Ground Realities
Ageing war criminals and their old crimes
General Harunur Rashid has been doing an admirable job of keeping us all posted on the need to resist the anti-liberation elements which have, of late, been rearing their heads. His careful and determined handling of conditions, especially through his efforts to organise the surviving sector commanders of the War of Liberation, is proof, if proof at all were needed, that the spirit which informed our view of the war and underlined our participation in that war is yet alive, and that it only needs men of courage and patriotism to rekindle it in order for the dark forces endangering our liberty to be sent packing.
In these present times, when the quality of leadership is often marred by pusillanimity, and courage in the face of adversity is all too conspicuous by its absence, General Harun gives us reason to hope. He thus reinforces the belief in all of us that despite all the mistakes and all the blunders we have committed in our handling of war criminals, collaborators, and others uncomfortable with the emergence of this free Bengali state, we still have it in us to run these elements of elemental darkness out of town.
And how do we go about doing that? There is a simple answer to that question: keep anyone who even remotely questions the genesis of Bangladesh's struggle for independence at arm's length. The trouble with us, with all of us, in these many years since the fall of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's government, has been that we have somehow demonstrated little enthusiasm about boycotting the local enemies of freedom at the social level.
When you have a situation where a freedom fighter has no problem serving as chairman of a corporation under a minister whose active collaboration with the Yahya Khan junta remains a historical truth, you get the sense that it is all right for politics to compromise itself. That is a bad way of handling things.
In history, modern history to be exact, there is little evidence to suggest that the Nazis or Fascists or any of their quislings, after the collapse of the system they had once foisted on society, have come back to play a leading role in society. You could even come closer to your own times, those that you inhabit at present.
No one will ever suggest, not even in a whisper, that the Hutu brigands responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in the mid-1990s will be rehabilitated in society. And that is how justice and fair play are expected to work. In Nuremberg, in 1949, it was justice coming full circle.
So, has there been no instance of a former oppressor, or friend of the oppressor, emerging from the caves to carve out a new career? Of course there has been, but have you not noticed how, once their sordid past caught up with such people, they were quickly swatted down?
Remember, if you will, the activist secretary general of the United Nations that was Kurt Waldheim. The moment it was discovered (and he was president of Austria at the time) that he had been linked to the Gestapo in the war years, an outraged world came down on him. He was unable to travel outside his country, for no foreign government would give him a visa. It was a pointless period that he spent in office.
That kind of example, unfortunately, has not been set in Bangladesh. Actually, we did not need to go looking for the old razakars, for they were all around us. And we were, in the end, able to do nothing that would make them feel ashamed of the sins and crimes they had committed upon their own people. Think of Khan Abdus Sabur Khan. A bare two days before the liberation of Bangladesh, he told a crowd of Pakistan-lovers in Dhaka that if the state of Bangladesh truly came into being, it would be as an illegitimate child of India.
It was the same Sabur Khan who, thanks to President Ziaur Rahman, made his way back to politics in a country he did not support and had little cause to love.
And on his coattails came into politics, and into the Jatiyo Sangsad, all those men and women who saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing of the atrocities their Pakistani rulers inflicted on Bengalis in 1971. Begum Khaleda Zia, yes, felt no tremor of guilt when she inducted two Jamaatis into her government. Where her husband had the Collaborators Act repealed, she had the beneficiaries of that regressive move sit in cabinet with her. This demonstration of leniency and love for people who have never loved their country is quite inexplicable.
And today you have a situation where an academic informs us, without batting an eyelid, that there are no war criminals in Bangladesh because the war in 1971 was between India and Pakistan. And he is a teacher? And he is a Bengali? Where was he between March 25 and December 16, 1971?
For that matter, where was Syed Sajjad Hussein in that year when Pakistan's soldiers and their local collaborators threw themselves into an orgy of killing and raping? Of course he was here. His colleagues at the university were being taken away, day after day, murdered day after day. And yet Hussein travelled abroad, to tell people in the West that life was going on apace in "East Pakistan."
There are innumerable tales of how Pakistan-loving Bengalis humiliated their fellow Bengalis, and so humiliated themselves through such denials of the truth. Justice Nurul Islam and Professor Deen Mohammad went abroad; and so did Shah Azizur Rahman and Mahmud Ali. Moulana Mannan's record, if you do not know anything about it, is there with Shyamoli Nasreen Chowdhury. Ask her. The al-Badr gang that picked up Professor Ghyasuddin and then murdered him is still out there. We have not unmasked these men who, in masked appearance, once went defending the Islamic Republic of Pakistan through spilling Bengali blood.
Now the time has arrived when, apart from organising a powerful political movement against these war criminals, we can do certain other things that will shame them into silence. The first step should be for the media, print as well as electronic, to boycott these elements and not publicise anything they do or say. When you have television invite an individual who thinks the conflict in 1971 was a civil war; when newspapers provide lengthy coverage to the comments of a man who did not see any War of Liberation in 1971; when you print statements from senior journalists telling you that your freedom fighters committed war crimes too, you give them space they do not deserve.
Points of view, their articulation, are surely a part of politics. But when an old collaborator tells you he too has a point of view, don't listen to him and move on. Men who have connived in genocide do not any more deserve any quarter from us. They can only have the law weighing the enormity of their guilt. Which is why it becomes important for us to identify anyone and everyone who questions Bangladesh's essence, even within our own families, and isolate them.
We will not invite them to our homes, we will not shake hands with them, we will not be in the same room with them. We will treat them as the people of Cambodia have been treating the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Note that the Hun Sen government has finally hauled in Khieu Samphan to have him answer for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is now for us, for the sector commanders, indeed for all Bengalis, to create the grounds for a future, purposeful trial of the war criminals we have not brought to justice since the dawn of our freedom. These men of sinister intent are in politics, in the administration, in academia. It should not be too difficult to locate them. They are old, they are ageing. Criminality, they say, cannot be concealed behind advancing years.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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