War crimes trials are a defining moment for Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, a moderate Muslim nation of 160 million people, a revolution is unfolding to keep the country’s secular character alive.

MOZAMMEL H. KHAN

In Bangladesh, a moderate Muslim nation of 160 million people, a revolution is unfolding to keep the country’s secular character alive. For two months now, hundreds of thousands of people from young men and women, aging former guerrilla fighters and grandmothers who still carry the scars of genocide, have occupied Shahbag Square in the capital, Dhaka. The collective anger of a nation, simmering below the surface for more than 40 years, has been called the country’s second war of liberation.

The roots of this resentment lie in the genocide of the Bengali people (of the then-East Pakistan, separated from West Pakistan by 1,600 km) that started in March 1971. The Pakistan Army wanted to overturn the verdict of the only general election in Pakistan, won by the East Pakistani party led by the charismatic leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The Pakistani occupation army and its accused Bengali collaborators, the mullahs of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, imposed a nine-month war of horrors on the Bengalis. The Bengalis fought back in what they saw as a war of liberation. The genocide resulted in an estimated 3 million killed and 200,000 women raped by the occupation forces and their Bengali accomplices, before the Pakistani Army’s humiliating surrender to combined Indian and Bangladeshi guerrilla forces in December 1971.

The government of the newly created state, Bangladesh, started trials of the Bengali collaborators, mostly members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, under a newly enacted law, the International Crimes (Tribunal) Act of 1973. However, the trials were stopped following the tragic assassination of the president and founding father in 1975.

It was not until 2008 when the current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Rahman’s daughter, campaigned on a promise to set up tribunals to try the 1971 collaborators for war crimes. She was swept into power in the fairest election in the country’s history, winning all but 30 seats in a 300-member parliament. In 2010 the war crimes trials finally began.

Among the first to be convicted was a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Quader Mollah (incidentally my own roommate in college days). But instead of the death sentence, Mollah was given life imprisonment with the possibility of a future pardon, if a change of guard takes place at the helm of the state. Hearing that his life had been saved, Mollah turned to the news cameras and, with a huge grin on his face, waved a victory sign to the crowd.

While Mollah was euphoric, liberal and secular Bangladeshis were infuriated. How could a man pronounced guilty of war crimes, accused of raping and shooting 344 civilians to death during the 1971 war, not receive the maximum punishment, the death sentence?

Within hours of the judgment, which was handed down on Feb. 5, ordinary students and bloggers used Facebook and Twitter to rally their contacts. Soon an impromptu gathering of hundreds, then thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands collected at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square.

For weeks, they have been there and despite the gruesome murder of one of the leaders, have kept their movement peaceful. The protesters wanted the government to amend the law to make it possible for the prosecution to appeal the decision of the tribunal, which the parliament did, to bring equity to the law, since only the defendants were able to appeal. In addition, they want a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami as a collaborator that took active part of the genocide.

The mullahs of the Jamaat-e-Islami, on the other hand, label the leaders of the uprising as atheist and anti-Islamic, even though religion and personal faith have no part in the current resurrection of patriotism.

For the first time ever in the Muslim world, there has been a popular uprising against the fascism of an Islamist party that garnered only 3 per cent of votes in the last general election. One would have expected the western intelligentsia to be thrilled at this development and for the media to report from the square. Instead, there have been many distorted reports criticizing the war crimes trials in such major publications as The Economist of London.

The uprising back home has touched the hearts and souls of Bangladeshis around the world, including the estimated 50,000 people of Bangladeshi origin who live in the Greater Toronto Area. Over the past few weeks, rallies organized by Bangladeshi students and attended by hundreds have been taking place in Toronto every weekend to support the historic demonstrations in Shahbag Square, where the spirit of the liberation war is being rekindled.

First published in TheToronto Star, April 16 2013

Mozammel H. Khan teaches engineering at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning and is the Convener of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh

Bangladesh Islamist: Bad moon rising

The Shahbag protests in Dhaka, which were held recently to condemn Bengali Islamists' collaboration with the Pakistani Army in 1971, have found both allies and critics in India's West Bengal region. Ironically, the Indian state is exploiting the anti-Shahbag narrative - led by Islamist forces within India - to earn brownie points with what it sees as a valuable minority. But at what cost?

GARGA CHATTERJEE

1971 is still fresh in the mind of many Bengalis from the West, when a massive relief and solidarity effort was undertaken on our side of the border to help a mass of humanity trying to escape what has been described variously as "civil war" and "genocide". The leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami in East Bengal and its student wing organized murder and rape squads, at times in collaboration with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Their specific crimes included mass-murder, rape as a weapon of war, arson and forced conversions. They escaped prosecution because Bangladeshi generals used them to cast an Islamic veneer of legitimacy over their illegal capture of power. In this way the JI was gradually rehabilitated. 

But then the present Awami League-led government came to power, and its manifesto promised the trial of war criminals. Thus started the proceedings against the collaborator mullahs in the War Crimes Tribunal. Last month's Shahbag protests were held to demand maximum punishment for the guilty. 

In West Bengal, which is in India, a few meetings and assemblies have happened around the issue of Shahbag. However, to the shock and dismay of many, the largest of these assemblies was a massive rally held in central Kolkata's Shahid Minar on 30th March, explicitly against the Shahbag protests and in support of the war criminals convicted by the tribunal. Various Muslim groups, including the All Bengal Minority Council, All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, Madrassa Students Union, Milli Ittehad Council and Sunnat-ul-Jamaat Committee, convened the meeting. People had also arrived in buses and trucks from distant districts of West Bengal like Murshidabad and Nadia, in additional to those from the adjoining districts of North and South 24 Parganas, Haora and Hooghly. Students of madrassas and the newly minted Aliah Madrassa University were conspicuous at the gathering.

They rallied because "Islam is in danger" in Bangladesh. Never mind that post-1947, that part of the world through all its forms (East Bengal, East Pakistan, People's Republic of Bangladesh) has seen a continuous drop in the population percentage of religious minorities, in every census since 1951.This rallying cry is not new. It was heard in 1952 when the motherland language movement was in full swing; in 1954 when the United Front led by Fazlul Haq and Maulana Bhashani challenged the Muslim League; in 1969 when the Awami League made its 6 demands; and in 1971 when Bengalees fought for independence. Now this demand is being made in the context of Shahbag in 2013. The pattern shows that 'Islam in danger' comes up during every secular movement for rights and justice. One of the main accused in the war-crimes trial, Golam Azam (also the leader of the Jamaat in East Pakistan in 1971), had used this old trick in the hat when he stated in 1971: "The supporters of the so-called Bangladesh Movement are the enemies of Islam, Pakistan, and Muslims." Replace 'Bangladesh' with 'Shahbag' and 'Pakistan' with 'Bangladesh', and you have the latest slogan.

Describing the struggle in Bangladesh as one between "Islam and Shaitan" (Satan), the Indian Muslim protestors announced at the meeting that they would cleanse West Bengal of those who were trying to support the present Prime Minister of Bangladesh and the war-crime trial effort. It was also threatened that those political forces that support Shahbag would be "beaten with broomsticks" if they came to ask for votes from Muslims. For effect they added that, just like Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie, Sheikh Hasina too will be kept out of Kolkata. They also endorsed the anti-Shahbag "movement" in Bangladesh. This last assertion is especially worrisome as the so-called movement has let loose its fury on the religious minorities of Bangladesh. It has resulted in a wave of violent attacks on Hindus, Buddhists and secular individuals, with wanton burning and destruction of Hindu and Buddhist homes, businesses and places of worship. Amnesty International communique mentioned attacks on over 40 Hindu temples as of 6th March. The number is over 100 now and still rising. 

Given the recent trends of politics in West Bengal, this large gathering and its pronouncements are not shocking. The writing has been on the wall for a while. A collapse in the Muslim vote of the Left Front is an important factor in its recent demise after more than three decades of uninterrupted rule. Various Muslim divines like Twaha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif have explicitly pointed out that decline as a point of threat to the present government. The Trinamool Congress wants to ensure a continued slice of this vote. The present government has tried to hand out sops to build a class of Muslim "community leaders" who eat out of its hand by giving monthly stipends to imams and muezzins. Very recently it was decided that such a cash scheme might be worked out for Muslim widows too. Given that it is beyond the ability of the debt-ridden, visionless government to solve the problems that are common to the poor, it has cynically chosen to woo a section of the marginalized on the basis of religion using handouts. These are excellent as speech-making points that masquerade as empathy and social justice. But it is dangerous politics to say the least. It sets into motion currents and gives fillip to forces whose trajectories are beyond the control of the present political groups. The Left Front's political fortune has not improved after its humiliating defeat. It has cynically chosen not to oppose this communal turn to West Bengal's politics, for it too believes that silently waiting for the incumbent to falter is a better roadmap to power. 

The damage such tactics are doing to the state's political culture is immense and may well be irreparable. The incumbent's connivance and the opposition's silence are largely due to decades of erosion in the culture of democratic political contestation through grassroots organizing. Both the incumbent and the opposition parties deal with West Bengal's sizeable minority population primarily via intermediaries, often doing away with any pretense of political ideology while indulging in that transaction.

For their part, organizations owing allegiance to a particular brand of political Islam have exploited this disconnect fully. An emerging bloc of Islamist divines and ex-student leaders have amassed students at short notice and launched protests to influence government policy. Such blackmailing is hardly aimed at uplifting the living standards of West Bengal's Muslims. Rather, it is a show of brute force that began with the successful driving-out of writer Taslima Nasreen during the Left Front regime. Its most recent example was the governmental pressure that managed to keep Salman Rushdie out of a proposed literary event in Kolkata, after he had successfully done such events in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai. This slow pushing of the envelope fits into a sequence of events that are increasingly stifling the freedom of expression in India. At the same time, its double standards are explicit. On March 21st, a medium-sized group consisting of small magazine publishers, human rights workers, theatre artists, women's organizations and peace activists had announced that they would march in solidarity with the Shahbag protests and express their support to the Bangladesh government's war crimes trial initiative by marching to the Deputy High Commission of Bangladesh. Even after it had obtained prior intimation, the rally was not allowed to move by the police due to "orders" and some of the marchers were detained. The same police provided security cover to pro-Jamaat-e-Islami organizations as they conducted their rally a month earlier, and again later when they submitted a memorandum to the same Deputy High Commission demanding acquittal of convicted war criminals. Last year the state issued a circular to public libraries to stock a sectarian daily even before its first issue had been published! 

The role of the state is explicit in these actions - it thinks it can play this game of brinksmanship with finesse. The flight of cultural capital from India is but a natural corollary of such unholy alliances, with the political class playing tactical spectators and enablers. 

The recent bye-election to Jangipur, a Muslim majority constituency, carried certain signals. Prompted by the elevation of Mr. Mukherjee to India's Presidency, this election saw the combined vote of the two main parties fall from 95% in 2009 to 78% in 2012. The major beneficiaries were the Welfare Party of India, a thinly veiled front organization of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the Social Democratic Party of India, an even more radical group of a similar ilk. Such groups are armed with a program of "tactical pluralism" (which is, it has to be said, akin to the tactical defence of Taslima Nasreen's freedom of speech by majoritarian communal political forces in the Indian Union). The rallying against Shahbag has blown the cover of faux pluralism. 

Communal tension in India has grown in recent years. There has, for instance, been serious disturbance by West Bengal standards in Deganga and Noliakhali. The majoritarian forces smell a subterranean polarization of the polity. Mouthing banalities about Bengal's "intrinsically" plural culture is useless: culture is a living entity, something that is always in flux, created and recreated every moment. At present it is being recreated by the victimization discourse of fringe groups like Hindu Samhati. And it is being recreated in religious congregations in parts of West Bengal where unalloyed poison produced by divines like Tarek Monawar Hossain from Bangladesh is played on loudspeakers. Thanks to technology, such vitriol produced in a milieu of free-style majoritarian muscle-flexing in Bangladesh easily finds its way to a place where the demographic realities are different. Hence the popularity and consequent defence of one of the convicted war criminals, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, who in his post-71 avatar had become something of a superstar in the Bengali waz-mahfil (Islamic religious discourse congregation) circuit. What are the effects of the subterranean cultural exchange of this kind? Well, one of them is a Holocaust-like denialism, evident in the audacious defence of Sayedee as proclaimed loudly at the recent rally in West Bengal.

First published in The Friday Times, April 19-25, 2013 - Vol. XXV, No. 10

Bangladesh is divided over justice for victims of past massacres

SHASHI THAROOR

The sea of humanity besieging the Shahbag area in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, for the last two months, has had an unusual demand – unusual, at least, when it comes to the Indian subcontinent. The demonstrators have been clamoring for justice for the victims of the genocidal massacres of 1971 that led to the former East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan.

The demonstrations have been spontaneous, disorganized and chaotic, but also impassioned and remarkably peaceful. Many of the several thousand demonstrators at Shahbag are too young to have had any personal experience of the killings that marked the Pakistani army’s brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to suppress the fledgling independence movement. But they are animated by an ideal – the profound conviction that complicity in mass murder should not go unpunished, and that justice is essential for Bangladeshi society’s four-decade-old wounds to heal fully.

What is curious about this development is that the subcontinent has preferred to forget the injustices that have scarred its recent history. A million people lost their lives in the savagery of the subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan, and 13 million more were displaced, most of them forcibly. But not one person was ever charged with a crime, much less tried and punished.

An estimated million more were massacred in Bangladesh in 1971, and only this year have some of the perpetrators’ local allies been tried. Almost every year, somewhere on the subcontinent, riots, often politically instigated, claim dozens – sometimes hundreds and occasionally thousands – of lives in the name of religion, sect, or ethnicity. Again, investigations are conducted and reports are written, but no one is ever brought before the bar of justice.

To paraphrase the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin: The intentional killing of one person is murder, but that of a hundred, a thousand, or a million is merely a grim statistic.

The idealism of Bangladesh’s young demonstrators, however, points to a new development. The outpouring of emotion evident at Shahbag was provoked by a decision of an international criminal tribunal convened by the government. The tribunal, which tries cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, found a prominent member of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, guilty of complicity in the killings of 300 people, but gave him a relatively light sentence of 15 years in prison (prosecutors had sought the death penalty).

By demanding severe punishment for those guilty of war crimes – not the Pakistani Army, long gone, but their local collaborators in groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Badar, Al-Shams and the Razakar irregulars – the protesters are also implicitly describing the society in which they wish to live: secular, pluralist and democratic.

These words are enshrined in Bangladesh’s constitution, which simultaneously declares the republic to be an Islamic state. While some see no contradiction, the fact that many of the collaborators who killed secular and pro-democracy Bengalis in 1971 claimed to be doing so in the name of Islam points to an evident tension.

If any proof of this clash of values were needed, it came in the form of a counter-demonstration against the Shahbag movement led by activists of the fundamentalist Islamic movement Hifazat-e-Islam, which occupied the capital’s Motijheel area. Unlike the Shahbag events, the counter demonstration was well-planned and organized, and conveyed the stark message that there was an alternative point of view in this overwhelmingly Muslim country.

The bearded, skull-cap-wearing protesters shouted in unison their agreement with speakers who denounced the International Crimes Tribunal. Their supporters include activists of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami-Bangladesh, which has fought alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The debate between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy is not a new one on the subcontinent. But the issue of justice for the crimes of 1971 has brought the divide into sharp relief. The Shahbag protesters reject Islamic extremists’ influence in Bangladesh, and even call for organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami to be banned, while Hifazat-e-Islam and its supporters want the country’s liberal forces repressed, secularist bloggers arrested, and strict Islamism imposed on Bangladeshi society.

The young people at Shahbag are mainly urban, educated and middle class; Hifazat derives its support mainly from the rural poor. Traditional versus modern, urban versus rural, intellectuals versus the peasantry: these divisions are the stuff of political cliche. But, all too often, cliches become established because they are true.

The Bangladeshi government’s sympathies are closer to the Shahbag protesters than to the Hifazat counter-demonstrators. But it must navigate a difficult path, because both points of view have significant public support. The authorities have even taken steps to appease the Islamists by arresting four bloggers for their posts. But the government remains resolute in its support for the international tribunal.

The irony is that true religion is never incompatible with justice. But when justice is sought for the crimes of those who claim to be acting in the name of religion, the terms of the debate change. The issue then becomes one that has been avoided in Bangladesh for too long: whether claiming to act according to the requirements of piety provides an exemption for murder.

The outcome of the standoff in Dhaka should provide an answer in Bangladesh, and its implications could reverberate far and wide.

First published in the print edition of The Daily Star, Lebanon, April 23, 2013

Shashi Tharoor is India’s minister of state for human resource development. His most recent book is “Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.” 

Stirrings of a Dhaka spring

Youths demand death penalty for Islamists, on trial for genocide during the nation's liberation war of 1971

SUBIR BHAUMIK

On February 5, one of two war crimes tribunals trying those accused of 'crimes against humanity' during Bangladesh's liberation war in 1971, sentenced Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) Assistant Secretary General Abdul Quader Molla to life imprisonment.

The judges say one of the many charges against him, the mass murder at Dhaka's Keraniganj, could not be proved.

By that evening, university student Mohammed Adil was on his way to Dhaka's Shahbagh Square along with thousands, demanding death penalty for Molla. "We are ready for a fight to the finish with the evil forces of 1971." His girlfriend, Raushan, a college student, also joined the protest. Three weeks later, they were still in and out of Shahbagh, shouting slogans between sweet talk.

A February 28 death sentence for former JEI lawmaker Delawar Hossain Sayadee drove the country to the edge.

The JEI threatened a 'civil war' and the government warned of tough action in the event of any violence. The protesters at Shahbagh said hanging Sayadee or the other war criminals won't be enough. They have given the government a March 26 deadline: Ban the Jamaat-e-Islami and nationalise the party's considerable assets.

The battle lines have never been clearer in the four decades after the 1971 Liberation War.

Bangladeshis expected the death sentence for Molla, the mastermind behind scores of massacres, after the tribunals sentenced an absconding JEI activist Abul Kalam Azad, alias Bachchu Razakar, to death on January 21. Tens of thousands of people who have streamed into Shahbagh, one of Dhaka's busiest intersections close to the Bangla Academy and the historic Race Course, waving angry banners depicting symbolic hangings of those accused of war crimes.

The huge presence of women of all age groups cannot be missed in the protests. Dressed in saris, salwar-kurtas or jeans and not in face-covering burqas, they are in no mood to spare those responsible for the gang rapes during the 1971 war. Bangladesh has made huge progress in women's empowerment, specially in education. The loudest voice in Shahbagh is of pintsized Lucky Akhtar. Fellow protesters call her "Slogan Kanya" (Slogan Girl)- such is the power, rhythm and telling effect of her slogans.

Prodded by a powerful community of bloggers loosely organised under the banner of Bloggers and Online Activist Network (BOAN), the thousands who had gathered to demand death for Molla are demanding a ban on JEI and nationalisation of its assets.

Social media has boomed in Bangladesh since 2005, with more than 140,000 bloggers posting on just one site, somewhereintheblog.net.

"The extraordinary world of Bangladesh's bloggers reflects a mini nation," says Syeda Gulshan Ferdous Jana, one of the pioneers.

That the protests are led from a non-party platform in a highly polarised society has made them unique. One of the leading figures of Shahbagh, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was murdered by suspected Islamists ten days into the protests. Haider, an architect by profession and blogger by passion, lambasted JEI'S religion-driven politics. His murder only added fuel to the protests.

Nursing the pain of history The protesters' angst is rooted in the legacy of Bangladesh's painful birth on December 16, 1971, when Pakistan's defeated army finally surrendered. But not before they had killed nearly three million people, raped more than a quarter of a million women and forced 10 million to flee to India. JEI militias, which opposed the independence of then East Pakistan, joined the mayhem.

No wonder then that JEI is the country's major Islamist party, but with just four seats in a 300-member parliament. Bangladesh passed a law to try 'war criminals' in 1973, but two years later, the country's founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated in a bloody coup. The military rulers legitimised JEI and made constitutional amendments to change Bangladesh's secular polity.

Only after the Awami League returned to power with a landslide victory in the December 2008 parliamentary polls did it muster the confidence to start the war crimes trials. The two war crimes tribunals, established in 201012, have so far indicted 11 people, including eight leaders of JEI.

The trials have made the youth aware of the horrendous atrocities of 1971. The Awami League's landslide 2008 victory was attributed to the massive support from first-time voters drawn in by promises of a war crimes trial. A generation of young people (a third of Bangladesh's 150 million are below 20) now want justice. "Though they defeated the Pakistan army, our freedom fighters could not finish JEI, the force of political Islam and the bitter legacy of Pakistan. These defiant tigers at Shahbagh have done that," says political analyst Saleem Samad.

The fury of this new "Bangla Spring" has continued for over three weeks, attracting school and college students, housewives and professionals, writers, filmmakers, stage artists, singers, poets and even rickshawpullers.

National cricket captain

Mushfiqur Rahim led nearly his team to Shahbagh to express solidarity with the protests. Popular cartoonist Tariqul Islam Shanto died of cardiac arrest while demonstrating there.

Shahbagh keeps the faith

The protesters say "Shahbagh does not sleep". It doesn't, literally. The day at the busy square, where thousands have encamped to carry on the unending protests, begins around 7 a.m. with the national anthem "Amar sonar Bangla, ami tomay bhalobashi (My golden Bengal, I love you)". It is followed by slogans, poetry, music, street theatre and films-all day and night.

As Shahbagh-type protests spread to other cities and even among Bangladesh's diaspora, the government has moved with the wind. An amendment has been passed to a 1973 law that will now allow the prosecution to appeal against Molla's verdict, or even try organisations such as JEI for war crimes.

A buoyant economy, fuelled by record remittances from expatriates (US $14.2 billion in 2012; up 16.3 per over 2011), success of its garment industry and huge progress in several social sectors, has given Bangladesh the confidence to emerge as a 'breakout nation' in this century. The country's GenNext is determined not to fritter away its economic success. "We must bury the legacy of a failed state like Pakistan in our country, once and for all," says bureaucrat-writer Musa Sadiq. The youth echo his feelings. "Our elders took the right decision to break out of Pakistan. Now we must finish our fundamentalists and develop Bangladesh into a modern liberal state," says engineering student Mohammed Nayeem.

That is why the "Bangla Spring" is so different from the recent "Arab Spring", which brought down authoritarian regimes only to be replaced by Islamists who oppose liberalism and force women newsreaders to wear headscarves. "You cannot put the veil on me or my generation, not anymore," says young student Sharmin Mahmud.

First published in India Today, March 1, 2013

Subir Baumik, a journalist worked for BBC for two decades and specialises in conflict and politics of North East India and Bangladesh