LONDON — If a Shakespeare should ever arise in Bangladesh, he would have plenty of tragedies around which to weave his history plays. The country is only 38 years old, but the vendettas among leading families have been just as tangled and bloody as the ones in 14th- and 15th- century England that gave the great playwright so much of his material. But that kind of history may be coming to an end in Bangladesh.
It's not quite dead yet. Last February, at least 4,000 soldiers serving in the Bangladesh Rifles, a border defense regiment, mutinied and began killing their officers. Fifty-seven officers and 17 other people were murdered by the mutineers, who dumped their bodies in sewers and an incinerator. The violence spread to military camps all over Bangladesh.
The mutineers said that they were revolting against poor pay, but many people suspected that there was a political motive behind it all. If there was, it failed. The rest of the army remained loyal, tanks surrounded the regiment's various camps, and the government promised to look into the rebels' complaints if they surrendered.