Editorial
Jamaat and Bangladesh's history
The party should repudiate its past to be acceptable
WE thought we have heard it all. We were wrong. The Jamaat-e-Islami has now laid claim of a sort to the War of Liberation. For a party which actively collaborated with the Pakistan occupation army, and formed the al-Badr and al-Shams goon squads whose specific job was the abduction and killing of Bengalis, this is quite a claim. The nation would have been happy to see this new face of the Jamaat if meanwhile it had done something about its past. To suddenly appear before the country with a so-called Jatiyo Muktijoddha Parishad and tell people that Jamaat supported our Liberation War and it honours our freedom fighters seems at best a joke and at worst a travesty of history. The joke and the travesty both have been emphasised by the recent ugly incident of a genuine freedom fighter being subjected to physical assault at a meeting of the so-called parishad.
It is the terribly flawed past of the Jamaat which makes it hard for us to share in its celebration of Bangladesh's freedom struggle in 1971. But, of course, thanks to the myopia of some of our rulers in the mid 1970s and later, the party which felt no compunction about trying to kill freedom and conspire against our war of independence most cheerfully came back into the political arena. It has been the Jamaat's good fortune, and the nation's ill luck, that the party graduated to being a coalition partner of the BNP following the 2001 elections. How much more mind-boggling can irony get to be? If today the Jamaatis are willing to turn a new leaf and persuade us into believing that they are loyal, patriotic Bangladeshis like the rest of us, they are most welcome. But for their claim to be credible, they must do a few things. They must repudiate the shameful role the Jamaat played as an adjunct of the Pakistan army in 1971. The party cannot suddenly cry hoarse about upholding the spirit of the Liberation War without at the same time informing the country officially and publicly that it has atoned for its sins in 1971. In the second place, the Jamaat should move decisively about expelling all its leaders and workers who took active part in the genocide of 1971 if it wishes to have a respectable place in Bangladesh.
The options are clear before the Jamaat. If it desires to set itself a new, nationally acceptable course in politics, it must publicly repent its dark deeds in 1971. It must not try, as it has tried so recently, to make a farce of the War of Liberation in any way. Public memory is known to be short, but not that short that we will forget 1971. For the Jamaat to suggest that it has freedom fighters under its banner is to insult the sacrifices of three million Bengalis. But it surely can make a new beginning, indeed reinvent itself, through joining in the national call for a trial of the war criminals of 1971. That should not be such a hard thing to do, is it, now?
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