In Bangladesh, a mothers’ call for justice is finally being heard
- Written and photographed by Dil Afrose Jahan
- Illustration by Erdy- Duangkamol Kongtanajaroenchai
- Edited by Purple Romero
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Key strategy: Accountability for state-sponsored crime
Authoritarians often try to cover up criminal human rights abuses and distort the historical record to avoid consequences and legal accountability. To counter this, activists try to preserve evidence of human rights abuses, keep memories of the victims alive in public discourse, and call for truth and justice for victims.
Key strategy: Preserving collective memory
Preserving the collective memory of a country ensures that present and future generations have access to knowledge that’s at risk of being erased by elite interests, and can be essential to accountability. Collective memories shape national identities and political developments; meaning that failure to preserve the historical experiences of marginalized groups perpetuates inequality and injustice.
Key tactic: Family-led protest movements
Since most legal systems give families special priorities when a member is victim of a crime, family-led movements that call for truth and justice for human rights abuses have unique moral authority. Powered by grief and rage, families of victims and their supporters can draw attention and gain supporters for broader rights movements.
Key tactic: Engaging the international community
When local and national governments are unresponsive or oppressive to demands for rights, reaching across borders can bring attention and solidarity from outside the country. Calls for justice under international human rights laws can get attention from neighboring governments and international bodies like the UN, as well as gain support from international protest movements working on the same topic.
On a wet Sunday in August 2024, dozens of women and children gathered on the steps of the Shaheed Minar monument in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. Hand in hand, they formed a human chain and displayed photos of loved ones whom they say were abducted by state agents under the rule of Sheikh Hasina.
Barely a week earlier, Hasina’s 15-year term as prime minister had finally ended. The group gathered in the rain were determined to seize the momentum. Going by the name Mayer Daak, – meaning “Mothers’ Call” in Bengali – they had been demanding justice for more than decade. Now, finally, the Bangladeshi authorities were listening.
By the end of August, the interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus had signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. After years of the authorities denying there were any cases of enforced disappearances in the country, this acknowledgement was a breakthrough that Mayer Daak hope will lead to answers and accountability.
It has been a long wait – but not one spent idle. Mayer Daak have tirelessly campaigned, protested and engaged in public actions. They have consistently challenged the official narrative that their family members just disappeared one day – and offered an alternative: Someone took them – someone with the mantle of power.
House of Mirrors
The interim government believes thousands of people may have been disappeared between 2009 and 2024.
Since Bangladesh was founded in 1971, both the country’s main political parties – Hasina’s Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) – have been accused of using state forces to perpetrate atrocities. Disappearances, however, became a “hallmark” of Hasina’s rule, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2009, her first year as prime minister, the organization noted only three reported cases of enforced disappearances. This number rose by hundreds year on year. Now, the interim government believes thousands of people may have been disappeared between 2009 and 2024.
Prime Minister Hasina was ousted by a student-led protest on August 5, 2024. The following day, Mayer Daak gathered outside the Director General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), one of the Bangladeshi intelligence agencies that has been linked to enforced disappearances.
They demanded to know where their loved ones were.
Some breaking into tears, they presented to the interim government a three-point list of demands: unconditional release of all victims of enforced disappearances from prisons and their return to their families; the establishment of a UN-sponsored Citizens’ Commission for Enforced Disappearances and Family members; and the destruction of all “mirror houses.”
Aynaghar, meaning “house of mirrors,” is a secret prison whose existence was first brought to light in a 2022 article by the exile media organization Netra News. Reportedly run by the DGFI, it has been described as a place where detainees could hear nothing but other detainees being tortured, screaming in pain, or crying for their families.
Inspiration from Latin America
Hazera Khatun was the first mother of Mothers Call. Her son, Sumon, an activist and local leader of the opposition BNP, was allegedly abducted from the Bashundhara area of Dhaka in December by black-uniformed men in 2013.
“We have done campaigning – press conferences, sending official letters, and high court writing – but there was no strategy, and nothing worked,” Sumon’s sister, Sanjida Islam Tulee, told Unbias the News. “It was a fascist regime, and inhuman in that they have violated human rights. From law enforcement to the judiciary, everything is corrupt.”
Sanjida says the authorities insisted the disappeared had simply gone missing by themselves. But looking to movements like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, formed in 1977 by the mothers of people disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War, they realized that if families looking for their missing came together, they could amplify their demands.
Hazera and her two daughters, Sanjida and Afroza Islam Ankhi, formed Mayer Daak in 2014. “We have developed these strategies from the Latin American countries that have had platforms like Mother’s Call. So, mothers and sisters all came together, and we raised our voices and realized that if we stopped, we would never get back our loved ones,” Sanjida says.
“When I come to meetings of Mayer Daak, I feel like we all have a common place to share, and that is the pain of losing loved ones. Over time, I feel like everyone on this platform is my family. All the disappeared persons are my brothers, and these women are my family.”
–Kaniz Fatema
Strength in numbers
Mayer Daak have shown there can be strength in numbers. This meant organizing hundreds of families who believe their members have been taken by the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a combined task force of police and military personnel, which formed in 2004 to oversee internal security and conduct government-directed investigations. In 2010, barrister and then-MP Mahbub Uddin Khokon claimed that the RAB had played a role in the detention of BNP leader Chowdhury Alam, who remains missing to this day.
Sanjida says the first to join their movement were the families of eight other men whose families say were picked up by state agents at the same time as Sumon, and who were also all involved in politics. Then more families came, first from Dhaka and then from the cities of Sylhet and Chittagong.
Among them was Kaniz Fatema. Fatema’s younger brother Samrat, the organizing secretary of the student wing of the opposition party BNP, was picked up by a white minivan. She went to the local police station, where police refused to file an abduction case because the family were not residents of the area where her brother was abducted. She tried again at her local police station, where she was told they could not take her complaint because the incident did not take place in their jurisdiction.
More than 11 years later, Kaniz remains devastated by her brother’s disappearance. She says she still cannot eat paratha and meat curry, a meal Samrat loved. But this is a pain she now shares with Mayer Daak – people who can best understand how she feels. “When I come to meetings of Mayer Daak, I feel like we all have a common place to share, and that is the pain of losing loved ones,” Kaniz says. “Over time, I feel like everyone on this platform is my family. All the disappeared persons are my brothers, and these women are my family.”
Rejecting the government’s line that enforced disappearances did not exist in Bangladesh, Mayer Daak made their struggle public, forming human chains to mark International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance and International Human Rights Day, as well as before two major religious festivals – Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
“The US sanctions - Sanjida Ankhi
Engaging the international community
In 2018, Prime Minister Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, wrote an article claiming that reports of state abduction were “ruses” staged by the opposition BNP – even going so far as to call some cases “comical.”
To refute such claims, Mayer Daak has worked to collect detailed information about the victims, in collaboration with Odhikar – a local initiative that documents human rights violations in Bangladesh – as well as international groups Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
Odhikar, which formed in 1994, was deregistered in 2022 by the NGO Affairs Bureau, a government body that regulates NGOs in Bangladesh. They were accused of spreading misinformation that “tarnished the reputation” of the state after they published reports of human rights violations.
Taskin Fahmina, a senior researcher at Odhikar, says the human rights organization is “persecuted” in Bangladesh. “This government did not let us work,” she said of Hasina’s Awami League administration. “They have persecuted us, arrested our human rights defenders, and intimidated our women human rights defenders.”
Mayer Daak also denounced what happened to Odhikar – a situation they were quite familiar with, as Mayer Daak has never been officially acknowledged by the authorities, nor received any help or assistance from the government. “The government never let us register,” Sanjida says. “We were not able to get any funding. All kinds of financial support comes from our own family, and we help each other when needed.”
With human rights activism under such pressure in Bangladesh, Mayer Daak turned to the international community. A significant breakthrough came in 2021, when the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned seven current and former RAB officials. This marked a new chapter in the United States’ complicated relationship with RAB. At one point, both the United States and the UK saw the elite force as an important ally in the fight against terrorism. In December 2010, The Guardian reported that both countries had provided training for the RAB, as revealed in leaked cables.
Mayer Daak believe that the United States would not have imposed the sanctions – which finally came in response to the rising number of human rights violations – without their persistent and vigilant lobbying for justice. “The US sanctions imposed visa restrictions because internationally, we were able to raise our voices, and we had credibility as we were telling the truth,” Sanjida says.
The following year, they submitted a list of 619 people they said had been forcibly disappeared since Hasina came into power to then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. On a visit to Bangladesh, Bachelet urged the government to investigate the cases of enforced disappearances and to ratify the UN International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
In 2022, Mayer Daak also met with Peter E. Haas, then US ambassador to Bangladesh, and reiterated their call for a proper probe into the disappearances of their loved ones.
The moment is now
Locally, however, Mayer Daak’s calls were repeatedly silenced. Eighteen-year-old Anisa Islam Insha and her mother have joined Mayer Daak human chains and protests since her father Ismail Hossain Baten went missing in June 2019. She recalls speaking about childhood memories of her father at a rally to mark International Human Rights Day in 2023, when police grabbed her mic. Later that day, the rally was broken up and all family members of the victims of enforced disappearance sent away.
Sixteen months later, her mother addressed the crowd gathered on the monument steps. “Today, in front of the central Shaheed Minar, I can breathe freely. Now, we no longer have to be afraid of the government,” she said. Yet freedom to breath and voice their pain and anger is just the start. Mayer Daak believe this is the moment to raise their voices louder than ever, if they are ever to get answers to the agonizing question of what happened to their loved ones.
The RAB’s new director, AKM Shahidur Rahman, has vowed that the security forces will not be involved in enforced disappearance under his watch, and in December 2024, the force admitted to the existence of the secret detention facilities. Two days later, the five-member Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances submitted its first interim report, titled Unfolding the Truth to Yunus.
The commission identified more than eight secret detention facilities where victims were held across the country. It has recorded 1,676 complaints of enforced disappearances, and scrutinized 758 of them, finding that 27 percent of the victims are still missing – but is says the actual number of enforced disappearances could be some 3,500.
“The most significant achievement of the platform is to continue being active, which brought us here today,” Sanjida says. “If we quit and shut ourselves in fear, then we would not be able to be here now, and we have a strong and credible place.”
A seismic political shift may be taking place in Bangladesh – one that Mayer Daak have played no small role in putting into motion. “It is important what Mayer Daak is doing, they are the first to show the resistance against Hasina, and they played the biggest role in uncovering her real face,” Shafiqul Alam, press secretary for Yunus, the chief adviser of the interim government, said.
And some families’ prayers have been answered, as a few of the abducted have begun to come home. The day after Hasina was ousted, former military general Abdullahil Amaan Azmi and barrister Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem, who had been subjected to enforced disappearances, were finally reunited with loved ones after eight years of illegal detention in Aynaghar.
About the Author
Dil Afrose Jahan
Dil Afrose Jahan is an international award-winning freelance investigative journalist and fact-checker based in Germany. She writes about human rights, climate change, gender, migration, human trafficking, conflict, and crisis.
