Trial by jury, not perjury

The big question is what are we going to do with them? That is the debate which is searing the nation. Drama or no drama, we have bagged two tomcats of terrorism, who were leading an army of hoodlums throwing bombs into movie theatres, courthouses and musical concerts. They have ordered to kill many people, now we hear even the parliament members were on their hit list. Pick and zap! Oy, it must be lots of fun. In our Freudian anxiety, who doesn't wish to do like that?

But the Lords of Death are in police custody now, one still recovering from a bungled attempt to blow up himself, or so we would like to think. If you recall, this man was lying on a push cart immediately after his arrest, his face and hair burned and one arm roasted like a rack of lamb, his swollen face and bloated belly conjuring the image of a fallen ghoul.

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We are waiting for them to speak, if they haven't spoken already. We don't need to know everything, honestly, not what inspired them to take this course. It's of no interest how they planned their attacks or recruited members to expand their network. We don't want to know how and where they sourced their explosives, although the authority may like to know. Only two things are important for us. Which bomb attacks are they responsible for? Who sponsored those heinous acts?

There is always an inequality in the justice for mass murderers. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, it doesn't work when one or few men conduct a holocaust or carnage, because in the end you can kill one man only once. Some years ago a Pakistani court had given a landmark verdict in the case of a paedophile, who had molested and killed hundred boys. The order was to hang the accused to death and then chop his body into hundred pieces, one for each victim.

More than anything, justice is geometric, not arithmetic. It is not so much important to settle the equation as it is to close the circle. We can give these militants consecutive life terms, hang them or hack them to death but justice will be achieved only if we can unravel all aspects of the crime, laying out all facts like articles displayed in museum.

That is exactly what they are trying to do in Cambodia. They are taking preparations for the trial of the Khmer Rouge. The budget is USD56.3 million, which will be spent on setting up special tribunals, appointing judges, building courtrooms and incidental expenses. The tribunal will be ready in 2007, and it has been already 27 years since the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge wiped out 1.7 million lives. Many of the criminals, victims and witnesses could be dead by then.

So what? Justice is not about vengeance. It's about closure, not so much to match crime with punishment but to restore the moral balance that we are accountable for our actions. That is why the family of the victim is allowed to watch when a murderer is sent to the gas chamber or given the lethal injection in the United States. It's an act of closure to demonstrate that the wrongdoer has been brought to justice right before their eyes.

We have many examples of exceptions in history when people got away with what they did. Pol Pot died before he could be brought to justice. Milosevich passed away in the detention cell in the middle of his prosecution. Many of the Nazi war criminals escaped justice. People, who collaborated with the Pakistan Army in 1971, were never tried.

That is why, I say it again, justice is not about vengeance because all murder trials happen after the victim is dead. But it is always about the crime. People are often tried in absentia, because justice must be upheld even if the criminal can't be held. Under the present scenario, the criminals have been held but the question is whether justice will be upheld. Will their trial be transparent and fair?

Let us not doubt that the trial will happen. But the question is how is it going to happen? Who will be the judges? In 1983, Professor Harry Elmer Barnes re-evaluated the Nuremberg trial of the German war criminals and observed that the court had no real jurisdiction over the accused or their offences. Then he wrote that it also permitted the accusers to act as prosecutors, judges, jury and executioners; and it admitted to the group of prosecutors those who had been guilty of crimes as numerous and atrocious as those with which the accused were charged.

It leads to the fundamental question whether even if the captured militants are punished, will it be fair trial? When the government is accused of complicity, fingers pointed at some of its ministers, will justice be achieved if we punish the guilty and protect the guilt? Think about it. Will it be fair if we hold trial of the gun and spare the hand which pulled the trigger?

In that case, the militants should get what they deserve but we must also look behind the scene. It's important to know who funded them and whose brainchild it was to unleash terror in the name of Islam to make political gains. Like there is chain of command amongst those who acted, there must be chain of command amongst those who guided. We need to get both sides so that the temporary remission of fever doesn't mislead us that the virus has been rooted out.

We must listen to the militants and understand why they utter the names they utter. Even better, their trial must be televised to the nation in the manner some international trials such as Saddam's are televised to the world. The families who lost their dear ones have the right to hear every word spoken by these militants, pick up every name they drop and scrutinize every argument they give. We owe it to these families so that they can understand the phenomenon which brought them pain, and know those who are responsible for it.

It is strange how these things work. Justice can be miscarried like a disrupted game of chess if one of the pieces is missing. The capture of the militants has made one thing obvious that no foreign operatives had infiltrated the country to do those subversive acts. They were our very own people with a warped sense of justice. If all the layers of conspiracy are peeled away, these militants are products of demonic forces which are more deeply rooted in politics than in religion.

The trial of the militants brings us the rare opportunity to separate one from another. It brings us the opportunity to look for faces hiding behind faces. Religion is passion of believers firmly embedded in faith. What politics does is stoke that passion so that the devout minds are deluded. We must use this trial to sort out that delusion. Otherwise, while we get mere headcounts in vengeance, justice is going to fail.

It means if we protect anybody who might have helped these militants we are going to lose the moral right to hold this trial and close the circle. What we need is a trial by jury, not perjury.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.