Bangladesh's new Prime Minister is forcing the country to confront the most traumatic episode in its history -- the 1975 assassination of the nation's founding father, and her father. The process may throw the country into new political turmoil and reveal an incriminating role played by the CIA. PNS correspondent Andrew Robinson, a writer based in South Asia for the last five years, reports from Dhaka.

DHAKA -- As Bangladesh last week mourned the 1975 assassination of the nation's founding father, his daughter, recently elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, has decided to do more than just compose impassioned eulogies and lay symbolic wreaths.

She ordered the arrest of three of the top ex-military men allegedly involved in her father's killing. And Bangladesh, forced to confront a traumatic past that may well incriminate the CIA, has once again been plunged into political uncertainty.

"Why does she bring up an issue that's 21 years old?" laments Rafiqul Islam, a 60-year-old chauffeur. "Can't she let bygones be bygones? She's supposed to be working on behalf of the country, not fulfilling personal vendettas. Now she and her party are doomed -- the army won't sit by while she goes about arresting their colleagues."

Mukol Gain, a 30-year-old office clerk, disagrees: "She deserves justice and justice will be served. It's one thing to assassinate a political leader like Gandhi, or America's president Kennedy; but it's another to massacre his entire family."

The house in which the "Father of Bangladesh," Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of his family were assassinated twenty-one years ago lies just a few blocks from where Mr. Islam and Mr. Gain work. The modest two story home is now a museum with glass-covered bullet holes and blood stains marking the walls. The bedroom in which Sheikh Mujibur told his family to wait for him while he attended to the unexpected night visitors downstairs (tanks parked in front of his house, army men breaking down the front door) remains in bullet-strafed disarray, cabinets and dressers machine-gunned into wood chips, bed sheets and pillows shredded and sealed off behind ropes.

The assassination occurred three years after Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan, a cause for which an estimated one million Bangladeshis died in battle. Most Bangladeshis have always known who Sheikh Mujibur's assassins were (Pakistan supporters in the army), but for the last 21 years the issue was not discussed publicly.

The assassins no doubt hoped to eliminate the entire Mujibur clan (they killed 20 of his family members in all), but one of his daughters, Sheikh Hasina, was in Europe at the time. Soon she took over her father's party and after many years of bitter political battles, including some 100 country-wide anti-government strikes, she was finally elected Prime Minister last June.

"After twenty-one years, we've now got the opportunity to translate into reality the dreams of the father of the nation," she said on announcing the country's first-ever official day of mourning for her father. "The real history cannot be suppressed by lies; it cannot be erased."

She may be right. Many historians attribute Sheikh Mujibur's assassination to the whims and fancies of America's Cold War warriors who viewed Shiekh Mujibur's socialist-leaning tendencies as threatening.

Ever since India began making overtures to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the CIA made Pakistan its number one ally in South Asia. As CIA director, former President Bush lobbied hard in favor of Pakistan's right to retain control over the region now known as Bangladesh. Only after Sheikh Mujibur's assassination did Washington begin working closely with Dhaka, mainly in the form of massive development loans offered in the guise of foreign aid.

If the three ex-army officers who were arrested this week are forced to testify in court, information regarding the real history behind the assassination may finally come to the surface.

At the same time, this "real history" may not be compatible with Bangladesh's current political needs -- especially as the country, pressured by the World Bank and other financial concerns, moves away from the economic independence policies of its founding father in favor of the capitalist ideologies of the West.

While Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hopes to return to the days of "Bengalee" pride and patriotism which fueled the country's independence drive, the country is becoming increasingly subjected to foreign interests -- an open market, free press, an illiterate democracy and the dehumanizing cheap labor interests of multi-national companies.

Then there is the simple fact that Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most overcrowded countries in the world. Can it survive yet another political upheaval which the Prime Minister's recent action threatens to stir up? Kabir Haq, a rickshaw-puller in Dhaka, offers his perspective: "The people in power are just arguing over the people in power. Nobody has ever cared about us."