Images

The Feb28.info initiative gathered a gallery of 313 gruesome images of the results of the government brutality of 5th and 6th May 2013.

You may peruse the Flickr here, but you will need to adjust your safe viewing filter. Metadata analysis contradicts the government's claim of a 10 minute 'flushing' operation. All life is sacred, and these images include those of many people who have left this world in some of the most grotesque ways imaginable. Behind each picture is a person, a family and more.

These images are snapshots of a dynamic situation, taken mainly by camera phones by people involved with the protest. As we might expect, the government, security services and ultra nationalist Shahbag movement have rubbished the pictures.

The the National Parliament, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed ridiculed the protesters,

//"They smeared red dye on their bodies and lay there....When the police went there and called them, they suddenly got up and ran for it." //

Fearful survivors of massacre are known to play dead if they think it will help their chances of survival.

The Commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, Benazir Ahmed laughed off allegations of massacre on television, dismissing the footage circulating widely on social media as the work of "Photoshop". A high flying English Literature graduate and veteran of lucrative peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, Ahmed unfortunately seems to learnt all the wrong lessons from his time in the Balkans. His conduct, decisions and command responsibility will no doubt be under increasing scrutiny as investigations proceed. A native of the prime minister's home district, Gopalganj, the first bastion of the Awami League party, it has been alleged that thousands of people from the locality have been recruited into the state security services.


 * Media Manipulation**

While the propaganda work by many young activists aligned with or sympathetic to the opposition misprojected the protest as an effort to unseat the government, forensic image analysis of the Feb28.info archive is long overdue. Preliminary non-expert analysis suggests that they provide evidence for a tremendous loss of life.

The role of key media actors, in suppressing the news is important to remember and put under the microscope. Allegations of conservative religious scholars and students indulging in wanton vandalism and burning of Qur'ans were used to justify government clampdown, and mainstream media journalists like the Daily Star's Sharier Khan filed a crucial false report claiming his reporting team were present throughout the joint forces operation and saw five bodies. This narrative broadly resembles the journalistic reproduced by the BBC Bangla service's editor Sabir Mustafa, who worked at the Daily Star previously to joining the BBC. The extent of media manipulation over this incident was discussed at length by Farhad Mazhar, who has himself been harrassed by the authorities.

As we see in the selection of tweets below, this report and others, including a statement extracted under torture from Hefazot e Islam's #2 leader Junaid Babunagari were used to counter allegations of massacre online as well as in print media.