'My father's killing should not be in vain'

NEWTON -- On the morning of Jan. 27, as Boston University professor Nazli Kibria was about to pick up her 3-year-old daughter from day care, her father, a member of Parliament 7,700 miles away in Bangladesh, was leaving a public meeting when two grenades exploded. Three people died instantly. Kibria's father, gravely injured, was dragged to a car and rushed to a hospital.

A few hours later, as she was leaving for the airport to go to Bangladesh, Kibria learned her father, Shah A.M.S. Kibria, had died. He was 73, a leader in the opposition Awami League party, a newspaper columnist, magazine publisher, former finance minister, former foreign secretary, and former diplomat. He was the most prominent person killed in recent years in a wave of violence against moderate politicians and intelligentsia, as well as religious minorities, in the predominantly Muslimnation of 141 million in southern Asia. A fifth person succumbed to injuries suffered in the January attack, and more than 100 were injured.

After Shah Kibria's death, streets in Dhaka, the capital, filled with mourners. The opposition called a three-day general strike. Kibria's widow, the professor's 67-year-old mother, Asma, has staged nonviolent demonstrations to press for a serious investigation into his death and an end to political violence. Though a Bangladesh Embassy spokesman says ''there is an investigation into this unfortunate event," the US State Department, in a human-rights report released last month, finds that a ''climate of impunity" accompanies the violence pervading the country's politics.

Nazli Kibria, 44, a soft-spoken associate professor of sociology, on sabbatical to research a book on Bangladeshi expatriates, has detoured to generate international pressure for a probe. She's met with State Department officials, Representative Barney Frank, and senatorial aides. She's sought media coverage and urged almost everyone she knows to write to Congress.

''Everything you hear -- the political rhetoric -- is preaching democracy in the Muslim world. We are in a war on terror. I don't know why people aren't paying attention to Bangladesh," Kibria says. ''My father's killing should not be in vain. If we can shift the tide of terror in Bangladesh, the tide of violence, it will have some meaning."

A banner born of blood
Kibria spreads a 10-foot-long white sheet on the living-room floor of the condominium she shares with her husband and two children. On the walls hang paintings by her mother, and in one corner stands the light box she and her husband use to help calm their 6-year-old autistic son.

Scrawled across the top of the cloth are the words ''Bring the Killers of Kibria to Justice" in English and in Bangla. Below, in scarlet ink, are 75 signatures, from expatriates and Kibria's friends, part of the ''Oath in Blood-Red Letters" campaign Kibria's mother launched. One expatriate included a poem. ''The blood of my blood," Kibria translates, ''is on the ground." A sky blue ribbon pinned to the fabric symbolizes her mother's request that Bangladeshis wear blue on Thursdays, the day Shah Kibria died.

Soon Kibria will depart with her young daughter for Bangladesh, stopping in London to seek support there. In Dhaka she'll hand the cloth to volunteers sewing together 500 similar banners for an upcoming protest.

The FBI, according to spokesmen for the State Department and the Bangladesh Embassy, is talking with the Bangladesh government about aiding any investigation. ''If the FBI is going to participate," says a State Department official, ''they want to be able to do a professional job."

Curled up on a sofa, wrapped in an embroidered shawl from Nepal, Kibria talks about her father and her new activism, continuing a conversation begun the day before in her office at BU. Until now she's been a busy working mother, with the added demands of raising a child with autism. At faculty meetings, ''she is not the first person to speak, and when she speaks she is not the loudest," says her BU colleague Daniel Monti. ''She is not by nature a public person." At home it is her husband, Jim Littlefield, a 47-year-old computer consultant, who's on the steering committee of the Network of Newton Autism Parents.

Kibria has a round face, wide-set dark eyes, and full lips, all in striking resemblance to pictures of her father and all framed by a mane of wavy black hair. She was born in New York, where her father served in Pakistan's delegation to the United Nations, and lived there for three years. Then she moved to Tehran, and, at 5, to Jakarta. At 8, Kibria went to Washington, where her father was posted at the Pakistani Embassy. Two years later, as Bangladesh fought for its independence from Pakistan, her father defected. ''A lot of what I'm doing reminds me of that time," she says. ''My father spent his days walking up and down the Hill, talking to US media."

In January 1972, shortly after Bangladesh was born, the family moved to Dhaka, where Shah Kibria served as foreign secretary. For two years Kibria lived in the mother country she previously had only visited.

''For my attachment to the language and the place, that was a really critical time," Kibria says. ''It was hard. The country was devastated." She remembers people taking refuge at her grandfather's home and rats roaming the house at night. ''There were things I didn't understand," she says. ''The schools were disorganized. A lot of things were not available. There was hardly any shampoo on the market. I had come from Washington. I was 10 years old. I was horrified by that. But it was exciting. People were so happy. There was a sense of hope."

If living in Dhaka cemented Kibria's identification with Bangladesh, then her many years in this country and at a major university give her an entree to government offices and media outlets here. Critics of attacks against other political figures, says Christine Fair of the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, ''didn't have an advocate here who was able to shine a light on what happened there."

Indeed, Kibria says she has two homelands. ''I go back and forth so much," she says, ''that I imagine I've lived there longer than I have." Except for that stay in Bangladesh, Kibria attended English-speaking schools. In 1974 the family moved to Australia and later to Geneva. In 1978 Kibria moved to the United States to attend Wellesley College and then the University of Pennsylvania for her doctorate. She met her New Hampshire-bred husband while she was at Wellesley and he at MIT. Their children, Shomik and Shumita, have Bangla names.

In concert with Bangladesh
The banner was signed late last month in a meeting at MIT that opened with a slide show that moves from the 1971 war for independence to the aftermath of Shah Kibria's death. Dramatic images from 1971, when Kibria was attending demonstrations in Washington, capture refugees in Calcutta and bodies in Bangladesh. Kibria remembers entreating her father in 1971 for a Barbie Dream House. The family's finances were precarious after Shah Kibria defected, yet he indulged his daughter's wish. Near the end of the presentation is a picture of Nazli Kibria, her mother, and her brother at a demonstration in Dhaka, in a sea of black flags and photos of the slain activist.

Kibria's grief is exacerbated by what Fair calls the ''comedy of cruelty" Shah Kibria reportedly suffered after the attack. First taken to a hospital with no blood supply or saline, then transported in an ambulance that ran out of gas on its way to a hospital that had no doctors available, he died en route to Dhaka. Pleas to the government for helicopter evacuation went unanswered. ''It's very sad," Kibria says. ''I don't know how much pain he was in."

The slide show's soundtrack, reflecting the days when Bangladesh was regularly in the news, features music from the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh sponsored by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. Some observers call for renewed attention to Bangladesh, governed since 2001 by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which includes two Islamist parties in its ruling coalition whose relationship to Muslim terrorist groups is unclear.

''The killing of Kibria in a public event fits the pattern of political figures getting killed," says T. Kumar of Amnesty International. ''It's a very brutal message to the people who oppose the government. We don't know who did this, but we do know that no one is being brought to justice in a meaningful way."

In August, Awami League chief and former prime minister Sheik Hasina Wazed and other opposition leaders survived a deadly attack on a political rally that Shah Kibria skipped because he had a cold. A month later, Shah Kibria was in Boston. True to his habit of giving his daughter something special each visit, he bought her a garnet necklace. He also met with 15 local expatriates concerned about violence against opposition politicians and moderate, secular voices in Bangladesh. He brought with him a copy of his magazine, with a cover picture of a literary critic who'd been attacked.

In mid-January the group met to organize the Bangladesh-America Forum Against Political Violence. Ten days later, Shah Kibria was killed.

News from afar hits home
Kibria's loss shrinks the world for many of her friends. Sociology department administrator Katie McNamara, who'd been unfamiliar with either Kibria's personal history or Bangladeshi culture, searched the Internet for guidance on appropriate ways for the department to express its condolences. Soon she was hooked on news from a faraway land.

''I'm a Catholic, American-Irish woman printing out stories about Bangladesh and reading them at my sons' sports practices," McNamara says. ''One of my ways to support her is to be a little more aware."

Monika Mitra, a public health researcher born in India, is taking a fresh look at the subcontinent. She's added The Daily Star, a Bangladesh newspaper, to the Indian papers she periodically checks online. ''When you come and live in a country you get removed from your own," Mitra says. ''Something like this makes you think, 'Look what's happening in my own neighborhood.' It hits you even more because it's Nazli's dad."

Now, seeking her father's killers, Kibria wishes she'd been less private. ''I never talked about my father's political position. A lot of people didn't know," she says. ''It was irresponsible of me. It was my responsibility to educate people."