1. Ziaur Rahman was a Bangladeshi military officer and politician who served as the sixth president of Bangladesh from 1977 until his assassination in 1981.
70 Facts About Ziaur Rahman
1. 2.
Ziaur Rahman was the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
3.
Ziaur Rahman previously served as the third Chief of Army Staff from 1975 to 1978 with a minor break.
4.
Ziaur Rahman served as a commander in the Pakistan Army in the Second Kashmir War against the Indian Army, for which he was awarded the Hilal-e-Jurrat from the Pakistani government.
5.
Ziaur Rahman was a prominent Bangladesh Forces commander during the country's war in 1971.
6.
Ziaur Rahman reinstated multi-party politics, freedom of the press, free speech, free markets, and accountability.
7.
Ziaur Rahman initiated mass irrigation and food production programmes, including social programmes to uplift the lives of the people.
8.
Ziaur Rahman's government initiated efforts to create a regional group in South Asia, which later became SAARC in 1985.
9.
Ziaur Rahman improved Bangladesh's relations with the West and China and departed from Sheikh Mujib's close alignment with India.
10.
Domestically, Ziaur Rahman faced as many as twenty-one coup attempts for which military tribunals were set up, resulting in at least 200 soldiers of the army and air force being executed, earning him a reputation of being "strict" and "ruthless" amongst international observers.
11.
Ziaur Rahman retired from the Bangladesh Army with the rank of Lt.
12.
Ziaur Rahman's death created a divided opinion on his legacy in Bangladeshi politics.
13.
Ziaur Rahman was born on 19 January 1936 to a Bengali Muslim family of Mandals in the village of Bagbari in Gabtali, Bogra District.
14.
Ziaur Rahman's father, Mansur Rahman, was a chemist who specialised in paper and ink chemistry and worked for a government department at Writers' Building in Kolkata.
15.
Ziaur Rahman was raised in his home village of Bagbari and studied in Bogra Zilla School.
16.
Mansur Ziaur Rahman exercised his option to become a citizen of a Muslim-majority Pakistan and, in August 1947, moved to Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan located in Sindh, West Pakistan.
17.
Ziaur Rahman spent his adolescent years in Karachi and, by age 16, completed his secondary education from that school in 1952.
18.
At the time, Ziaur Rahman was a captain in the Pakistan Army who was posted as an Officer of the Defence Forces.
19.
Ziaur Rahman went to East Pakistan on a short visit and was struck by the negative attitude of the Bengali middle class towards the military, which consumed a large chunk of the country's resources.
20.
The low representation of the Bengalis in the military was largely due to discrimination, but Ziaur Rahman felt that the Bengali attitude towards the military perhaps prevented promising young Bengalis from seeking military careers.
21.
Ziaur Rahman attended military training schools of the British Army.
22.
Ziaur Rahman worked in the military intelligence department from 1959 to 1964.
23.
Ziaur Rahman was awarded the Hilal-i-Jur'at medal for gallantry by the Pakistan government, Pakistan's second highest military award, and the first Battalion of the East Bengal Regiment, under which he fought, won three Sitara-e-Jurat medals and eight Tamgha-i-Jurat medals, for their role in the 1965 War with India.
24.
In 1966, Ziaur Rahman was appointed military instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy, later going on to attend the Command and Staff College in Quetta, Pakistan; he completed a course in command and tactical warfare.
25.
Ziaur Rahman helped raise two Bengali battalions called the 8th and 9th Bengals during his stint as instructor.
26.
Ziaur Rahman joined the 2nd East Bengal regiment as its second-in-command at Joydebpur in Gazipur district, near Dhaka, in 1969, and travelled to West Germany to receive advanced military and command training from the British Army of the Rhine and later spent a few months with the British Army.
27.
Ziaur Rahman was posted in Chittagong, East Pakistan, in October 1970, to be second-in-command of the 8th East Bengal Regiment.
28.
Sheikh Mujibur Ziaur Rahman was arrested before midnight on 26 March 1971, taken to Tejgaon International Airport and flown to West Pakistan.
29.
Ziaur Rahman organised an infantry unit gathering all Bengali soldiers from military and EPR units in Chittagong.
30.
Ziaur Rahman designated it Sector No 1 with its HQ in Sabroom.
31.
On 30 July 1971, Ziaur Rahman was appointed the commander of the first conventional brigade of the Bangladesh Forces, which was named "Z Force", after the first initial of his name.
32.
Ziaur Rahman's brigade consisted of the 1st, 3rd and 8th East Bengali regiments, enabling Ziaur Rahman to launch major attacks on Pakistani forces.
33.
Major General Ziaur Rahman was appointed as Chief of Army Staff after Shafiullah resigned.
34.
Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf and the 46th Brigade of Dhaka Cantonment under Colonel Shafaat Jamil revolted against Khandaker Mushtaq Ahmed's administration on 3 November 1975, and Ziaur Rahman was forced to relinquish his post and put under house arrest.
35.
Shafaat Jamil escaped but was injured, while Ziaur Rahman was freed by the 2nd Artillery Regiment under Lt.
36.
Ziaur Rahman realised that the disorder had to be suppressed firmly if discipline was to be restored in the Bangladesh Army.
37.
Ziaur Rahman became the chief martial law administrator the same year.
38.
Ziaur Rahman tried to integrate the armed forces, giving repatriates a status appropriate to their qualifications and seniority.
39.
Ziaur Rahman became the president of Bangladesh on 21 April 1977.
40.
Ziaur Rahman was viewed as a professional soldier with no political aspirations because of his imprisonment in former West Pakistan during the Bangladesh War of Independence.
41.
In 1978, General Ziaur Rahman ran for and overwhelmingly won a five-year term as president.
42.
Ziaur Rahman reversed course from his predecessor Mujib's secular, democratic socialist, pro-Indian policies.
43.
Ziaur Rahman announced a "19-point programme" of economic emancipation which emphasised self-reliance, rural development, decentralisation, free markets and population control.
44.
Ziaur Rahman spent much of his time travelling throughout the country, preaching the "politics of hope" and urging Bangladeshis to work harder and to produce more.
45.
Ziaur Rahman focused on boosting agricultural and industrial production, especially in food and grains, and to integrate rural development through a variety of programmes, of which population planning was the most important.
46.
Ziaur Rahman introduced and opened the Bangladesh Jute and Rice research institutes.
47.
Ziaur Rahman launched an ambitious rural development programme in 1977, which included a highly visible and popular food-for-work programme.
48.
Ziaur Rahman promoted private sector development, export growth, and the reversing of the collectivisation of farms.
49.
Ziaur Rahman's government reduced quotas and restrictions on agriculture and industrial activities.
50.
Ziaur Rahman launched major projects to construct irrigation canals, power stations, dams, roads and other public works.
51.
Ziaur Rahman began reorienting Bangladesh's foreign policy, addressing the concerns of the mostly staunch rightists coupled with some renegade leftists who believed that Bangladesh was reliant on Indian economic and military aid.
52.
Ziaur Rahman moved away from India and the Soviet bloc his predecessors had worked with, developing closer relations with the United States and Western Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
53.
Ziaur Rahman moved to harmonise ties with Saudi Arabia and the People's Republic of China, Pakistan's ally who had opposed Bangladesh's creation and had not recognised it until 1975.
54.
Ziaur Rahman proposed an organisation of the nations of South Asia to bolster economic and political cooperation at a regional level.
55.
Ziaur Rahman believed that a massive section of the population was suffering from an identity crisis, both religiously and as a people, with a very limited sense of sovereignty.
56.
Ziaur Rahman issued a proclamation order amending the constitution, under whose basis laws would be set in an effort to increase the self-knowledge of religion and nation.
57.
Ziaur Rahman believed that Islam, as a religion, could play some role in guiding the Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
58.
Later, Ziaur Rahman introduced Islamic religious education as a compulsory subject for Muslim schoolchildren.
59.
Ziaur Rahman undid this as well as the ban on communal parties and associations due to his commitment to multiparty democracy and political pluralism.
60.
In public speeches and policies that he formulated, Ziaur Rahman began expounding "Bangladesh Nationalism", its "Sovereignty", as opposed to Mujib's assertion of a Bengali identity based on language-based nationalism.
61.
Ziaur Rahman even amended the constitution to change the nationality of the citizens from Bengali, an ethnic identity, to Bangladeshi, a national identity, under sovereign allegiance, not political belief or party affiliation.
62.
In such a workshop in September 1980, Ziaur Rahman spoke to the learners.
63.
Ziaur Rahman enacted several controversial measures, some to discipline the army, some to solidify his power, and some to win the support of Islamist political groups such as the Jamaat-e-Islami.
64.
Ziaur Rahman gave foreign appointments to several men accused of assassinating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
65.
Amidst speculation and fears of unrest, Ziaur Rahman went on tour to Chittagong on 29 May 1981 to help resolve an intra-party political dispute in the regional BNP.
66.
Ziaur Rahman is credited with ending the disorder of the final years of Sheikh Mujib's rule and establishing democracy by abolishing BAKSAL.
67.
The Indemnity Act, an ordinance ordered by Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad in 1975 pardoning the subsequently convicted killers of Sheikh Mujibur Ziaur Rahman, was not abolished by Ziaur Rahman during his tenure as president.
68.
Ziaur Rahman brought Bangladesh into the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a move that was widely welcomed by the general public.
69.
Ziaur Rahman lost the 1996 elections to the Awami League's Sheikh Hasina but returned to power in 2001.
70.
In 2004, Ziaur Rahman was ranked number 19 in the BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time.