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On July 10, Shafikul got his Korean visa and finished all necessary formalities from Bangladeshi authorities prior to his departure. On July 14, he was ready to fly. Shafikul went to the Zia International Airport in Dhaka in the evening, as his departure was scheduled for early morning on July 15. He got his boarding pass from Dragon Air.
But when he went to the Immigration Police Desk at the airport, his dream began to fade. The police began harassing Shafikul and finally seized his passport, saying he needed "clearance from his permanent home address" before he could depart. The poor man could do nothing but return home.
After a couple of weeks Shafikul managed to get his passport back from the Special Branch of the Police with a "no objection" report. By that time, the date to report for his job in South Korea had already passed. Only prompt and effective intervention from the high-level foreign and expatriate affairs ministries of Bangladesh could save the situation.
There has been no report of action against the police officers who were responsible for harassing Shafikul – raising the same old question about the authorities' passion for impunity. Moreover, there should be an explanation from the authorities as to what grounds the Immigration Police had for seeking clearance from the permanent address, which should have been checked prior to the issuance of a passport.
Who will compensate Shafikul for the great loss he has suffered?
There is no question that the Immigration Police of Bangladesh are among the worst of their kind in the world. This writer had some experience with them while flying from Dhaka to the Indian city of Varanasi via the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, a few months back. A police officer at the airport immigration desk asked my destination. I replied, "Varanasi." The police officer then asked me to show my visa, and I showed him the Indian visa in my passport. The officer asked, "How come you have a visa for Kolkata and want to visit another country?" I was speechless!
I explained to the officer that Kolkata and Varanasi are two different cities in India, not different states at all; however, it did not work. Another officer was called to deal with the matter and found it a very complicated case. Then, a higher-ranking police officer got involved, but also failed to resolve the matter.
The whole experience was unbelievable. The police spent about an hour, keeping me waiting here and there and moving all around the airport. At one stage, I told the police officers that they should have basic knowledge about the countries and international airline routes if they were going to work at an international airport, and that they should stop wasting people's time and energy in such a way.
This comment was taken as an insult to the police officers, who became annoyed and asked, "How dare you insult police officers like us?" I was able to escape from them only by threatening to call my friends in the police department – their superior officers.
After being warned to mind my manners with the police in future, I was allowed to catch my flight – which was two hours delayed, as most Bangladeshi airlines habitually are. However, the police officers were still not convinced about the status of Varanasi, whether it was an independent state or a city in India.
There are hundreds of similar experiences that Bangladeshis face regularly at the hands of the police. Government officials, in their speeches, frequently ask the people to cooperate with the police. But as long as they remain repressive and counterproductive, overburdening the people with unnecessary miseries, the police do not deserve cooperation.
It is the police who need to be educated to radically change their attitude. The authorities must punish those who abuse their power to harass citizens, and open channels for victims of abuse to get redress from the perpetrators. The people will automatically start cooperating with the police when the force becomes civilized and trustworthy.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
