Social+Media+Ephemera

The social media platforms of facebook and twitter are a rich, dynamic and challenging source of knowledge on the Motijheel matter. These ephemera hang in the air for some time and speak to the individual realities of their authors, repeaters and intended audience.

This account from an Dhaka Medical College Hospital doctor was posted on leader of the opposition Khaleda Zia's Facebook page on 6th May
// "blood ,blood and blood everywhere..........deads carried rushing in emg dept....one after another ............two three at a time.........policed fired rubber bullet directly in the eyes of most victims.....but the question is there are a lot of stab and choping wound...most stabs are one and half inch deep to the surface ....dead in one blow...who did that....police fired in the jugular artery ..spot dead.....one enter throgh mastoid and exit through eye ....it was live bullet....no body knows what to do....we cried like babies.....lord help us..." //

On the other hand. Radwan Mujib Siddiq, the Prime minister's LSE educated nephew and Governance Performance Monitoring Expert at the United Nations Development Programme in Dhaka posted this on 7th May.
 * A Defender of the Regime**

How plausible are the allegations of a 'cover up' coming from senior opposition leaders? A view from a friend who works in media:

// "Thankfully we live in a Bangladesh where no government has the power to impose a media blackout on anything of national importance, and certainly not on numbers shot dead by law enforcers. In fact, we no longer live in a Bangladesh where police can massacre scores of p pl in the night and make their bodies 'disappear' en masse. This may have been possible in the era of dictatorships between 1975-1990, not anymore. Most recently, in the most adverse of circumstances, 2007 -2009, journalists and human rights crusaders have defied curfews and censorship, spy agency detentions and torture, to report the facts. //

//In Bangladesh 10 times out of 10 please trust the mainstream media over social media. In fact, if you dont live in modern-day Syria or Myanmar, that's a maxim to live by. The mainstream media have been reporting the facts all day. The problem is that the FACTS aren't good enough for some who are making up politically expedient fictions to serve their narrow, partisan, power struggles. To suggest that journalists, human rights groups, lawyers, civil society and the government are all complicit in a conspiracy to hide the death toll betrays a sorry ignorance of the ground realities of Bangladesh. //

//Any loss of life through conflict is tragic, and when a state shoots it's own citizens these events should be scrutinised by a public inquest. Let's demand that. Playing politics with the dead bodies and death toll is a cheap and overused tactic in Bangladesh and it's the last thing I expect to encounter from educated and enlightened citizens. Please do look for another version of events always, but please, also hang on to your grasp of reality." //

**The BBC Bangla Service**
==== Arguably, key gatekeepers in the mainstream international media have played an important role in preventing the story from emerging. In this facebook defence of the BBC Bangla Service on the Bangladesh Studies Network group, editor Sabir Mustafa wrote on 15 Audust 2013. ====

//".... far from blocking anything, BBC Bangla was the FIRST media to report eyewitness accounts of Shapla Chattor police ops, at 0630 and 0730 Dhaka time on May 6. The programme also included the FIRST interview with Hefajot leader Junaid Babunagari after the Shapla crackdown. Since then, we have reported every single twists and turns in the this story, including allegations by BNP, further interviews with HI leaders, rep orts by Amnesty, HRW, Odhitar, the lot. But what have not done, is treat doctored and fake social media stuff as authentic. I don't think any responsible media should treat unverified and unverifiable stuff on the internet as 'evidence' of anything. For your information, after intense investigation, HRW has managed to identify just ONE death at Shapla Chattor in the early hours of May 6." //