By Khandaker A. Raquib
Last morning, the International Crimes Tribunal assembled to hear charges of enforced disappearance against twelve senior military officers, the majority of whom had already fled the country. Only three generals appeared in person to challenge allegations tied to the Joint Interrogation Cell (JIC), popularly known as Aynaghar, a secretive detention site long rumored to be operated under Bangladesh’s military intelligence the DGFI. The prosecution alleged that twenty-six citizens were forcibly disappeared, illegally detained, and tortured inside this clandestine DGFI-operated site.
Earlier, Chief Prosecutor Tajul Islam began by rendering the JIC not as an abstract site of torture but as a palpable, lived environment. The detention cells, he said, were “small compartments” behind DGFI headquarters, sealed with metal grills, each equipped with surveillance cameras, yet deliberately deprived of light. Loud industrial fans drowned the sound of azaan or public announcements, preventing detainees from identifying their location. Songs were blasted at high volume. Such a description pushed me to rethink the way spaces of extreme confinement remake the prisoner’s sensory world, collapsing time, disorienting perception, and severing the self from recognizable reality. To Guenther (2013), this was the state’s architecture of disappearance, not merely to detain bodies, but to erase orientation, and to dismantle the relationship between the detainee and the world that might remember them.
Yet the sensory regime was not impermeable. Tajul reminded the court that one detainee, Lt. Col. Hasinur Rahman, had managed to identify the site and later publicly name it, an eruption of what Michel Foucault once called subjugated knowledges, those buried and politically disqualified truths that re-emerge to destabilize institutional narratives of secrecy and legitimacy (Foucault 1976). In naming the place, Hasinur had disrupted the secrecy that undergirded the JIC’s power; his testimony formed a counter-archive, a revolutionary document against the state’s efforts to render the space unknowable.
From this architectural narrative, the prosecution moved seamlessly into a juridical one. Tajul charted a chain of command that reached the highest levels of political authority, alleging that enforced disappearances were carried out under the direct knowledge, and sometimes instruction of the former Prime Minister. This articulation of superior command responsibility reflected the ways global legal norms have circulated into domestic legal spaces. Kathryn Sikkink’s notion of the justice cascade has prompted a rethink of how national courts increasingly adopt international legal frameworks to redefine state violence not as an internal excess but as a crime within a global moral community (Sikkink 2011). In framing these generational disappearances through global doctrines, the prosecution was not merely telling a story, they were also rescaling the grammar of accountability in Bangladesh.
The defense, however, offered a contrasting ethnography, this one of bureaucracy. Advocate Azizur Dulu invoked an internal Army Court of Inquiry that had blamed eight mid-ranking officers, none of whom overlapped with the three present defendants. He emphasized DGFI’s internal compartmentalization between Counter Terror and Counter Intelligence. Political intelligence; each bureau siloed, each insulated from the operational tasks of the other. His argument, in effect, drew on the logic of bureaucratic fragmentation that Matthew Hull describes as essential to how modern states distribute agency and responsibility (Hull 2012). In this defense narrative, it was not the absence of violence that was asserted, but the absence of linkages, the state broken down into functional modules, each too bounded to be blamed for the acts of others.
When Prosecutor Shyikh Mahdi responded, he did not simply dispute the factual claims; he intervened at the level of conceptual framing. Enforced disappearance, he argued, is not a single act but a continuous crime, one that begins at the moment a person is removed from legal protection and ends only upon reappearance. The temporality of the crime, he suggested, makes partial or intermittent involvement legally meaningful. This view aligns with the jurisprudence emerging from Latin America and with Veena Das’s broader insight that violence is lived not in discrete events but in “the descent of the extraordinary into the ordinary,” unfolding across time, bodies, and everyday relations (Das 2007). Mahdi’s argument thus challenged the defense’s bureaucratic time-stamp logic; disappearance cannot be cut into segments without also cutting the victim’s lived experience.
Outside the courtroom, journalists pressed Mahdi: Bangladesh has no established jurisprudence for disappearance, shouldn’t caution prevail? Mahdi’s response inverted the terms: “This is opportunity.” It was a telling moment. In it one could hear the echoes of Kamari Clarke’s description of juridical globalization, where local courts actively seize global norms not as constraints but as resources for reimagining political possibility (Clarke 2019). For Mahdi, Bangladesh was not lagging behind the world; it stood at the threshold of its own legal reinvention, drawing from Argentina, Chile, and post-war Germany to craft a new doctrinal terrain.
What struck me most as an ethnographer was how the courtroom became a dense field of epistemic struggle. The prosecution mobilized survivor testimonies, international legal language, and sensory descriptions of torture. The defense mobilized bureaucratic documents, inquiries, and organizational charts. Both sides were, in effect, vying to define which archive would count as truth.
In this struggle, the JIC itself emerged as the central ethnographic object, not just a building, but a node within a broader apparatus of disappearance, secrecy, and administrative control. It was a space built to obscure time, mute sound, and sever relational ties. It was also, paradoxically, a space whose existence could only be known because subjugated testimonies and emergent legal frameworks converged to make it visible.
