UN membership for Palestine is a good thing in principal. And, if it can be achieved, it will be good in practice for both Palestinians and Israelis for two reasons:

It will strengthen the hand of the moderate Palestinian consensus and isolate the Hamas contingent. No one opposes the UN bid led by Mahmoud Abbas more than his compatriots in Hamas. The Arab Spring and the possibility of UN recognition could weaken the legitimacy of Palestinian Islamist politics.

And secondly, it will compel the two sides to return to peace talks. This will be the only way to tackle the intransigence of the Israeli right-wing, most visibly manifest by Netanyahu’s refusal to stop Settlement building in the West Bank.

In actual fact, these two points could be boxed into one: keeping out extremists from both sides out of the negotiations room, which is where peace will ultimately be drawn.

The issues and provisos from both sides that obstruct peace seem intractable and downright insurmountable. But some things will have to be accepted by both sides if any progress is to be made: Palestinians need to accept they cannot demand right-of-return to Israel, and Israel must return to its 1967 borders and a return of the Settlements.

There is a real possibility for the two states to exist side by side. This blog has been very vocal in its criticism of Jew-hatred and the demonisation of Israel, mostly from within Muslim discourse because that’s where we find most evidence of it in Britain.  At the same time, we also want to see a state for the Palestinian people.

These are not mutually exclusive positions.

ISLAMABAD: In a daring raid, Saudi Special Forces arrested renegade Afghan leader, Mullah Omar, from a famous five-star hotel located in one of Pakistan’s most popular vacation spots – Bhurban.

The news spread like wildfire and people were seen cursing the Pakistani government for allowing the Americans to undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty – again.

However, when it became clear that the raid was not conducted by the Americans but the Saudis, the frowns turned into smiles and many were heard saying, ‘Jazzakallah!’

Only minutes after the raid, Pakistan’s prime minister and Army Chief appeared on state-owned television and congratulated the nation and thanked the Saudi regime for helping Pakistan in its war against terror.

Interestingly, religious parties like Jamaat-i-Islami, (JI) Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) and some banned sectarian organisations, along with Imran Khan’s Pakistan Thereek-i-Insaf (PTI) which had originally called a joint press conference to condemn the raid, changed their stance half-way through the conference when told that the raid was by Saudi forces and not the Americans.

Munawar Hussain, JI, chief, was first heard lambasting Pakistan’s PPP-led civilian government for letting the country’s sovereignty be violated by the Americans, but after a reporter confirmed that the raid was executed by Saudi forces, Munawar turned to Imran Khan and embraced him.

‘Mahshallah!’ he exclaimed. “Today is a glorious day for our Islamic republic!”

Imran Khan and JUI chief Fazalur Rehman had earlier questioned the real identity of the man arrested from the five-star hotel, saying that even if it was Mullah Omar, we should be ashamed because Omar was a freedom fighter, conducting a liberation war against the Americans.

However, after it became clear that the arrest was made by Saudi forces, both Imran and Fazal then claimed that Mullah Omar was no friend of Pakistan and that he was not even a Muslim.

In a joint statement, JI, JUI and PTI, congratulated the nation and said that they had been saying all along that the Taliban were Pakistan’s greatest enemies and should be exterminated.

The statement also said that the PTI and JI will continue to hold sit-ins against American drones which were parachuting evil men like Mullah Omar into Pakistan and violating the sovereignty of the country. For this, the statement suggested, that Ahmad Shah Abdali should be invited to invade Pakistan and defeat the Americans.

When told that Abdali died almost two hundred years ago, PTI and JI termed this to be nothing more than western propaganda.

Imran Khan added, that from now on he should be addressed as Imran of Ghaznavi and that one of Pakistan’s most prominent revolutionary and youngest nuclear physicists, Zohair Toru, was building anti-drone missiles.

Toru, who was also present at the conference, confirmed this while licking a lemon flavoured popsicle. He said it was a very hot day and popsicles helped him concentrate.

Meanwhile, a military spokesman also held a press conference to give the media a briefing on the details of the raid.

He said the raid was executed by Saudi Special Forces who came from Saudi military bases in Riyadh.

The helicopters then landed on Margala Hills in Islamabad. On the lush hills, Saudi soldiers disembarked from the copters, got on camels and rode all the way to Bhurban in broad daylight.

They were twice stopped at checkpoints by Pakistani Rangers but were allowed to cross when some Saudi soldiers said something to the rangers in Arabic. It is believed that the Saudis promised the Rangers jobs in Saudi Arabia.

An eyewitness claims the Rangers smiled and waved to the departing camels, cheering ‘marhaba, marhaba.’

The camel army reached the five-star hotel in Bhurban at 11:00 am and right away rode their way into the sprawling premises.

The camels were also carrying rocket launchers, sub-machineguns, pistols, grenades and popcorn, all concealed in large ‘Dubai Duty Free’ shopping bags.

The military spokesman added that although the Pakistan Army had no clue about the raid, there were a dozen or so Pakistani military personnel present at the hotel.

When asked whether these men questioned the camel riders, the spokesman said that they did see the armed camels enter the hotel but the military men were at the time more interested in interrogating a 77-year-old Caucasian male whom they had arrested for smoking in a non-smoking area.

“After the Abbottabad incident, we are keeping a firm eye on Europeans and Americans,” the spokesman said.

Even though the white man turned out to be an old Polish tourist, the spokesman praised the military men’s vigilance. “Our country’s sovereignty is sacred,” he added.

According to the Pakistan military, the Saudis then rode their camels into one of the hotel’s kitchens and fired teargas shells.

This way they smoked out the chefs and their staff out into the open. From these, a Saudi commander got hold of a one-eyed chef with an untidy beard.

The Saudi commander looked at the chef and compared his face to a photograph he was carrying. He asked: ‘Al-Mullah-ul-Omar?’ To which the chef was reported to have said: “No, al-chicken jalfrezi. Also make very tasty mutton kebabs.”

The commander then asked, ‘Al-Afghani?’ to which the chef said, “Yes make Afghani tikka too. You want?”

A reporter asked the military spokesman whether the Pakistani military men present at the hotel witnessed the operation. The spokesman answered in affirmative but said they didn’t take any action after confirming that Pakistan’s sovereignty was not being violated.

The reporter then asked how the military men determined that Pakistan’s sovereignty was not being violated. Answering this, the spokesman said that since the camel riders were speaking Arabic there was thus no reason for the military to charge them with violating Pakistan’s sovereignty.

This statement made the media men at the press conference very happy and they consequently began applauding and raising emotional slogans praising Islam, ISI and palm trees.

Soon after the announcement that Mullah Omar was arrested by Saudi forces, the country’s private TV channels became animated. One famous TV talk-show host actually decided to host his show in a Bedouin tent. Instead of a chair, he sat on a camel wearing a Pakistan Army uniform.

Though most of his guests — that included prominent ex-generals, clergymen and strategic analysts — praised the operation and heaped scorn at Mullah Omar, there was one guest, a small-time journalist, who disagreed with the panelists.

He asked how a wanted man like Mullah Omar was able to live in Pakistan undetected and that too while working as a chef in a famous five-star hotel. He also said that Mullah Omar had also been appearing on various cooking shows as a chef on various food channels.

To this, the host snubbed the journalist telling him that he was asking irrelevant questions.

‘But before this operation, everyone was supporting the Taliban and telling us they were fighting a liberation war against the Americans,’ the journalist protested.

‘No,’ said the host, ‘it was the civilian government that was in cahoots with the Taliban. It should resign.’

‘No,’ the journalist replied, ‘it was our agencies!’

This made the host angry and he slapped the journalist. He threatened the journalist by saying that he would lodge a case against him in accordance with the Islamic hudood ordinance.

The journalist responded by saying that the Saudis had violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. Hearing this, the host slapped the journalist again, saying he will get him booked for blasphemy.

At the end of the show the host and the panelists burned an American flag and sang the Pakistani national anthem in Arabic. Then, after handing over the treacherous journalist to the authorities, they proceeded to Saudi Arabia to perform hajj.

However, they were soon deported by the Saudi regime for violating Saudi sovereignty.

Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the “core issue” in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine conflict – that it is the “running sore” whose eventual healing will heal the wider region and beyond.

That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn’t relieve those in Damascus or Manama or Sana’a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not “the heart of the matter”, as the cliche always insisted it was. The heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in, day out, for 40 years or more.

Yet it is not the suffering of these hundreds of millions of Arabs which has attracted the sympathy of the UN Human Rights Council. Nor has it stirred the compassion of left-leaning liberal types who pride themselves on thei r care for the oppressed. Few places get them excited the way Israel does.

So in 2009 Sri Lanka could kill between 7,000 and 20,000 civilians, displacing 300,000 more in its bombardment of the Tamils at about the same time as the Gaza conflict – but you will search in vain for the Goldstone report into Sri Lankan war crimes. Nor will you find Caryl Churchill writing a play called Seven Sri Lankan Children – asking what exactly is it in the Sri Lankan mentality that allows them to be so brutal.

There is no Goldstone or Churchill to probe the 4 million deaths in the Congo, the slaughtered in Darfur or the murdered in the Ivory Coast, let alone the civilian deaths inflicted by the US and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one is proposing an academic boycott of those nations or any of the other serial violators of human rights. Tellingly, two members of the four-person board of the LSE’s Middle East Centre are firm advocates of cutting all scholarly ties to Israel – but were only too happy for the college to receive £1.5m from the Gaddafi family.

No I’m not making this up. Jonathon Kay, who comments for the Canadian National Post has the lowdown:

The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion”, which makes it “racist”. The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos”.

But Kay asks could this be part of a bigger conspiracy?

We have investigated the logo and determined that what the stylized design actually spells is “Zork” — a chillingly obvious reference to the famous trilogy of 1980s-era, dungeon-themed text-based computer games comprising Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and, of course, Zork III: The Dungeon Master. This suggests that Olympian visitors to London will be cast into a subterranean dystopia populated by trolls, thieves, cyclops, and, of course, man-eating grues. For an Iranian government so terrified of Israeli Jews that it will not even permit its athletes to compete against them, the Grue-ish menace must seem even more terrifying.

A funny take on another cringeworthy moment of enlightenment from the authorities in Tehran. How embarrassing for the Iranian people and their heritage that they should allow themselves to be controlled by idiots who believe in this kind of thing:

Voting against sharia and slavery

In the near-blanket media coverage of the Egyptian uprising, another compelling story of people power overcoming Islamic totalitarianism is unfolding in North Africa though it scarcely gets a mention and relatively no news coverage whatsoever. But Southern Sudan is now a new nation in its own right after it separated from the Islamist North Sudanese republic via a referendum of secession, in which nearly 99% from the south voted for independence! Here is a report from Morri Francis:

On Monday, I joined hundreds of people packed into the John Garang Memorial Centre, armed with small “South Sudan” flags. A big TV screen connected us to the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission in Khartoum.

Finally – the announcement that all of southern Sudan has been waiting to hear – the results of our vote on our future, whether or not to become a separate nation.

As I heard the news, my mind was ringing with the challenges ahead. Then my phone also started ringing, with friends from around southern Sudan telling me how they were celebrating.

People were happy but calm, as they had already known that the results were a landslide. Some groups went to hotels and bars to party, and danced until morning.

I am proud that we have been able to defy the doubters, with a calm vote – a clear show of everyone’s heartfelt wish for peace.

Unified in our almost 100% vote for separation, among southerners the talk on the street is now a determination to pull together for the development of our new nation.

I hear more than 200,000 southerners have returned from the north, many coming back with the desire to develop our new nation. In Juba, where I live, many are stranded at the Nile River port, still awaiting assistance so they can reach their final destination.

The hopes and expectations of southerners for our new nation are enormous, and there are difficulties ahead. Our jobless youth hope for a new start in life, our parents hope for schools for their children – everyone is dreaming of a better tomorrow.

South Sudan's leader Salva Kiir

Omar al-Bashir, you may be sickened to learn, has been “rewarded” after France and the US agreed to grant him a one year reprieve from facing the ICC on charges of war crimes and genocide. On the day the people of Southern Sudan celebrate their liberty, student protesters in the north are being beaten to death by al-Bashir’s men on the streets of Khartoum.

The halal butcher of Khartoum

Olivia Warham, director of Waging Peace, said: “The final results of southern Sudan’s referendum on secession come as student protesters are beaten and killed on the streets of Khartoum, serving as a reminder that the world cannot see the referendum as a ‘job well done’ and turn away from Sudan.

“The Sudanese youth are demanding the freedoms that their ‘brothers’ in Egypt and Tunisia have claimed, and we should be hearing similar warnings from David Cameron that the Sudanese people too must be allowed to demonstrate without brutality.”

She added: “Only this week the Darfur genocide continues as President al-Bashir’s troops have swept into camps and villages with armoured attacks and aerial bombardment of unarmed civilians. Coming after the height of the world’s attention on the referendum, al-Bashir must face closer scrutiny on Darfur and his continued human rights abuses or more horrors are inevitable.”

Gaddafi was always given to taciturn, imperial arrogance, but in the video he actually attempts to engage his audience, appealing to the Tunisian people who have lost so much to Bin Ali’s kleptocracy – to reinstate him! Coming across like a botoxed and constipated cross between Imran Khan and George Galloway’s favourite she-man, Pete Burns – it’s a tragi-comic performance. If you look really close, you can even catch the faintest glint of humanity in his dead, reptilian eyes.

Mona Eltahawy gives the world’s saddest, longest-serving dictator a slapping:

Some Arab countries have simply ignored what happened: no official statement from Algeria or Morocco. Others said they respect the wish of Tunisians but filled their state-owned media with reminders that they weren’t anything like Tunisia: Egypt.

Leave it to Muammar Gaddafi, the world’s longest-serving dictator, to best portray that panic. Addressing a nation where thousands had faced down the bullets of Ben Ali’s security to protest at unemployment, police brutality and the corruption of the regime, Gaddafi told Tunisians they were now suffering bloodshed and lawlessness because they were too hasty in getting rid of Ben Ali.

If every Arab leader has watched Tunisia in fear, then every Arab citizen has watched in hope because it was neither Islamists – long used by our leaders to scare many into acquiescence – nor foreign troops that toppled the dictator: it was ordinary and very fed up people.

Tunisians must remember that during these days of chaos. We’re hearing reports that neighbourhood watch committees have sprung up to protect against looting and violence, which many blame on Ben Ali’s loyalists.

Interestingly, both western observers and Gaddafi have been crediting WikiLeaks, but for different reasons. By buying into the idea that leaked US embassy cables about corruption “fuelled” the revolution, commentators smear Tunisians with ignorance of facts and perpetuate the myth that Arabs are incapable of rising up against dictators. Gaddafi railed against WikiLeaks because he, too, wants to blame something other than the power of the people – and cables from Tripoli portray him as a Botox-using neurotic inseparable from a “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse.

Gaddafi’s Libya has had its own protests over the past few days. Nothing on the scale of Tunisia, but enough that his speech to Tunisians could be summarised thus: I am scared witless by what happened in your country.

That’s why I insist we stop and appreciate Tunisia: relish the revolution that is no longer a euphemism for a coup.

These protests began after Mohamed Bou’aziz, an unemployed university graduate in the town of Sidi Bouzid, attempted to burn himself to death on December 17 when the produce he sold on the street to earn a living was confiscated. (He later died of his injuries.)

How could Mr. Bou’aziz know what the implications of his desperate act would be in just one month’s time? His sacrifice inspired huge demonstrations that spread across the North African country, organized in part through resourceful use of Twitter and Facebook. These were met with brutality by the security forces, a grim reality that simply provoked more protest. Unarmed demonstrators were regularly teargassed. Many were arrested. As many as 70-80 people were shot or beaten to death. But the protesters marched on.

This largely peaceful, democratic revolution (on the side of the opposition at least) was not led by or inspired by the fundamentalist movements that have tried to claim the oppositional space in many Arab and North African contexts in recent years. It was instead, by all accounts, a largely secular appeal for real political reform and for social justice. As reflected in today’s front page of the Paris daily Liberation (above; credit), women, many unveiled, were increasingly visible in the protest marches.

One can hope that today’s initial victory of North African people power will serve as an example of what is possible in other countries in the region. This is what Noam Chomsky has called the threat of a good example. One dictator brought down by popular revolt – no dictator is safe now.

Hope is a powerful, incandescent force. Hope in the political realm has been a rare commodity of late in this part of the world. Bou’aziz’s revolution may have brought that back. But, just as the power of hope should not be underestimated, neither should the danger of hopes unfulfilled.

It is unclear exactly what the future holds for Tunisia now.

Mohammed al-Ghannouchi, the Prime Minister who has also been in power since 1999, has taken over as President since the departure of ousted President Ben Ali, whom Saudi Arabia “‘welcomed.’” A state of emergency was declared, with soldiers guarding public buildings, tanks on the streets of Tunis, and prohibitions on public meetings.

The government must respond to the grievances that first provoked these events – creating jobs, meeting human needs, fostering equality of all kinds, enabling freedom of expression and association, institutionalizing real social democracy – rather than simply engaging in window dressing that preserves the Tunisian system with a different figurehead. The international community, and the U.S. government, should support this process.
The biggest external impact of events in Tunisia could come in neighboring Algeria, which I visited twice last fall, and which witnessed scattered, sporadic émeutes – riots – throughout 2010. The country has just experienced a week of widespread, intensive youth protests that seem to have been the result of a similar long-simmering anger over high unemployment, corruption, economic disparities and la hogra, the arrogance with which officials often treat ordinary people. (photo credit) However, the immediate catalyst was likely the sharp increase in the price of staples like cooking oil and sugar at the beginning of the year. See this useful discussion of the possible causes by journalist Chawki Amari writing in El Watan, one of Algeria’s leading daily newspapers.

Some have suggested that the initial disturbances may have been provoked – perhaps by private interests that control the sugar and oil markets and were unhappy over government regulatory action in this arena. It is hard to say. However, even if this were the case, legitimate popular anger clearly took over from there. Some – only some – of the recent protests turned violent with young rioters throwing stones at police and passing cars, burning tires and looting shops.

Unfortunately, the avenues for peaceful protest are stifled in Algeria due to the continuing imposition of a state of emergency since 1992.

For example, following the week’s protests, last Sunday, January 9, a civic group called the Intercommunal Association of Aïn Benian-Staoueli tried to hold a peaceful gathering in the coastal town of Staoueli about 20 kilometers outside of Algiers. Their efforts were forcefully thwarted by “preventive” arrests. Algerian writer and journalist Mustapha Benfodil, who was attempting to cover the event, was among those arrested. He later recounted his experiences in El Watan, offering an eyewitness account of la hogra in action. As he notes, those picked up by the police that day were suspected of the rather kafka-esque offense of “attempted peaceful gathering.” (They have since been released – though across the country many young protestors remain in jail.)

For Algeria’s democratic opposition, the current challenge is to find a way to translate this month’s explosion of youthful anger into positive political change, and to maximize the jolt of energy from events in next door Tunisia. According to Benfodil, the former task requires the mobilization of civil society, trade unions, academics, the middle class, NGOs and others, “if they truly want to transform this impetuous winter into a democratic spring…”

One of the most damaging allegations was that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah repeatedly urged America to attack Iran. The Saudi leader was recorded as having “frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme”.

The leak said he told the Americans to “cut off the head of the snake” at a meeting in 2008. The leaks also disclose how leaders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran as “evil” and a power that “is going to take us to war”.

Give us your captions for the photo below.

1. standard “deplore and condemn” statements from the peace camp, from leftie organisations like peace now, b’tzelem, adalah, rabbis for human rights and so on.
2. standard “you see what we have to deal with, this just makes peace more difficult” statements from the palestinian authority and allied bodies
3. standard “vowing revenge on the zionists” rhetoric from the likes of hamas and its fellow travelers.
4. anodyne PR-speak from the military authorities making excuses for why they weren’t able to prevent the incident or prosecute the people involved

what is usually absent is the voice of religious traditionalism – except, unfortunately when it is supporting the obscene “price tag” policy that is bringing the settlement enterprise into further disrepute.

it’s therefore encouraging to see the voice of mainstream modern orthodoxy being raised in a productive way, particularly here in our own dear jewish chronic, where a scion of the united synagogue rabbinate, now a figure of growing authority in the modern orthodox establishment in israel, speaks out against the disgusting attacks on mosques that have been the latest desecration of the Divine Name. r. gideon sylvester is known to me personally as a man of the highest moral and religious principles and a committed a-list educator; it was another sad loss to anglo-jewry when he joined the continuing brain drain of our best and brightest, leaving his pulpit in hertfordshire for a new life in israel. happily, he has not faded from the uk scene, writing regularly in the jc and invariably giving a clear statement of the sort of moral leadership we all ought to be able to expect from a modern orthodox rabbi and zionist.

more of this, please

r. sylvester gives a quick insight into precisely why the actions of the mosque-desecrators are so despicable – not only are they an affront to moral sense and jewish history, but they are in complete contradiction of some of the strongest principles of halakhah (jewish religious law), the system that the most extreme settlers claim to be serving. let us be absolutely clear about this: the provisions in the Torah that are often cited as justification for harassment and persecution of arabs clearly do not apply to the muslim and christian inhabitants of the west bank; they only ever applied to the immoral and idolatrous “seven nations” of canaan, the canaanites, girgashites, hivites, hittites, amorites, jebusites and perizzites, the “seven nations greater and mightier than you” of deuteronomy 7:1. these nations no longer exist. they have not existed, officially according to halakhah, since “sennacherib mixed up the nations” (tosefta kiddushin 5:6) – this is the source of the position cited by r. sylvester taken by rabbis halevy, herzog and sacks. therefore it is, halakhically, impossible to spot, say a girgashite any more. as i have said on numerous occasions, i certainly wouldn’t be able to identify one even if he danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing “girgashites are here again”.

quite apart from this, such activity flies in the face of the even stronger Torah imprecation to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in egypt” – this is repeated no less than three times in the Torah: exodus 22:21, leviticus 19:33 and deuteronomy 23:7. nobody is saying that jews – or even settlers – have no right of self-defence. this, however is simply an act designed to provoke, inflame and exacerbate tensions that are already at breaking point. this is a political act, not a religious one – any suggestion that it has any kind of religious sanction must therefore be resisted in the strongest possible terms. anyone who acts in such a way is a desecrator of the Divine Name and an apostate, not a zealot. they are setting up the land as an idol – building an “asherah pole” next to their altar (deuteronomy 16:21) – and ignoring, with astounding accuracy, the even more explicit words of the Torah – juxtaposed *just one verse before*:

“justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land that HaShem your G!D Gives you.”

in other words, you have been Warned.

significantly, r. sylvester highlights the participation of rabbis aharon lichtenstein and shlomo riskin, both of whom are major figures in modern orthodoxy in israel, which can often be overlooked in favour of the more theatrical and controversial ultra-orthodox “Torah sages”. like another regular participant in demonstrations of religious solidarity with arab victims of jewish extremist activity and a particularly prominent proponent of dialogue, peace and harmonious co-existence, r. menahem froman, both are also inhabitants of important west bank settlements, r. lichtenstein in alon shvut and r. riskin in efrat. both settlements are, i believe likely to be retained by israel in the event of a peace agreement, unlike r. froman’s settlement of tekoa and the militant strongholds from which settler violence emanates. i’m not aware of these two public and highly regarded figures taking such a public position in this way before – their efforts have been quieter, more background – and it is good to see them taking a civilised stand so publicly. we need more of this – and quickly. it cannot happen soon enough and it cannot be widespread enough. it is time for religious jews to take a stand and say “not in our name – and not in the name of the Torah”.

Apparently Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former leader of the South Asian Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, has been banned from the UK. He had a visa that was valid until 2015. It has reportedly been revoked.

1. Pakistan’s main spy agency says homegrown Islamist militants have overtaken the Indian army as the greatest threat to national security, a finding with potential ramifications for relations between the two rival South Asian nations and for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. A recent internal assessment of security by the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful military spy agency, determined that for the first time in 63 years, it expects a majority of threats to come from Islamist militants, according to a senior ISI officer.

2. Much now depends on the ability of the government and its foreign allies to bring relief to flood victims. Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops and virtually the army’s entire helicopter fleet are now involved in the effort. But its resources are way overstretched, and for months to come the army is unlikely to be in a position to even hold the areas along the Afghan border that it has recently won back from the militants, let alone initiate any new campaigns against the Taliban. That means the war in Afghanistan is about to become even more bloody.

3. Pakistan has taken an awfully long time to understand that it faces an unprecedented terrorist threat that is not a result of conspiracies hatched in Washington, New Delhi or Tel-Aviv, as many in the public believe, but that is the result of the Pakistani state’s nurturing of extremist groups since the 1970s.

4. There appears to be a deeper reason that the global community is not responding as generously to Pakistan today: that country’s rampant corruption and links to Islamic terrorism. Quite simply, there is grave suspicion that aid will end up in the wrong hands: those of the Taliban.

UNICEF Canada is here.

The scene in the south of Iran where hundreds of mass graves have been dug

General Hossein Moghadam, the Guard’s former deputy chief, was speaking after film footage showed strings of freshly dug graves in the south of the country.

They were close to the site of war graves for the dead of the long war between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which devastated the region in the 1980s.

“The mass graves that used to be for burying Saddam’s soldiers have now been prepared again for US soldiers, and this is the reason for digging this big number of graves,” Gen Moghadam told the Associated Press, which obtained the footage.

The warning is unlikely to be more than symbolic. No-one expects a land invasion, should the White House authorise a strike on nuclear facilities, while Iran has so far suggested counter-action is most likely to be aimed at American allies in the Gulf and Western bases there.

Gen Moghadam’s claims might be a sign that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is increasingly reliant on the Revolutionary Guard for political backing, is feeling the heat of international diplomatic pressure over his aggressive posture on Iran’s uranium enrichment programme.

Washington has made full use of the diplomatic victory it won in forcing through a new United Nations sanctions package, with the unexpected support of both Russia and China, in June.

Iranian businessmen both inside and outside the country say the economy is suffering, while President Ahmadinejad’s many enemies from within the ranks of his own conservative faction in the leadership are frequently outspoken on his domestic record across the board.

Last week Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the American joint chiefs of staffs, kept up President Barack Obama’s double-handed approach, saying that he had prepared an attack plan focusing on Iran’s nuclear plants while at the same time accepting he was unwilling to use it.

Both sides are open about the brinkmanship threats of force involve, with the wider Middle East fearing it will be sucked into open conflict. Gen Moghadam went on to say: “If the US decides to take a pre-emptive action and attack Iran, Iran will have no choice but to strike the American bases in the region.

“The heavy costs of such a war will not be just on the Islamic Republic of Iran. America and other countries should accept that this would be the start of an extensive war in the region.”

Ambassador Husain Haqqani and the ear of US envoy Richard Holbrooke

The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not even remotely reflect the current realities on the ground. For example, a retired Pakistani general is named as the master planner of the Afghan Taliban’s strategy. But this is a man who hasn’t held any position within Pakistani intelligence or the military for more than 20 years. For its part, Pakistan’s current leadership will not be distracted by something like these leaks. We have paid an unprecedented price in blood and treasure over the last two years. We will not succumb to the terrorists.

Who is Husain Haqqani? According to this report, when he was a student at Karachi University, Haqqani was the elected president of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s premier far-right Islamist party.

And who is the the retired Pakistani general “named as the master planner of the Afghan Taliban’s strategy” whose hands-on involvement Haqqani is keen to deny in his latest WSJ article? He is Lt General Hamid Gul, who is personally identified dozens of times in the leaked reports and referenced in 8 reports as an “enabler” of the Taliban.

And here’s Gul himself, making an appearance on al-Jazeera, doing his best to debunk the WikiLeaks as “fictional” and a “pack of lies” and claiming that they were created by:

“Independent civilian contractors penetrated by Afghan intelligence, who are very inefficient, the Indians who have their own axe to grind, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence”

So there you have it. A note of advice from an old pro – if ever you find yourself named in leaked intelligence reports and accused of:

• Smuggling magnetic mines into Afghanistan
• Attacking NATO troops
• Of plotting to kidnap UN staff to bargain for imprisoned Pakistani militants
• Of meeting Arab militants from al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal belt to send suicide vehicles into Afghanistan

blame the Afghans, the Indians and the Israelis.

According to the report, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which comprises the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are classified in this broad-based UN Index as having “Medium Human Development”. It places its position at 110 of 182 countries, putting the Palestinian Territories in neither the top nor bottom groups.

And most surprising of all, the country’s HDR index places it ahead of the muslim-majority countries Egypt (123), Indonesia (111), Pakistan (141) and Bangladesh (146).

Where is data of the alleged ‘exteme humanitarian crisis’ and the starving Gazans that the Left insists on holding up as examples of said crisis?

Here is an image of a people “starving” at a fruit and veg market bursting with produce in Gaza:

And one of “destitution” at the lady’s souk:

But back in Bangladesh, there’s no poverty or starving people at all, is there? No flotilla for this young girl:

Nor for these children in Pakistan,

And of course these people in Egypt have no experience of social deprivation at the hands of a corrupt and venal government administration do they?

There is no doubt that the British left, Islamists and the hinterland of “muslim middle England” will ignore the ramifications of this report and blithely continue doing what they do reflexively: Indulge in the usual toxic cocktail of ‘whataboutery’ and blaming the USA, the “neocons”, Nick Cohen and of course, the Jews Israel.

Pakistani support for the Taliban is prolonging a conflict that has cost the West billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Last week 32 Nato soldiers were killed.

According to a report published today by the London School of Economics, which backs up months of research by this newspaper, “Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude” in Afghanistan.

The report’s author, Matt Waldman, a Harvard analyst, argues that previous studies significantly underestimated the influence that Pakistan’s ISI exerts over the Taliban. Far from being the work of rogue elements, interviews suggest this “support is official ISI policy”, he says.

The LSE report, based on dozens of interviews and corroborated by two senior western security officials, states: “As the provider of sanctuary and substantial financial, military and logistical support to the insurgency, the ISI appears to have strong strategic and operational influence — reinforced by coercion. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign.”

The report also alleges that Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, recently met captured Taliban leaders to assure them that the Taliban had his government’s full support. This was vigorously denied by Zardari’s spokesman. Pakistani troops have launched offensives against militants in North and South Waziristan.

However, a senior Taliban source in regular contact with members of the Quetta shura told The Sunday Times that in early April, Zardari and a senior ISI official met 50 high-ranking Taliban members at a prison in Pakistan.

According to a Taliban leader in the jail at the time, five days before the meeting prison officials were told to prepare for the impending presidential call. Prison guards wearing dark glasses served the Taliban captives traditional Afghan meals three times a day.

“They wanted to make the prisoners feel like they were important and respected,” the source said.

Hours before Zardari’s visit, the head warder told the Taliban inmates to impress upon the president how well they had been looked after during their time in captivity.

Zardari spoke to them for half an hour. He allegedly explained that he had arrested them because his government was under increasing American pressure to end the sanctuary enjoyed by the Taliban in Pakistan and to round up their ringleaders.

“You are our people, we are friends, and after your release we will of course support you to do your operations,” he said, according to the source.

He vowed to release the less well-known commanders in the near future and said that the “famous” Taliban leaders would be freed at a later date.

Five days after Zardari’s visit, a handful of Taliban prisoners, including The Sunday Times’s source, were driven into Quetta and set free, in line with the president’s pledge.

“This report is consistent with Pakistan’s political history in which civilian leaders actively backed jihadi groups that operate in Afghanistan and Kashmir,” Waldman said.

“Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey. We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong, between legal and illegal.”

That’s an impressive job of grandstanding by Davutoglu, but let’s not forget that in the “choice between right and wrong” and in the not so distant past, Turkey had few scruples when it leveraged its alliance with the US and Israeli security organisations to help them to track down and imprison the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Now Turkey wants the world to know that it is single-handedly taking on Israel and its oppression of a stateless minority. But when it comes to oppression of another stateless minority, Turkey’s brutal oppression and record of crimes against humanity against its Kurdish minority goes back a long way and, as far as brutality goes, takes some beating.

As Robert L Pollock explains:

What’s more, Turks remain blind to their manifest hypocrisies. Ask how they would feel if other countries arranged an “aid” convoy (akin to the Gaza flotilla) for their own Kurdish minority and you’ll be met with dumb stares.

Turkey’s blind spot on the Kurdish issue is especially striking when you recall that Turkey nearly invaded Syria in 1998 for sponsoring Kurdish terrorism. Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan then bounced around the capitals of Europe, only to be captured in Kenya and handed over to the Turks by the CIA. Turkey’s antiterror alliance with Israel and the U.S. couldn’t have been more natural.

Yet Prime Minister Erdogan was one of the first world leaders to recognize the legitimacy of the Hamas government in Gaza. And now he is upping the rhetoric after provoking Israel on Hamas’s behalf. It is Israel, he says, that has shocked “the conscience of humanity.” Foreign Minister Davutoglu is challenging the U.S: “We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong.”

Please. Good leaders work to defuse tensions in situations like this, not to escalate them. No American should be deceived as to the true motives of these men: They are demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East.

the thing that struck me initially, from the moment i got to the airport for our easyjet flight, was the other-worldliness of our ultra-orthodox fellow-travellers. now, the thing is, we live in a strictly orthodox community at least in part and know a lot of people with black hats, large beards, modest wigs and a mediaeval approach to family planning and, for the most part, they’re really just like everyone else. these guys on the plane, though – they’re really, really not fun to be around. mrs bb had some words with one who pushed in front of the buggy with mini-banana #2 in it and he looked at her like she was from outer space. she was clearly a respectable married woman, modestly dressed (at least by most people’s standards, even if she wasn’t covering her hair) and travelling with a skullcap-wearing husband. casual interaction with these people doesn’t appear to reveal that they have learned any of the laws of deportment, behaviour or politeness – and, yes, there are plenty of these in the halakhah. next thing, we sat down next to another who was quietly studying talmud, and rocking his daughter in her buggy. he’d seen the whole thing and said quietly to us “people just don’t know how to behave these days”. it was nice to be reassured that appearances aren’t everything.

this initial impression i got of the total fracture of israeli society along religious lines was only reinforced throughout my stay. bernard lewis famously described it as split down the middle between the “jews of christendom” and the “jews of islam”, which, largely speaking, remains true: the “christian” jews – i.e. mostly ashkenazi, from europe, north and south america and the british commonwealth, split into multiple ideologically-driven subgroups covering the spectrum from militant secularism to religious fanaticism, each with its own microclimate. the “islamic” jews, from the middle east, africa and south/central asia, whose relationships are more tribal, more ethnically based, and a traditional approach to religion that embraces all levels of observance – their relationships with each other and the islamic world based more on empirical and family experience than ideological principle. both “christian” and “islamic” jews can be pragmatic or stubbornly bloody-minded, depending on circumstance.

however, the real change i see in the society is from the russians – jews (mostly) of neither european christendom nor the islamic world, but fundamentally different to both; for the most part as hostile to religion as only people brought up under communism can be, with the attitude to ethnicity and human rights that brought us the siege of grozny and the ascendancy of vladimir putin; they understand the law of the jungle, but for all this, their very lack of religious scruples brings its own pragmatism. not to mention, of course, israel’s significant population of arabs, druze and circassians. this, then, is the israel that has developed since the end of the cold war. the fundamental four-way split is only exacerbated by the political culture, with proportional representation enabling parties to be created around ethnic blocs, religious minorities and political tendencies, the current coalition being comprised of parties which are defensive hawks, ethnic conservatives and free market economists, which is why it looks so right wing to your average guardian reader.

what really struck me, however, is the extent to which religion divides the society. we were initially staying in a hotel in the beach resort of netanya and it astonished me just how hard it was to find a kosher restaurant – and the preponderance of cyrillic menus. we also spent a goodly time staying with mrs bb’s utterly delightful cousins in haifa who are what i’d call “soft” secularists; in other words, they have no problem with religious people as long as nobody gets in their face about it. however, they don’t know the first thing about jewish practice, not even the most basic blessings; even our three-day-a-yearers know more. aside from them living in israel and speaking hebrew, you’d be hard put to tell them apart from, say, your average brazilian. my own cousins are somewhat more traditional, but not much; then again, their parents made aliyah as adults with a jewish education and some of their partners are from traditional or religious families. however, this is the exception rather than the rule. both are relaxed about the religious practice of others, but what really gets their goat is the behaviour of religious people who refuse to participate economically, who they see as cynically exploiting society and the political system.

israelis (particularly in corporate jobs) also work a six-ish-day week, from sunday to friday lunchtime in most cases. if you’re sabbath-observant, this doesn’t leave a great deal of time to do anything else. effectively, this means a significant barrier to socialisation or interaction with the non-sabbath-observant. if i lived in israel, my own practice would effectively remove my social life with anyone who wasn’t within walking distance, or sabbath-observant. in fact, there would be significant pressure to abandon my observance entirely or become more obsessive about it, because there’s no time to actually do anything like take the kids out for the day. it seems to me that this drives a wedge between the religious and secular, leaving little room for the moderately religious and driving polarisation of behaviour. it is easy to see why any religious control over public life causes huge inconvenience to the secular, as well as why secular behaviour clashes so hugely with religious observance (for example, israelis never, ever turn off their phones!)

compared to the gaping rifts in the jewish population, there is comparatively little dislike of arabs. the general abrasiveness of israeli behaviour is observable in the aggressive use of mosque loudspeakers, but certainly in the north (from about haifa up to the lebanese border) there is a sizeable arab population which appears moderately well-integrated into the workforce, if not socially. i didn’t get any attitude from any of the arabs i interacted with, certainly and, if anything, they were friendlier and politer than the jewish israelis (well, that’s family). my cousins don’t have many arab friends, though they appear comfortable working with and employing them. my recently-widowed, english-born uncle is of a different generation, but even he made reference to the integration of arabs in the workforce – they’re not all blue-collar by any means. he volunteers at a major city hospital where the director is an arab, dr masad barhoum - “and”, said my uncle, “good for him”. the sad thing is that the policy of separation from the palestinians has simply resulted in the importation of foreign labour – it’s not unusual to see asian “guest workers” where once you’d have seen palestinians. i think we’re all pretty aware of the effect on the palestinian economy, but the israeli economy simply sources its labour elsewhere. this is the result of the bombings and terror; fifteen years ago, it simply wasn’t the case. this is why economic co-operation must at some point resume, at which point the wall will have to come down.

the matzav – the “situation” – is clearly a cause of huge frustration. i was struck by the disappointment in the political class and in the country’s leadership (our relatives are generally kadima supporters, with some likudniks, albeit i’d say they were pretty left for likud) together with the repeated recognition that “we are authors of our own misfortune”. if i had to sum it up in one sentence, what i heard from my family could be stated as: we should be doing our bit to fix the situation with the palestinians, but we just haven’t done so; it just seems to be too hard to do and there are too many forces, internal and external, that are pulling in the other direction. there is a sort of quiet despair that i haven’t seen before, together with a dogged determination to give the iranians and their hizbollah stooges a dam’ good kicking if they go any further. not many of the people i talked to were looking for a fight, but more than one person stated flatly that an attack on iran was on the cards; they are now purpose-building “sealed rooms” in their flats and houses as a matter of course against WMD-enabled rocket attacks. but in the meantime, life goes on, although there isn’t much hope of a resolution, people simply try and get on with life as best they can. i talked to a number of people about the ray hanania peace plan that i have previously promoted. it produced reactions varying from surprise (for all that it was reported in the israeli press) to disbelief to sceptical welcome. it was just hard for people to believe that such a thing was feasible although, in principle, they understood and supported the compromises that would be necessary. this, if nothing else, i found encouraging and cause for hope.

of course, none of this is the “front line”, politically speaking. i didn’t visit the separation wall, or the green line, or jerusalem. these places are where the people with an axe to grind (like extremists, journalists and activists) tend to cluster and they’re extensively reported. naturally, few of these people – and it is largely they who influence the political arena – it is rare, however, that anyone ever reports on how people think and act in israeli civil society itself, because it’s not nearly as “interesting” (read “nutty”).

in my view, there are a couple of things that are absolutely essential for israeli society to get out of the stalemate it’s currently in:

1. political reform – this eternal coalition-building simply gives extreme views and splinter groups disproportionate leverage.
2. a comprehensive commitment to social cohesion – this means not only that the ultra-orthodox are going to have to work, but that israel itself needs a five-day working week; israel once spent a great deal of effort on social integration, unfortunately it was mostly wasted on trying to build a socialist, secularist utopia. israeli society needs a vision for all its people, not just the excluded middle.
3. more long-term political horizons and engagement with the world; i think this will come from new realities in the diaspora, j-street and the new european jewish lobby organisation ought to help this reorientation.

i don’t know if any of these things are possible – the social, political and international pressures against it are formidable.

we can but hope.

a reptilian overlord yesterday

anyway, we’ve had boobquake, gayquake and immorality-inspired flooding so, predictably, our new icelandic friend eyjafjallajökull has been pressed into surface for this purpose, proving variously that:

1. we should never have turned on that large hadron collider

2. iceland is being too tolerant of neo-paganism and europe of gay rights

3. G!D Disapproves of “obamacare”

4. people are having a go at the pope

5. aliens (or satan) are doing space paintings with ufos

6. G!D Disapproves of the british advertising standards authority ruling that the israeli tourist board can’t show the western wall as part of israel, because they’ve never taken the trouble to annex the Temple mount.

and my personal favourite:

7. the iron core engine of the planet is today becoming reenergized by the huge magnetic force field of the incoming twin binary dark star to our solar system (called “nibiru” in ancient sumer, or “nemesis the destroyer”)

personally, my money’s on deepak chopra’s laxatives.

****

A QUARTER CENTURY AGO I met a man who calmly told me how he had organised the massacre of a family. He wasn’t confessing out of a sense of remorse; he was bragging about it, grinning as he spoke to me.

I was a young reporter on assignment in Dhaka, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with Bangladesh, which had emerged as an independent nation after a bloody war of liberation 15 years earlier, in 1971. The man I was interviewing lived in a well-appointed home. Soldiers protected his house, checking the bags and identification of all visitors. A week earlier he had been a presidential candidate, losing by a huge margin.

He wore a Pathani outfit that looked out of place in a country where civilian politicians wore white kurtas and black vests, and men on the streets went about in lungis. He had a thin moustache. He stared at me eagerly as we spoke, curious about the notes I was taking, trying to read what I was writing in my notepad. He sat straight on a sofa, his chest thrust forward, as if he was still in uniform. He looked like a man playing a high stakes game, assured that he would win, because he knew someone important who held all the cards.

His name was Farooq Rahman, and he had been an army major, and later, lieutenant-colonel. He had returned to Bangladesh recently, after several years in exile in Libya. Before dawn on 15 August 1975, he led the Bengal Lancers, the army’s tank unit under his command, to disarm the Rokkhi Bahini, a paramilitary force loyal to President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League party. When he left the Dhaka Cantonment, he had instructed other officers and soldiers to go to the upscale residential area of Dhanmondi, where Mujib, as he was popularly known, lived. Soon after 5:00 am, the officers had killed Mujib and most of his family.

I had been rehearsing how to ask Farooq about his role in the assassination. I had no idea how he would respond. After a few desultory questions about the country’s political situation, I tentatively began, “It has been widely reported in Bangladesh that you were somehow connected with the plot to remove Mujibur Rahman from power in 1975. Would you…”

“Of course, we killed him,” he interrupted me. “He had to go,” he said, before I could complete my hesitant, longwinded question.

FAROOQ RAHMAN BELIEVED he had saved the nation. The governments that followed Mujib reinforced that perception, rewarding him and the other assassins with respectability, political space, and plum diplomatic assignments. One of Mujib’s surviving daughters, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, who inherited his political mantle and who was to become the prime minister of Bangladesh, was marginalised for many years. She lived for a while in exile, and for some time, was detained. The political landscape after Mujib’s murder was unstable. Bangladesh has had 11 prime ministers and over a dozen heads of state in its 39-year history. Hasina was determined to redeem her father’s reputation and seek justice, and her quest has larger implications for Bangladesh’s citizenry. Hundreds of thousands—and by some estimates perhaps three million—people were killed during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis now wait for justice—to see those who harmed them and their loved ones brought to account. But the culture of impunity hasn’t disappeared. It took more than three decades for Sheikh Hasina to receive some measure of vindication.

SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON of 27 January this year, Mahfuz Anam received a call from an official, saying that the end was imminent. Anam was in the newsroom of Bangladesh’s leading English newspaper, The Daily Star, which he edits. He knew what the message meant: perhaps within hours, five men—Farooq, Lt-Col Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan, Lt-Col Mohiuddin Ahmed, Maj Bazlul Huda, and army lancer AKM Mohiuddin— would be hanged by the neck until dead at the city’s central jail. Anam told his reporters to be prepared, and sent several reporters and photographers to cover the executions.

“We had hints that the end was near, particularly when the relatives of the five men were asked to come and meet them with hardly any notice,” Anam told me during a long telephone conversation a week after the executions. “The authorities had told the immediate families that there were no limits on the number of relatives who could come, and they were allowed to remain with them until well after visiting hours. We knew that the final hours had come.”

Once the families left, the five men were sent to their cells. They were told to take a bath and to offer their night prayers. Then the guards asked them if they wanted to eat anything special. A cleric came, offering to read from the Qu’ran. Around 10:30 pm, a reporter called Anam to say that the city’s civil surgeon, Mushfiqur Rahman, and district magistrate Zillur Rahman had arrived at the jail. Police vans arrived 50 minutes later, carrying five coffins. The anti-crime unit, known as the Rapid Action Battalion, took positions providing support to the regular police force to prevent demonstrations. Other leading officials came within minutes: the home secretary, the inspector general of prisons, and the police commissioner. Rashida Ahmad, news editor at the online news agency, bdnews24.com, recalls: “Many media houses practically decamped en masse to the jail to ‘experience a historic moment’ firsthand.” Anam told me, “By 11:35 pm, we knew it would happen that night. We held back our first edition. The second edition had the detailed story.”

Bazlul Huda was the first to be taken to the gallows. He was handcuffed, and a black hood covered his face. Eyewitnesses have said Huda struggled to free himself and screamed loudly, as guards led him to the brightly lit room. An official waved and dropped a red handkerchief on the ground, the signal for the executioner to proceed. It was just after midnight when Huda died. Muhiuddin Ahmed was next, followed by Farooq, Shahriar, and AKM Muhiuddin. It was all over soon after 1:00 am.

Earlier that day, the Supreme Court had rejected the final appeal of four of the five convicts. Shahriar was the only one not to seek presidential pardon. His daughter Shehnaz, who spent two hours with her father that evening, later told bdnews24.com, “My father was a freedom fighter; and a man who fights for the independence of his country never begs for his life.”

Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, was at her prime ministerial home that night. She was informed when the executions began, and she reportedly asked to be left alone, and later offered namaz-e-shukran (a prayer of gratitude). Many people, most of them supporters of the Awami League, had gathered outside her house that night, but she did not come out to meet anybody. A few days later, she told a party convention that it was a moment of joy for all of them, because due process had been served.

The mood was sober and subdued. Dhaka residents I spoke to told me the celebrations were only in certain localities. Ahmad, who was at her news desk until late at bdnews24. com, wrote to me, saying the mood was sombre, and many looked at it as a time for reflection, although that night and the following day there was muted rejoicing in some areas. Many could understand Hasina thanking God, and other politicians welcoming the closing of a dark chapter, but some felt it a bit much that parliament itself thanked God and adjourned for the day, she said.

The chapter is not yet closed. In early February, Awami League activists ransacked and set afire the home of the brother of Aziz Pasha, one of the self-confessed conspirators who had died in exile in Zimbabwe a few years ago. Six other conspirators remain at large, and the Government says it is determined to bring them back.

CALL IT JUSTICE, REVENGE, or closure. It has taken 34 years for this particular saga to reach its end. Khondaker Mushtaq Ahmed, who took over as Bangladesh’s president after Mujib’s assassination, had granted the officers immunity and praised the assassins. General Ziaur Rehman, who later became president, con- firmed the immunity. A series of articles in August 2005 were published simultaneously in The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the coup d’état that killed Mujib and much of his family. Lawrence Lifschultz, an American journalist who had been South Asia Correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1970s, revealed that one of his principal sources, alleging CIA links with the political leadership of the coup, was the US Ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Boster.

While Boster sought anonymity during his lifetime, Lifschultz disclosed after Boster’s death that the ambassador had in 1977 informed he and his colleague, the American writer, Kai Bird, that the US Embassy had contacts with the Khondaker group six months before the coup, and that the ambassador had himself ordered that all links with Khondaker and his entourage be severed. Boster claimed he learned later that behind his back the contacts continued with Khondaker’s associates until the actual day of the coup.

In their book, Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (1979), Lifschultz and Bird document Khondaker’s prior links to a failed Kissinger initiative during the 1971 war. Khondaker’s colleagues in Bangladesh’s government-in-exile had discovered his covert contacts with Kissinger, and it ended with him being placed under house arrest in Calcutta. Four years later, Khondaker—who was in Mujib’s cabinet—became president after the military coup, and once in office, he granted immunity to the assassins.

Later governments gave some of the assassins high-ranking posts, even though these men had conspired to eliminate the country’s elected leader. Lt- Col Shariful Haq Dalim represented Bangladesh in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tripoli, and became high commissioner to Kenya, even though he had attempted another coup in 1980. Lt-Col Aziz Pasha served in Rome, Nairobi, and Harare, where he sought asylum when Hasina first came to power in 1996. She removed him; he stayed on in Harare, and died there. Maj Huda was briefly a member of parliament, and also served in Islamabad and Jeddah. Other conspirators served Bangladeshi missions in Bangkok, Lagos, Dakar, Ankara, Jakarta, Tokyo, Muscat, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Ottawa, and Manila.

The Oxford-trained lawyer, Kamal Hossain, who was Mujib’s law minister, and later foreign minister, told me, “The impunity with which Farooq operated was extraordinary. When he returned to Bangladesh, the government facilitated him and President [Hussain Muhammad] Ershad, who wanted some candidate to stand against him in the rigged elections. [Ershad] let Farooq stand to give himself credibility.”

It was clear that a trial of the assassins would only be possible if Mujib’s party, the Awami League, came to power. That happened in 1996, and Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, became prime minister. The cases began and the court found all 12 defendants guilty. But Hasina lost the 2001 elections, and the process stopped, resuming only after her victory in the elections of December 2008. The government now wants to bring the surviving officers back to Bangladesh: Noor Chowdhury is reportedly in the United States; Dalim is in Canada; Khandaker Abdul Rashid, Farooq’s brother-in-law, is in Pakistan; MA Rashed Chowdhury is in South Africa; Mosleuddin is in Thailand; and Abdul Mazed is in Kenya. Bringing all of them back may not be easy, because they will face executions. Canada and South Africa have abolished the death penalty, and Kenya put a stop to it recently, making it harder for those governments to extradite them.

How does a nation, whose independence was soaked with blood, which lost a popular leader of its freedom struggle in a brutal massacre, reconcile with that crime? What form of justice is fair? Does the death penalty heal those wounds?

Bangladesh thinks so. It is among the 58 countries (including India) that retain the death penalty, but it applies it only in rare cases, like murder. In 2008, five people were executed in Bangladesh. Many governments oppose the death penalty on principle, and the European Union appealed to the Bangladeshi government to commute the sentence of Mujib’s assassins. The human rights group Amnesty International also sought clemency, while agreeing that the men should face justice.

Bangladeshi human rights lawyers have found it hard to challenge the death penalty because it is not controversial in Bangladesh. There are also political exigencies. One human rights activist told me, “We are against [the] death penalty but the dilemma is that we are in a country where life imprisonment really means imprisonment guaranteed until your party is in power. The death penalty is almost seen as the only way to guarantee justice for such a grisly crime.” Grisly, it certainly was. This is what happened.

IN 1975, Dhanmondi hadn’t changed much from how it looked at Independence, with roads lined with two-storey houses dating back to the 1950s. Today, there are multi-storey buildings, English-medium schools, new universities, shopping malls and hookah bars
to lure younger crowds. Back in 1975, the area was quieter. In the evening, people strolled along the periphery of the large lake in the middle of the neighbourhood and at night you could hear the tinkle of the bells of the cycle rickshaws plying the roads.

On 15 August 1975, before dawn, 700 soldiers with 105 millimetre weapons left their barracks and headed for the three homes where Mujib and his family lived. Everyone was still asleep at Mujib’s home, number 677 on road 32 in Dhanomondi. Mujib’s personal assistant, Mohitul Islam, was at his desk when Mujib called him, asking him to call the police immediately. Mujib had heard his brother-in-law Abdur Rab Serniabat’s house at 27 Minto Road was being attacked. Serniabat was a minister in Mujib’s government.

Mohitul—who lived to tell the tale—tried calling the police, but the phones weren’t working. When he called the telephone exchange, the person at the other end said nothing. Mujib snatched the phone and shouted into the mouthpiece.

The guards outside were hoisting the national flag when the soldiers arrived. The guards were stunned to find army officers rushing in through the gate, ordering them to drop their weapons and surrender. There were a few shots.

A frightened servant woke up Mujib’s son Kamal, who got dressed and came down when Maj Bazlul Huda entered the house with several soldiers. Even as Mohitul tried telling Huda that it was Kamal, there was a burst of gunfire; Kamal lay dead. Huda quickly went to the landing of the staircase when he heard Mujib’s voice.

“What do you want?” Mujib asked Huda, whom he recognised.

The soldiers pulled their triggers, spraying Mujib with dozens of bullets. Before his burial the following day in his birthplace, Tungipara, the imam noticed at least ten bullets still lodged inside Mujib’s body. When I visited the house in 1986, I saw dozens of bullet marks on the wall and staircase where he was killed. Mujib had collapsed on the stairs; his trademark pipe in his hands. He was dead by the time his body stopped tumbling down the stairs.

The killers then went inside the house, and one by one, killed everyone they could find: Mujib’s wife Fajilutunessa, Kamal’s wife Sultana, Mujib’s other son Jamal and his wife Rosy, and Mujib’s brother Naser, who was heard pleading, “I am not in politics.”

Then they saw Russell, Mujib’s ten-year-old son, who was crying, asking for his mother. He, too, was killed.

Around the same time, another group of soldiers had killed Mujib’s brother-in-law, Serniabat at his home, and a third group had murdered the family of Fazlul Haque Moni, Mujib’s nephew, an influential Awami League politician who lived on road 13/1, about two kilometres away from Mujib’s home. At that time, Mahfuz Anam was a young reporter at the Bangladesh Times. He lived across the Dhanmandi Lake, and had a clear view of Sheikh Moni’s house. “I saw what happened,” he recalled. “Early that morning I was awakened by the sound of firing. I got up. My room was on the side of the lake. I ventured out to the boundary wall. I saw troops enter Sheikh Moni’s house. I heard plenty of firing, followed by screaming. I heard shots—some random, some from sub-machine guns. I saw the troops leave the house. It was all over in four to six minutes. I could hear the people inside groaning; it continued for some time.”

The junior officers’ coup had proceeded exactly as planned. There had been no resistance from the moment Huda and his team had reached Mujib’s home. After taming the Rokkhi Bahini, Farooq arrived at Mujib’s gate, eager to know what had happened at Mujib’s home. Huda told him calmly, “All are finished.”

When we met a decade after those killings, I asked Farooq, one of the leading conspirators, “And the ten-year-old boy: did he have to be killed?”

“It was an act of mercy killing. Mujib was building a dynasty; we had to finish off all of them,” he told me with a degree of finality, his arm slicing ruthlessly in the air, as if he was chopping off the head of someone kneeling in front of him. There was no mercy in his eyes, no remorse, only a hint of pride.

They had tried killing the entire family, but they could not get Mujib’s two daughters, Hasina and Rehana, who were on a goodwill tour in Europe. Hasina was in Bonn, Germany, where her husband, MA Wazed Miah, a nuclear scientist, was a researcher at a laboratory (He died in May 2009). Kamal Hossain, Mujib’s cabinet minister, was on an official visit to Belgrade. Speaking a week after the executions of Mujib’s killers, he told me, “I first heard there had been a coup. Later, at the home of the Bangladesh Ambassador to Yugoslavia, we sat listening to French radio, and more information began coming out. We heard about Mujib’s death, then we heard about the other family members. My first thought was Hasina’s safety.” He met her in Bonn and decided to sever his relations with the new government. He handed in his official passport to the ambassador, and left for England, which had better links with Bangladesh, and where getting information would be easier. Hasina, too, decided there was no need for her to go back. She was granted asylum in India and lived in New Delhi with her husband until 1981. Hossain returned to Dhaka in 1980.

IN OCTOBER 1986, I visited Mujib’s house, the mute witness to the ghastly events of that dawn. As if to ensure that no one will forget the tragedy, Hasina, who showed me around, had made only minimal changes to the house, preserving the crime scene. The bare walls bore bullet marks. Shattered glass lay on the ground of what was once Mujib’s library. On the
staircase on which Mujib was shot, and on the wall which he tried to grip for support as he fell, darkened blood stains were still visible.

Mujib was 55 when he was killed. He had been in and out of Pakistani jails, and was widely regarded—and initially revered— as Bangladesh’s founding father. At the time of Partition, what is now known as Bangladesh formed the eastern wing of Pakistan. The two parts of Pakistan were divided by thousands of kilometres of Indian territory. Islam united the two, but culture, language and the idea of nationhood divided them. The eastern half was more populous, and should legitimately have commanded greater resources, but the generals and politicians in power in the western half disregarded eastern demands, responding to eastern claims with contempt, if not repression. Punjabis dominated the Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pathans in the west, and they had even less regard for their Bengali compatriots.

Things came to a head in 1970, when in nationwide elections, Awami League secured a majority. Mujib should have been invited to become Pakistan’s prime minister, but the generals and politicians in the west thought differently. Mujib’s negotiations with Gen Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s ruler, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party which had won a large number of seats in the west, continued interminably. Meanwhile, Yahya Khan sent Gen Tikka Khan to Dhaka. Many Bangladeshis remember planeloads of young men arriving on flights from the west. They were military men but not in uniform, and they did not carry weapons. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s navy was shipping weapons through ports like Chittagong, keeping Bengali officers in the dark, and secretly arming the men who had landed in Dhaka.

The crackdown began on 25 March 1971, as the Pakistani army brutally attempted to crush Bengali aspirations. Mujib was jailed in West Pakistan. In the east, hundreds of thousands were killed, and millions of refugees made their way to India. A civil war followed, and India aided the Mukti Bahini, as Bangladeshi freedom fighters were called. In early December, Pakistan attacked India on its western front; India retaliated, and its troops defeated Pakistan on both fronts within a fortnight. Indian troops entered Dhaka, and thousands of Pakistani troops surrendered. A few weeks later Mujib returned to the Tejgaon airport. A sea of humanity greeted the leader of the new nation, Bangladesh.

Three and a half years later, Farooq and his men annihilated most of Mujib’s family. “Even dogs didn’t bark when we killed Mujib,” Farooq told me.

THE SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN of 1975 was not the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of 1971. He squandered his unprecedented goodwill for two reasons. First, he could not meet the phenomenal expectations Bangladeshis had in his leadership. Lifschultz, who
was based in Dhaka in 1974, remembers the day when Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, visited Bangladesh for the first time since its independence from Pakistan. As Bhutto’s motorcade moved from the airport into central Dhaka, a section of the crowd lining the street shouted, “Bhutto Zindabad (Long Live Bhutto).”

Lifschultz thought this was rather bizarre. He told me there were conflicted feelings among some Bangladeshis who in 1974 were living through the first stages of a severe famine. Clearly, some believed their hopes had been belied, but to him, the cheering of Bhutto seemed particularly perverse, given the circumstances of Bangladesh’s emergence.

BANGLADESHI FRUSTRATION with Mujib was understandable. By mid-1974, Bangladesh was reeling from a widespread famine that experts believe was at least partly due to political incompetence. Citizens were also stunned by the ostentatious weddings of Mujib’s sons at a time of economic crisis. Food distribution had failed, and people were forced
to sell their farm animals to buy rice. Thousands of poor people left their villages looking for work in the cities. Irene Khan, who was until recently the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, was a schoolgirl in the early 1970s. She recalls hungry voices clamouring for food outside the gates of her family home every day.

With public criticism over the mass starvation growing, Mujib clamped down on dissent. He abolished political parties and created one national party called Bangladesh Krishak Shramik Awami League (BAKSAL); removed freethinking experts who did not agree with his policies; nationalised newspapers (closing most), and allowed only two each—in Bangla and in English. He stifled dissent within the party, suspended the constitution, and declared himself president. Now editor of The Daily Star, Anam calls those measures the greatest blunder Mujib made. “It is still a mystery what led him to do that. He had it all. There was nothing, nobody in the parliament opposed to his policies, except for a few voices. He was the tallest man in the country. Why did he do it? It was in total contrast to his political heritage. It was a dramatic transformation from a multiparty system to a one party state.”

The only time I met Farooq, in 1986, he expressed outrage at those changes, “How do you pass an amendment in Parliament which abolishes party membership in just 11 minutes? No discussions, nothing!” Bangladesh, in his opinion, was becoming a colony of India, and as a freedom fighter, he thought he had to stop that. “I tried to save the country,” he told me, his tone rising, “Mujib had changed the constitution so that the court could not do a thing. All power was with the president.”

None of Farooq’s explanations justified the terrible manner in which he and his family were killed, but the famine and his increasingly authoritarian rule partly explains why there was little outward expression of grief after his assassination. At the same time, it was not just Mujib’s killing, but the brutality of it, that many Bangladeshis felt justified the death penalty for the assassins.

Justice moves slowly in Bangladesh. According to a recent study, Bangladesh’s jails can hold only 27,000 prisoners, but there are some 70,000 inmates in jail, and some 47,000 are still awaiting trial, according to the inspector-general of prisons. One reason for the backlog is the shortage of judges. The other is that some defendants are too poor to afford legal help.

The trial of Mujib’s assassins falls under a different category. There was little political will to try the assassins. That changed when Hasina came to power. The five of- ficers were sentenced to death as early as 1998. They appealed, but higher courts upheld the sentence in April 2001 and November 2009 respectively. They sought a Supreme Court review, and later, four of the five applied for presidential pardon. While the government meticulously followed the constitutional procedures, many have noted the speed with which the final appeals were dealt with.

A four-member special bench of the Supreme Court’s appellate division met at 9:25 am and issued a verdict at 9:27 am, on 26 January 2010, rejecting the review petition. Senior civil servants of the law and home ministry met at noon, and discussed the issue for three hours. Farooq, who had resisted writing his mercy petition, did so that afternoon. Officials received and dispatched his petition within minutes, as they were all in one room with colleagues whose approval was needed. A report on bdnews24.com said that President Zillur Rahman rejected the petition at 7:30 pm (the hangings occurred soon after midnight).

The quick turnaround of the documents was remarkable. One lawyer told me, “What you saw wasn’t due process; it was process with undue speed.”

THERE IS A SENSE IN DHAKA NOW, that the executions have brought the tragedy to a close. Perhaps; but many other wounds continue to fester. On the day of Mujib’s killing in 1975, the officers had also arrested Tajuddin Ahmed, Nazrul Islam, Kamaruzzaman, and Mansur Ali—four leading Awami League politicians suspected of being pro-Mujib. On the
night of 3 November 1975, soldiers came to the jail, and asked for the four to be brought to one cell. The jail authorities tried to find out what was going on, when a call from the president asked them to cooperate. The soldiers then took out their weapons, and, without reading out any charges, without any trial or any authority, sprayed bullets on them, killing them instantly. Mosleuddin, involved with the 15 August killings, proudly claimed to have played a role in the jail killings. Khondaker gave the killers immunity. Some pro-Mujib of- ficers overthrew Khondaker two days later. A counter-coup followed, and the situation was stabilised weeks later when Gen Ziaur Rahman took over, ending the pretence of civilian rule. Tajuddin’s daughter, Simeen Hossain Rimi, has compiled her father’s writings and sought justice. The government has said it will pursue that case, too.

And then there are the war crimes.

When Hasina came to power in 2008, one of her electoral promises was to seek justice for the victims of the 1971 war. Without getting into the technical debate over whether what happened in Bangladesh in 1971 was a genocide— which is a legal term with a precise meaning in international law—there is enough evidence to prove that both war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed in Bangladesh. Many of those who committed those acts are still free: some live abroad, some in Pakistan and some in Bangladesh, living with the same impunity as some of Mujib’s killers did until recently. These individuals resisted an independent Bangladesh, and successive governments in Bangladesh haven’t pursued the matter. Some governments lacked the political capital and will, some had little moral authority, and some have even been complicit with some of the crimes.

That context has changed with Hasina’s recent victory. Irene Khan, who worked for many years at the UN High Commission for Refugees before leading Amnesty International, told me:

You can have debates about whether particular acts constitute war crimes or genocide. You can debate whether what happened was a war or an internal con- flict. But they were crimes against humanity. There was obviously culpability and collusion of some locals with the Pakistani army. For instance, in December 1971, before the formal handover to the Indian army, there was a whole list of intellectuals who were picked up and killed. These were not political cases; these were civilians. Those crimes have remained uninvestigated; it is extremely important that there is a commission of inquiry, if Bangladesh is to put a closure to this chapter of its history. Even if you will have only a limited number of prosecutions, you need a full record of what happened.

Pakistan’s own war inquiry commission report of 1974 mentions that tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and many women were raped. Bangladeshis find that report incomplete because it barely scratches the surface of what happened.

Justice for those crimes against humanity won’t be easy. At the time of the final handover of Pakistani prisoners of war, India and Bangladesh signed a tripartite treaty with Pakistan, which effectively granted immunity to Pakistani soldiers. While Bangladesh passed a law subsequently to try war criminals, that law only focused on Bangladeshi collaborators, leaving out the Pakistani army. “That issue has always been brushed under the carpet,” Irene Khan told me. “The real question is: can an international treaty sign away the rights to justice of victims? The treaty absolves the Pakistani army and political leaders.”

Realpolitik may have prevented going after Pakistanis, and domestic politics made targeting local collaborators complicated. Hasina’s rival was Khaleda Zia, Ziaur Rahman’s widow. She led the Bangladesh National Party, which has had an electoral alliance with Jamaat-i-Islami, a fundamentalist party. Some of the Jamaat’s leaders and many followers are accused of being collaborationists.

The Bangladeshi government had said it would commence trials in March. A tribunal was expected to be set up in Dhaka by 26 March, Bangladesh’s Independence Day, but nobody has been indicted yet, no prosecutors or investigators have been appointed, and only Bangladeshi ‘collaborators’ will be tried. Some observers fear that the process will be seen as an attack on Jamaat-i-Islami. If the initial indictees are only from the Jamaat, they will claim they are being victimised, and the credibility of the process will suffer. A fair process would also investigate the conduct of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi freedom fighters who are alleged to have committed atrocities against Urdu-speaking Biharis, many of whom supported Pakistan.

And all this, to what end? It is a people’s quest for justice; a society’s desire to break the imposed silence. It is to reassert the norms that govern a nation, to re-establish the foundations on which civilisation can rest.

Irene Khan is not sure if the recent executions will help turn the tide against the culture of impunity. “This is a systemic problem in Bangladesh,” she says. “There is impunity from the local policeman who beats up a suspected thief, to the security forces who tortured and killed suspected mutineers in interrogation cells.” She refers to the failed Bangladesh Rifles mutiny last year. Guards of Bangladesh Rifles objected to army officers commanding them, so they held officers hostage, killing many of them and ransacking the barracks, before surrendering. Hundreds of mutineers were tortured later, and over 60 died.

THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY runs deep. Hasina may think of reaching closure for her personal grief. For millions of Bangladeshis, that remains an elusive goal. Projonmo 71 is a social movement, bringing together the children of those who died during the independence war. Staunchly Bengali in their nationalism, many of its members are secular.

Meghna Guhathakurta, an academic who taught international relations at Dhaka University and is now the director of Research Initiatives, a development think tank, is one of them.

She vividly remembers the midnight of 25 March 1971. Her father, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, who was a professor of English at Dhaka University, was correcting examination papers. Schools and colleges were closed, as Bangladeshis had embarked on a non-cooperation movement. She feared her father would get arrested, and they had been warned.

An army convoy came to the campus. There were six apartments in the building. The soldiers began banging on the doors. An officer and two soldiers entered their ground floor apartment through the back garden. The officer asked in Urdu, “Where is the professor?” Her mother asked why they wanted to meet her husband. The officer said they had come to take him away.

“Where?” she asked. The officer did not reply.

Guhathakurta told me what followed in a calm voice:

My mother called my father. The officer asked my father if he was the professor. My father said yes. ‘We have come to take you,’ he said. Meanwhile, several other professors were being brought down. Some families tried to hold them, but we told them—‘let them go, otherwise they will shoot you.’ We turned around, and we heard the firing of guns. And we saw all of them lying in a pool of blood. Some were shouting for water. We rushed out to the front part of our compound. I saw my father lying on the ground. He was fully conscious. He told me they had asked him his name and his religion. He said he was a Hindu, and they gave orders to shoot him. My father was hit by bullets in his neck, his waist, and it left him paralysed. The soldiers had run away. We took my father to the house. We could not take him to the hospital because there was a curfew.

He remained in pain, and they could only take him to the hospital on 27 March, when the curfew was lifted. He died three days later.

I asked her about the executions of Mujib’s assassins. “I am against impunity, and I am very much happy justice has been met,” she said. “But I am not happy that we have the death penalty. Not every crime has been tried yet.”

She is a peace activist and has thought of forgiveness, but there is a moral dilemma around that idea. British writer Gillian Slovo, who was born in South Africa, had faced such a moral quandary in the years after apartheid was lifted. During apartheid, Slovo’s father, Joe, led the South African Communist Party, and he and her mother, Ruth, first lived in exile in Mozambique, from where they carried on their anti-apartheid activism. They were among the few whites to take on the South African regime (her mother had been detained without trial in 1963, and the couple fled South Africa after the African National Congress leadership was rounded up). Tragedy struck in Mozambique, when agents of apartheid sent her a letter bomb, which exploded, killing her.

Slovo ended up confronting the man responsible for sending that lethal parcel to her mother. She discovered a copy of her book, which she had autographed, had ended up with that man. I met Slovo in late 2008, soon after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and I asked her if it was possible to forgive. After all, South Africa had astounded the world with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered a non-violent way in which the oppressor and victim could resolve differences face to face. Slovo told me, “Lots of countries like truth commissions because they look at South Africa and think of the miracle. But I am not sure if it was entirely miraculous; it had its flaws, too. The commission was a compromise to stop people from fighting. People need to see if the two sides want to stop fighting first. It is impossible to otherwise start a process that goes so deep. There is a difference between individual and collective responses. South Africa’s experience reflected the thinking of an archbishop [Desmond Tutu], whose church believed in forgiveness.”

Guhathakurta had studied at a convent, and the Christian ideas of mercy were ingrained in her as a child. She was 15 when her father was murdered, and the impression of those school lessons was strong. She told me, “I remember the first thing I did was to say: I forgive those who killed my father. But in a multicultural system it doesn’t always work. Not all religions are about forgiveness. Revenge is permitted in many religions. Human beings have a primordial urge to take revenge.”

Many years later, Guhathakurta was interviewing victims of 1971 for a film. She was talking to those who escaped from killing fields, and families of people who were victims. That’s when it occurred to her: trauma never really ends. Her nightmares will always stay. She acknowledged her anger. She did not want revenge; she wanted justice. She said:

For me, justice would be when the Pakistani government realises what it did. But they have not even recognised the genocide. For me, justice means something like Berlin’s Holocaust Museum is constructed in Islamabad. I want to see signs where they say that such an event took place, and it was our fault, because we did it, and we are sorry. You can’t ask the daughter to forgive the murderer of her father. Revenge doesn’t make sense, either. Just because my father died doesn’t mean yours has to die. But recognition, that something took place, and the fact that it should not take place again— that’s justice. The Holocaust museum says it happened, therefore it can happen again.

Slovo had put it slightly differently: Real reconciliation only happens when the terrible is acknowledged, so that you can’t say it did not happen.

TOWARDS THE END of the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s novel, Kartography, Maheen tells her niece Raheen, “Bangladesh made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.”

Bangladesh abounds with victims—each family has a horror story of its own, where a loved one has been hurt grievously, and the ones who have committed those atrocities have not faced justice, nor expressed remorse. It is impossible to heal everyone. But honest accounting of what happened would be a good start. Trying Mujib’s killers, seeking the extradition of those living abroad and solving the mystery of the jail killings are useful steps in making sense of their warped politics, where individuals bragging about killing defenceless people were being rewarded.

Removing the culture of impunity will be a small step towards justice—not necessarily through death penalties, but through remorse, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Until that happens, the question Projonmo 71 left inscribed on the plaque commemorating the martyred intellectuals at Rayer Bazaar in Dhaka will continue to resound across the wounded rivers and valleys, awaiting an answer: “Tomra ja bolechhiley, bolchhey ki ta Bangladesh?” (Is Bangladesh saying what you had wanted to say?)