Editorial
Trial of the war criminals
The issue cannot be hedged any longer
Nobody could have missed the demand of the people of the country during the Victory Day celebrations on 16 December this year. The call for the trial of war criminals reverberated throughout the country from different segments of the people, be it businessmen, be it workers or labourers, be it the civil society or the valiant freedom fighters. We would like to add our voice to it.
We believe that trial of the war criminals is necessary for the democratic future of Bangladesh. Firstly, we believe that it will serve the cause of justice, particularly those that have suffered directly, to call to account the people that in league with the occupation forces perpetrated the most barbaric acts on the people of Bangladesh like murder, mass killing, rape, plunder, loot and arson….the catalogue of crimes is long indeed. And this is very much in conformity with universally accepted legal standards. These are crimes against humanity, crimes against the people of Bangladesh; these are crimes in the eyes of the law everywhere.
Secondly, we believe that our polity and indeed our politics must be cleansed of the stigma of war criminals that has for many years cast a dark shadow on Bangladesh. It acquires greater poignancy when one considers that the issue is linked with a very fundamental question the birth of Bangladesh. These war criminals under the umbrella of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim League in 1971 had sought to strike at the very basis of our statehood. And had they been successful we would have been forever destined to live as a colony and enslaved people, with our culture and language destroyed.
We would like to be unequivocally clear that the issue of the trial of war criminals should not be linked with any extraneous issues like banning religion-based politics, etc. We fear that linking one with the other may dilute the very call for war criminals' trial.
We are also alive to the question as to why after 36 years this question has surfaced again. We believe that the issue has always been alive in the hearts and minds of the people. The demand has been renewed with great deal more vigour and reinforced by certain snide and pejorative remarks about the War of Liberation and the freedom fighters by the Jamaat leaders and people of the same ilk. The inability or indeed lack of inclination to try the war criminals during the three democratic regimes demonstrates a typical case of political opportunism on the part of the major political parties as much the weakness of our polity, rendered so because of the destruction of the democratic traditions and institutions by BAKSAL and the military and autocratic regimes post-1975 August. The autocrats needed political support to legitimize their rule and found in these elements very willing supporters. Jamaat in particular exploited this situation to gain political space.
However, it needs to be made distinctly clear that we are calling for the trial of all war criminals and not just those that belong to Jamaat because we believe for a fact that there are war criminals in many of the political parties in Bangladesh. In the same vein we would like to call upon these parties to consider whether they would like to continue to be associated with those that are mere deadweights because of the grave crimes they are accused to have committed and because of their role in 1971 against the very birth of Bangladesh.
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