of an Islamist occasion that opposed the creation of Bangladesh.

Ali was seen particularly as a risk to Hasina as a result of he sat atop a big and profitable empire: a financial institution, a media community, hospitals.

“I’m not happy with his function in ’71,” Arman stated of his father. However as his lawyer, Arman stated that his father had not deserved a day in jail, a lot much less hanging.

After years of ache and uncertainty, Arman was lastly in a position to reunite together with his spouse, daughters and mom whereas he recovered in a hospital. However he’s haunted by the capriciousness with which his life was devastated: the abstract execution of his father, essential years stolen from household life, the abuse and isolation that shattered any sense of safety — all seemingly on a whim that can by no means be absolutely defined.

“It wasn’t in my worst nightmares that they might take me away from my all the things,” he stated, “in a second the place my father was going to be executed.”

A seek for justice

Within the hours after Hasina’s overthrow, a small group of women and men minimize by way of the jubilant crowds flooding the streets and arrived on the gates of the nation’s army headquarters.

A number of the males have been survivors of enforced disappearances. The ladies, the family members of these nonetheless lacking, had been knocking on doorways for years looking for proof of life, or at the least closure.

They’d been introduced collectively by a time-sensitive reality: There may nonetheless be prisoners contained in the Home of Mirrors. If these on the gates didn’t look the commanding officers within the eye and communicate to them now, the final of the disappeared may vanish endlessly.

Near midnight, the officers lastly let in three representatives for a gathering. At first, the officers repeated their textbook response: There was no such factor as an enforced disappearance. When the survivors instructed the officers that they knew at the least two males held inside — that they had managed to see them throughout their day by day lavatory runs — there was little room for denial.

A torn poster of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, after his daughter, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, fled the nation, in Dhaka on Aug. 10, 2024. (The New York Occasions)

“They stated, ‘Give us 24 hours of time, we are going to kind it out,’” stated Hasinur Rahman, a retired military lieutenant colonel who had been forcibly disappeared for over 18 months and had gone in as one of many representatives. “‘If anybody is left, we are going to guarantee they are going to be launched as early as doable.’”

Over the subsequent couple of days, Chakma, Arman and Azmi have been all let loose.

Their launch crammed the households of different victims with the form of hope that they had not felt in years. Over the next days, the moms and sisters and daughters of the lacking have been in every single place.

They have been at vigils for pupil protesters who had been killed by Hasina’s forces. They have been exterior the Supreme Courtroom, holding placards. One lady, Shirin Akhtar, discovering a hoop of army males guarding the court docket constructing, appeared to officer after officer, holding the arm of every and pleading tearfully for assist finding her son, Mohamad Sayed.

They have been additionally exterior the army headquarters in Dhaka and army bases in a number of different elements of the nation, asking the identical query: The place are our family members? Wherever they gathered, they might chant: “The Home of Mirrors, the Home of Mirrors.” The response can be louder: “Shatter it! “Shatter it!”

One night time, they arrived on the headquarters of the interim authorities that took over after Hasina’s ouster, to current their plea to Muhammad Yunus, the 84-year-old Nobel laureate who’s now the nation’s caretaker chief. One man, Babul Hawlader, his son’s photograph hanging from his neck, sat cross-legged in the course of the street resulting in the principle gate.

Contained in the headquarters, Sanjida Islam Tulee, whose brother Sajedul Islam Sumon disappeared in 2013, described the group’s demand for justice. Their mom had turn into the core of a protest group known as Mayer Daak, or “the mom’s name,” which stayed on the streets for years. Now the outdated lady sat quietly subsequent to Yunus, hugging a framed portrait of her lacking son.

“We’re carried out ready,” her daughter stated to Yunus. “What we would like is one thing concrete.”

He instructed the ladies that his authorities was a results of their protest: Their persistence for all these years had helped encourage the pupil protesters and others to stand up and topple Hasina.

If the nation’s interim leaders can’t pursue justice for them, Yunus stated, “then this authorities has no that means.”

Within the weeks that adopted, Yunus signed a global treaty on enforced disappearances and fashioned a committee to analyze the crimes in Bangladesh. On Thursday, the nation took an preliminary step in that course of when a particular court docket set as much as examine accusations of crimes in opposition to humanity introduced it had issued an arrest warrant for Hasina, who’s in exile overseas.

However in an indication of the troublesome process forward, and of how justice and reconciliation have been elusive all through Bangladesh’s historical past, Yunus was measured in his promise to the ladies in these early weeks.

“Maintain your hopes up,” Yunus instructed them, “however I can’t say what the outcome shall be.”