| Front Page Nizami as history knows Staff Correspondent
Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer Motiur Rahman Nizami, who enjoyed leniency of the past governments, is now at an isolated cell of Dhaka Central Jail thanks to the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) implicating him in the Gatco graft case that eventually led to his arrest on Sunday night.
Although there is enough evidence of his involvement in atrocities during the Liberation War in 1971, he and other local collaborators of the Pakistani occupation forces managed to evade arrest.
Chief of Al-Badr, a force formed with local collaborators of the Pakistani invading army to eliminate intellectuals of Bangladesh, Nizami also got off scot-free even after dozens of former ministers and senior politicians were put behind bars after the Fakhruddin Ahmed-led government assumed power early last year.
He was finally arrested, not for war crimes, after a court issued a warrant of arrest against him following the Gatco charge sheet.
Various documents show he was one of the leading figures among the Jamaat-oriented local collaborators during the independence war.
He was the president of Jamaat's youth front, Islami Chhatra Sangha (now known as Islami Chhatra Shibir) and carried out a wide range of activities against the Liberation War.
Under his supervision and leadership, the al-Badr (para-militia) force was organised with a scheme of making Bangladesh a nation without her intellectuals. Al-Badr is accused of murders, rapes and arson attacks.
Jamaat, for its involvement in anti-liberation activities, was constitutionally banned after the country's independence and many Jamaat leaders had to face trial on charges of war crimes.
The trial was, however, blocked and the anti-liberation forces were politically rehabilitated in the wake of the bloody changeover of power in 1975.
With the demands for trial of war criminals and barring anti-liberation forces from contesting polls getting momentum again in recent months, Jamaat leaders started denying their roles in 1971.
Most political parties that have sat with the Election Commission (EC) for talks on electoral reforms opined that Jamaat couldn't be registered as a parliamentary party in independent Bangladesh.
The Jamaat leaders now claim they didn't work against independence and there is no war criminal in the country.
But the accounts of Lt Gen AAK Niazi, who led the Pakistani occupation forces as the chief of Eastern Command of the Pakistan Army in 1971, prove the claims false.
Niazi in his book "The Betrayal of East Pakistan" categorically says the Razakar force was formed by the Pakistan government to fight the freedom fighters.
In his book, he says Jamaat-e-Islami, Nizam-I-Islami Party and several factions of Muslim League were known as rightist political parties at the time and the Razakar force was formed with the men recruited from these parties.
Jamaat leaders Golam Azam, Abbas Ali Khan, Motiur Rahman Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed launched a countrywide campaign urging youths to join Razakar, Al-Badr and the Al-Shams forces to fight the freedom fighters. The then home ministry also used to send reports to West Pakistan about the activities of these forces.
Speeches and writings of Jamaat leaders published in their mouthpiece, the daily Sangram, in 1971 also demonstrate how Jamaat, Razakars, Al-Badr, Al-Shams and peace committees functioned and indulged in killings and atrocities.
Nizami and his party are also accused of patronising Islamist militants that quickly emerged in the country in 2005 through bomb blasts and grenade attacks.
When notorious Bangla Bhai of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) was carrying out a reign of terror in the country's northern region in 2005, Nizami pinned the blame on the media of creating a "fictitious criminal".
"Police have nothing to do when there is no existence of this so-called Bangla Bhai. Who should they arrest?" Nizami told reporters at the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban the same year.
But former BNP lawmaker Abu Hena before his expulsion from the party named former minister Aminul Islam, former industries minister Nizami and Jamaat secretary general and former minister Mojaheed as patrons of Islamist militants.
Majority of those who were arrested on charges of bomb blasts and murders and are now facing trial belong to Jamaat or its student wing Shibir.
Two more murder cases against Nizami, filed with Keraniganj and Pallabi police stations for killing freedom fighters and general public during the Liberation War, are now under investigation. |
