Each day felt like 10 in the normal world: Michael Chakma freed from Aynaghor
Ever since ethnic minority rights activist Michael Chakma was abducted in 2019, many feared he was dead. His family even conducted funeral rituals. On 7 August, Michael emerged as a free man
When his captors woke him up in the middle of the night, handcuffed and blindfolded, and took him to a car, Michael Chakma knew, finally, they were going to kill him. His five years of life incarcerated in secret dark prisons was coming to an end.
The loneliness will also end with this death, he thought.
Several hours into the ride, his captors changed cars. He sensed a different group of people were now carrying him to his final destination.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
The life he lived in the last five years – if you may call it life at all – was all about breathing, spending day after day in secluded dark rooms. He knew all along that today or tomorrow this day would come. The need to keep him alive would come to an end.
So, he didn't have much to do or say. An ethnic minority rights activist, Michael learned long ago that his life was challenging and the price of his activism was high.
But when the car reached an area between Chattogram and Khagrachari, the captors said they were releasing him.
"I was surprised but I didn't believe them." Michael kept his silence.
"Sometimes I felt death was far better than this. Living was all about breathing – nothing else was there in life. You don't have contact with any person in the world. No matter how much I try, no words can express what it was like there," Michael said.
Then the captors asked if he had eaten anything. He didn't. "Don't worry, you may have lunch at your home," the captors told him.
"I thought they were lying and going to kill me," Michael said.
After releasing him in a teak forest, they said, "We will shoot if you untie your hands and unfold your eyes before half an hour."
Michael waited, still convinced that the fateful bullet would pierce him any moment.
But it didn't.
"Until I could open my eyes, and saw them gone, I thought I was about to be a victim of crossfire," he said. "But when I opened my eyes, I saw the sky for the first time in five years."
Ever since Michael was abducted in 2019, many feared he was dead. His family even conducted funeral rituals in his memory.
But he was alive in dark cells, moved from cell to cell several times – but each cell was equally dark, small and lonely. Every day, he lived knowing that the end was all but confirmed.
Five years is a long time.
"It was inhumane, unimaginable. It was dark like a grave. Spending a day down there was like living 10 days outside. No one can practically imagine it unless it is forced upon them," Michael said.
Ever since he was released, Michael has been interviewed by several television news channels and newspapers. He talked and talked. But still, ask him anything, and he never gets tired of answering it.
In the past five years – which in Michael's estimation felt like 50 years in the normal world – he couldn't talk.
"Sometimes I felt death was far better than this. Living was all about breathing – nothing else was there in life. You don't have contact with any person in the world. No matter how much I try, no words can express what it was like there," Michael said.
There was also no way to understand the difference between day and night in most of those secret prisons, if not all.
It was difficult to set the body clock. So, he set the clock as per meal hours. When they served breakfast, it meant it was morning. When served lunch, it meant it was noon and dinner at night.
Michael said, when speaking of his family's trauma, "When your loved ones die, you have a way to recover from it. Because you know that he or she died, and there is no way he will come back. But when a person goes missing, you never know what happened or if they would ever come back."
In the tormenting wait for his return, his family had to deal with the rumours that accompany enforced disappearance, which compounds their trauma. And then there is his trauma on what they are going through.
"I went through severe mental torture myself. There was no way I could know whatsoever was going on with my family."
Michael had doubts in the first few months if he would ever go home alive. It was a lawless world. There was simply nothing he could do. Gradually, he gave up all hope of survival.
"I was convinced I wouldn't get out of here alive as days, months, and years passed," he said.
Michael prepared himself mentally so that he wouldn't think of anything else in the world.
"I decided to live life as it was for the rest of the days, until I was killed," he said. "I set my own clock on how much I would sleep, pray, meditate and exercise. Whatever they said or did, I accommodated them accordingly. I had no option. Even if I screamed my lungs out, it wouldn't make a difference."
Michael said the politics he does, somehow helped him in processing the nightmare he endured. "Because I do politics for the repressed people, it is a very challenging form of politics. I used to remember my martyred brothers. I tried to hold myself together thinking of my people," he said.
During his long incarceration, Michael felt the presence of other victims like him, through their noises. He could see their bodies on their way to the bathroom.
Michael continued, "I wondered why they were incarcerated like me. Why don't they try us under the law if we committed any crime? Why do you need such a secret, inhumane prison to torture people when you have laws and judiciary to conduct trials?"
Michael's days of inhumane incarceration have finally ended. As it did for two other victims of long incarceration, after Sheikh Hasina's fall. However, dozens of victims like Michael remain missing.
Sheikh Hasina fled but dozens of families continue a suffocating wait for the return of their loved ones – that is if they are alive in the first place.
