These can only erode her credibility.
We are aghast at the PM's sweeping and unsubstantiated allegations that the opposition BNP resorted to killing and kidnapping 'to fulfil its political mission' of foiling the war crimes trial. This is not for the first time she has said so; but the intensity of her tirade doesn't fit in with the current political vibe.
A relative calm seemed to pervade an otherwise torrid political scenario, thanks to the opposition deciding to sit in talks with the President. When we have just suggested that the onus is more on the ruling party to take things forward on the presidential talks, to be careful with words, here comes the Prime Minister with tongue-lashing at the BNP.
If the Prime Minister has specific information about the BNP's direct or indirect hand in the incidents of disappearances and 'secret killings', why doesn't she share it with the public and arrest the 'culprits'?
Obviously, she doesn't have any hard information, otherwise why is she talking of a probe? And how good a probe it is going to be when she as the PM is being judgmental about its outcome?
Let's make it clear though, when Begum Khaleda Zia and Moudud Ahmed has asked for stopping the war crimes trial we condemned them in the strongest of terms. But to shift the blame of a law and order failure in curbing disappearances and secret killings (only on Saturday four persons disappeared) on to a 'plot' hatched by BNP to foil war crimes trial without furnishing any proof is disingenuous at best and misleading at worst.
This is trivialising the most dreaded form of criminality that enforced disappearance and secret killings are.
This is also denigrating the minimal respect for human rights of those who have been abducted without a trace and occasionally surface as dead bodies. It is the state's responsibility to protect its citizens and not to empty the laps of mothers or households of their only earning members or leave a wife widowed. If the state fails to do it then it takes on the label of terrorising the citizens just because some gangsters have a field day with impunity.
