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CAMPOS' HISTORY OF THE PORTUGUESE
Spotlight on the Portuguese in Bengal-IV
Prologue and selection by Raana Haider
From: 'The Bengalas'
The Portuguese historians dwell much on the wickedness of the "Bengalas." De Barros remarks: "the people natural to the land of Bengal, are mostly Hindu, weak in fighting but the most malicious and treacherous in the whole East; so that to injure a man anywhere (sic) it is enough to say he is a Bengala.* (*Footnote: Whiteaway says in his History of Rise of Portuguese Power in India, that a Portuguese description of the Bengalis calls them "False and thieves, people who get up quarrels as an excuse for robbery.") The Portuguese historians seems to have erred in the application of the word "Bengalas", whom the Portuguese in India referred to as treacherous in the reports sent to Portugal. By "Bengalas" the Portuguese in India did not only mean the Hindus but the Muhammadan rulers of Bengal who were indeed most malicious and treacherous especially towards the Portuguese whose earliest expeditions they had either treacherously put an end to or tried their best to do so in every covert manner. Hence de Barros who had never come to India probably confounded "Bengalas" with the "native people of Bengal" and ascribed to the latter the character which the rulers of Bengal possessed...
From: 'Geography of Bengal'
The geography of Bengal was not exactly what it is today. It was an irony of fate that in India towns and cities should have risen and fallen, depending as they did on the fickleness of a river that shifted its course here and there; or on the whims of a ruler who fixed his heart on a newer spot; or still more on the grim destinies which in every age create kingdoms and as quickly destroy them.
From: 'Chittagong'
When the Portuguese came to Bengal, Chittagong was its chief port, and the main gateway the royal capital Gaur. Its geographical position lent it importance Situated as it is at the mouth of the Meghna, this port was most convenient for navigation. The Meghna was the principal route to Gaur, the other being up the Hooghly. With the fall of Gaur, Chittagong began to decline, and trade was diverted to Satgaon, which in its turn was supplanted by Hooghly. Chittagong was always a bone of contention between the Rajas of Bengal, Arakan and Tippera, who strove for supremacy over the seaport until the Mughal conquest of Bengal. All the Portuguese commanders that came to Bengal first entered Chittagong. In fact to go to Bengal meant to go to Chittagong. It is the "city of Bengala" referred to in the early Portuguese writings. They name it Porto Grande (great port) in contradistinction to their Porto Pequeno (small port) in Satgaon. Hooghly eventually came to be known as Porto Pequeno.
First settlements in Chittagong and Satgaon, 1536-1537
However, finding himself secure from the menace of Sher Shah, he (Mahmud Shah) changed his mind as to allowing the Portuguese to build fortresses in Chittagong and Satgaon but he permitted Affonso de Mello to build factories and offered to give them custom-houses. He, indeed, appointed Nuno Fernandez Freire the chief of the custom-house of Chittagong, granted him land with many houses empowering him to realize rent from the Moors and Hindus who lived there, and gave him many other privileges over the people. The custom-house of Satgaon which was less in importance than that of Chittagong, was given to Joao Correa. The people were indeed surprised to see that the King had given the Portuguese so much power and such a firm footing in Bengal. This was the first establishment of the Portuguese in Bengal, almost simultaneously in Chittagong and Satgaon...
From: 'Chittagong, 1537'
From the earliest Chittagong was the greatest harbour of Bengal, as already stated, and it continued to be so, as long as the far-famed Gaur remained the royal capital of Bengal and one of the queens of Eastern cities.* (*Footnote: Camoes thus speaks of Chittagong, Lusiadas, Canto X, St. cxxi.
See Cathigam, amid the highest high
In Bengal province, proud of varied store
Abundant, but behold how placed the Post
Where sweeps the shore-line towards the southing Coast.
From: 'Capture of the Fort of Chittagong'
Towards the last two decades of the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese settlement in Satgaon was flourishing so well and the Portuguese were in high favour with Akbar and Jahangir, the Chittagong settlement was equally well progressing. The Mughal authority had not, however, yet extended to Chittagong side. The King of Arkakan who held it, was favourably disposed towards the Portuguese. The Portuguese, it appears, had a skirmish with him and one Antonio de Souza Godinho about 1590 had captured by force of arms the fort of Chittagong and made the island of Sandwip tributary to it...
'The Sites of the Portuguese Settlements'
Old Chittagong or Chaatigam of the Portuguese writers was, according to de Barros's map (1540), Bleav's map (1650), Broucke's map (1660) and other old maps, on the northern bank of the Karnaphuli river almost to its mouth. It is not the same, therefore, as the modern town of Chittagong which is situated ten and half miles to the east of the mouth of the Karnaphuli. Strangely enough in 1598 Van Linschoten* (*Footnote: Linschoten, Hakl. Ed. Vol. I p. 94. "From this River Eastward 50 miles lyeth the towne of Chatigam which is the chief town of Bengala.") The first Portuguese settlement, founded by Affonso de Mello in 1537, was obviously in the real Chatigam as marked by de Barros in his map. There is no trace left of the Portuguese factory, their custom-house and their "circuit of houses." But the relics of their later establishment still survive...
From: 'Cidade de Bengala'
In the literature of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and especially in the Portuguese writers, there are frequent references to a "City of Bengala," which is generally supposed to have been Chittagong. Varhtema as early as 1510 speaks of taking his route to this City of Bengala though according to Garcia de Orta, he never came to Bengal. Duarte de Barbosa, who was one of the earliest Portuguese to write a geographical account of the African and India coasts says "...this sea (Bay of Bengal) is a gulf which enters towards the north and its inner extremity there is a very great city inhabited by Moors which is called Bengala, with a very good harbour."...
From: 'Dacca'
Situated on the banks of the Bouriganga, or as Manrique says, on the banks of the famous and at that place fertilizing Ganges, Dacca commanded an extensive trade and was the resort of many merchants especially since Islam Khan made it the capital of Bengal in 1608. At the time of the Portuguese settlement in about 1580, Dacca did not hold this proud position though it was noted for its rich industries.
[To be continued]
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Candid thoughts
Mohiuddin Babar
The sports arena in the country remained under the influence of cricket for quite some time. The national cricket team's sensational entry into the elite club of test playing nations in late nineties baptized cricket almost as a national game with total attention at all level - from state to local-focused with increasing emphasis on development of the game. Money poured in heavily from both public and private sectors. However, in measuring the success of the investments, it is difficult to come up with any commendable observation as the performance reports of the national team contains more red marks than positive notes. The cricket enthusiasm over the years eclipsed the once popular game football to the extent that even the traditional seat of the game was once under severe threat of being relocated.
Football, however, has made a dramatic come back as a well loved game. The Super Cup tournament that ended last week clearly manifested the hidden love for the game. As the tournament with a tag of surprisingly high money value was a big bang. The presence of capacity crowd at the stadium and the bannered attention given by the media were like volcanic eruption of passionate attachment to the game.
Indeed, football has been popular sport in this land since long. It was in the early forties when it emerged as a well-liked game in Dhaka. The historic Paltan Maidan, at that time a vast open ground in the outskirt of the old city, became the hub of the game. The Ronaldsay Shield was the first tournament during the mid forties that succeeded in creating lot of ripple effects in taking the game to far and wide in the country. In the fifties, the Aga Khan Gold Cup football tournament turned out to be a big football fiesta. Since then, football remained pegged to local leagues, mainly due to dearth of financial support and proper patronization. There was no big news until the national team won the SAFF championship in 2003 but the excitement chilled down fast in the face of some notable achievements by the cricket team at that time.
The Super Cup tournament has shown that football still commands huge popular support - almost passionate. This subdued passion could have been unearthed long time back if the Football Federation had attended it properly, earnestly and professionally. Quite unfortunately, organizations like the sports federations were never spared from being politicized and that was the root cause for the loss of popularity in the game.
The recent report of discontentment of the just hired Brazilian coach at the lack of minimum kits and gears needed for training the national team speaks of the gaps. The coach was certainly starting from the scratch and he found the failings right there.
Football is a popular game that does not call for big investment. It can be played easily, anywhere, any season. Above all, it is a game of strong physical skills but more importantly, it is a source of recreation for tens of thousands of people, both in the urban as well as in the rural areas. Let the whistle blow for a massive football campaign through out the country.
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WRIGGLE OUT CONFESSIONS
Confession under gruesome torture
Maswood Alam Khan
I am not sure whether the former US President George W. Bush Jr. was genetically sadist or not. But it is known to all and sundry that President Bush vehemently refused to put an end to torture in the name of civilization. He vetoed legislation put to him by the Congress that would have outlawed the use of waterboarding (a method of torture approved by CIA) and other controversial enhanced interrogation techniques. You are tied to a board and your ankles, wrists, chest and head are strapped firmly down. Water pours onto your face, flows up your nose, into your mouth, down your throat and fills your lungs and stomach. This is waterboarding. The CIA uses waterboarding to try to extract information from detainees in the 'war on terror'. President George Bush thought it was a 'necessary tool'.
It was during the presidency of George Bush when the world came to learn about the horrendous stories of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide perpetuated by the US Army and their allied agencies on the prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It was also during the tenure of the same US President when one Khalid Sheikh Mohammad along with four codefendants after undergoing daily torture and starvation for six years in the US-controlled Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba pleaded guilty; they knew their confession means their sure death sentence. Still, they appealed to allow them to confess that they themselves had orchestrated the Sep 11, 2002 terror attack on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people, asking a military judge to take their guilty pleas at once as they said: "We don't want to waste time". He even confessed to planning a terror attack on Plaza Bank of Washington--a target that didn't even exist until 3 years after his capture. He was a living victim of extreme torture!
Confessing a crime (not committed) and then embracing the death penalty (not justified) on the part of a suspect under continuous torture is tantamount to a freedom from a hell, a heavenly relief from an unbearable anguish, or a blissful resurrection from agonizing sufferings a tortured man earnestly craves to find eternal peace in death.
Our Home minister the other day told the parliament that six hundred and eighty persons died in the custody of law enforcement agencies after 2002. They died while lawmen had launched drives to arrest them or recover illegal arms from their possessions. Many of them reportedly died of heart attacks and many had committed suicides.
"One more BDR soldier dies" became a familiar headline in newspapers during the interrogation sessions that took place immediately after the BDR carnage in Pilkhana in the last week of February. Newspaper readers whispered to each other to know why BDR soldiers were dying so frequently either of heart attacks or from suicides! Morgue sources quoting inquest reports said that there were marks of blood clots on both hands and legs and also on the back of some of the deceased making it palpably clear that the BDR soldiers before succumbing to heart attacks or committing suicide had undergone some physical tortures. Or, who knows, some of them had perhaps dropped dead while being flogged!
As usual, after autopsy, the bodies of the deceased are to be handed over to the families and the families have to carry the heavy burden of the dead bodies to their respective village homes. Children, wives and parents of the deceased unfurl the dead bodies, find the injury marks on the bodies of their beloved, look askance at the bearers who brought the corpses home and let out their high-pitched wails. After cursing the unknown perpetrators for a while they get too fatigued to cry and the dead are customarily buried. "How and why have they died?" remains for ever an unanswered question buried in their minds. But, the authority concerned owes the orphaned children and widowed wives an explanation about the deaths. If the aggrieved are denied the explanation the nation must not condone the concerned authority's silence to the widowed and to the orphaned.
We hate and despise with every fiber of our being those members of BDR and their abettors who perpetuated the genocide upon the unarmed and innocent Army officers and their family members and we earnestly demand exemplary punishment of the perpetrators in the quickest possible time. But, we cannot tolerate an attempt to justify torture based upon "an eye for an eye" rationale before the alleged are convicted by a court of law.
Unless there is convincing evidence the law enforcing agencies have got no right to put a suspect in any interrogation where s/he should feel a little discomfort. It has been proven by the criminologists that torture doesn't work well in extracting confession of a crime. In the first place, people being tortured will say anything to get respite from it. Secondly, people who are willing to kill themselves for their faiths or beliefs historically don't react to torture. Thirdly, countries that used torture to gain intelligence have found that it is useless and in most cases misleading.
By speaking against torture as a means of interrogation I don't want to mean that someone like Syed Tawhidul Alam, deputy assistant director of B.D.R, the prime rebellion suspect, should be given free boarding in a suite of Hotel Sonargaon and fed the best available food to get information from him. There are scores of ways, especially new methods of detecting crimes and identifying criminals based on forensic science, which can help our law enforcement agencies to control crime by bringing the real criminals to books. The use of torture does not increase our security. Torture only serves to perpetrate violence and itself is a form of terror. There has of course to be interrogation to extract information from suspects being held on remand. When interrogation fails to produce any desired result, the suspects may also be made to undergo what psychologists call "white torture", a type of extremely painful psychological torture that entails sensory deprivation and isolation. But, under no circumstances a suspect or an alleged criminal, even if he is caught red-handed, should undergo beastly methods of torture like applying electric shocks to victims' genitals, heads, ears and legs or suspending the victim from the ceiling by the legs or pulling the suspect's nails by a pair of pliers or keeping the person naked in the cold etc. And if a suspect, may God forbid, dies as a short-term or a long-term result of physical or psychological torture the victim's relations must be given the maximum latitude of legal shelter to charge the law enforcing custodian with cold-headed murder.
Bangladesh is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degradation Treatment or Punishment (In short Convention Against Torture or CAT) which is also signed by the United States and by over 140 countries. It is ludicrous to think that we claim ourselves as a civilized nation when members of our law enforcement agencies are still dependent on crude tortures and are yet to be trained to treat suspects with civility.
Incidents of mutilated victims, encounter killings, alleged "suicides" in police stations and disappearances are routine in our country. Over the last few decades, there has been mounting evidence that torture has become an institutionalized practice in our society. Many hundreds if not thousands have died because of torture in the past few years. Notwithstanding our country's membership with CAT, torture continues to be rampant in Bangladesh and an integral part of our administrative system--a disgraceful legacy we have borrowed from our past colonial rulers and a black legacy we are leaving behind for our future generations.
Impunity, granted by some loopholes in our Criminal Penal Codes, remains the single most important factor that greatly contributes to torture being inflicted by the members of our police as well as armed forces who are practically immunized by our domestic legislations. It is difficult to imagine that a victim, living under constant fear of intimidation and retaliation by the law enforcing agencies, in spite of having the necessary material resources will ever pluck courage to file in a court of law a criminal suit against a police official or an officer belonging to RAB or Army.
God saved America through Americans electing Obama as their new President. "Civilized" Americans could be yet more inhuman, yet more infamous than the bloody Hitlerites had another Bush been elected last year to carry on torturing the innocent. Bygone however is bygone. Let us forget the past. Let us look ahead. Let there be an end to torture. We no more want to hear shouts and groans of the tortured constantly emanating from the torture chambers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or in Bangladesh. We no more want to see families bearing the dead bodies of victims killed in extrajudicial executions. And let us hope the interrogators' anger is soon changed to grief and despair on hearing the groans of the tortured and on seeing the blank expression of the orphans who lost their fathers at the hands of extrajudicial executioners.
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