Justice delayed...a third of a century gone

Granted there is significant controversy whether the magic number of 3 million killed in 1971 is accurate or not. Frankly, I am not dogmatic about the number. May be it was 3 million or just a million or somewhere in between. May be the immediate post-independence government exaggerated the number of massacre victims to earn extra sympathy. Perhaps the number of women raped was less than 200,000. Fine. The dispute over exact numbers, however, does not detract from the fact that a massacre took place that was planned with precision and executed ruthlessly. The numerical semantics lessen the burden of guilt only to the extent that some perpetrators, to recall Nuremberg prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross, 'forfeited their lives once while others more guilty forfeited it many times over.' No matter how we analyze the numbers, they put to shame the extent of all the other alleged atrocities in the world that we regularly harp about. It was neither journalistic license nor patriotic fervour that prompted Anthony Mascarenhas, erstwhile Pakistan's premier newsman, to call 1971 the 'ugliest genocide in history'.

Thirty-two years later, the victims of that genocide are yet to see one single individual of the Occupation Forces brought to justice. Not one. In comparison, thousands of Nazis and Japanese were hauled before war crimes tribunals while Israel, to this day, continues to hunt down those Nazis who somehow escaped the hands of Nuremberg justice. Even the mighty Slobodan Milosevic is behind bars for conspiring to annihilate Bosnians and Croats.

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While Milosevic eats Christmas dinner at The Hague's prison canteen, General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi is making money selling his book and speaking at posh Lahore seminar halls, and Brigadier Manzoor Hassan Atif is being inducted into the International Hall of Hockey Fame. Tikka Khan, the 'Butcher of Bengal' may be dead but hundreds of other former Occupation officers are enjoying the perks of the exceptionally good life that service in the Pakistani armed forces guarantees. Why, were I to play a round at the Margalla Hills Golf Club outside Rawalpindi, chances are I will run into at least a couple of the good old chaps on the ninth hole lamenting the 'fall of Dhaka to the miscreants and their Hindu masters.'

Pro-liberation forces, pro-Bangladeshi nationalism forces, pro-this, pro-that. What have all these alliances of convenience done to bring the matter of the 1971 genocide to the world's attention, let alone take steps to initiate a war crimes trial? Nothing at all. Some have been astutely ambivalent about going further than seeking the trial of the domestic mutineers, lest they not even get that. Others, comforted by having top flight Independence war heroes in their councils, have quietly reached a dé

tente of silence with the quisling elements from 1971. Yet others are too concerned about Marxist dialectics and materialistic conspiracies to do anything practical about real issues.

And the masses wait for someone, somewhere, to pick up their cause with as much passion as the cause of other peoples has been championed. Poor masses, for they understand not that the most dangerous place in a modern society is between a politician and publicity: Palestininans and Kashmiris generate publicity, even in Dhaka; forgotten Bengalis from 1971 do not. While rightly so Robin Cook said that 'War crimes have no statute of limitations.' But their perpetrators and victims do have natural limits on their lives.

In the winter of 1939-40 as Nazis gobbled up country after country and threatened Britain itself, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain kept on talking about everything except Hitler, hoping people would forget the looming danger. Infuriated by the premier's nonchalance, then Opposition leader Clement Atlee called on the back-bench Tory MP Winston Churchill to 'stand up and speak for England'.

On this thirty-second anniversary of Victory Day, we need someone to stand up and speak for the victims of the Bangladesh genocide and demand the justice that they so richly have deserved for a third of a century.

Esam Sohail is a banker by profession and a former college lecturer of international affairs.