Ground Realities
Of "civil war," hypocrisy and ageing quislings
The issues are getting vexing, especially when they ought not to. Let us begin through noting how Shah Abdul Hannan has got it all wrong. We are not surprised, for good reason. Those who have never been comfortable with the fundamental premise of Bangladesh's armed struggle for freedom have, since August 1975, woven insidious tales to explain their reading of the issues involved in 1971.
Hannan, and with him many in Pakistan and even in the West, have consistently, deliberately looked upon the War of Liberation as a civil war between the two wings of Pakistan. They are wrong. Or they are being mischievously misleading. Or both. Hannan and his friends have got our history turned upside down. Or humiliated altogether.
A civil war is a conflict between groups or regions within a country, largely around issues related to political power sharing or ethnicity. That is how matters came to a sorry pass in Lebanon. In Lebanon, a part of the country did not decide, through a declaration of independence, to move out of the mother country. The Lebanese army did not launch a genocide against a part of the population and so compel it to take a fresh new road to self-assertion. It was civil war pure and simple in Lebanon because of the inter-religious conflicts that threatened to undercut the fabric of society.
Spain went through a murderous civil war in the 1930s. It did not break into pieces because no part of it went into an armed movement for liberation from Madrid. In the 1990s, the murder of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda left the country maimed badly. That was civil war. The country stayed intact.
A civil war does not lead to the break-up of a country. A civil war is resorted to by people who consider themselves part of the same country despite their divergence on the issues. That was not the case with Bengalis in 1971. Back in that year, the Bengali population, having drawn the sad but realistic conclusion that the civil-military bureaucratic complex in Rawalpindi was not about to hand over political power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League, that, indeed, the Pakistan military had already initiated genocidal operations against the people of the country's eastern province, opted to go for a formal declaration of independence.
Beginning on March 26, 1971, therefore, it was all-out war between two states, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. It was not civil war, for civilian Bengali armed groups were not hounding and killing civilian West Pakistani armed groups, or vice versa. It was not civil war, because a national army had pounced on a population that considered, for all the right reasons, that army to be a force of occupation in a country struggling for freedom. Hannan's arguments do not stand the test of logic and history.
A civil war begins and ends with a country remaining in one piece. Lebanon has not been sundered in two. Somalia, for all the ugliness of the conflicts eating away at its soul, is still a single country. That has not been true of Pakistan because, in 1971, there was no civil war in Pakistan. In 1971, Pakistan was a foreign occupying power in a fledgling Bangladesh. Hannan knows it. Like others of his kind, he repudiates that knowledge.
You might now raise the matter of Biafra, the eastern Nigerian province that decided in 1967 to go free and give itself a new name. For three years, until 1970, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu's forces fought a gradually losing battle against the armed forces of the federal Nigerian state.
When Biafra collapsed, not many were surprised. Biafra, after all, had tried to secede, for no good political or legal reason, from Nigeria. It was this lack of a moral base that forced Biafra back into the union. In terms of history, therefore, the Biafra conflict is but a version of civil war waged between different segments of the population of a country.
You can go even further back in time, to the 1860s, when the southern states of the United States of America decided to secede from the north over the question of slavery. They called themselves the Confederate States of America. It was a morally wrong, legally flawed political and military struggle they pursued against their own, and it was doomed to fail. It did fail, in 1865.
Now come closer to modern times. The Indonesian army was spectacularly unable to subdue the people of East Timor into being part of the Indonesian state because the Timorese shared little in terms of culture and politics with Indonesia. The struggle between East Timor and Indonesia was not a civil war. For the Timorese, it was a long, sustained armed movement for political freedom. It was a similar ethos that worked in Bangladesh in 1971.
Move on to another aspect of the issues we happen to wallow in. Some of the leading lights of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jatiyo Party have all been reminding us of the sinister role the Jamaat-e-Islami played during our War of Liberation. No one argues with that, for the Jamaat has always operated in dense darkness. It was opposed to the creation of Pakistan. It caused mayhem in Lahore over the Ahmadiyya issue in 1953. And then it gleefully assisted the Pakistan army in shooting and raping Bengalis by the thousands. The shooting would not stop until the tally of the dead reached a horrific three million. As many as 200,000 women became victims of Pakistani military lust.
Shah Abdul Hannan, in happy agreement with Pakistan and in tones similar to those of World War II Holocaust deniers, says the figure could not have been more than 26,000. We can afford to be dismissive of his point of view. Even so, we ask Hannan: Is it a laughing matter when as many as 26,000 people (a figure he and Pakistan make note of) are murdered by an army?
While he mulls over a possible response, if he at all does, let us go back to the BNP and the JP. These parties have the gall to condemn the Jamaatis when it was they who encouraged the re-emergence of the collaborators in the sun. Recall the Zia years. The Collaborators' Order was repealed. The wartime clarion call of Joi Bangla was swiftly banished and replaced by Bangladesh Zindabad.
Air Vice Marshal M.G. Tawab organised a seerat conference in Dhaka in 1976 and made it clear into what parochial parameters the country was being pushed. That was Pakistanisation at work. So were the moves in the Ershad period to club this Bengali state into a communal straitjacket, to place a skullcap on Kazi Nazrul Islam, to give the state a religion it could call its own, all in the interest of herding us away from the principles we so clearly upheld between December 1971 and August 1975.
Khondokar Delwar Hossain now informs us, as if we did not already know, who the Pakistani collaborators were in 1971. He does not explain, though, how Motiur Rahman Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, men we recall parading on the streets of this city in 1971 trying to drum up support for the Pakistan army, came to be ministers in the government led by Khaleda Zia. He says not a word about Shah Azizur Rahman, nothing about the undermining of Bengali nationalism that Zia, Khondokar Abdul Hamid and others promoted through a spurious nationalism, all reminiscent of the old, discredited two-nation theory, they called "Bangladeshi nationalism."
The Jatiyo Party demands a trial of the Jamaatis who helped in the murder and rape of Bengalis. Should that demand not have been raised, and answered, in the days when General Ershad held power? Hypocrisy is but another term for shamelessness. Nizami and Mujahid have little shame when they try to pass themselves and their followers off as innocent little lambs in a long-ago war.
Much a similar degree of shamelessness characterises those who, having been instrumental in the rehabilitation of men who have never had cause to be patriotic Bengalis, have not forgotten Pakistan, and yet now mingle with the millions whose contempt for the old quislings is as pronounced as it was back in 1971.
These ageing razakars need comprehensive handling. The proponents of "civil war" in 1971 should not go free. Al-Badr men, some of them senior civil servants today, need to be purged. The crusade that Jahanara Imam began in the early 1990s calls for a revival. Our children, and our children's children, will not be safe in this Bengali republic if the ghosts of Pakistan remain on the prowl in our streets.
The state is not a social club for those who repudiate it and yet enjoy the creature comforts it provides. It then makes sense to argue that the old collaborators and all the enemies within be dealt with ruthlessly.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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