Again. For the third time this year – and it’s only May – a secular blogger in Bangladesh has been hacked to death with machetes. Ananta Bijoy Das was on his way to work at a bank in Sylhet on Tuesday, May 12, when four men in masks pounced on him and then chased him down the street to chop him with their heavy sharp weapons. They’re such evil sadists that they don’t even have the “mercy” to shoot their victims, but instead choose the most brutal, terrifying, personal way of killing possible.
Das wrote for the blog Mukto-Mona (Free Mind). Mukto-Mona was the brainchild of Avijit Roy, who was hacked to death in Dhaka in February. Das was a Facebook friend of mine, from 2010, and we had a lot of friends in common. He was part of this large global group of freethinkers that we all feel we belong to. He was a comrade, a copain, a colleague; we all get a little bit hacked up in our hearts when the bastards get one of us.
Das wrote mostly about science, but he also wrote a poem in honour of my beloved friend Taslima Nasreen, who herself was forced to flee Bangladesh years ago because of threats. Taslima posted a translation of the poem by Debashish Bhattacharya on her blog yesterday.
The wolves and hyenas of the darkness are prowling over the world
Naked swords in hand, their unconcealed carnal desire dripping off from their eyes and mouths.
Intellectual conceit, under the veneer of fake social awareness, is chewing out
Every issue from big bang to human evolution, global vision .
Alexandria to Nalanda being rampaged and raped by them,
The ‘elders’ are breathing in hatred and violence in their pens,
Blood of the innocent dripping off the shameless swords everywhere.If you violate their fatwa, their red eyes and edicts
You get beheaded in the east west north south wherever you are.
They have bought over all – the arms, muscles, judiciary and the media.
Nevertheless someone or other is lighting the fire somewhere,
The fire of protest, the revolutionary fire which burns off the stinking, old, decomposed beliefs and rituals, ‘sacred’ establishments.
The lighted path travels from Hypatia to Mary, Rokea –
All hail Taslima, salute to you.
There’s nothing productive to say about this nightmare. Reasonable people already know it’s horrific, and unreasonable people won’t listen. Instead of trying to say anything productive I’ll just draw up a partial list of the most recent horrors.
Human Rights Watch put Boko Haram’s body count at over 1000 at the end of March.
Attacks by the Islamist armed group Boko Haram killed more than 1,000 civilians in 2015, based on witness accounts and an analysis of media reports. Boko Haram fighters have deliberately attacked villages and committed mass killings and abductions as their attacks have spread from northeast Nigeria into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger since February.
The number of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq and Syria was over 3000 as of April, according to Newsweek.
The combined number of bodies discovered in ISIS mass graves has surpassed 3,000 after the gruesome extent of the terror group’s mass murder in the Iraqi city of Tikrit was revealed on Tuesday.
A number of mass graves dug by the terror group have been confirmed in both Syria and Iraq, taking the toll from the graves and mass killings to 3,071. The toll does not include individual civilian deaths nor deaths of those killed in clashes with the terror group.
Al-Shabab killed 147 college students in Garissa in northeastern Kenya a few weeks ago. Al Jazeera reported some details:
At least 79 people were also wounded in the attack on the campus, which lies around 200 km away from the border with Somalia.
On Friday, a huge crowd of traumatised and shocked survivors and relatives of those killed or missing gathered at the university gate.
‘I am so worried, I had a son who was among the students trapped inside the college, and since yesterday I have heard nothing,’ said Habel Mutinda, an elderly man, his face streaming with tears.
And of course there was the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, which killed 17 people. There was the attack in Copenhagen which killed two. There was the murder of Avijit Roy and the murder of Washiqur Rahman. There were the three killed in the hostage siege at the Lindt café in Sydney. There are so many it’s hard to keep track of them all. There are bombs at markets in Nigeria that kill many people at random and there are machete attacks in Bangladesh that kill one targeted secular writer …. and then another and then another.