Staff Correspondent

The UN rights office (OHCHR) has said the ousted Bangladesh regime appeared to have made coordinated efforts to suppress truths about rights violations during the July August Uprising instead of taking even minimal steps to ensure accountability of people concerned.

“Between 1 July and 5 August 2024, OHCHR was unable to find out any genuine efforts by the authorities of the former Government to investigate, let alone ensure accountability for, any of the serious violations and abuses committed by security forces and Awami League supporters,” it said.

“In some cases, police also took (victims) bodies from hospitals, hid bodies from families or burned bodies in an apparent effort to conceal killings,” the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) in its fact finding report.

The UN organ last week released the report titled Human Rights Violations and Abuses related to the Protests of July and August 2024 in Bangladesh.

According to the report OHCHR also received information about police and RAB units being given unrecorded allotments of ammunitions, so that their extensive volume of shooting would not be picked up in ammunition expenditure accounts.

It said former senior officials confirmed that during that period no investigations into the security forces’ use of firearms were conducted and “allegations of torture and serious ill-treatment were not investigated either”.

The former officials, it said, claimed no victim complaints were received in view of pressing security situation prevailing at the time.

But the OHCHR noted that numerous reports detailing alleged violations published by credible local and international media, and reports issued by human rights groups should have given ample cause to open investigations at their own initiative.

“Rather than taking steps towards ensuring accountability, the authorities appear instead to have made coordinated efforts to suppress the truth about violations that had occurred,” read the report.

The UN rights organ reported that the agents of directorate general forces intelligence (DGFI), national security intelligence (NSI), police’s detective branch and police maintained a presence at hospitals where many victims were treated and confiscated records with important evidentiary value from them.

The report said police and other authorities also intimidated victims, their families, lawyers, journalists and others who called for accountability or otherwise drew attention to killings by security forces.

“Regarding certain high-profile cases of killings, DGFI agents called or personally visited victim families and their lawyers in an effort to intimidate them,” the OHCHR said.

Moreover, it said, the authorities also sought to conceal violations by the security forces by falsely accusing others noting that in Abu Sayeed’s case hundreds were wrongly accused or arrested though widely circulated video footage and other information, “making it evident that police had killed him”.

The OHCHR report said the ex-premier and other senior officials also made public statements falsely accusing BNP or Jamaat-e-Islami members of killings and injuring protesters which were evidently done by security forces.

The report said Bangladesh foreign ministry claimed to forward the concerns of the international community to the Prime Minister’s Office, as well as the Home Affairs Ministry and the Information Ministry about the human rights violations.

Currently fugitive ex-foreign minister claimed that he personally briefed the then Prime Minister about the concerns raised by foreign and international leaders while another senior official personally raised concerns about excessive force in a meeting with her at the very beginning of August.

The report noted that on July 17, the then premier announced the establishment of a judicial inquiry headed by three judges, while blaming all incidents on ‘opposition instigators’ and ‘terrorists’.

“The inquiry was assigned to investigate the ‘incidents of death, violence, vandalism, arson, looting, terrorist activity and damages caused by the quota reform movement’, suggesting an exclusive and one-sided focus on the acts of protesters alone, leaving to one side the much more widespread violence of the security forces,” it read.

But the report said a former senior government official and another official confirmed the OHCHR that this judicial inquiry never issued any even interim report or findings, nor left behind any other record of its activities when it stopped functioning on 5 August.

The National Human Rights Commission, within its own mandate, also failed to hold authorities accountable for human rights violations and protect victims other than issuing a vague statement on July 30 describing the loss of life as “very unfortunate and a violation of human rights” and urged the authorities not to make mass arrests.