Down Memory Lane: The 5 August Coup And The Calculated Overthrow Of Sheikh Hasina-Part: 2

A Betrayal of Justice - The Great Farce of July 2024 or The Brutal Charade of July–August 2024!!!

I have never engaged in active politics in my lifetime, nor have I ever sought affiliation with any socio-cultural organisation. Nor shall I, until the very end of my days. Yet since 1966, I have been a vigilant political observer, scrutinising the ebbs and flows of our national history from the ground. In 1968, I renounced forever any vestige of loyalty to the hollow concept of Pakistan. From 1966 onward, I have remained a steadfast supporter of the Awami League and of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Father of our Nation.

Professionally, I have been serving within private business firms for more than half a century. In the quiet hours outside work, I have written countless articles in English on diverse subjects, both for newspapers within Bangladesh and for publications abroad. My words are never whimsical—they emerge from the crucible of lived experience.

In the turbulent days of early July 2024, I frequently walked through Shahbagh, Dhaka University, Nilkhet, Mirpur, Shamoli, Sundarban Road, and other areas. At Shahbagh, one afternoon, I witnessed a small so-called protest against the quota system. The sight before me was grotesque: ragged street urchins, fanatical madrasa students, hardened vagabonds, a scattering of students from Dhaka University, private universities, and colleges—an unruly rabble dragged there for hire. I am convinced that the poisonous hand of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al-Badr mass murderers of 1971, and their sinister heirs, was at work behind this spectacle.

What enraged me beyond words was their sacrilege: they desecrated our sacred National Flag—trampling it under their feet, some even sitting upon it playing cards—while chanting at the top of their lungs: “Muktijoddhader gale juta maro, tale, tale!” (“Strike the Freedom Fighters with shoes, down, down!”). As a frontline fighter of 1971, I felt my blood boil. During the Bangladesh’s liberation war, I wielded a sub-machine gun against the marauding Pakistani army and their local collaborators, especially the Jamaati Al-Badr butchers. At that moment in Shahbagh, had such a weapon been in my hands again, I would not have hesitated to fire upon these vile miscreants. Though they were of my grandchildren’s age, I felt they were not of Bangladesh at all. They were the poisonous spawn of Pakistan. Such treacherous creatures have no rightful place in the Bangladesh that was won at the cost of rivers of blood in 1971.

One day, I returned to my alma mater, Dhaka University—where I had been a student more than fifty-four years ago—out of a deep yearning to see the spirit of student activism with my own eyes. To my unspeakable dismay, I found some of them raising the shameful chant: “Amra shobai razakar!”—a deliberate perversion of a statement by Hon’ble Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. That such words could echo through the very campus which once birthed the thunder of our independence struggle was to me a wound deeper than any blade.

In July 2024 a curfew was declared, and the Bangladesh Army patrolled our streets — yet I spent those days walking the roads, lanes and byways of Dhaka to see with my own eyes what was truly happening. What I witnessed was not a revolution. It was not an uprising. It was a betrayal of justice: a theatrical farce staged by the American deep state CIA in league with their direful confederates to install an unlawful puppet regime in Bangladesh headed by Muhammad Yunus to serve their geo-political interests fitfully. 

Their skullduggeries were the fruits of a calculated, cynical abuse of power — a deliberate assault upon due process, human dignity, and the rule of law. But the truth sits deeper still, embedded in the dark heart of a conspiracy. Without justice, a nation is only dust scattered by the winds of time — a hollow echo of what it might have been.

I reiterate I do not speak from gossip or rumor. Since 1966 I have been a keen political observer at the grassroots. During the tumult of July and August 2024 I stood among crowds in Dhaka and watched the so-called “anti-quota” protests unfold. Let there be no mistake: this was neither people’s power nor spontaneous dissent. It was a sinister, well-orchestrated campaign of violence and sabotage — a theatre of terror whose designers I hold to be international and domestic adversaries of our sovereign will.

Cloaked in secrecy, nearly 98% percent of the so-called protestors were plucked from madrasahs, urban slums, and the margins of impoverished communities. Their familiar garb — pajama, panjabi, and cap — was stripped away, replaced with Western attire to disguise them as the face of a modern, spontaneous movement. Yet behind this carefully contrived façade lurked the murderous hand of Jamaat-Shibir’s blood-stained operatives, preying upon their own people with diabolical cunning. They weaponised grief, choreographed anarchy, and unleashed a campaign of slander and sabotage aimed squarely at dismantling the legitimate government of HPM Sheikh Hasina.

Yet Sheikh Hasina remains the lawful Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Despite their ruthless plots, she has not yielded her mandate.

If the perpetrators — the murderers and their various death squads — are held to account, if interrogations are pursued with unflinching rigor, the naked truth of their monstrous deeds will emerge. The massacres and maiming that stained those dark days were not accidents of fate; they were deliberate crimes against our nation.

Western media have reported that certain U.S. agencies, since 2018, organised and trained special forces allegedly intended to remove Sheikh Hasina from power. What I observed suggested nothing less than a meticulously prepared, multi-billion-dollar blueprint: a coalition, in my estimation, linking American intelligence, sympathetic domestic actors, Islamist reactionaries and Pakistan’s ISI — converging with local political saboteurs to engineer a coup.

From my vantage, the CIA was the principal mastermind — operating at a distance yet pulling strings on the ground. The ISI supplied shadowy assistance. Inside the country, influential figures and discredited political currents conspired with militarised elements to topple democratic rule. Money, foreign training and a web of false narratives made the overthrow of a legitimate government possible on 5 August 2024 — an act that I view as illegal, unlawful and unconstitutional.

The tragic irony is bitter: the Bangladesh we forged through unimaginable sacrifice in 1971 now teeters on the verge of being refashioned into something unrecognisable — an Islamist-tilted polity that would resurrect the two-nation theory we buried in our sacred soil in 1971. These grim actors aspire to transform our republic into a terrorised state, a banana republic ruled by fear and fanaticism.

After Sheikh Hasina’s fall, the anti-liberation forces — the heirs of 1971’s Jamaat-e-Islami mass-murderers, their successors, and the putative political factions aligned with them — launched a sham narrative designed to disgrace the prime minister, denigrate the Awami League’s achievements and erode the very foundations of 1971’s hard-won legitimacy. They trafficked in lies and theatrical outrage, trading in the currency of chaos.

At long last, Gen Waker like a perfidious man — who on 5 August 2024 surrendered our nation into the hands of the CIA-ISI-Yunus assemblage and their cronies — now offers sermons to the public. Because of him and his cohorts, the glorious Bangladesh we reclaimed at the bay of blood has been hollowed out by forces hostile to our liberation. His name is already shrouded in ignominy; history will remember him for his treachery.

We must not accept this fate. The spirit of 1971 demands unyielding resistance. We owe it to the martyrs, to the mothers who lost sons, to the thousands who bled for our flag, to resist every attempt to erase the truth of our liberation. The struggle now is to protect the memory and the institutions birthed by that sacrifice — to restore justice, reclaim sovereignty, and preserve the Bangladesh we fought so fiercely to create in 1971. 

This coup is no anomaly—it is a page from the CIA’s well-thumbed playbook. As Senator Frank Church once warned, “Deception is a state of mind, and the mind of the State.” And so, the global media, manipulated and maligned, twists the truth. Today, in the eyes of many, “Deception, thy name is CIA.”

The jest now rings true: If the Mafia didn’t do it, the CIA probably did. Bangladesh, in 2024, became the stage of such a sinister script. The so-called Interim Government is but a marionette—the strings held in Langley, the voice that of Yunus.

July and August 2024 unfolded as a tragic farce—predictable, yet no less devastating. Morality, legality, and reason were cast aside, replaced with violence, lies, and betrayal.

Thousands were killed, wounded, or vanished in a campaign of terror. Yet the blame, grotesquely, was heaped upon Hasina—so that those monstrous heirs to anti-liberation forces might seize the throne. Even Brigadier General Sakhawat Hossain, the first Home Affairs Advisor under Yunus, admitted publicly that the fallen were felled by 7.62 mm rifles—military weapons, not police issue, acquired through clandestine arms deals.

In a rare moment of candor, even Yunus confessed—at the Clinton Foundation in New York—that this “revolution” was not spontaneous. It was scripted, rehearsed, and ruthlessly executed.

The curtain has fallen, but the story is not over.

We, the boys of 1971, will not yield. We have seen tyranny before. We have buried the martyrs. And we know: as long as we remember, as long as we resist, Bangladesh will never be lost.

(TO BE CONTINUED…)

By Anwar A. Khan 

×