- AFP
- October 24, 2014, 9:23 am
Bangladesh Islamist war criminal Ghulam Azam dead at 91Dhaka (AFP) - Former Bangladeshi politician Ghulam Azam, who died on Thursday just two weeks short of his 92nd birthday, was a convicted war criminal compared by prosecutors to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Azam, the ex-head of the Jamaat-e-Islami Islamist party, was serving a 90-year jail term for masterminding widespread atrocities during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence with Pakistan when he died of a heart attack.
His party, Bangladesh's largest Islamist grouping and a key opposition, insisted until the end that the five charges -- including murder and conspiracy -- were false and "politically motivated".
Azam started out as a political science professor and author of over 100 books, experimenting with left-wing politics before joining Jamaat in the 1950s.
He led the party when Bangladesh -- known as East Pakistan after the partition of British India in 1947 -- went to war, in which three million people would die, against Pakistan.
With Azam at the helm, Jamaat opposed Bangladesh's secession from what was then West Pakistan.
A special court set up by the secular government concluded in July last year that Azam had orchestrated the establishment of several pro-Pakistani militias which massacred intellectuals at the end of the nine-month conflict.
When India intervened in the war it became clear Pakistan would lose and Azam "masterminded" the killing of dozens of professors, playwrights, doctors and journalists, the court said.
Many of whose bodies were found a few days after the war ended in a marsh outside the capital, their hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded as if they had been executed.
"The aim was to cripple the country intellectually. Without his consent it could not have happened," state prosecutor Sultan Mahmud said on the day of Azam's conviction.
- 'His role was like Hitler's' -
"His role in the 1971 war was like Hitler's in the Second World War," Mahmud added.
After the war, Azam fled to Pakistan where he allegedly formed the East Pakistan Restoration Committee, portraying the liberation war as a conspiracy by India.
He left Pakistan for London in 1973 where he edited a Bengali newspaper and continued to campaign against recognising Bangladesh's independence.
After independence, Bangladesh cancelled Azam's citizenship and banned Jamaat and other faith-based parties. Thousands were arrested for collaborating with Pakistan.
But another deadly turn in Bangladesh's volatile politics brought Azam back to Dhaka on a Pakistani passport in 1978, three years after the nation's founding leader Sheikh Mujib was assassinated.
A junta had taken over and was allowing Islamic parties to operate openly again.
Under Azam's stewardship, Jamaat staged a revival by setting up a new student wing that has become a formidable force with thousands of loyal cadres.
His political rehabilitation was complete in 1993 when the Supreme Court returned his citizenship. After the judgement, he apologised for his past activities but fell short of giving a full apology for his wartime role.
Although his party has never won more than five percent of votes, Azam has played the role of kingmaker repeatedly since democracy was restored in 1990.
He shifted alliances, helping the nation's two main rival parties to return to power in turn and in the process reviving the fortunes of the once universally despised Jamaat party.
In 1996, he allied with Sheikh Hasina, the current premier and daughter of independence hero Sheikh Mujib, helping force her bitter rival Khaleda Zia of the BNP to resign and accept a caretaker administration.
Before he quit politics in 2000, he steered Jamaat back to an alliance with Zia's centre-right party ahead of the 2001 polls. Zia won by a landslide and formed a cabinet which included two ministers from Jamaat.
Hasina did not forget the humiliating loss. She stormed back to power in 2009 on the back of growing youth-led anti-Islamist sentiment and this time she vowed to try all those who committed war crimes during the 1971 war.
In January 2012, an octogenarian and wheel-chair bound Azam was arrested at his home in the capital for war crimes. Eighteen months later his fate was sealed.
Ghulam Azam likened to Hitler
Former Bangladeshi politician Ghulam Azam, who died on Thursday just two weeks short of his 92nd birthday, was a convicted war criminal compared by prosecutors to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Azam, the ex-head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was serving a 90-year jail term for masterminding widespread atrocities during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence with Pakistan when he died of a heart attack. ......
More At: http://www.thedailystar.net/ghulam-azam-likened-to-hitler-47319
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বৃহস্পতিবার রাতে মারা যান ৯০ বছরের কারাদণ্ডে দণ্ডিত গোলাম আযম।
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বিস্তারিত পড়ুন- http://www.samakal.net/2014/10/24/94250
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