Now, anyone can read newspapers from 1972-75

For around 12 years, there was an unwritten restriction in the Dhaka University Central Library on allowing readers to read newspapers from the period between 1972 and 1975, when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was in power.
However, following Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and the fall of the Awami League government, the library authorities say they have recently made the newspapers available to readers once more.
There is an archive inside the DU Central Library, where authorities preserve daily newspapers from the period before independence as well as after it.
Students, teachers, and researchers are allowed to visit the archive as per their academic necessities.
But from some time during 2012-2013, students were unable to access newspapers from the period between 1972 and 1975.
Nahid Islam, now a master’s student of public administration, said that he had visited the Central Library when he was a first-year student, looking for newspapers from that time, but couldn’t find them. When he asked the librarian, he was told that they were not there.
When this correspondent visited the library archive this afternoon, some readers were seen perusing the newspapers that were finally made available again.
They said that they had come to the library after hearing that the authorities are allowing readers to access newspapers from the 1972-75 Bangabandhu regime.
But readers expressed disappointment because they were unable to find newspapers from at least five days in 1975 between August 15 to 19.
An official of the library said, “Newspapers from those particular five days had been damaged due to rain and lack of care.”
However, students said that it seemed to them that someone had removed these particular newspapers from the 1975 volume.
“I took a volume of newspapers from 1975. But I noticed that newspapers from at least five days were removed from the volume. Authorities should be more careful in preserving this history,” said Mohammad Sumon Mia, a fourth year student of the philosophy department at DU.
Nahid Islam said, “I came here to read newspapers from 1972-1975. I am trying to understand the present situation by relating to that time.”
Contacted, Prof Md. Nasir Uddin Munshi of the Department of Information Science and Library Management, who has recently resigned as the acting librarian of the Central Library, told The Daily Star, “We carefully preserved newspapers from those particular years as there was an instruction from the special tribunal that was holding trials for the 1971 war criminals to preserve the history of that time. Sometimes, they took some documents for the benefit of their case proceedings.”