Bangladesh moves to ban Jamaat-e-Islami
Bangladesh war crimes investigators moved on Tuesday to outlaw the country’s largest Islamic party, accusing it of genocide and other atrocities during the 1971 bloody struggle for independence.
Government investigators handed a report detailing war crimes allegations against Jamaat-e-Islami to prosecutors, in the latest move against the party which has banned from contesting January elections.
“We want total dissolution of the party,” the government’s chief war crimes investigator Abdul Hannan Khan told reporters. “Jamaat and its wings took the decision to act as auxillary forces of the Pakistani army in committing atrocities in the 1971 war. So the party cannot avoid its superior responsibilities,” Hannan said. Hannan said prosecutors from the country’s controversial war crimes tribunal would now proceed with charges against the party which would lead to a trial in the same tribunal.
“The whole nation has been waiting for this trial. It is the first time after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials that a party is to be prosecuted for war crimes,” Hannan said, comparing Jamaat to the Nazi party. The tribunal, set up by the secular government in 2010, has already convicted more than a dozen of Jamaat´s leaders over crimes allegedly committed during Bangladesh’s war against Pakistan for independence.
A senior Jamaat leader was executed in December after his conviction, sparking a fresh wave of deadly protests by Islamist supporters. Protesters have repeatedly clashed with police over the tribunal, which Islamists claim is aimed at eradicating its leaders, leaving more than 200 people dead since last January when the verdicts were first handed down. Jamaat, a leading opposition party, was banned from contesting general elections held in January this year which were boycotted by other opposition parties and marred by bloodshed.
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The Jamaat has a controversial history & while a move towards democratic ideals should be welcomed, the communal atmosphere is too fragile to permit anything less than complete honesty. It is unclear whether its ideological transitions are tactical or basic: See Javed Anand: Reluctant Democrats. It is also unclear whether they see the danger to democracy stemming from the positions taken by their sister Jamaats in Bangladesh & Pakistan: Kolkata Rally on Bangladesh; or the intimidation of Taslima Nasreen:
The idea of Muslim interest is as dubious as that of Hindu or Sikh or Christian interest & often translates as the interest of the self-appointed leaders of the community in question. .. If the Jamaat uses political support as a lever for endorsement of its conservative positions on homosexuality or 'hurt sentiment', it will not be contributing to strengthening democracy, but weakening it. Any party that obtains political support on this basis will have further communalised the atmosphere. It has been a long-standing assumption in Indian politics that Muslims are a jagir of the conservative ulema & intellectuals. This fabricated stranglehold of clerics must be rejected. For Indian Muslims, as for all citizens, it is democracy and an impartial administration that count, far more than motivated agitations over writers and 'hurt sentiments'- DS
