Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution
(By Lawrence Lifschultz)
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| Author | Lawrence Lifschultz |
Part I tells the moving story of Taher, one of the leading military figures in Bangladesh's War of Liberation in 1971, and at one time a close colleague of the country's current head-of-state, Major General Ziaur Rahman (Zia). On 7 November 1975 a general uprising shook Bangladesh and set off a broad mutiny inside the Bangladesh Armed Forces. This is the story of that uprising and its betrayal. Eight months later Abu Taher was secretly tried and executed by his former friend, whose own life Taher had saved on November 7th. Zia and Taher broke over an issue critical for the entire Third World. What would it be? Revolutionary socialism in one of the poorest countries on earth, or a path of capitalist development based on the largesse of the U.S.A. and the plans of the World Bank?
Part II presents the first exhaustive investigation into the overthrow of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who died in the coup of 15 August 1975. Working jointly with Kai Bird, Assistant Editor of 'The Nation' (New York), Lifschultz has unearthed a story which reaches back into the clandestine history of more than a decade of South Asian politics. Their careful work shows how a cohesive group of conservative Bengalis, who rose to prominence in the Pakistan period and were swept aside by Mujib after Independence in 1971, finally staged a coup in alliance with a faction of Mujib's own party and reinstated themselves in power. The investigation traces the history of relations between these circles and the United States. It is a complex story reaching from Henry Kissinger's obscure animosities, to covert contacts in the midst of Pakistan's civil war, to a time bomb inside the Mujib regime's own national intelligence organization.
Lawrence Lifschultz's unique sources encompass over 200 interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Bangladesh, together with U.S. government documents obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. He also reproduces in a series of remarkable appendices the court record of the secret trial of Colonel Taher; the author's own interview - the first of its kind - with the CIA's Station Chief in Dacca at the time of Mujib's overthrow; a summary of a confidential study by the Washington based Carnegie Endowment on American foreign policy in the midst of Pakistan's civil war; and a careful account of the long-standing relationship between the East Pakistan (Bangladesh) Security Services and the U.S. Office of Public Safety.”
