Hasina government : ambitious endeavor to record interviews with participants in the 1971 Liberation War is abandoned in Dhaka Report

Hasina government: According to reports, a Rs. 50-crore project that the now-deposed Sheikh Hasina administration had started to document the history of Bangladesh’s Liberation War of 1971—which included video interviews with over 15,000 participants—will now be put on hold.

According to a story published on Wednesday in Prothom Alo, a renowned daily in Bangladesh, the present government in Dhaka has no intentions to preserve the interviews, and the agency working on the project will not be compensated.

Officials informed the newspaper that they discovered anomalies in the film and that the recorded conversations did not accurately portray the “exact history” of the Liberation War.

The article said that since the recordings did not accurately capture the experience of the liberation fighters, the tapes were deleted out of concern that they would give the next generation a bad view of the Liberation War.

The Awami League administration started the initiative in 2022, according to the publication, so that those who fought in the 1971 Liberation War may tell future generations about their experiences.

‘Birer Kante Bir Gatha (Heroes Voice Heroic Tales)’ was anticipated to cost Rs. 49.57 crore (Bangladesh) to execute. It had 16 films, 80,000 YouTube videos, and 80,000 documentaries based on interviews with liberation fighters that were expected to be finished by December 2024.

In August of that year, a student rebellion resulted in the overthrow of the Awami League administration. In May 2023, the project was completed when the Ministry of Liberation War at the time signed a contract with Management and Training International Limited (MTI).

The agreement called for interviewees to answer 19 questions, such as which sector a freedom warrior fought in, whose orders he followed during the conflict, where and how he was throughout the nine months of the Liberation War, if he was wounded, and so on.

According to the investigation, project administrators said that the deleted footage did not fit the required standards. According to reports, the contractor disregarded the interim government’s request to cease producing movies, and as a result, their invoices were not paid, project director Afrazur Rahman told Prothom Alo.

After a committee was established to check 14,640 films and advised the administration not to accept the assignment, the decision was made to discontinue it. According to a review committee assessment cited by Prothom Alo, the captured video pictures were of very low quality.

Additionally, it discovered that the designated organization was unable to accurately portray the Liberation War’s actual history during the interviews.

Future generations will see the Liberation War negatively if these films are kept in archives. According to the research, “paying the bill against these videos will be a waste of government money.”

When asked what would happen to the cancelled interviews, Prothom Alo cited anonymous Ministry of Liberation War Affairs officials who said that the recordings would not be kept in the film archives since they did not accurately portray the Liberation War.

Management and Training International Limited (MTI) assistant program manager Ajmal Kabir Rabbi told the newspaper that they believe the decision to remove the recordings was “intentional.” “If our previous 12,788 interviews were of good quality, how can the next 14,640 interviews be bad?” Rabbi said. “This is an act of retaliation by the current interim administration,” he said.