Salim Mansur - Genocide and Justice in Bangladesh
Genocide and Justice in Bangladesh
by Salim
Mansur January 9, 2014 , Gatestone
Institute, New York
It seems in modern times that the post-colonial history of
Muslim societies has been over-determined by violence in the name of religion.Bangladeshis, despite significant internal opposition from
militant Muslims supported from the outside, have shown a preference for their
secular culture, based on language and not religion. Islamic solidarity, then as now, meant support for the
architects of genocide, not for the victims.
There also seems genuine concern in the West about the role
of religion in politics. World history, as Hegel noted, is a world court; and
the evidence in this court discloses that the fusion of religion and politics
has held for the longest time. As politics is about power, religion has
undeniably been used as the most potent instrument of power. Abdul Quader Molla, arrested in August 2010, was one among
several members of the JI, including its chief, Professor Ghulam Azam, indicted
for crimes against humanity, and for aiding and complicity in committing such
crimes, during 1971. This period in Bangladesh
is referred to as the year of the "liberation war" against the armed
forces of Pakistan ,
among whom members of the JI were notorious. The indictments were made under
the provisions of the 1973 International Crimes Tribunal Act [ICTA], voted and
passed by the first elected parliament of an independent Bangladesh .
Those indicted were tried in special courts, known as the International Crimes
Tribunals (ICT), set up under the Act.
In bringing to trial these Muslim collaborators and in
making them confront their past – among the charges against Molla was the
cruelty with which he beat a two-year old child to death after killing his
father, mother and two sisters inside their home – a democratically elected
government in a Muslim majority country for the first time in fourteen
centuries of Arab-Muslim history arranged for, and brought to trial, Muslims
charged with crimes against humanity.
The decision by the opposition party, the BNP, to undermine
the legitimacy of the trials emboldened the JI and its supporters to turn
violent. Their effort to intimidate the government and the majority of the
people who supported the trials has exposed even further the authoritarian
nature of their politics and their agenda of "Islamization" that most
Bangladeshis reject. The trials have brought Bangladeshis not only to relive
their torments of 1971, but also to take a stand for their secular culture
against the intimidation and intense pressure of Muslim fundamentalists.
The Bangladesh
story of genocide and struggle for justice has a wider significance. The manner
in which the ruling elite in Pakistan
unleashed the military to commit genocide against its own people, although
physically removed in a territorially divided country, is revealing of the
"not so secret anymore" history of Muslims and how Islam has been
wilfully abused by those in power. It is the story of Muslim-on-Muslim violence
from the outset of Islam; of the wars waged by Arab-Muslim caliphs beginning
with the first, Abu Bakr, against dissident Muslims; of the cruelty that
peaked, within fifty years of the Prophet Muhammad's demise, with the brutal
murder of his grandson, Husayn, and his companions, by Muslim Arabs in Kerbala,
Iraq; and of the silence thereafter among Muslims in general regarding crimes
against humanity committed in their name wherever the flag of Islam was raised
– as in Pakistan.
Unlike Bangladesh 's
story of genocide, war and liberation, tyrants in Muslim history have either
been removed by equally tyrannical rivals, occasionally with outside help, or
through fratricides – while the abuse of ordinary Muslims continues unabated. In Iraq ,
for instance, the trial of Saddam Hussein was only made possible because of
regime change brought about by the Americans. The Iraqi tyrant was pulled out
of a hole by American soldiers, and his trial and execution took place behind
the security wall provided by American forces.
But in Bangladesh ,
Bengali Muslims fought back against their Muslim oppressors. They eventually
succeeded with the help of India
in defeating the Pakistani military and its fanatical Muslim collaborators of
the East Pakistani wing of the Pakistani JI. There is a profound lesson in this aspect of Bangladesh
history for Muslims everywhere. If Muslims truly want freedom and wish to write
a new history of reform of Islam, they have to fight for it. They have not
merely to defeat the fanatics of Islam, but, as a free people, bring them to
justice; and as evidence of their freedom, demonstrate they can arrange fair
trials for their oppressors in an open court, with rules of evidence, while
maintaining the principle that those indicted are presumed innocent until
proven guilty.
In modern times, even though the West has striven to
distance politics from religion, the wall between the two remains porous.
Nevertheless, the West holds itself as a mirror to the rest of the world, and
especially to Muslims, of what modernity means in terms of separating politics and
religion, and why such separation might be essential for cultures wanting to
make the transition into the modern world of science and liberal democracy.
The war crimes trials rekindled the memory of this secular
nationalism, especially for the generation born after 1971; the war crimes
trials reminded them that when religion is abused, as Muslim fanatics have
abused it so egregiously, genocide comes perilously close. This is the lesson
that Bangladeshis have taken to heart, and for this reason they might well be
better positioned to make the journey into modernity than any other Muslim
society, irrespective of how well some of them are endowed with wealth from
natural resources. And this is the lesson of history that Bangladeshi Muslims,
ironically as victims of genocide and of Muslim-on-Muslim violence, are well
positioned to instruct others in the Arab-Muslim world.
There is a complex history here with a chain of actors and
events; they turned the horrors unleashed by the military regime of a united
Pakistan under General Yahya Khan against a defenseless civilian population in
then-East Pakistan into an international crisis that included genocide, war and
the break up of the largest Muslim country at that time.[1] In 1971, when Molla was a twenty-three year old activist in
the student wing of the JI, he participated in the formation of a pro-Pakistani
militia known as "al-Badr," a reference to Islamic history's first
battle in which the Prophet Muhammad fought against his Meccan enemies.
This
newer al-Badr militia would be as notoriously violent and bloody-minded as were
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
and the Taliban in Afghanistan .
Molla came to be known as "Mirpurer Koshai," or the "Butcher of
Mirpur," a township in the vicinity of Dhaka ,
Bangladesh
Three justices of the Bangladesh High Court oversaw Molla's
trial held by the ICT-2. The hearings took place in open court and under the
provisions required by the International Covenant for Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR). Bangladesh is a signatory of the Covenant, has ratified it, and
the ICTA of 1973 with the Rules for the ICT were prescribed in accordance with
the requirements of Article 14 of the ICCPR, ensuring that universally
recognized safeguards be provided to the accused. The ICT also reminded the
accused that while his rights to a fair trial were fully protected, the court
was mindful, as is the ICCPR, of the rights of the victims to receive justice.
Molla's trial took place in an open court, his rights were
fully accorded and he was represented by six lawyers. His defense was given
ample time and opportunity to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses, to
challenge and test the evidence, and to call upon a list of defense witnesses
to refute the charges. In the verdict of the ICT-2, Molla was found guilty as
accused and sentenced to life imprisonment. This judgment was appealed by the
prosecution, and the Supreme Court, in overruling the ICT verdict, sentenced
the accused to death. Molla's lawyers sought a review of the Supreme Court
decision, but once the process was exhausted, he was sent to the gallows. Molla
remained until the end defiant, displayed no remorse, mocked the court, denied
any wrongdoing, and refused to ask for clemency by appealing to the president
for leniency or forgiveness after the final verdict against him was handed
down.
It was predictable that the execution of Molla would spark
violence in Bangladesh ,
and deepen the existing political divide between supporters of the AL
and those of the BNP. Apart from the personal animus between the two leaders,
the political stance of the two parties towards the history and legacy of 1971
has, ironically, turned into a major point of contention and partisan
hostility.
Most Bangladeshis, irrespective of their differences, recall
the traumatic events of 1971 with horror and grief. The memory of the genocide
perpetrated by the Pakistani army and its local collaborators continues to
haunt the memory of the nation. In a comparative study of twentieth century
crimes against humanity, Death By Government (1994), R.J.
Rummel, one of the leading authorities on the subject, wrote:
"In 1971, the self-appointed president of Pakistan
and commander-in-chief of the army General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top
generals prepared a careful and systematic military, economic, and political
operation against East Pakistan (now Bangladesh ).
They planned to murder that country's Bengali intellectual, cultural, and
political elite. They planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands
of its Hindus and drive the rest into India .
And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be
subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation
to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide."
In a world grown weary with mass killings and brutalities
since the end of the Second World War, the dark, blood-soaked history of Bangladesh
stands as one of the most gruesome between the Holocaust and the madness of
Khmer Rouge killers in Cambodia
during the years 1975-79. The official estimate of people killed in the
genocide is around three million, of nearly a quarter million women raped, and
some ten million people driven into India
as refugees.[3]
For more than two decades after 1971, politics in Bangladesh
was greatly unsettled by the after effects of the genocide and war. A poor,
liberated country was driven to famine and endemic violence resulting from the
legacy of destruction wrought on the economy, infrastructure, institutions, and
the social fabric of the country. The situation was made even more grievous by
the self-inflicted wound of political leaders unprepared and unsure on how to
handle the escalating challenges of poverty, annual floods and public despair.
As the country was reduced to surviving on international aid, corruption
mushroomed. Henry Kissinger had contemptuously dubbed Bangladesh ,
upon its liberation, as a "basket case;" and the ineptness of its
leaders, including Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, deepened the trauma of the people.
Eventually however, despite the immensity of the problems,
the country began to turn around. The military regimes that followed the
killings of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and General Ziaur Rahman gave way to democratic
rule.[4] It was to the chagrin of the Bangladesh government that 195
Pakistani war criminals whom it had named and asked the Indian government to
hand over for trial, were instead repatriated to Pakistan with the rest of
nearly 100,000 prisoners of war whom India held after the surrender of the
Pakistan army in December 1971. The repatriation took place under guarantees
negotiated among the foreign ministers of Bangladesh ,
India and Pakistan
in what is known as the Delhi Agreement of 1974, which stipulated that the government
of Pakistan
would prosecute them. Pakistan
not only reneged on the Delhi Agreement, it refused to acknowledge the role of
its military-political elite and its armed forces in planning and committing
genocide in Bangladesh .
As of this date, Pakistan
has not made any gesture of official remorse, nor has it offered any apology to
the people of Bangladesh ... Read more:
