BANGLADESH: In defence of the human rights defender: FMA Razzak's story told

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(Free-Press-Release.com) May 29, 2011 -- States and state agents have historically used violence to stifle public debate, and silence their critics. In many countries around the world today, states no longer rely heavily upon overtly coercive methods and instead acknowledge the need for authentic debate. But in many others, states and state agents continue to resort primarily to coercive methods.

In such countries, some persons try to break the silence on matters of importance that threaten repressive systems for social control. These persons we honour with the title, "human rights defender". Oftentimes, the efforts of these persons seem small, especially to people in countries where authentic debate is taken for granted. Yet, such efforts necessarily begin small, and build up only with years of hard work.

Despite their appearance of smallness, such efforts challenge fundamental principles on which the state's power is based. For this reason, human rights defenders in these countries inevitably become targets for violence. Sometimes the violence seems arbitrary. Sometimes it seems grossly disproportionate to the small efforts of the person.

People unfamiliar with the milieu in which the human rights defender has been working naturally have trouble seeing how apparently small efforts to change society can provoke savagery. At such moments, those people who work with the human rights defender have a special responsibility to delineate the person sharply from his social and political environment, and in so doing, to set out some features of that environment, so that others can also understand why the person has been made the subject of violence.

For this reason, the Asian Human Rights Commission is issuing this short narrative on the work of a Bangladeshi human rights defender, FMA Razzak.

The story of how members of an army officer's family barbarically attacked and almost killed Razzak, gouging at his eyes and breaking his limbs, is now internationally known. The AHRC has set up a campaign webpage, which it is updating constantly, providing the latest details on the case and on subsequent events.

The purpose of this narrative is not to iterate all the contents of statements and appeals on the attack against Razzak, but to explain what motivated the attack, and to show how the police, judiciary and National Human Rights Commission in Bangladesh are working not to defend this human rights defender but to enable the continuance of violence and impunity in their country. To do this, we must begin with the story of Razzak, the human rights defender. That story, although specifically the story of Razzak, is more generally the story of the human rights defender as Bangladeshi; the story of anyone who sincerely believes and fights for human rights in such a country.
A life thrice endangered

Three times FMA Razzak has been in imminent danger of losing his life because of his work as a human rights defender.

The first time that Razzak escaped with his life was in 2002. Razzak by then had been taking an interest in human rights issues for five or six years. His interest had been sparked by a visit to his district of Khulna, on the western seaboard of Bangladesh, by a retired appellate division judge of the Supreme Court, Justice KM Subhan. The former judge, a firm human rights advocate, had spoken to a group of local journalists, Razzak among them. The journalists had given a commitment to the senior jurist that they would do their best to work on human rights issues in the region.

Razzak took this commitment seriously. He began documenting and reporting on human rights abuses in and around his home area. This task was not a minor one. With a populace of over two million in Khulna district alone, stories of abuse were all too easy to hear. Yet, too few people were listening, let alone doing anything about them. Most people with stories to tell were poor and socially isolated. Hardly any journalists took an interest in them. Some considered the stories trivial, others deliberately ignored them, preferring to ally themselves with money and power.

If they were going to be serious about their commitment to Justice Subhan, Razzak and a few others realized, they would have to take the work to the next level. They set up and registered a new organization, the Human Rights Development Centre.

In Bangladesh, a country with a current population of over 160 million, groups like the Human Rights Development Centre are integral links in the chain of human rights defenders from the village to the national level. Professional organizations in the capital, like the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Centre for Trauma Victims, or BRCT, depend on human rights defenders in the districts for information and support.

>>>CONTINUE READING: http://www.humanrights.asia/news/ahrc-news/AHRC-STM-067-2011

Bangladesh     human rights defenders