Syed Faruque Rahman

Lieutenant Colonel Syed Faruque Rahman (also spelled Farooq or Faruk) (died 28 January 2010) was a Bangladeshi army officer who was the chief organiser of the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding President of Bangladesh on 15 August 1975. Rahman led a group of junior army officers who overthrew Sheikh Mujib's regime and installed Khondaker Mushtaque Ahmed as president.

Plot
Holding the rank of Major, Rahman was the lead organiser of a group of junior officers who were disenchanted with the rule of Bangladesh's founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The plotters accused Sheikh Mujib of corruption, nepotism and ruling as a dictator, and criticised his pro-India and pro-Soviet stance in foreign affairs. Supported covertly by senior cabinet minister Khondaker Mushtaque Ahmed, Rahman led an attack on Mujib's residence, killing him and his entire family, with the exception of two of Mujib's daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana. Immediately after the killing, the officers installed Khondaker Mushtaque Ahmed as the new president of Bangladesh.

Please also refer to the excerpt from Bangladesh: A Legacy Of Blood by Anthony Mascarenhas, which was quite an in-depth account at the time and of the time.

First published in 1986 and reprinted in 2006 by Hodder and Stoughton Educational, Bungay, Suffolk.

Chapter V: A Summer Of TigersPage 43There was crisis everywhere.-Shiekh Mujibur RahmanThe summer and autumn of 1974 to many people in Bangladesh were the worst in living memory. The orgy of killing by the Pakistani army in 1971 had been traumatic; but in retrospect it was accepted as the price of independence, and in the darkest days of the freedom struggle the hope of a new life burned fiercely in the hearts of Bengalis. Now in the third year of independence hope was extinguished.The food supply had deteriorated due to smuggling, market manipulation and corruption at all stages of the imports and distribution network. Rice prices were soaring beyond the 300 Takka crisis mark. Then the floods came, engulfing 21,000 square miles or two fifths of the total land area of the delta country during July, August and part of September. Famine and crisis stalked the land like the big jungle cats. People in the countryside began to die like flies.Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself publicly admitted later that 27,000 people died of starvation. In the circumstances this was a very conservative estimate. Bodies take a long time to get run down, and for every human being who ultimately falls victim to starvation, many others are killed off by diseases arising from malnutrition and low resistance. Since at least 3,000,000 people were living below the starvation line, by that reckoning the death toll as a result of the famine was well into six figures.Indeed, confirmation of this assessment came from the Prime Minister himself. Before emplaning for New York to address the General Assembly after Bangladesh had been admitted to the United Nations, Mujib ordered his ministers to open up gruel kitchens in all the 4300 ‘unions’ (i.e. groups of villages) in the country. Ultimately 5700 gruel kitchens were opened to give three to four million people a meager life-sustaining meal each day.Millions of people in the countryside surged to the towns in search of food. Thousands of them gravitated to Dhaka, the capital, in the hope that Bangabandhu would give them something to eat. But the Prime Minister was hard-put to maintain even weekly ration for the population which was multiplying at the rate of three million a year. It was calculated that the Bangladesh population of 75 million would double itself in 26 years.The influx of people to the city brought new tensions to Dhaka where the government was embarrassed by the large swarms of beggars and destitutes everywhere. On 3 January 1975, a massive cosmetic operation was launched forcing 200,000 destitutes and slum dwellers either to return to their villages or to be moved to three ‘camps’ that had been hastily laid out several miles from the city. The worst of these was at Demra, 14 miles from Dhaka, which the Guardian (dated 18.2.1975) described as “Mujib’s man-made disaster area”. Conditions in the camp were appalling.More than 50,000 people were crowded into the camp which was ringed with barbed wire and guarded by the Rakhi Bahini. The authorities had provided a few latrines and water pumps. Each family was also given a 19’x19’ plot of land for a hut but no building materials. There were also no medical supplies, no means of income for the people and only a meager food ration. The four bed ‘hospital’ was used as a dormitory for the camp officials. An old man told visiting journalists, “Either give us food or shoot us”. According to Grace Samson, a Dutch Salvation Army volunteer, the tragedy was “not an act of God, but an act of government; a man-made disaster”. It is not known how many perished in these camps. But it marked another turning point, for the people now not only cursed the government but also Sheikh Mujib himself.He had till then generally managed to escape the public odium for the mess in Bangladesh. People blamed Mujib’s ministers and officials around him rather than him personally. This may have been for emotional reasons because many still had lingering hope that Bangabandhu would ultimately live up to public expectation. Mujib for his part did not miss any opportunity to blunt criticism by diverting it to his ministers.M.R. Akhtar (‘Mukul’), who was close to Mujib, tells an interesting story of how on one occasion this was done. According to him, at the beginning of March, 1975, Sheikh Mujib was secretly in touch with some leaders of the opposition Jashod Party who were supposed to be underground at the time. The Jashod, which rightly or wrongly had the reputation of being pro-Indian party, wanted to refurbish its image with a big demonstration against the government, including an assault on Bangababan. According to Mukul, Mujib persuaded them to march instead to the house of the Home Minister, Mansoor Ali. A deal was done. So on 17 March after a big protest meeting at Paltan Maidan the mob was led to Mansoor Ali’s house, which was savaged. The minister, rather conveniently, had gone out of town with his family for a few days. The affair ended when the Rakhi Bahini opened fire on the mob killing eleven people. Thus according to Mukul, the Jashod’s image improved without any real damage to Mujib’s. Mujib had another cause for celebration that day. It was his 53rd birthday.The violence continues to mount, Mujib himself at the end of 1974 claimed that almost 4000 Awami League party workers, including five Members of Parliament, had been killed ‘under cover of darkness’ by opposition groups. Brigadier Manzoor said that much of the killing was the result of intra-party squabbles. Khandaker Mostaque Ahmed, who succeeded Mujib as President, told me that sometimes in his house in the old quarter of Dhaka the nights were made hideous by the wailing of women whose husbands and sons had been dragged away by the Rakhi Bahini on Home Minister Mansoor Ali’s orders. Moshtaque claims these unfortunate people “just vanished”.Shiekh Mujib’s reaction to the mounting crises caused by mismanagement and corruption was to launch a series of cosmetic operations. To him it was inconceivable that he had failed the people. He dismissed nine ministers blaming them for the mess. He prosecuted some minor officials and party men and in a grand gesture ordered the army to clean up the smugglers and hoarders. The last act was one of series of colossal blunders that year which hastened his end.Till then the soldiers, isolated in their barracks, had only been distant observers of the fading Bangladesh dream. Now they were brought face to face with all the gruesome details of the terrible rot afflicting the country. They did not like it. Inevitably some of them began to think it was a patriotic duty to save Bangladesh from the waywardness of politicians. Thus the army was drawn into politics and it destroyed Mujib.When dramatic gestures failed to stem the rot, Mujib persuaded himself that it was not his policies that were wrong but the system of government. Apparently the parliamentary system with a Cabinet of ministers collectively responsible to the National Assembly hampered his style. He began to complain the parliamentary system was not suited to the requirements of Bangladesh. There was a curious redundancy in Mujib’s desire for more power. His towering position as Bangabandhu, and the tight grip he had on all but eight seats in the National Assembly since the elections in the previous year had reduced Parliament to the position of rubber stamp. No one dared deny him anything yet; yet Mujib hungered for more power. He decided to switch to a presidential system loosely devised on the French/American pattern. He did this in an outrageous manner.In less than a month the National Assembly rubber-stamped the changes, 294 members voting in favour and none against. The captive press chorused its approval. The sycophants cheered. Sheikh Mujib described this action as the ‘Second Revolution’ aimed at “emancipating the toiling people from exploitation and injustice”. He was sworn in as President on 25 January 1975. In the short span of three years the great parliamentarian had become the great dictator!The farcical nature of the ‘Second Revolution’ was exposed by the composition of his new Cabinet….The government, as a whole, continued its rapid journey downhill. Apparently all that had happened was that the Mad Hatter’s dance had briefly halted for a game of musical chairs and Mujib, the puppet master, had got himself a new whip. Otherwise nothing had changed. But Mujib had irrevocably harmed himself. By concentrating all state authority in himself he had also concentrated public criticism and hostility against his own person. No longer could he pass the blame on to his ministers, officials and party men. This was a curious blunder for so astute a politician.Page 46.Military messes became the centres of plotting. The intelligence services kept close tabs on all this and when their reports reached Mujib he made no secret of his intentions to supplant the army with the Rakhi Bahini. The more he moved in that direction, the more he alienated the army.But at that time the immediate threat to Mujib’s life was not from the army but from a totally unexpected quarter.It so happened the Siraj Shikdar, leader of the Maoist Sharbohara (proletarian) party and the man Mujib’s son Kamal had once tried to hunt down, was finally caught by the police near Chittagong towards the end of December, 1974. According to his brother-in-law, Zackaria Chowdhury (‘Zack’), Siraj Shikdar was escorted to Dhaka and taken to Gonobaban to meet Sheikh Mujib. Mujib tried to win him over. When Shikdar refused to compromise Mujib ordered the police to ‘deal’ with him.Zack said Siraj was driven handcuffed and blindfolded to the police control room on the disused Dhaka racecourse and then taken out at night on a lonely road and shot. The official explanation given at the time was that Siraj Shikdar was shot dead “while trying to escape”. His sister, Shamim, who is Zack’s wife, however maintains that the bullet wound on Siraj’s body clearly show he had been shot from the front six times in the chest, probably with a sten gun.Whatever the reason, it was openly talked about in Dhaka that Siraj Shikdar had been liquidated on Muib’s instructions. Shamim herself was convinced that her brother died by Mujib’s hand. So this 19-year-old girl decided to take revenge. “I got a revolver from the (Shorbohara) party and looker for an opportunity to kill this murderer”, she told me. Shamim was banking on the fact that, as she was known as one of Bangladesh’s best known sculptresses who had won the President’s award for achievement the year before, she could get close enough to Mujib to shoot him.She made several requests for an appointment with Mujib. Each time she was put off. Then she invited him to an exhibition at the Dhaka University’s school of art. Mujib accepted the invitation but failed to turn up. “I was getting desperate”, she recalls. “However much I tried I just couldn’t get within shooting distance of him”. She never did. Fate intervened to save Mujib. Shamim fell in love, got married to Zack and left the country with her husband.Bravo Squadron of the First Bengal Lancers under the command of Major Farook Rahman in July 1974 moved from its base in Dhaka to Demra, just south of the capital. The move was part of a dramatic ‘Operation Clean-up’ ordered by Shiekh Mujibur Rahman in a grand gesture of public appeasement. Farook’s command at first extended to the whole of the Narayanganj industrial complex. Later he was moved further south to Munshiganj. He took up his new assignment in an ebullient mood. “Ah, very good”, he told his troops, “the Prime Minister has at last found out what his chaps have been doing and since he wants the army to fix them, let’s do a good job.”Farook went about his task in characteristic no-nonsense manner. Within days he had cleared up a particularly black spot near the roundabout on the Narayanganj Road which was infested with dacoits. The leading bandit in the area was a 20-year-old man professing to be an Awami Leaguer. After being arrested by Farook he freely confessed to having killed 21 people. “I asked him why he had done it”, Farook told me later, “and the bloody fellow answered, “I did it on my ustad’s (chief) orders”. The ‘ustad’ was Mujib. What the hell was I supposed to do?” The incident gravely disturbed the young officer. He was even more upset by the increasing political interference whenever action was taken against Awami Leaguers.Elsewhere other army officers were having similar experiences in the course of their police-keeping operation. Hundreds of people were arrested by them for smuggling, hoarding and intimidation and murder. Invariably, after a telephone call from Dhaka to the local police, charges were quietly dropped against the most prominent of these men and they were allowed to go free. “It was a damned awkward situation”, Farook recalled. “Every time we caught a chap he turned out to be either an Awami Leaguer or a very staunch Awami League supporter. They were getting protection from the top and we were getting a shelling for doing our job.”Farook said he received a general order in writing informing that should he arrest anyone he would be acting on his own responsibility and that his regimental commanding officer and the brigade commander would not be answerable if anything went wrong. “None of the senior commanders would accept responsibility because the Prime Minister had said, “If you take any funny action you will be hanged for it””, Farook said. “It meant that we were supposed to stop short of the Awami League. The whole thing was a damn farce.”At the same time Farook and the officers were being told to have no mercy on the opposition, particularly Naxalites (Maoists) and other leftists who got caught in the army’s net. “I was given orders to beat them up, get information from them and then throw them in the river”, Farook told me. “Colonel Shafat Jamil (then Brigade Commander Dhaka) said they were vermin and must be destroyed”. Farook said Shafat Jamil was reflecting orders from the top. “As far as Sheikh Mujib was concerned”, he said, “the indirect orders to us were for leftists like Siraj Shikdar and Col Ziauddin and such groups, if we catch them to kill them.” Farook refused to comply with these orders. “I was not deeply interested in Marxists”, he said, “but what impressed me was that these chaps did care for the country. They may have gone the wrong way ideologically but they had not so far done wrong to the country.” So whenever he caught one of these men Farook quietly let him go.One day during a combing operation in Tongi area north of Dhaka Major Nasser who was commanding another squadron of the Bengal Lancers, arrested three small-time thugs. In the course of the interrogation one of the men broke down and told the army officers a story about a particularly gruesome triple murder which had rocked Tongi the previous winter. It transpired that a newly married couple travelling to their home in a taxi had been waylaid on the outskirts of town. The bridegroom and the taxi driver were hacked to death and their bodies thrown in the river. The bride, who was carried off to an isolated cottage, was repeatedly raped by her abductors. Three days later her mutilated body was found on the road near a bridge.Confessing to his part in the crime, the thug told the army men the police investigation was called off when they found out that the ring-leader of the gang was his boss, Muzamil, chairman of the Tongi Awami League. According to Farook, the confession so infuriated the interrogating officer, a boyish lieutenant named Ishtiaque who had since resigned and left the country, that “he started kicking the chap so hard that he died of internal injuries”.Muzamil himself was taken by Major Nasser to Dhaka for prosecution after he confirmed from police records that the thug had been telling the truth. According to Farook, Muzamil offered Nasser 300,000 Takkas for his release. “Don’t make it a public affair”, the Awami Leaguer advised him. “You will anyway have to let me go, either today or tomorrow. So why not take the money and forget about it?” Nasser, who was affronted by this blatant attempt to bribe him, swore he would bring Muzamil to trial and make him hang for his crime. He handed him over to the civil authorities. Farook said they were all astonished a few days later to find that Muzamil had been released on Shiekh Mujib’s intervention. “I told you to take the money”, Muzamil crowed. “You would have been the gainers. Now I have been released anyway and you get nothing.”The incident shattered Farook and his colleagues. Tongi marked the turning point for them. “It seemed as if we were living in a society headed by a criminal organization. It was as if the Mafia had taken over Bangladesh. We were totally disillusioned. Here was the head of government abetting murder and other extreme things from which he was supposed to protect us. This was not acceptable. We decided he must go.”   “…when hope is extinguished, accountability denied and the people have nothing further to lose, they turn to violence to redress their wrongs.”    - Anthony Mascarenhas    Preface, Bangladesh: A Legacy Of Blood

Indemnity
As president, Khondaker Mushtaque Ahmed issued the Indemnity Ordinance, which prohibited any investigation and prosecution of the killing of Sheikh Mujib. Rahman was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and held a position of power in the new regime until it was overthrown in a counter-coup by pro-Mujib officers led by Maj. Gen. Khaled Mosharraf, who ousted Khondaker Mushtaque. However, the 6 November 1975 coup against the Mosharraf by Lt. Col. Abu Taher brought Maj. Gen. Ziaur Rahman to power, who appointed Syed Faruque Rahman and the other assassins to positions of power in the armed forces and diplomatic corps. In 1979, the Bangladeshi parliament under Ziaur Rahman's Bangladesh Nationalist Party converted the Indemnity ordinance into an official act of parliament.

In the 1980s, Rahman was forced out of the army and into retirement. After the assassination of Ziaur Rahman in 1981, Rahman returned to active politics by founding the Freedom Party and running for the presidency against Lt. Gen. Hussain Muhammad Ershad in 1986.

Trial and execution
In 1996, the Awami League under the leadership of Mujib's daughter, Sheikh Hasina won the general election and became the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Under her party's majority, the Indemnity Act was repealed and a court case initiated over the killing of Mujib and his family. In 1998, the Dhaka High Court sentenced Syed Faruque Rahman to death. After the Awami League's defeat in the 2001 general election, the BNP government of Begum Khaleda Zia slowed down the proceedings in the Mujib murder case. After Sheikh Hasina returned to power in 2009, the court case was restarted. After Rahman's plea for clemency was denied by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, he was executed along with other plotters on 28 January 2010.