Former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s latest attempt to sanitize the 2024 massacre is as cynical as it is cruel. In her interview with The Hindu, she said the state’s response was “proportionate in nature, made in good faith and intended to minimise the loss of life.” Yet the U.N. human rights office estimates 1,400 Bangladeshis were killed, including about 180 children. That is not proportionate. It is butchery.
Those children were not insurgents; they were students with notebooks and dreams, demanding fairness in a broken system. The U.N. report describes what happened next: troops and police using live ammunition, executing unarmed protesters at point-blank range, and torturing detainees. Hasina’s security apparatus turned Dhaka and dozens of campuses into killing fields.
To call that “good faith” is to spit on the graves of the young. Her words reveal a leader who still cannot grasp the scale of her own brutality, or worse, one who can and simply does not care. Bangladesh was not defending itself from invasion; it was being slaughtered by its own government.
Hasina fled on Aug. 5, 2024, but the pain she left behind still stalks the nation. The interim government under Muhammad Yunus has promised reforms, yet justice remains elusive while those who directed the killings remain untouched.
Bangladesh cannot heal without truth. The families of those 1,400 dead, of those 180 children, deserve trials, not platitudes. Until accountability replaces denial, Hasina’s legacy will be written in blood.
History will not remember her as a leader who erred in judgment, but as one who butchered her own citizens and called it proportional.