The price of not talking

STATISTICS do not necessarily tell it all. But just to put the matter in perspective, statistics of the damage done in the last five weeks as a consequence of the oborodhs and hartals imposed by BNP may help to justify the point I want to flag. 

Nearly 90 people are dead, a large number of them victims of petrol bomb attacks. A hundred thousand crore taka has been lost due to lost productivity. And despite what some ministers say about the situation being normal, the finance minister has perhaps uttered the truth. The economy is in dire straits and the capital is virtually cut off from the rest of the country. 

To see the youths being made deliberate victims by a political party that claims to be fighting for democracy mixed with the blatant unconcern displayed by the ruling party reduce politics to a calling which the young generation would want to stay away from. I say this fully aware of the flak that this would draw from many who would see this as putting the AL and BNP on the same scale. 

The fact is, a reaction, however abhorrent that might be, cannot be de-linked from the cause of it. While the BNP cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of the mayhem created since January 5, the AL has to share the burden of what has happened by way of violence in the same measure. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that the turmoil is not the result of the ruling party's policy, one of which is to make BNP ineffective in Dhaka city, and flaunts the argument for the public to consume will find few takers in much the same way as the BNP's argument that it is not linked with the current spate of violence unleashed since January 5 would not wash with the public. 

For a political party which, according to some ministers, has been neutered after the January 5 elections, to carry on in this manner when majority of its top central and district level leaders are in jail, speak something of their organisational capability, even if that has been directed wrongly towards violence. And it is not quite an 'outsourced' violence by Jamaat, since nearly 75% of those arrested from in situ in the capital only are BNP activists. And that percentage would be fairly representative of the entire country. 

In a situation where the BNP-led alliance is capable of wreaking continued violence and where the government is totally impervious to the sufferings of the people, and apparently unable to stem the violence, the appeal of the citizen's group to the president, PM and BNP chief was an exhortation to the three to do something to come out of the current situation. Regrettably, that has been summarily dismissed by the PM and other ministers. Not only that, the AL and its allies have painted the protagonists of dialogue as pro-violence. Unfortunately, rejection of any suggestion of dialogue means that, given the government's inability to stem the violence, and with the return of crossfire incidents, the people must brace for an unending cycle of violence.  

The main reason for refusal to entertain any idea of talks with the BNP is that the AL and partners think that there cannot be dialogue with perpetrators of violence, killers and terrorists. 

It is disheartening to hear educated people advocating against AL-BNP dialogue citing quite unrelated incidents of terrorist attacks in the West, particularly referring to the recent Sydney and Paris incidents and how they were handled. However, even if we were to accede that the BNP is all these -- murderers and killers -- so were the BGB (then called BDR) mutineers who were literally escorted like VIPs to, of all the places, the prime minister's secretariat for negotiation. Did we not initiate discussions with the Shanti Bahini? And this process had started in 1986 during the peak of insurgency in the CHT. Offers for peace negotiations and settlements for Vietnam flowed back and forth regularly, even when fighting was at its peak. And only after the Joint Declaration on Peace on December 15, 1993, did the IRA declare a ceasefire in Northern Ireland

A political issue cannot be resolved on the streets. Yes, BNP's policy is blatantly destructive. And their grassroots workers are under tremendous strain to continue with oborodhs and hartals. I also believe that the view of general secretary of Barisal city AL, rooting for dialogue between the two parties, is fairly representative of grassroots AL workers' mind. And if an offer of talks can stop the violence and spare the public then why not.

Please go ahead and stop the violence using the law enforcing agencies. But from what we have seen so far there is no evidence to believe that these agencies are quite up to the task of stopping the violence soon. And the fault is not theirs since they did not have to face such a situation before. But what after violence is stopped by use of force? Can the AL and its partners afford not to address the underlying political issue that has caused the violence to germinate in the first place? 

Most violence stems from political issues and are resolved not by use of force alone but by addressing the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter as it stands now is political. And that is what has to be addressed. And that has to be done through dialogue, and done immediately. The price of not talking will be unimaginable. And the price will have to be paid by the people, who own this land, and not by the political parties who command this land.

The writer is Editor, Oped and Defence & Strategic Affairs, The Daily Star.