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Friday, August 13, 2010

[ALOCHONA] Re: Bringing a Forgotten Genocide to Justice




Shimul Chaudhury

I have read Time's analytical news story, titled "Bringing a Forgotten Genocide to Justice", in its issue on August 03, 2010 (
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008085,00.html).
 I especially like a sentence toward the end of the article, which reads: "This should never be about targeting one political group". However, unfortunately, the rest of the report, I am afraid, may mislead the readers, as the piece gives only a partial picture of a political drama that is happening in Bangladesh and demonizes an Islamic political group. The reporter Ishaan Tharoor completely misses to mention the widespread political maneuvering and torture on the opposition forces by the ruling party, especially by misusing the public sentiment on Bangladesh's liberation war of 1971.

What the present government of Bangladesh is doing has little to do with the country's bloody past, and it has more to do with capitulating to, or rejecting, the overarching political and economic hegemony of a big neighbour and regional power, which the reporter Ishaan Tharoor deliberately or inadvertently did not mention at all. What is more, while providing links to Time's archive of the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, Mr Tharoor was very much selective. He also totally overlooked systematic brutal treatment of rival political parties by the ruling party. October 28, 2006 nearly a dozen unarmed men of an Islamic political party were killed in brutal daylight on the streets of Dhaka.
The whole world had watched that on television screens on that day. All the allegations of that Islamic party's collaboration with the Pakistani army are still theories, and are not based on facts or evidence. Moreover, after the liberation of Bangladesh, the workers of that party have not waged a war against the country; conversely, they have completely accepted and showed total loyalty to the new-born state and have not launched any campaign to re-join Pakistan. Conversely, a number of leaders of other parties, including some of those which are in power now, would have been in prison by this time for their Pakistan sympathies and 'collaboration' at that time.

On June 29, 2010 the three top leaders of an 'Islamic' party were arrested on some preposterous 'blasphemy' charges. Soon after that, the people came to know very well that the blasphemy allegation against these leaders was not only unfounded and pointless but also ridiculous and laughable. The government then recycled its typical weapon of public sentiment of the 1971 liberation war to use and re-use it against political opponents.

Despite blatant undemocratic practices and cruel exercise of power by the ruling party, the dominant media (both domestic and foreign) is largely silent about its brutalities. What a section of the media usually highlights, for example, is the political stance of an Islamic party in 1971 in favour of a united Pakistan. After about four decades of the liberation of Bangladesh, the political stance of that party in 1971 can be interpreted in two ways: firstly, it was totally wrong to espouse the cause of retaining a united Pakistan, given all the inequalities that had existed between the then West Pakistan and the then East Pakistan; secondly, the way the border security personnel of a big neighbouring country are killing many innocent Bangladeshis on a regular basis and given that neighbour's economic and political exploitations of Bangladesh may vindicate the real or perceived fear of those in 1971 about a Bangladesh, axed from Pakistan, being subject to such hostilities, which are actually the present-day realities. However, this is a matter of political and historical analysis and should be done in an academic way. Importantly, even if the stance of a particular party was wrong (and I believe, it was), it can also be interpreted as its right to hold a political opinion.

The post-1971 Bangladesh is yet not a better place to live, and this is not because of the independence of 1971, but because of the failure of the successive governments that have ruled the country ever since and because of the hostilities by the big neighbour, especially in the border regions. The BDR carnage and the killing of dozens of military officers on February 25, 2009 have already weakened the national defence system of Bangladesh. As a result, post-February-2009-Bangladesh is much more vulnerable and more exposed to foreign aggression. The Islamic political party now at the receiving end of the ruling party's wrath is not the sole author of the wide range of political and social ills that have been crippling the country for a very long time. Even enemies of that party would not disagree that its people are no less responsible citizens than many others in other political parties. If such people are marginalized and penalized, the ultimate sufferer will be the country itself.

If the undemocratic practices by the ruling authorities in the country are overlooked because they use the slogan of secularism, and if the Islamic party under mention is demonised for its leanings otherwise, then that will not augur well for the future of Bangladesh and its people. The latter will have to bear the brunt of the consequences of all repressive actions by the powers that be in today's political power matrix.

The writer can be reached at:
honestdebater@yahoo.ca
http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=108868&date=2010-08-13


On 8/6/10, Isha Khan <bdmailer@gmail.com> wrote:
Bringing a Forgotten Genocide to Justice
 

Two years ago, TIME met Ali Ahsan Mojaheed at the headquarters of his far-right Islamist party, nestled amid a warren of religious bookshops and seminaries in Dhaka. He welcomed this reporter by peeling a clutch of ripe lychees. "Our fruit is the sweetest," said the secretary general of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami, proffering a sticky hand. But the conversation soon soured. Asked about the traumatic legacy of Bangladesh's 1971 independence — when the territory then known as East Pakistan split from West Pakistan in an orgy of bloodshed — Mojaheed dismissed the need for a proper reckoning with the past. "This is a dead issue," he almost growled. "It cannot be raised."

But this month it finally has. Far from the protective, lackey-patrolled confines of his offices, Mojaheed and three other prominent Jamaat leaders (including the party's leader Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami) are under arrest, appearing for the first time in a war-crimes court to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and against peace — the last of which has not been invoked since the trials at Nuremberg. They rank among the topmost figures implicated in the systematic murder of as many as 3 million people in 1971 as the Pakistani army and ethnic Bengali collaborators attempted to quash a Bengali-nationalist rebellion. Their prosecution presents a watershed moment for this beleaguered nation of 160 million. A July 30 op-ed in the Daily Star, a leading Dhaka-based newspaper, says, "the trials will allow us to close the door, once and for all ... so that we are not forever fighting the battles of the past." (See the museum that preserved the memory of Bangladesh's atrocities.)

That past — Bangladesh's tangled history of violence and discord — goes a long way to explain how one of the 20th century's worst massacres is now largely forgotten in the rest of the world. Bangladesh's origins lie in two bloody partitions: first, in 1947, when British India was carved into two separate independent states, Muslim-majority Pakistan emerged more as a conceit of ideology than one of geography — its two wings separated by a thousand miles of India in between. The artificial union didn't last a quarter-century and Bengali separatism led eventually to a brutal crackdown by the West Pakistani–dominated army, aided by Islamists like Mojaheed and his colleagues, who were loyal to the greater Pakistani cause and who allegedly led or helped organize death squads that targeted Hindus, students and other dissidents. The intervention of Indian troops turned the tide and Bangladesh, as East Pakistan renamed itself, won its freedom in December 1971, its cities hollowed out, the economy in tatters and its population ravaged. (From TIME's Archives: India and Pakistan poised for war in 1971 over Bangladeshi independence.)

But the U.S.'s Cold War alliance with Pakistan's military dictatorship and the opposition of influential Muslim states like Saudi Arabia to Pakistan's partitioning meant there was little international pressure for a proper inquiry into the atrocities of the war. Within Bangladesh, coups, assassinations and vendettas came to define the political landscape. Successive governments became peopled by those with pro-Pakistani or Islamist backgrounds and connections. Mojaheed's Jamaat even found itself in power for a spell within a coalition government. "The primary issue for politicians was to survive," says Ali Riaz, a Bangladesh scholar and professor of political science at Illinois State University. "Thinking about the issue of murders and genocide became secondary." (From TIME's Archives: The bloody birth of Bangladesh.)

Observers say not grappling with what happened has had a profound cost for Bangladesh. "It's incredibly damaging for society," says Caitlin Reiger, director of international policy relations at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York City. "Imagine the trauma of people who have suffered the loss of family members, rape and other violence and still have to live down the street from the likely perpetrators." Reiger and others claim this has led to Bangladesh's notorious culture of impunity, where corruption is widespread, extrajudicial killings by security personnel is still common and justice is known to come, if ever, oft-delayed and deferred. A tribunal, in theory, would lance the boil at the source of the rot. (Comment on this story.)

In practice, though, these proceedings are far more fraught, especially four decades after the fact. Doubts still swirl around a U.N.-backed tribunal in nearby Cambodia that delivered its first verdict last week, sentencing the chief prison master of the Khmer Rouge — the radical, collectivist regime that oversaw the killings of nearly 2 million people in the mid-1970s — to 35 years in jail. The sentence could possibly be shortened to 19 years and has raised howls of protest from many survivors of the Cambodian genocide. Still, most observers have cautiously applauded this belated, imperfect justice — delivered despite years of foot-dragging by the ruling government, which has ex–Khmer Rouge cadres in its ranks.

In Bangladesh, there's little question about the political will of the present government, run by the secularist Awami League, a party born during the fight for Bangladeshi independence. But there are fears that it is using the trials to grind its proverbial ax and target political enemies. "The process has to be as transparent as possible," says Riaz. "If they fail to do this properly, it'll be a disaster for the nation." At the moment, the country's specially arranged International Crimes Tribunal is operating mostly on its own. As long as the country maintains the death penalty — executing just last year five men responsible for the 1975 murder of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's founding father and also father of the current Prime Minister — assistance from the international community will be limited.

Experts imagine the trials in Bangladesh, like those in Cambodia, may take years. While the four now under arrest may be the most well-known participants in the genocide, countless others remain scattered across the country, abroad in Pakistan and elsewhere; extraditions look unlikely. Prosecutors will also be hampered by a woeful lack of documentary and forensic evidence. Low-lying Bangladesh sits atop an alluvial plain and some of the most common killing zones in 1971 were by water pumping stations and rivers, where bodies were literally flushed away into the sea.

Still, to this day, almost every single household in the country has a story to tell of a family member slain. Most counts of the genocide arrive between 1 million and 3 million people killed; 200,000 to half a million women were raped. In Bangladesh, perhaps more than in any other grim vetting of the past, raw personal testimonies may have to comprise the bulk of the proceedings. "This should never be about targeting one political group," says Reiger, "but about painstakingly following the evidence and seeing where it leads you." For a country seeking to put its ghosts to bed, the road ahead is still shrouded in shadow.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008085,00.html
 



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