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The martyrs, war crimes and justice Haroon Habib Beginning with Operation Searchlight on March 25, 1971 in Dhaka, the Pakistani army had perpetrated widespread violations of human rights with support from its local collaborators. The massacre and mass rape in 1971 were the most incredible and calculated crimes in the 20th century. Indiscriminate killing, rape and torture of unarmed civilians and destruction of properties by the occupation army and their local agents continued throughout the nine months. The marauding army and its local goons, who were mostly the members of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, carried out systematic executions as part of their plan to suppress the quest for national independence by the Bengalis.
The well-known researcher R. J. Rummel published a book in 1997, titled 'Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900', in which he states: “In East Pakistan (Bangladesh) [General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals] also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to ensure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan (now Pakistan) for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.” The crimes were horrendous: some three million people were killed, nearly half a million women were raped and over 10 million people were forced to flee to India to escape military persecution. Justice has not yet caught up with the perpetrators. This has had a profound effect on Bangladesh's society in the last four decades. In mid-December 1971, when the Mukti Bahini and their Mitra Bahini were advancing to Dhaka, liberating most occupied cities and towns along the way, the Pakistani forces were quickly abandoning their camps sensing imminent defeat . On the eve of their unconditional surrender to the Bangladesh-India Joint Command, on December 16, the local agents and abettors of the occupation army, under a carefully thought-out plan, eliminated hundreds of leading intellectuals, ostensibly to destroy the intellectual underpinning of this nation. Philosophers, professors, writers, poets, journalists, doctors, engineers and social thinkers were among those best known personalities who were picked up from their houses, blindfolded and taken to various desolate pits in Dhaka's suburbs, only to be tortured and slaughtered. The bodies of those martyrs lay for days in those slaughter grounds till they were spotted after the surrender of the Pakistan army in Dhaka. While the largest number of killings took place in Dhaka on December 14, the marauding army and its killing squads --- al-badr and razakar --- butchered thousands of individuals almost in all parts of the country . The list is quite long. The records show that only on the night of December 14, over 200 intellectuals were murdered in Dhaka alone . In observance of Martyred Intellectuals Day on December 14, Bangladesh will remember those patriotic sons of the soil. Streams of people will visit the Martyred Intellectuals Monument at Mirpur and Rayer Bazar, where a memorial was built on a mass killing ground. Political, cultural and civic forums will commemorate the dire tragedy that took place just before the fall of the Pakistani army. The people of Bangladesh faced the worst genocide in the twentieth century in the name of Islam and Pakistan in 1971. Innumerable women were tortured, raped and killed. The Pakistani soldiers kept thousands of Bengali women as sex slaves in their camps and cantonments. Susan Brownmiller, who conducted a credible study on the subject, has estimated the number of raped women at being over 400,000. Understandably, December 14 this year is going to be observed amid renewed demands for a speedy trial of those people who had perpetrated some of the most heinous crimes in history. Four decades have passed with the families of the martyred intellectuals waiting to see justice done . But, ironically, the old collaborators still spread insidious lies to undermine the history and spirit of the great national war that established Bangladesh on the world map. Therefore, Bangladesh is faced with a huge challenge in terms of the need to bring the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in 1971 to justice. With the formation of the War Crimes Tribunal, following a unanimous resolution passed in Parliament in 2009, to try the war criminals, the government of Sheikh Hasina has inaugurated what could turn out to be a new chapter in Bangladesh's history. I would rather call the phase a 'new liberation war'. This government has set in motion a process that was long overdue. On March 25, 2010, it announced the formation of a tribunal, an investigation agency and a prosecution team under the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, a law enacted as early as 1973, barely two years after Bangladesh's liberation. In fact, the process of the present trial is a resumption of the process that was set in motion after Bangladesh's emergence. On January 24, 1972, The Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order was promulgated. The government led by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman constituted 73 Special Tribunals for trials of those who were directly involved in crimes like murder, rape, arson, loot and abduction. Till October 1973, those tribunals had disposed of 2,848 cases and sentenced a total of 752 persons to various terms of imprisonment. An estimated 11,000 accused were in jail. But the process got sabotaged after 1975. Gen Ziaur Rahman, who was at the helm of affairs then, quickly repealed The Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order 1972, on December 31, 1975 only three months after the bloody changeover of 1975, and released all the convicted and under trial prisoners from prison. Despite a widespread national desire to see justice done, in the three decades after 1975, a succession of military regimes swept aside all attempts at justice. The period also saw a planned rehabilitation of the war criminals and their supporters in politics. The present trial is also a rejuvenation of the Spirit of 1971 on the basis of which East Pakistan became Bangladesh. It also makes a moral point: that the rule of law must prevail and justice must be dispensed in the case of those who committed the crimes. There was an earlier civic attempt to hold the much needed trial. On December 29, 1991 one of the leading figures accused of war crimes, Ghulam Azam, became the ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist party that had taken up arms to oppose the country's independence from Pakistan. Led by Jahanara Imam, a national committee was formed to lead a countrywide campaign . On February 14, 1992, the Ekattorer Ghatak-Dalal Nirmul Committee was formed to bring Ghulam Azam, who was the chief of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1971, and his associates, to trial. An open court, Gonoadalot, was formed and, on March 26, 1992, a verdict against Ghulam Azam and others was pronounced . Sheikh Hasina, then the main opposition leader, moved a motion in Parliament to begin the formal prosecution of those who had committed war crimes in 1971. But the move did not bear fruit due to resistance from the then ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party(BNP). Begun afresh in 2007, the movement for the trial of war criminals got a meaningful boost through a sustained national campaign led by the Sector Commanders' Forum. At the last general elections, an overwhelming majority voted the present ruling alliance for their commitment to try the war criminals when in power. The trial is not just a fulfillment of the current government's political commitment, but also a step towards meeting a national obligation to the judicial process. The completion of the trial could bring to a close a painful episode in Bangladesh's history. On one hand, it will establish the rule of law; on the other, it will be able to help the new generation become aware of the sufferings the nation went through in its struggle for independent nationhood and understand how religion can be abused to justify heinous crimes like murder and rape. The trial, therefore, is no ordinary one. It is an answer to the innermost urges of an aggrieved nation. It also addresses the travails of countless bereaved families, widows and orphans, those who were wounded and immobilised. It is, therefore, a solemn unfinished task, to remove a national stigma. The irony is that those who committed the crimes as henchmen of the Pakistan army four decades ago, are now established political leaders, well-entrenched businessmen or highly connected Islamists, all of whom have their own agenda. Understandably, the tribunal as well as the government will have to face up to a hard reality. The war criminals of 1971, many of whom left the country at the dawn of independence but returned and were rehabilitated, thanks to the military and pseudo-democratic rulers, have become organised and powerful. Despite such odds, it is the considered view of the secular school of thought in Bangladesh that if the trial process is withdrawn, or kept incomplete halfway through, under any pretext or compulsion, Bangladesh will suffer a great blow. Those who had opposed the country's independence and perpetrated some of the worst crimes against humanity on religious grounds, will be able to further consolidate themselves, to our everlasting shame, if the trial remains incomplete.
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