After Asadullah was gunned down on July 19 in Sector 7 Uttara, his wife began a desperate search for him. It was only on July 24 that Farzana Akter got a clue at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital morgue.

She learned that Asadullah had died on July 22. His body had already been buried at the Rayerbazar cemetery, one of the eight unidentified victims of the July Revolt.

Mortuary officials kept a photo of his body, which helped confirm his identity.

Farzana waited until the end of August, but Asadullah’s name was not on the official list of martyrs until Saleh Mahamud Rayhan, from her neighborhood, contacted her.

Saleh documented the martyrdoms and cases of human rights violations in Uttara during the July uprising – one of the bitter battlegrounds of that period.

Saleh, a member of the July Revolutionary Alliance volunteer group, obtained some photos from an employee at the Sea Food House restaurant where Asadullah was shot. He reviewed the photographs and took a witness statement.

All this was done to establish that Asadullah was killed and who shot him. He was a local leader of the Chhatro League. They now plan to file a case against the perpetrator at the International Criminal Court.

Similar to Asadullah’s case, the July Revolutionary Alliance has so far documented 82 cases of assassinations in Uttara. This is one of many groups that has been on this path of documentation.

During our interviews with several volunteers and researchers, they described the mental toll. Days of conversations with the victims’ families, the gruesome details of the murders and the pain of the grieving mothers left them deeply affected.

However, despite the heavy trauma, they maintained an extremely meticulous standard of documentation.

“The trauma of this pregnancy was so intense that our work almost stopped at one point,” said university student Hasan Imam, a volunteer documenting the testimony of martyrs’ families in the Jatrabari area.

He added, “For example, the mother of a martyr in Ashulia, whose body was burnt by the police, kept asking us, ‘They killed my son, but why burn the body?’

“What do you say to that?”

Why records matter

Shoeb Abdullah, a digital rights lawyer and visual archivist, said: “The first urgent task after the fall of any autocratic regime is to reveal the wounds inflicted on society by that regime.”

He added: “This process begins with the careful archiving and documentation of grave human rights abuses, disappearances and crimes that have occurred under such rule. This archiving is essential not only for the prosecution of those responsible, but also for achieving national reconciliation”.

According to the official list of martyrs published on September 24, at least 708 people were killed in the July uprising in Bangladesh. At the same time, the interim Health Ministry said more than 1,000 people had been killed, Reuters reported in August.

On October 31, Sarjis Alam, secretary general of the July Martyrs Memorial Foundation, said the foundation had listed and verified more than 1,600 dead – and the number is expected to rise. The list is with the Ministry of Health for further verification.

The task is a tall order, no doubt. And although the final list is yet to be published by the authorities, for the volunteer organizations that have committed, it is a Sisyphean one.

Not only are they collecting the numbers of the martyrs and the wounded, but the volunteers are collecting family testimonies, hospital data, eyewitness accounts and visual evidence. It is a long process and in many cases proves to be emotionally demanding.

It is not lost on Abdullah that many young people in particular have taken up this task since the fall of the Hasina regime, and that those involved in archiving these mass murders face significant mental health challenges.

“I am currently in contact with at least 15 communities who are actively volunteering in this initiative, although unfortunately they lack proper guidance,” said Shoeb, “They are often exposed to disturbing content – ​​retweeting gory images, videos and statements from victims and families. which had already been witnessed on the streets,” he said.

“Confronting these graphic memories repeatedly has a profound impact on their mental well-being, which could lead to serious problems. However, it is important to recognize that this mental health crisis cannot be addressed through medication alone. In this case, justice is essential. , like medicine,” he added.

The intricate details

Saqib Sarker, a freelance journalist and researcher, worked on an international project that aims to document the killings that took place during the July-August movement for “accountability purposes”.

“I was asked to join in July. I was very eager to work, but hesitated at the time, considering the immense risk involved. For me in particular, I felt “more” in danger, if that makes sense, because I was fully working. while as a journalist at Netra News,” Sarker told The Business Standard.

Even though all this now seems like a distant past, Sarkar’s “intense mental weakness and dilemma” was genuine because Hasina was still in power.

“For a typical news story, for example, you would talk to family members of the victims and other witnesses. We also do the same work, but we approach it as gathering evidence, not simply recording a comment,” he said.

“We conduct very detailed interviews with family members, witnesses (if available), collect police, hospital and other documents, photographic and film evidence (if available), corroborate the film/photo by visiting the site and matching photo images /video”.

It can be quite difficult because the family or the witness does not understand why they have to confirm something that seems obvious to them.

Sometimes a witness will summarize the entire event in a few sentences. They will say, for example, “When I saw (name) bhai shot, I took him to the hospital.”

“My challenge then is to go back and ask them a lot of details — whether they actually saw the moment the bullet hit the victim … how they approached the victim if the police were still shooting … if they could walk or if he should have crouched I need details on how exactly they transported the victim to a rickshaw without help.”

In addition, it can also be difficult to explain the role to the person you are interviewing, since you are not doing the interviews for a news station. People sometimes struggle to understand the purpose of the interview and tend to expect that it will lead directly to the prosecution of police forces or former government officials.

Local volunteers shared that they also maintain some documentation mechanisms.

Hasan Imam said he is filming video interviews with the families of the martyrs and details about their lives, where, when and how they were killed. “We are also taking testimonies of those who witnessed the deadly and bloody fighting and those who were injured and lost their limbs,” he added.

Saleh’s group is also collecting videos of the martyrs’ families and corroborating the footage from where they were killed. “We have some drone footage. We’re checking to see if we can track them down, checking which police officer or who shot them. It’s a proper investigation,” he said.

There are also groups such as the Bangladesh Protest Archive, which documents human rights abuses from online and offline sources.

One of its members, Adnan Aziz, said he has documented more than 500 violations so far.

“We categorize and catalog them by types,” Adnan said.

“The total work on a case often takes a few days to complete,” Sarker said, “There’s not necessarily a typical length of time.”

Sometimes witnesses want to avoid interviews for various reasons. And there are cases where new evidence emerges, such as online footage, and the archivist has to go back to the family or the witness.

Carrying the weight of trauma

“Many could not bear the mental trauma and left work,” Hasan said.

Saqib, on the other hand, has not experienced a significant mental toll himself, but admitted it can be “quite distressing” to listen to family members reminisce about what they went through trying to learn the news of their loved one’s death their. the.

Hasan explained how the volunteers, over time, became mentally unstable, lost their appetite and lost their sleep. “We had to get mental health support,” he added.

Saleh, a member of Uttara’s volunteer organization, said: “I was directly involved in the protests and saw people die. I was angry, so I didn’t feel the horror in my core. But listening to so many families every day now hits deeper.”

When Hasan began his work on August 6, his main objective was to establish that a massacre had been orchestrated in Bangladesh by archiving documents.

Hasan remains steadfast to this day. “Our motto is to ‘bring July back.’ No matter what, we’ll bring July back again and again. We will not allow July to be forgotten,” Hasan recently told TBS.