Bloody Old Home Week
Dhanmandi, the old neighborhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh … back when it was Dacca, East Pakistan … is shot up the Bangladesh Rifles, a paramilitary border force that mutinied over pay and objections to Army leadership. Latest is the PM has pardoned them and promised to address demands to end heavy daylong that left several dead … including senior officers executed and dumped in a ditch … and dozens wounded.
Isolated third-world incident caught my eye only because I know the unit, used to live across Dhanmandi Lake from HQ, watched from the rooftop as a kid when they deployed against student demonstrators on Jinnah Avenue in the late 1960s.
A family friend was a young officer who let us kids hang out in the old Raj-style regimental mess with crossed swords, silver service and tiger skins all over the place and turbanned stewards, let us play with old Enfield rifles and bayonets, invited the family to a couple of events. That was when it was the East Pakistan Rifles, and the officers were all West Pakistanis, tall, light-skinned Urdu-speaking Pathans and Punjabis commanding smaller, darker Bengali jawans, who later killed their officers and took on the Pakistan Army in the 1971 war for independence. Apparently the unit has a long history of leadership issues. We were a year gone by then, no idea what happened to the friendly young captain.
The regiment’s lineage goes back to 1795. As for pardoning mutineers who have just shot up a residential neighborhood and killed their officers, doesn’t sound like a great policy, but that’s their business.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:21 am Comments (0) on Wednesday, February 25, 2009
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