Heads bowed, in gratitude|| The martyrs, war crimes and justice || The intellectuals' legacy|| Murder most foul || Memory's eternal flame || Our homage||

 

Murder most foul

Junaidul Haque

On December 14, 1971 just a couple of days before our Victory Day, the day Pakistan's occupation army surrendered and we finally became independent we lost our best sons, our intellectuals. Poets, writers, philosophers, our best university teachers, doctors and engineers none were spared. Who killed them? Who wanted to cripple us intellectually? Who wanted to deprive us of the wisdom of our best thinkers? Quite naturally, the Pakistan army and their lackeys, their local cohorts, the war criminals. How could the war criminals kill their Bengali brothers so cruelly, in such an inhumane manner? It is a question whose answer we couldn't find in almost forty years. If our martyrs are our best sons, their killers are our worst. We simply want to disown them these hated war criminals. We can never forget what they did in 1971, we can never forgive the killing of our intellectuals and our innocent citizens by them. We shall hate the killers of 1971 as long as we live!

Bangladesh was getting ready for her final victory. The Mukti Bahini, with the help of the allied Indian forces, was launching their final assault on the retreating Pakistani occupation army all through the country. Sensing their inevitable defeat, the killing squads of the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams belonging to the Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim League and Nizam-e-Islam went into brutal action. They picked up Bangladesh's best sons from their residences, killed them in the ugliest possible manner and dumped them in the Rayer Bazar marshes. Who were the martyrs? People as brilliant as Prof. Munier Chowdhury, one of the brightest teachers Dhaka University has ever produced, and Dr. Govinda Chandra Dev, the saintly, childlike philosopher (killed earlier in March). Did these patriots and wise men deserve such a cruel, bestial death? The whole nation was speechless in grief and anger. The people condemned the Pakistan army and their collaborators from the core of their hearts.

The Razakars were active all over the country. They were created and paid by the occupation forces of Pakistan. They were guided, armed and helped by them. The war criminals provided all information of the movements of the freedom fighters to the Pakistan army. One of their cruelest acts was abducting Bengalee women, some barely in their teens, to be sent to the concentration camps of the Pakistan army. They grabbed the lands of the minority community, who mostly had to flee to India for the tragic nine months. In the last few days of the war, when these ugly forces sensed imminent defeat and an end to their orgy of killing, they started the heinous act of abduction and killing of Bengali intellectuals. It is alleged that Major General Rao Farman Ali was the mastermind behind the killing operation. He was the chief advisor of the killing Razakars. A very fortunate few were listed but could hide in time and thus escaped abduction, torture and death. They included names as respected as Prof. Serajul Islam Choudhury and Prof. Ahsanul Huq of Dhaka University. Mass graves of the intellectuals were discovered immediately after liberation. Newspaper reports of those days make it clear that major leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Nezam-e-Islam and Muslim League and their student and youth wings were involved in acts of mass murder. Major Siddik Salik, who was in charge of the information department of the army, named these leaders clearly in his account of the 1971 war, Witness to Surrender.

The crimes that the Razakars committed are no less gruesome than those of Hitler and his Nazi cohorts. In early 1972, the Collaborators' Act was promulgated. By October 1973, over 37,000 suspected war criminals were arrested of whom 26,000, against whom there was no clear evidence of killing, rape and arson, were pardoned under a general amnesty. When Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was murdered on the tragic night of August 15, 1975, 11,000 suspected killers and rapists were in jail, facing trial. They were let free by the post-1975 government of Khandakar Mushtaq-Ziaur Rahman. General Zia even made Shah Azizur Rahman, a known collaborator of the Pakistani army in 1971, the country's prime minister. He headed the cabinet of a country whose independence he had opposed vehemently!

The rehabilitation of the collaborators of the Pakistan army continued throughout the eighties and the nineties of the last century. Begum Khaleda Zia's government of 2001-2006 was in power with the help of the heinous collaborators. Fortunately the people of Bangladesh voted against the collaborators in politics and supported Awami League in a massive manner in the election of 2008, giving the party a mandate to try the war criminals. They are no ordinary criminals. They most brutally killed thousands of innocent people and hundreds of Bengalee intellectuals in 1971. The nation simply cannot forgive them.

The martyred intellectuals, whom we remember most lovingly and respectfully on December 14 every year, will never be forgotten by us. They are our pride, our glory. Their sacrifices will be remembered as long as Bangladesh exists. And Bangladesh will exist forever.
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Junaidul Haque writes fiction and essays. He studied English literature at the University of Dhaka.