Now is the time to unite
Ishtiaque Rahman, Uttara
I truly believe that some of the bombing incidents could have been avoided with a bit of careful planning by the security forces. The state-controlled police, whose primary duty is to protect the citizens, has to come forward and provide assistance in preventing such tragedy, with greater vigour and purpose. It's the common people who have to face the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune, time and again. It's most unfortunate that more than 200 people were injured by the grenade-blasts at the Awami League meeting, and 20 (known, so far) will never again be seen or heard by their near and dear ones. It should be obvious to all by now that our organizational and managerial skills need to be further enhanced. The perpetrators of the Aug 21st carnage had clear knowledge of the lax security arrangements at the meeting site; that is why they could swoop down on the unsuspecting crowd in such great numbers, do the dirty job then flee with relative ease, unchallenged, without hindrance. There is a lot to be said about holding mass general meetings in public places; the first and foremost being the total disregard to the inconvenience it causes others who wish to use these public thoroughfares (and we haven't got too many). I am speaking of political-party assemblies, election campaigning, and many such occasions where thousands gather in one place and bring the traffic to a standstill. We simply have to manage some other way to indulge ourselves. This free-for-all mental attitude of ours must change. This attitude spills over to many other areas of our everyday lives, such as, use of loudspeakers at abusive levels at all hours of the day and night, haphazard dumping of construction materials, setting up shops on foot-path, etc. Regarding the Aug 21 grenade attack; none arrested as yet, not even a single witness stepped forward to tell the investigators what the perpetrators looked like, how they ran away (or rather vanished), what kind of vehicles they used for their getaway, which direction they came from, in which they went.... In this day and age of digital cameras we don't even have one clear snapshot of an assailant firing the gun at the four-wheeler of Sk Hasina. So, we haven't caught any of the grenade-tossing, gun-toting phantoms; surely with better security planning we could, at least, have identified one of the evildoers. We don't know who amongst us is pulling off these kind of dastardly acts, we may never know; however, I do not comprehend the need to call a foreign investigation team to visit the crime scene. We couldn't amass any of the vital information about the perpetrators' identity after a week of probing, how can we expect to get any break-through findings by someone flying in from thousands of miles away.w We need to join forces and organise, various political parties need to shed their differences. We need to put up a strong united barrier so that such fiendish perpetrators cannot disrupt our lives with such regular frequency. The big question is, can we unite to uplift of our nation?
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