“Saudi Arabia Is Your Owner You Dog!”

What would be the outcome of this kind of attack had it been perpetrated by a white non-Muslim Briton? It would be “Islamophobic” and rightly condemned. But when we see it perpetrated by Arabs on South Asian Muslims, it will be dismissed at best – or the victim will be considered to have “asked for it”.

Subrata Adhikari Shuvo and Russel Parvez

Some good news from Bangladesh on the plight of the “Atheist Bloggers” who were associated with Shahbag movement and were subsequently detained without trial for allegedly “defaming Islam”.

Dhaka Senior Special Judge Mohammad Zahurul Haque granted bail to Shuvo and Rasel after taking into cognisance the charges against the three bloggers arrested.

The court’s Additional Public Prosecutor Tapash Paul told bdnews24.com that the other blogger – Mashiur Rahman Biplab – had submitted no bail petition. “That is why the court granted bail to the two.”

These bloggers were accused of ‘inciting religious passions’ through their postings on the Internet. These bloggers were arrested from Dhaka on Apr 1 following persistent demands by Hifazat-e Islam to punish ‘atheists’.

Shuvo, Biplab and Pervez were sent on remand under article 54 as suspects.

On Apr 3 morning, another blogger Asif Mahiuddin was taken to the detective police’s office and similarly sent on remand.

On Apr 17, police filed two cases against them under ICT regulations. Hearing was to take place on May 12.

We look forward to the remaining bloggers Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Asif Mohiuddin will be released shortly and that the government of Bangladesh will be able to extend measures to protect these men.

Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin strongly denies any role in the murder of 18 intellectuals in December of that year.

He is alleged to have been a member of the Al-Badr group, which identified and killed pro-independence activists.

He is accused with another alleged Al-Badr member, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a United States citizen.

His lawyers have rejected all the allegations against him. They say that none of the accusations have ever been formally put to him and there has been no attempt to question him.

“The statements made by members of the government of Bangladesh are grossly defamatory to my client, wholly untrue and are refuted in their entirety,” his lawyer Toby Cadman told the BBC.

Cadman’s statement is covered more extensively in the Telegraph:

Toby Cadman, Mr Mueen-Uddin’s lawyer, said on Saturday: “No formal allegations have been put to Mr Mueen-Uddin and therefore it is not appropriate to issue any formal response. Any and all allegations that Mr Mueen-Uddin committed or participated in any criminal conduct during the Liberation War of 1971 that have been put in the past will continue to be strongly denied in their entirety.

“For the Chief Investigator to be making such public comment raises serious questions as to the integrity of the investigation. The Chief Investigator will be aware that the decision as to the bringing of charges is made by the Prosecutor and not an investigator.

“Therefore, the comments by the Chief Investigator are highly improper and serves as a further basis for raising the question as to whether a fair trial may be guaranteed before the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh.

Also in the Telegraph is some biographic detail on Mueed-Uddin:

Since moving to the UK in the early 1970s, Mr Mueen-Uddin has taken British citizenship and built a successful career as a community activist and Muslim leader.

In 1989 he was a key leader of protests against the Salman Rushdie book, The Satanic Verses.

Around the same time he helped to found the extremist Islamic Forum of Europe, Jamaat-e-Islami’s European wing, which believes in creating a sharia state in Europe and in 2010 was accused by a Labour minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, of infiltrating the Labour Party.

Tower Hamlets’ directly-elected mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was expelled from Labour for his close links with the IFE.

Until 2010 Mr Mueen-Uddin was vice-chairman of the controversial East London Mosque, controlled by the IFE, in which capacity he greeted Prince Charles when the heir to the throne opened an extension to the mosque. He was also closely involved with the Muslim Council of Britain, which has been dominated by the IFE.

He was chairman and remains a trustee of the IFE-linked charity, Muslim Aid, which has a budget of £20 million. He has also been closely involved in the Markfield Institute, the key institution of Islamist higher education in the UK.

And his alleged crimes:

Mr Mueen-Uddin, then a journalist on the Purbodesh newspaper in Dhaka, was a member of a fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which supported Pakistan in the war. In the closing days, as it became clear that Pakistan had lost, he is accused of being part of a collaborationist Bangla militia, the Al-Badr Brigade, which rounded up, tortured and killed prominent citizens to deprive the new state of its intellectual and cultural elite.

The sister-in-law of one such victim, Dolly Chaudhury, claims to have identified Mr Mueen-Uddin as one of three men who abducted her husband, Mufazzal Haider Chaudhury, a prominent scholar of Bengali literature, on the night of 14 December 1971.

“I was able to identify one [of the abductors], Mueen-Uddin,” she said in video testimony, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which will form part of the prosecution case.

“He was wearing a scarf but my husband pulled it down as he was taken away. When he was a student, he often used to go to my brother in law’s house. My husband, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, we all recognised that man.”

Professor Chaudhury was never seen again.

Also among the as yet untested testimony is the widow of another victim, who claims that Mr Mueen-Uddin was in the group that abducted her husband, Sirajuddin Hussain, another journalist, from their home on the night of 10 December 1971.

“There was no doubt that he was the person involved in my husband’s abduction and killing,” said Noorjahan Seraji. One of the other members of the group, who was caught soon afterwards, allegedly gave Mr Mueen-Uddin’s name in his confession.

Another reporter on Purbodesh, Ghulam Mostafa, also disappeared.

The vanished journalist’s brother, Dulu, said he appealed to Mr Mueen-Uddin for help and was taken around the main Pakistani Army detention and torture centres by Mr Mueen-Uddin. Dulu Mostafa said that Mr Mueen-Uddin appeared to be well known at the detention centres, gained easy admission to the premises and was saluted by the Pakistani guards as he entered. Ghulam was never found.

Mr Mueen-Uddin’s then editor at the paper, Atiqur Rahman, said that Mr Mueen-Uddin had been the first journalist in the country to reveal the existence of the Al-Badr Brigade and had demonstrated intimate knowledge of its activities.

After his colleagues disappeared, he said, Mr Mueen-Uddin had asked for his home address. Fearing that he too would be abducted, the editor gave a fake address. Mr Rahman’s name, complete with the fake address, appeared on a Al-Badr death list found just after the end of the war.

“I gave that address only to Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, and when that list appeared it was obvious that he had given that address to Al Badr,” Mr Rahman said in statements given to the investigators.

“I’m sure I gave the address to no-one else.”

Mr Rahman then published a front-page story and picture about Mr Mueen-Uddin, who had by that stage left the city, naming him as involved in “disappearances.”

This brought forward two further witnesses, Mushtaqur and Mahmudur Rahman, who claim they recognised the picture as somebody who had been part of an armed group looking for the BBC correspondent in Dhaka during the abductions. The group was unsuccessful because the BBC man had gone into hiding.

Under British law, no-one can be extradited if they face capital punishment. But now that Mueen-Uddin has been indicted it allows the story of his escapades can be discussed in the public domain without being forced to be taken down by his lawyers under British libel laws, as has been the case in the past. But also under British law, no-one can be extradited if they face capital punishment.

Isn’t British secular law, or “the man-made law of the kuffaar” as Islamists like to call it, wonderful?

Those who call the EDL racist are dangerously missing the point

Confronted with something completely new, people translate it back into language they understand.  Hence the sign Smash the racist EDL! Good sentiment but claptap.  Racist movements do not, as a rule, have signs saying Black and White Unite! or insist on multi-racial recruitment, or pick fights with real racists and physically toss them out, all of which the EDL has done.

That doesn’t make it nice.  ”They said I deserved to be raped in the head because of my last name”, said a young lady on the fringes of the protest.  I believe her; Alexander Melagrou-Hitchens and Nick Cohen, two sources I trust, have reported similar things.  Being non-racist or anti-racist doesn’t make the EDL innocuous but it can make it more dangerous.  What we might be seeing in real time is the birth of a truly British form of fascism.

Fascism is usually considered indivisible from racism but that is a historical accident: the nations in which fascism first arose all have ethnic conceptions of citizenship.  Britain is a rare exception in having a civic idea of citizenship.  You can become British in a way you can never become German; you can only be born German.  But is a revolutionary form of nationalism.  It is completely possible to put together a multi-racial fascist movement as long as it has a common goal and a common enemy that keeps the factions glued together.

That brings me to another vignette.  Call me sentimental if you will, but despite its appalling taste in music and inability to carry a tune on a shovel, the anti-fascist coalition brought a smile to my face.  But as the Cambridge Pakistan Society marched past I noticed that their banner, proclaiming a devotion to pluralism, tolerance etc. bore a face I would swear was Zia ul Haq.  I invite you to look up the General’s record and then ask whether that face has any place in an ‘anti fascist’ coalition.  That threw me into a reverie; one group absent from the UAF coalition is the journal Searchlight which found itself on the receiving end of a whispering campaign accusing it of “Zionism” when it denounced Holocaust denial by groups other than standard neo-Nazis.

This is the missing X factor in the complacent slogans that were carried past me.  The EDL can be as rancid as you might like, but that does not make the Islamic far-right any more pleasant or any less real.  No one is entitled to forget the following: when the Islamic far right was conducting an international Kristallnacht with liberal doses of murder and signs praising both Hitler and the Holocaust because of a cartoon, the police protected the mobs instead of restraining them as they did with the EDL (I think there were twice as many police officers than EDL members present)  and when one of our fellow students did the right thing and republished the cartoon in solidarity, the police arrested her.  That attitude has hardly changed; Mme LePen was, rightly, protested at our union, but I will wager that no protests will greet Mehdi Hasan’s appearance, a man recently caught calling non-believers “cattle”, “of low intelligence”, “kaffirs” etc.

It would the most profound myopia to think that if far-right violence of one kind is not just endured but actively abetted, other far-right movements would not follow suit (it’d be a damn sight easier to condemn the EDL tout court if ‘another 9/11’ plot had not just been foiled).  The Norwegian terrorist Breivik says in cold print that what turned him from a bore to a killer was seeing the establishment grovel before Islamic far right violence.  That is by no means an isolated case: in India, witnessing the same thing, the Hindu fascists of the Shiv Sena decided that they were entitled to some small-minded philistine bigotry as well, so they cast around for an excuse for outrage and found the artist M.F. Husain.  Deciding that his picture of the goddess Saraswati hurt their feelings, they attacked the family and galleries of India’s greatest artist, and when he fled to our shores, they found Tony Blair’s government as willing to pander to their outrage as to that of the Islamic mobs.

Which is exactly why the EDL’s lack of racism makes it far more dangerous.  Stand any Saturday for ten minutes in our high street and look around, and then ask yourself whether a return to a mono-racial Britain is even theoretically possible, much less desirable.  But what happens when the EDL joins forces with the Shiv Sena?  Or still other international far-right movements?

At best, I submit, those of us who are genuinely opposed to fascist and sectarian modes of life will find ourselves in the position of “British Muslims for Secular Democracy” who are denounced as Uncle Toms by the bien passant establishment and told to “Fuck off back to Pakistan” by the EDL.

The EDL went from a BNP splinter organization to one with twenty times its membership in nothing flat and that growth is probably not unconnected to its official repudiation of racism, and it is absolutely not unconnected with the failure to tackle the Islamic far right.  Any anti-fascist movement that wants to have any chance will have to realize that fascism comes in all nationalities and all colours these days.

‘Islam or Atheism – Which is More Rational?’ was the title of a recent debate that took place at University College of London. It may as well have been titled ’7th century Arabian goat herder myths or a rational scientific approach – which makes more sense? In any case, the debate pitted well-known US atheist Prof. Lawrence Krauss against a little known UK-based Muslim called Hamza Tzortszis and was organised by a group calling itself IERA.

Upon digging a little deeper, I found that IERA, far from being moderate or even traditional Muslims, are actually a group of Islamist extremists with strong Wahabi influences that routinely intimidate and attack moderate Muslims whilst towing the Saudi-Wahabi line. Their speakers promote sexism, anti-semitism, wife-beating, apostate-killing and a whole range of other unsavoury things. It therefore, came as no surprise that the event was segregated, the so-called moderator was a member of IERA and the hand picked audience was 90% Muslim. The security guards were also IERA affiliated and did their level best to intimidate atheist guests.

However, much has already been made of the extremist and deceptive nature of IERA and their brutish methods. The purpose of this piece is to examine the content of the debate, and, having listened to an audio recording, I will summarise my thoughts.

If this debate is to be judged on showmanship and crowd reaction then the Muslim side won by a country mile. If it is to be judged on intellectual merit than the Muslim side, despite the huge home advantage, came out looking rather silly. In fact, Hamza reminds me of the old saying ‘never debate with stupid people, they will take you down to their level and beat you with experience’. Hamza simply does not know how to conduct a civilised debate, he lacks a rudimentary understanding of the concepts he tries to deal with and is quick to resort to bickering and ad homs.

His case for proving that Islam is more rational rested on two tried and tested arguments. Firstly, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) as popularised by William Craig Lane, and secondly, the literary miracle of the Qur’an argument. These are arguments that I, as an ex-Muslim, have considered in the past and found unconvincing for the following reasons.

In reference to the literary miracle of the Quran, the great Persian polymath al-Razi had the following to say:

“You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Koran. You say: “Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.” Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in better meter. By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation. Then you say: “Produce something like it”?!

The language miracle claim is one I have never understood. It simply doesn’t make sense because there is no such thing as a language miracle. Languages are human constructs that are evolving and ever-changing. The rules that govern languages are made and adapted by humans too. So the idea of God giving humankind a language miracle seems, at first glance, absurd. However, it gets worse.

The argument can be summed up as follows:
Premise 1 – Inimitability proves divinity
Premise 2 – The Qur’an is inimitable
Conclusion – Therefore, the Qur’an is divine

The entire argument rests upon these very shaky foundations and if any one of the two premises can be undermined then the conclusion does not hold. With regards to premise 1, inimitability can point to other than divinity, since Jinns, Angels, Satan and even aliens could potentially have authored the Quran, humans and Gods are not the only two possibilities. Premise 2 is also problematic because the Quran is not inimitable in the first place due to the high number of factual and scientific errors it contains.

For example, the Quran (9:30) claims that Uzair (or Ezra) was considered the son of God by Jews. There is absolutely no record in Jewish history of this belief ever being held by anyone. Even if a
small group of Jews in a remote part of the world did hold that belief, it is very inaccurate for the Quran to refer to ‘Jews’ in general. Furthermore, the Quran claims the sun goes around the earth (36:140), sperm comes from between the back bone and the ribs (86:7), it refers to Alexander the Great as a Prophet of God, etc. The conclusion that the Quran is divine, is therefore not supported since it rests on questionable premises.

There are also further problems with the challenge. Who judges what is or isn’t superior to the Quran? There is no objective way to judge this challenge. Furthermore, the Qur’an already negates the challenge by claiming no-one is able to meet it, therefore Muslims are compelled to reject any attempts. Since Islam demands death for apostates and blasphemers, only a crazy person would openly attempt the challenge.

In spite of the above, many have taken up the challenge whilst concealing their identities. A Christian project called al-Furqan produced an entire book in Arabic which the authors claimed challenged the Quran. There is a website called surahlikeit.com that has many verses that challenge this argument.

At this stage we encounter yet another absurdity with this challenge, most people, including Hamza, don’t speak Arabic so they are not in a position to verify if the challenge has been met. Furthermore, most of those that do speak Arabic are not versed in classical Quranic Arabic and even fewer are versed in 7th century poetic standards. Therefore, there are not many people in the world able to understand the challenge at all.

Think about this for a moment. The salvation of your eternal soul rests on your ability to master an ancient and unspoken dialect of a language from another part of the world and then research whether or not people are able to produce a verse like a book written in that language 1400 years ago.

Islam descends into utter fare when it states that those who reject it’s message will be roasted in hell for all eternity. Humans are, bizarrely, expected to accept the notion that drawing certain, not altogether irrational, conclusions is enough to condemn them to hell fire. Assuming Islam is true and let’s say, for argument’s sake, a person is not very bright and not able to fully appreciate the miraculous nature of the Quran. Does that person deserve to spend an eternity in hell for not coming to the same conclusions as other people when examining the evidence, especially when the evidence is in another language in this case?

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) can be summed up thus:
Premise 1 – Everything that begins to exist has a cause
Premise 2 – The universe began to exist
Conclusion – Therefore, the universe must have a cause

Whilst this argument, at first glance, seems logical and has some philosophical merit, when placed in the context of theism, it becomes meaningless since it cannot be used to arrive at a theistic God. The first cause could be anything, it could be a static, unconscious quantum fluctuation arising in a second dimension of time. It could be a uncaring and apathetic being, it could be multiple beings, it could be something we simply can’t fathom. A first cause does not help establish the existence of Allah.

However, there are other problems with this argument too. With regards to premise 1, it is not obvious that ‘everything that begins to exist has a cause’. Quantum particles come into existence without a cause all the time. If God exists, then does that mean that God has a cause? At this stage believers would argue that God is eternal and thus doesn’t need a cause, only things that are finite need a cause. This leads us on to premise 2.

It is not certain that the universe is finite and began to exist at some stage. What do we even mean by universe in this context? If it is taken to mean all that exists then we are dealing with a
period before time, since time only exists in our universe, and what reasons do we have to assume that causation existed during this period. Furthermore, just because the universe is expanding does not mean it came into existence, rather it’s expansion came into existence but it could have existed in a different form before then, i.e. it could have been contracting or was one part of a much great system.

Furthermore, the KCA commits the fallacy of composition, the fallacy of using the parts of the constituents to infer to properties of the whole. For example, the oft-quoted syllogism:
i. all atoms are colourless
ii. cats are composed of atoms
iii. therefore cats are colourless

has valid premises but an invalid conclusion as it commits the fallacy of composition. If we compare the KCA syllogism in this case:
i. every effect that began to exist in the Universe had a cause
ii. the Universe is composed of all effects
iii. therefore the Universe had a cause

we find that it is similarly fallacious.

To be fair, this does not imply that the Universe did not have a cause, only that the KCA cannot be used to deduce this, were it true.

The KCA takes everyday human thinking and applies it to the existence of our universe. However, it assumes that the human mind is capable of comprehending our universe and how things came about. What if, as Hume postulated, we are simply incapable of grasping the origins of our universe and destined to remain uncertain for the entirety of our existence has a species?

Science seeks to answer the ‘how’ questions whilst religion posits simplistic answers for the ‘why’ questions. But if there are no answers to the ‘why’ questions? What if life and the universe is simply too vastly complex for us to comprehend and ultimately without meaning and purpose? Some can live with that, other clearly can’t. Science can’t explain everything but religion can’t explain anything.

In recent debates between Muslim preachers and atheist activists, the issue of absolute morality or moral absolutism has been frequently and enthusiastically raised. This seems to be the believers new trump card since no-one is buying the scientific miracles in the Qur’an humbug any more.

The argument goes along these lines. If one does not follow religion, how can one know right from wrong? What guides one’s morality or prevents one from killing, stealing or having sex with their mother? Surely morality without the divine, being subject to human whims, interests and desires, will fluctuate over time depending on social norms and trends? Thus, it is not really morality at all.

In contrast the morality provided to believers from God, as expressed in scripture, is absolute and eternal since it comes from the creator.

When believers make this argument they, perhaps unwittingly, treat the existence of a theistic God as a given. It is as if they are thinking ‘why would anyone ignore the morality God has given to us in favour of the opinions of people’. It doesn’t occur to them that atheists are working on the premise that there isn’t a God and, therefore, no divine moral guidelines. They, therefore, have no choice but to approach morality from a rational point of view and judge actions and intentions in a different way.

However, the absolute morality provided by religion is neither absolute nor very moral. If we take Islam, for example, according to popular scholarly interpretations of scripture, albeit highly literalistic and conservative ones, people can be killed for having gay sex, apostates can be murdered, husbands can have sex with wives against their will, older men can marry pre-pubescent girls, soldiers can rape female captives and people can own slaves. In other words, far from providing moral guidance, one can use Islam to sanction behaviour that most people would consider highly unethical.

Fortunately, most Muslims do not partake in the above behaviours because they live in a world in which morality has evolved since the 7th century. They, like everyone else, are influenced by conceptions of morality that are informed by the modern age and modern intellectual trends. However, when faced with the dilemma of textual literalism and modern morality, they have two options. They can either seek to re-interpret edicts contained in religious texts or re-contextualise them.

Re-contextualisation forces them to concede that Islam does not provide absolute morality, rather it offers fossilised morality from a particular point in history that is no longer relevant and has been replaced by human intellectual endeavours. Re-interpretation compels them to enter into debates about what Islamic texts really say and what theologians have said over the years, thus nullifying Islamic claims of providing clear absolute morality. In other words, whatever they do, the conclusion that Islam provides absolute morality is undermined.

There is also a third, and surprisingly popular, option that involves accepting an unsavoury idea or edict in theory but not acting according to it. This involves developing a cognitive dissonance and subconsciously accepting that there is a conflict between reality and belief without facing the conflict and resolving it. This option is clearly a bit of a cop out.

Thus, Islam, as well as other Abrahamic faiths, offers a form of morality that is frozen at a certain point in history and, unless significantly adapted and updated, is largely irrelevant and regressive. However, the problem doesn’t stop there. Religion encourages people to ignore their innate moral compass in favour of moral principles derived from scripture. This can lead to people doing things that they would normally consider wrong such as suicide bombings. Steven Wienburg once said ‘good people do good things and evil people do evil things, but for good people to do evil things you need religion’.

Islam really shot itself in the foot when it claimed to be the final revelation from God for all times and all places. Islam is clearly dated and is heavily influenced by Bedouin Arab tribal customs and norms. It is also lacks universalism and is imbued with patriarchy and ethnocentrism.

Moral philosophy is vexatious at the best of times. Whether or not one believes in the existence of absolute morality (many moral philosophers do not) one has to concede that our understanding of morality is evolving. It changes and adapts over time as we learn more about the world and about ourselves as a species. What were deemed acceptable behaviours in the past, such as burning women we thought were witches or killing unwanted children, are deemed morally wrong today because our understanding of morality, in line with our understanding of ourselves, is developing and will continue to do so.

In my view, morality is, first and foremost, a human construct, it exists in our minds and has no meaning outside of the human experience. It is our way, as humans, of deciding how to judge actions. Whether you approach morality from a consequentialist or deontological point of view, actions are judged by their outcomes and their ability to further our survival and flourishing as a species. Over time, we have learnt to look favourably upon those behaviours that are good for our survival as a species and thus developed an innate moral compass.

The task of developing and fine tuning moral thinking remains an on-going one and is subject to fluctuations depending on many factors. What we don’t need, and what doesn’t help the evolution of morality, is fossilised and outmoded moral thought from a certain point in our history being masqueraded as eternal and absolute truth.

AS I GO TO SUPPORT BANGLADESHI ACTIVISTS WHO ARE DEMANDING THAT HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATIONS STAND WITH THE VICTIMS OF 1971. MY LETTER TO A FORMER COLLEAGUE AT AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

I write this with a heavy heart as I know that you are one of the few at Amnesty International, fully conscious of the dangers of fundamentalism and no friend of the pro-jihadi faction. I know you have done much to raise awareness of the human rights issues which are raised whenever fundamentalists press their agenda. You have fought against declaring Ahmaddiyas as ‘non-Muslim’ and explained to colleagues the importance of moving fast to prevent bad legislation being put in place. Complaining atrocities have happened is simply not good enough. They should be prevented in the first place.

I am sure that it is in that spirit that you have commented on the war crimes tribunal and on Amnesty International’s opposition to the death penalty. I too stand in opposition to the death penalty, but I support the spirit of the Shahbagh movement in its desire to seek justice and accountability.

Activists and human rights advocates have felt abandoned by the Western human rights organisations, which have produced not a single report on the crimes committed in 1971 in Bangladesh nor the impunity enjoyed by the Jamaat e Islami in the UK. As we demonstrate in front of Amnesty today, I hope that you will come out and meet us. Neither the Bangladeshi activists nor the Centre for Secular Space are enemies of human rights. Indeed, we are all engaged in one of the greatest human rights struggles of our times.

It is not too late to remedy Amnesty International’s wrongs, most of which lie elsewhere in the organisation. I hope you will share this with Salil Shetty, Widney Brown, Kate Allen and other relevant bosses.

1) Amnesty International UK should apologise for its part in legitimising the Jamaat e Islami by giving Abdul Bari a platform at an AGM, in spite of very strong advice not to treat as ‘Muslim leaders’ fundamentalists belonging to a party implicated in war crimes .
2) Amnesty International should apologise publicly and clearly for embracing ‘defensive jihad’ an ideology which was used in Bangladesh to rape and kill.
3) Amnesty International should use its own genocide guidelines to pronounce on the nature and severity of the crimes committed. We believe that these crimes amount to genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Where does Amnesty International stand?
4) Amnesty International could assert its strong committment to ending impunity and announce an investigation into the threat to human rights constituted by global religious fundamentalist organisations such as the Jamaat e Islami.

Every single one of these demands is within Amnesty International’s policies. All it needs to implement them is integrity and political will.

With very best wishes

Since 5 February, Bangladesh has been transfixed by this ongoing, immense protest. Hundreds of thousands have occupied Shahbagh Square in protest at a verdict passed by the International Crimes Tribunal on war crimes committed during the genocide which preceded the founding of the country in 1971. One of those found guilty, Abdul Kalam Azad, was sentenced to death. Another, however, Abdul Quader Mollah, the assistant secretary general of a Muslim party which collaborated with the genocidaires, the Jamaat–e-Islami, was given life imprisonment. The protests which followed, and are still continuing, are led by intelligent and liberal people; they are, however, calling with great urgency for the death penalty to be passed on Mollah and other convicted war criminals.

The genocide is still too little known about in the West. It is, moreover, the subject of shocking degrees of denial among partisan polemicists and manipulative historians. Before 1971, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, detached from the main body of the country. The founders had believed that the unity of religion would bind it together. Over time, however, the incompatibility of secular cultures had grown overwhelming. Parts of the Pakistani rulers regarded the Bengalis with open racist contempt.

In his 1967 memoirs, General Ayub Khan wrote that “East Bengalis…have all the inhibitions of downtrodden races … their popular complexes, exclusiveness and … defensive aggressiveness … emerge from this historical background.” This common hostility towards an immensely rich secular culture reached a tipping point when the leader of the nationalist Awami League, Sheikh Mujib, won a national election. He was imprisoned, and the Pakistani forces began a genocide which lasted from March to December 1971.

Pakistan has never accepted responsibility for what happened. Moreover, historians and journalists have come perilously close to genocide denial, or have seemed motivated by a desire to minimise the numbers involved. The official Pakistani estimates were originally only 26,000 dead and 2 million refugees. A recent Oxford historian whose methodology was savagely criticised declared that there were no more than 50,000 to 100,000 dead from all sides in the war.

If this were true, the Pakistani forces would have fallen short of their ambitions. At a meeting on 22 February 1971, the Pakistani President General Yahya Khan is recorded as saying in fury: “Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.” Ten million fled to India; 30 million left the cities and went to the villages.

In the first phase of the war, young men and Hindus, Awami League members, intellectuals, students and academics were targeted for murder. In the second phase of the war, women were singled out. It is thought that at least 200,000 women were raped by the Pakistani forces and their collaborators – 25,000 victims found themselves pregnant, so that is not implausible. There are eyewitness accounts of “rape camps” set up by the Pakistani forces. The numbers, and the names of rape victims, remain disputed. Sheikh Mujib, the first leader of Bangladesh, ordered the destruction of lists so that the shame would not follow the victims all their lives.

In the last week of the war, when Pakistani defeat was inevitable and a new nation was clearly about to be born, a concerted effort was made to kill as many intellectual leaders as possible, many between 12 and 14 December. The names of potential leaders of the future nation to be murdered were found in the diary of at least one Pakistani officer.

Bengali collaborators in the form of armed vigilante groups, Al-Shams and Al Badr, took the lead in these murders, only two days before the war came to an inevitable end.

It is impossible to know the real death toll. The historian R J Rummel, who has looked as deeply into it as anyone, concludes that the “final estimate of Pakistan’s democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000.” The numbers became politically important in the decades following. As the scholar Bina D’Costa points out, for the Bangladesh government, an upper figure gave the new country greater legitimacy; for the Pakistanis, to scoff and diminish allowed them to demonstrate an ongoing distrust. Whatever the final figure, tens of thousands of those killed died as cruel and appalling deaths as anyone has ever devised. Out of thousands of episodes, one should read the evidence to this trial given by an extraordinarily brave woman, the single survivor of her family. She told how she saw her parents, her two sisters and two-year-old brother killed in front of her before she was raped by 12 soldiers. She was 13 years old.

That was 40 years ago. The Pakistani perpetrators of the war crimes have never been brought to trial – after independence, Pakistan said that if a single one of its soldiers were tried in the new country, no Bengali then living in the Western half would be given permission to leave. Nor, until very recently, have the Bengalis who collaborated with the genocidaires. The current trials have operated under constant threats of violence from a still active Jamaat-e-Islami. Some war criminals fled abroad. As long ago as 1995, the British authorities had their attention brought to alleged war criminals living in London by a Channel 4 documentary directed by the Dhaka journalist David Bergman. One, Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, who has been working as an NHS administrator, is only now beginning to be brought to justice.

The shabby series of amnesties and diplomatic effrontery that has left some of the cruellest mass murderers of the century enjoying a peaceful retirement was often challenged by activists, without success. An attempt by the author and national heroine Jahanara Imam to promote war crimes trials in 1992 did not succeed. The International Crimes Tribunal was finally established only in 2008. Its work is slow, and everyone feels that it is achieving what it can before the government changes at the next election. There is no faith at all that Khaleda Zia, the leader of the opposition and, it is often asserted, an ally of the Jamaat-e-Islami, would allow the Tribunal’s work to continue for a day, or let its sentences stand.

The rage of the crowds at the life sentence given Mollah is that they know, as so often before, that Sheikh Hasina’s government has not achieved what it could, and a change of government will almost certainly lead to a pardon of imprisoned war criminals. It has done so often in the past. Hence the call for the death penalty, as the one punishment that no politician can reverse.

The calls for the death penalty are the counsel of despair. These are people who believe passionately in the rule of law, and justice. They have seen too many times that justice is only done at the bidding of politicians, and may be undone. But the chaos of the Mollah trial has stirred great concern from observers, and from thoughtful Bengalis. The pressure of the Shahbagh protests has encouraged Sheikh Hasina’s government to intervene, proposing the possibility of prosecution appeals, in the interests of securing the death penalty. More intervention in justice by politicians; more judicial murder; more martyrs. It is important, above all, that democratic states reveal themselves to be better than the brutes who murdered and raped, and did their utmost to extinguish a people. And yet the probability that some of the worst war criminals in history will never face justice, and the worst of their collaborators will only have to face a year or two in prison, drives the protesters to despair.

What is the solution? Serious doubts have been raised about aspects of the trials, and the death penalty cannot be the right solution. But life imprisonment in Bangladesh for the mass murderers commands no respect.

There is one further possibility: the Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor was not imprisoned in Liberia, but under the provisions of the ICC in The Hague. The intervention of international law-makers ought to be desirable, and to take murderers out of the control of national politicians. That might permit, too, the trial of the main war criminals, and not just their Bangladeshi collaborators.

The Bangladesh atrocities are too important to go on being manipulated when a government changes. It seems as if this convulsive national exorcism, if it is to achieve justice, must take place in the eyes of the world, and with the world’s input. For the rest of us, we have averted our eyes for too long. We have a duty to learn about this forgotten genocide, and face our own responsibilities squarely – not to shelter murderers, not to ignore, not to forget.

A very nice man

Jamaat leaders in Rajshahi announced the shutdown on Tuesday hours after Ataur Rahman was picked up for his alleged involvement in Monday’s attack on an Awami League office in the city.

The Rapid Action Battalion detained him around 5:15pm on his arrival at the capital’s Kalyanpur from Rajshahi by a bus, Lt Col Ziaul Ahsan, director of Rab’s intelligence wing, told The Daily Star.

The Rab official claimed that the elite force personnel seized 20 handmade bombs and 12 books on jihad written by different leaders of Jamaat from his possession.

His other hobbies are stamp collecting and painting watercolours.

A Day before the Pakistan Army surrendered to the Bangladesh Mukti Bahini and the Indian Armed Forces, they and their Jamaat-e-Islami collaborators carried out a slaughter of the most prominent Bangladeshi academics and intellectuals. Today’s protests in Dhaka are the cries for justice by the sons and daughters of those who were killed in the name of Islam and Pakistan that day and the three million who died in the genocide carried out by the Pakistan Army and its jihadi militiamen in the previous nine months.

Here is the New York Times report from the war zone, dated December 19, 1971. Every Pakistani must read this and hang their head in shame.

NY Times Report, December 19 1971

Do I hear you say that Bangladesh is far away and the genocide was long ago?

Not so far away. Not so long ago. And the agonies of Bangladeshi liberals are nothing in comparison to the contradictions of their British counterparts.

The conflict between the Shahbag and Jamaat has already reachedLondon. On 9 February, local supporters of the uprising demonstrated in Altab Ali Park, a rare patch of green space off the Whitechapel Road in London’s East End. They were met by Jamaatis. “They attacked our men with stones,” one of the protest’s organisers told me. “There were old people and women and children there, but they still attacked us.”

The redoubtable organiser is undeterred. She and her fellow activists are going back to the park tomorrow for another demonstration. Her friends are worried, however. They asked me not to name her after unknown assailants murdered Ahmed Rajib Haider Shuvo, one of the leaders of the Dhaka rallies, on Friday.

Whitechapel was where socialists and Jews confronted the British Union of Fascists in clashes that leftists mythologise as a grand moment of anti-Nazi solidarity. While they still talk about the Battle of Cable Street and remember 1936, it is far from clear to me where today’s British left stands in relation to modern struggles against ultra-reactionaries.

Liberal muliticulturalism contains the seeds of its own negation. It can either be liberal or multicultural but it can’t be both. Multiculturalism has not meant a defence of all people’s rights to practise their religions and speak their minds without suffering racial or sectarian hatred. As events have turned out, it has led to official society picking the pushiest group of “community leaders” and honouring them.

In the case of British Islam, the anointed group was Jamaat-e-Islami, even though its British members included men accused of war crimes in Bangladesh. It was as if the establishment had decided that Opus Dei represented British Catholicism or Shiv Sena represented British Hinduism or the most bigoted form of orthodoxy represented British Judaism. The scoundrel left led the way down this murky alley, as it leads the way into so many dark places. Ken Livingstone and George Galloway have backed the Jamaat-dominated East London mosque, and Islamic Forum Europe, the Jamaat front organisation that now controls local politics in Tower Hamlets.

But to concentrate on the dregs of the Labour movement is to miss the point. Whitehall has been as keen on dealing with the allies of war criminals. Many East Enders have noticed that the Metropolitan Police seems less than anxious to follow up reports of menacing “Muslim patrols” or threats to drinkers at gay bars.

The moderate Muslims at the Quilliam Foundation told me that the status Britain had given to Jamaat helped push British Bangladeshis away from social democratic politics and towards radical Islam.

The British-Asian feminist Gita Sahgal launched the Centre for Secular Space last week to combat such indulgence of theocratic obscurantism. She told me that Jamaat perverts traditional faith and she should know. Not only did she name alleged Jamaat war criminals living in Britain for Channel 4 in the 1990s, she is also Jawaharlal Nehru’s great niece and a distant relative of the Indira Gandhi who sent the army into Bangladesh. I admire Sahgal and Quilliam hugely, but they are mistrusted, even hated by orthodox leftwingers. The feeling is reciprocated in spades and perhaps you can see why.

Many do not want to talk about Bangladesh massacres that moved liberal opinion to outrage in the 1970s, just as many did not want to talk about Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds in the run-up to the second Iraq war. These are politically inconvenient genocides they would rather forget.

The most bracing effect of the demonstrations in Dhaka and London is that the terror is not being forgotten and liberals are being forced to pick sides. Let us hope that they stop picking the wrong one.

Read it in full.

On February 5, the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) found Mullah guilty in five out of the six charges against him. Known as Mirpurer Koshai (Butcher of Mirpur) because of his atrocities against citizens in the Mirpur area of Dhaka, he was charged with beheading a poet, raping an 11-year-old girl and murdering 344 people. The ICT sentenced Mullah, presently assistant secretary general of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, to life in prison. For the protesters in Shahbag Square, this isn’t enough — they want Mullah hanged. On the other side, the Jamaat-e-Islami protested violently and also took out demonstrations. But its efforts to influence global opinion foundered in spite of a well-funded effort.

Curiously enough, Mullah’s case has been taken up by the government of Turkey. President Abdullah Gül sent a letter last month to the president of Bangladesh requesting clemency for all those accused of mass murder. Fortunately, Turkey’s president appears to be an exception and much of the world has shown little regard for genocidal killers.

Pakistan has shown zero interest in Mullah’s fate. The media is silent and the Foreign Office has not issued any statement. This is quite ironical because, like the forgotten Biharis of East Pakistan, Mullah has been abandoned although he subscribed to the Two-Nation Theory and had fought alongside the Pakistan Army for a united Pakistan. In 1971, local political and religious militia groups like Razakar, Al-Badr and Al-Shams assisted Pakistani soldiers in the mass killings of Bengalis, often singling out Hindus. Many militia members were also members of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

The disinterest in Shahbag Square epitomises the enormous gulf that separates Bangladesh from Pakistan. The period of our national history — where 54 per cent of the country’s population chose to secede from the other 46 per cent — remains supremely inconsequential to Pakistanis. For them, Bangladesh could well be on the other side of the moon. The question is: why?

Searching for an answer, I browsed through textbooks currently used in Pakistani schools. The class-five Social Studies text (English), taught to 12-year olds, begins with citing the differences between Hindus and Muslims (e.g. Hindus burn the wife after her husband dies but Muslims don’t), the need to be aware of the hidden enemies of Pakistan (religious extremists are not mentioned) and the importance of unceasing jihad. It devotes a total of three sentences to a united Pakistan, the last of which reads: “With the help of India, East Pakistan separated.”

The class-eight Pakistan Studies textbook (English) is still briefer and simply states that, “Some leaders of former East Pakistan with the active help of India managed to break away from Pakistan and established Bangladesh.” The class nine-10 (Urdu) book — by far the most detailed — devotes nearly three pages to explaining the disintegration. The listed subtitles include: a) Incompetent government of Yahya Khan; b) Hindu domination of trade; c) Nefarious role of Hindu teachers; d) Language problems; e) Indian interference; f) The elections of 1970.

Having seen only grotesque caricatures of history, it is impossible for Pakistan’s youth to understand 1971. But how can I blame them? Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s knew in our hearts that East and West Pakistan were one country but not one nation. Young people today cannot imagine the rampant anti-Bengali racism among West Pakistanis then. With great shame, I must admit that, as a thoughtless young boy, I, too, felt embarrassed about small and dark people being among my compatriots. Victims of a delusion, we thought that good Muslims and Pakistanis were tall, fair and spoke chaste Urdu. Some schoolmates would laugh at the strange sounding Bengali news broadcasts from Radio Pakistan.

Read it in full.

Murdered: Rajib Haider (26)

Rajib Haider who blogged under the name of ‘Thaba Baba’ was one of the blogger activists of the Shahbag youth  uprising in Bangladesh. Yesterday came news that Rajib was slaughtered in Dhaka close to his home. His throat and wrists were slit, in signature Chaatra Shibir (Jamaat-e-Islam’s student wing) style, and he was left to die.

Ahmed Rajib Haider, 26, was an active participant of the ongoing nonstop demonstrations at Shahbagh demanding death sentences for all ‘war criminals’.

Officer-in-Charge of Pallabi Police Station Abdul Latif Sheikh told bdnews24.com that they recovered Shuvo’s body from Laalmatia’s Palashnagar around 9pm.

He said the face bore signs of slashes. A scarf was wrapped around the blogger’s throat, Sheikh added.

This was not a simple mugging case as police said the deceased’s laptop was found near the body of the architect.

His had, a few days before his murder, appeared on a “hit list” of names on the Jamaat-e-Islami run blog “SonarBangladesh’

Jamaat's "hit list" of Shahbag activists

CNN reports:

Haider was an active supporter and participant of the ‘Shahbag Movement 2013‘ in Bangladesh that demands capital punishment of the War Criminals of 1971 War of Independence of the country. He was a renowned blogger in ‘somewhereinblog‘ with a nick ‘Thaba Baba‘. A major portion of his posts were targetted against the War Criminals of 1971 and the political party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and their student wing Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir. TheInternational Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh is currently administering trials of the party’s top leaders and sentenced death penalty to a former leader whereas life term to a current leader. The charges against the other leaders are in progress.

Earlier on February 11 (1:32 PM local time), on ‘Sonar Bangladesh‘ blog, a hitlist was published listing the names and facebook profile links of some activists of the Shahbag Movement and the victim Rajib was the first one in it. The blog is backed by Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir and there are multiple posts that published such hitlists. The screenshot of this hitlist was saved by an activist of the movement although the original post was removed later on.

Following the news, the Shahbag movement announced that a Janaza (funeral rites) would be held for the murdered activist at the square. This was followed by a tweet by “Farabi Shafiur Rahman”, one of the alleged murderers who posted this:

Translated:

Any imam who reads the janaza prayer of Thaba Baba will also be killed. Janaza prayers are only for Muslims, not for unbelievers or apostates. Those who have spent their whole lives insulting the Prophet are not Muslims and cannot have Janaza Prayer read. Thaba Baba’s corpse should be fed to the animals in Dhaka Zoo. The soil of this motherland will not back into her womb the corpse of any unbeliever or apostate insulting Allah or his Prophet in unspeakable language.

In spite of the threats, Rajib’s janaza was held at Shahbag earlier today, with several tens of thousand in attendance:

What do you expect the government to do? Shoot at unarmed women and children? Slaughter college kids and shopkeepers? The demands of Shahbagh and the AL overlap to some extent. That is not surprising given the universal hatred for Razakars this country once felt in ‘71. The fact that politicians have since seen fit to worm these men back into power does not mean they were ever rehabilitated in the eyes of the common people. The fact that most people in the country hate Razakars, including the sitting government, should not really detract from the legitimacy of the cause.

A second criticism is that this cause is bloodthirsty, immoral, a mere baying for revenge. As others have pointed out, it doesn’t take 41 years to kill a handful of men. The chant in Shahbagh is fashi, a call for the hangman’s noose. Hanging is a specific kind of death. It spells out crime and punishment. It answers with explicit finality the question of Razakars, atrocities and guilt. These people want a result which cannot be retracted.

In any case, the significance of Shahbagh is that ordinary people have taken to the streets after a long, long time. This is not about legal arguments, or capital punishment morality, or political manoeuvring towards future elections. I believe deep inside, this is a visceral rejection of fundamentalism, and the end game which Jamaat brings to the table. On some level I think people realize that there is no room for us in the kind of world they want to build.

Our people are secular at heart. Our women work. We love music, and dancing. We care about literature, and language. Even with thousands in Shahbagh chanting for death, there is, inevitably, pockets of song and dance and plays, outbursts of the sentimentality which is our national character. We were never meant to be a fundamentalist state.

This Jamaat thing is alien, even when perpetrated on us by some of our own. Shahbagh is the silent majority rising up against the use of religion to bully, the issuing of bewildering fatwas, the adoption of Arab dress and Arab ways, the blatant distortion of the past, the peculiar assault on our culture.

Read the rest.

The anti-Jamaat Mass Rally in Shahbag Square

We are now in day 5 of the ongoing anti-Jamaat rallies that have swept Bangladesh, with the largest one attracting more than 200,000 protesters in Dhaka.

Hundreds of thousands of people rallied Friday in Bangladesh’s capital to demand executions for people convicted of war crimes involving the nation’s independence war in 1971.

The protesters in Dhaka urged Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to review a verdict sentencing a senior leader of Jamaat-e-Islami to life in prison for killings and other crimes.

The protesters said the life term was not enough as Abdul Quader Mollah was found by a tribunal guilty of five charges, including playing a role in the killing of 381 unarmed civilians.

The government will appeal the sentence. A defence lawyer says they will also appeal seeking an acquittal for Mollah, whose verdict is the second after Hasina came to power through a 2008 election and formed a tribunal to try those suspected of war crimes during the war. Both sides have 30 days to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The life sentence comes after a former party member was sentenced to death last month.

The exact number of the protesters was difficult to know but streets near Dhaka University were filled with 1971 fighters, students, political activists, teachers and people from various walks of life. Some organizers put the number at up to 200,000, and Anjan Roy, a television talk show moderator who lost more than a dozen family members and relatives in 1971, told The Associated Press that more than 100,000 joined the rally.

Hours after Tuesday’s verdict by an International Crimes Tribunal, protesters burst into the street, denouncing the verdict. They have been protesting non-stop since while planning for Friday’s mass rally.

Many of the younger protesters said they were not happy with the verdict.

“We will not return home unless we get justice, complete justice,” said Shakil Ahmed, a college student. “I did not see 1971, but those who killed our people and helped Pakistani troops in their effort to halt the creation of Bangladesh should be hanged,” he said.

 

Jubilant Anti-Jamaat Rally

Says blogger, Kazi Sudipto:

“While the International War Crimes Tribunal is making their decision for war criminals of 1971, the young generation has engaged themselves on a tremendous protest against the war criminals , Jamat-e-islami and Islami chattro shibir . Thousands of people are roaring against them at Shahbag”

Here is a video of the one of the largest popular protests in the Bangladesh’s 42 year history:

“We want the death verdict of the War Criminals” they chant. This is public opinion and they said that the War Crimes Tribunal had no public mandate.

On the BBC Radio 4 show ‘Hecklers’, Gita Sahgal takes on the combined force of the Islamists Tahmina Saleem (Islamic Society Britain), Tariq Ramadan (freelance Islamist), Nazir Ahmed (House of Lords), Moazzam Begg (Cage Prisoners) and Daud Abdullah (Muslim Council of Britain)

Minister of Saudisation and Slavery

It is with regret to announce the sudden death of the Yemeni origin Saudi Minister of Labour Mr. Adel Fakieh. His death was a result a Road Traffic Accident. He was being driven by a Bangali chauffeur whose work permit profession was documented as baker. The car was of German origin while the colliding vehicle was Japanese whose driver is of Sudani origin . Mr. Adel was dressed in the finest robes at the time made of silk from Iran and stitched by the tailors from Pakistan. Emergency services move his obese body from the accident site to the Indian owned Saudi German Hospital. Attempts by professional Filpino and Egyptian medical staff (who were very busy training certain idiotic Saudi graduates of Bedouin origins on the importance of oxygen to the human brain), were unsuccessful. All the work permits of the medical staff were in order, except the radiologist from India was discovered to have a fake degree.

Mr. Fakieh was recently target of assassination attempts by certain chamber of commerce members of Balochi origin over the imposition of the SR 2,400 fees on expat staff.

Mr. Fakieh is survived by his poultry farm and few cows/goats. His wife was of Lebanese origin who left him after introduction of 2,400 riyal fees for her own residence permit. She took the white kids along with her.

His other business interests include a private education institute in partnership with directors of certain governmental organizations. This establishment is run by an expatriate friend of his in contravention of the labour laws as the expatriate already has a day job under a different sponsor.

Ever since the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) began its work, opponents of the mechanism have emphasised that the first government of the state pardoned the alleged war criminals, that this was a project of political witch-hunt against Jamaat and BNP senior leaders and that there was no demand for justice from the majority of Bangladeshis who were more interested to move forward and have economic security rather than revisit the past. This write-up explores the political history until the ICT started its proceedings to respond to some of these claims.

We know how it began. That the Pakistani forces were perceived by the overwhelming majority of Bangladeshis who supported liberation as occupation forces; and that India’s armed intervention to end the conflict was welcomed. Pakistan also attracted global condemnation due to its brutal military crackdown in 1971, which resulted in mass atrocities and genocide. But what happened after the war was over?

Post-1971 diplomacy
After the war ended on 16 December 1971, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi clearly stated that she wanted Pakistan to recognise Bangladesh and, most importantly, that she wanted to bury the ‘Kashmir question’ by making Pakistan accept the ceasefire line as the permanent international boundary. Pakistan, on the other hand, advocated a step-by-step approach that excluded the Kashmir issue. From the Pakistani point of view, the immediate challenge was the withdrawal of Indian forces from the western front and the release of Pakistani prisoners-of-war (POWs).

On this last point, India countered that the POWs had surrendered to the India-Bangladesh joint forces, and that therefore India could not release them without Bangladesh’s concurrence. Prime Minister Gandhi and Pakistan’s President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto subsequently met in Simla from 28 June to 3 July 1972, but even afterwards the fate of the POWs remained unresolved. Under the Agreement of Bilateral Relations between New Delhi and Islamabad, both parties decided to withdraw their armed forces to their respective sides of the international border. In Kashmir, they agreed to respect the line of control resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971. However, there was a continuing deadlock over the release of approximately 93,000 Pakistani POWs, including 15,000 civilian men, women and children captured in East Pakistan. India was adamant that the prisoners would not be released without Bangladeshi agreement; Bangladesh refused to discuss this or any other issue without Pakistani recognition of its sovereignty; and Pakistan was firm in not recognising Bangladesh before Sheikh Mujibur Rahman spoke to Bhutto. Moreover, Bangladesh was determined to try some 1,500 POWs for war crimes.

When Bangladesh applied for UN membership in 1972, it was barred by China’s veto in the Security Council. At the time, the relationship between China and Pakistan was strategically important because Pakistan was mediating between the Nixon Administration and China. Bangladesh obviously needed international support, and finally moved towards normalising its relationship with Pakistan. A joint India-Bangladesh declaration was issued on 17 April 1973, which, although omitting other political matters, did include the recognition issue, UN membership and the Kashmir dispute.

This meant that the 400,000 Bengalis detained in Pakistan would return to Bangladesh, that about 260,000 non-Bengali citizens of Pakistan would be repatriated, and that about 90,000 Pakistani POWs would return to Pakistan. However, Islamabad rejected Dhaka’s right to try the POWs on criminal charges, and expressed its readiness to constitute a tribunal to try individuals charged with offences. Pakistani Minister of State for Foreign and Defence Affairs Aziz Ahmed publicly stated that Pakistan was willing to set up an international tribunal to try the prisoners-of-war.

Bangladesh insisted that the Pakistani POWs be tried in Bangladesh by Bangladeshi judges and, on 17 April 1973, the government announced its decision to convene war-crime trials. Although India and Bangladesh jointly proposed a three-way exchange of detainees, the first Bangladeshi foreign minister, Kamal Hossain, declared that 195 Pakistani prisoners would be brought to the capital and prosecuted for genocide and other war crimes (Statesman Weekly, 21 April 1973). On 11 May that year, Pakistan filed a petition in the International Court of Justice requesting that it issue an order prohibiting India from transferring any prisoner to Bangladesh (Pakistan Affairs, 1 June 1973). On 28 August, India and Pakistan signed another treaty, with Bangladeshi support, providing repatriation procedures for all POWs other than the 195 charged with war crimes.

The 1973 treaty was the result of compromises on the part of all three parties. Bangladesh moved away from its non-negotiable stance regarding POWs, and agreed to release all but the 195 even without Pakistan’s recognition of its sovereignty. In turn, Pakistan agreed to repatriate all Bangladeshis and non-Bengalis, and implicitly recognised Bangladesh. Clause V of the treaty stated that Bangladesh would participate in a meeting with Pakistan ‘only on the basis of sovereign equality’. No Pakistan Army officials were ever tried for crimes of war that took place during 1971.

The POW negotiation, meanwhile, overshadowed the other important issue, the legitimacy of the national movement and the recognition of Bangladesh, on which no national consensus in Pakistan had yet emerged. Even today, the astonishingly small amount of impartial analyses of 1971 on the causes leading to the conflict reinforces the impression that Pakistani writers did not wish to be dubbed as traitors. Moreover, the emergence of Bangladesh and its deep emotive significance was seen as a ‘national humiliation’ – but one caused not so much by Bengalis as by India.

Political tension in the subcontinent eased with Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman’s decision to grant a general clemency to Pakistani military and civil-service officials held in India on charges of war crimes. However, Bangladesh never quite recovered from this decision. On 29 November 1973, Mujib further announced a general amnesty for all ‘Bangladeshi’ prisoners held under the Collaborators Act, the only exceptions being those facing criminal charges.  Nearly 33,000 ‘detained collaborators’ were subsequently freed.

A political reckoning
In the first phase of rebuilding the war-torn state there was also a general perception held by the ordinary people who were targets of mass violence that not only there was no redress, but many of those who perpetrated the violence in the first place have subsequently risen to positions of significant power. Related to this, one of the first problems that Bangladesh suffered was acute factionalism within the Bangladesh Army. This was threefold, between the Muktibahini; the freedom fighters, those who had fought the war; and the repatriates, those who had been in (West) Pakistan during the war and who returned to Bangladesh in 1973-74. These internal divisions, combined with the systemic weakness of Bangladeshi politics, caused almost a dozen successful and unsuccessful coups d’état in just the first decade of Bangladesh politics.

The bureaucratic elite in Bangladesh was adversely affected by sectarian discontent, factionalism and contradictory political orientations. From its very establishment, the bureaucracy was plagued by controversy due to the conflict between ‘patriots’ and ‘non-patriots’. The first major complication within the bureaucracy occurred over the issue of ‘collaboration’ with the Pakistani regime in 1971. About 6,000 government employees, including nine former CSP (Civil Service of Pakistan) officers, lost their jobs on charges over being collaborators.  At this time, a significant shift took place with regard to all new appointments, with a quota being reserved for members of the Muktibahini and a special civil-service exam being held to recruit the muktijodhya, or freedom fighters. With a rapid rise in unemployment and increased economic hardship, many managed to secure fake certificates of participation in the Liberation War, in order to take advantage of the quota system.

In the aftermath of the war, the words ‘collaborator’ and ‘miscreant’ rapidly began to lose meaning. Increasingly, they were used to denounce any element within the community, including economic rivals or political opponents, whom the ruling authority wished to eliminate. The government screened out individuals following a special investigation commissioned to identify major war criminals. However, the investigation’s report was never made public, nor were the names of the 195 principal planners and executioners charged with responsibility for genocide and rape committed during 1971.

On 24 December 1971, home minister A.H.M. Kamruzzaman publicly pledged that the collaborators would not escape justice, and that a large number of collaborators – including the former governor, Dr. Malik, and members of his Cabinet – were officially reported to have been taken into custody. On 31 December, the government decided to set up an inquiry into the dimension and extent of genocide committed by the Pakistan Army in Bangladesh, and a presidential order establishing special tribunals to try collaborators was also issued. On 29 January 1972, Mujib declared that his government would not forgive those who were guilty of genocide in Bangladesh. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, the Bangladesh government also decided to set up two tribunals, one for the trial of individuals accused of genocide, and another for the trial of war criminals.

The Indian Army finally withdrew from Bangladesh in March 1972. In a public meeting attended by Indira Gandhi, Mujib announced that the Pakistani POWs would be handed over to Bangladesh for trial. This position was negotiated through several diplomatic manoeuvres around the subcontinent. The Bangladesh government appointed S.R. Pal and Serajul Haque as chief prosecutors for the trials of Pakistani POWs accused of genocide. However, regardless of the government’s public statements, it soon realised the impossibility of the situation, and finally decided to try only the 195 prisoners accused of serious crimes.

In 1975, the Awami League was ousted from power, when Sheikh Mujib and most of his family were brutally assassinated by dissatisfied factions of the Bangladesh Army. The AL would not reassume power until 1996. In many ways, the issues of the Liberation War and muktijudhyer chetona (the spirits and aspirations of independence) were seen as exclusively belonging to the Awami League, because of its leading role in the nationalist struggle. Moreover, the other two major parties that alternately ruled the country – the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jatiya Party – openly included some politicians who had played extremely questionable roles during the Liberation War. Even with the AL’s re-assumption of power two decades later, nothing was done about war criminals and collaborators. Faced with massive poverty and economic hardship, a war-crimes tribunal was simply not high on the government agenda.

While the country was struggling with economic crisis in the mid-1990s, one perilous growth slowly engulfed the nation. The political parties and collaborators who had allegedly engaged in partisan roles in the genocide and rape of 1971 slowly made their ways back into power. For a variety of reasons, both the BNP and Jatiya Party cohabited with the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islamic alliance, and it soon became clear that issues related to war crimes will never be considered by these alliances. For many of the political elite, the issues of war criminals and collaborators were ‘dangerous’ history or even ‘too close to home’. Long before the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) started its proceedings, it was well understood that any fresh investigation of 1971 and the demand to prosecute the war criminals and collaborators could well bring down some very high-level politicians.

Elusive justice?
Virtually from the beginning of the army crackdown, the East Pakistan leadership knew about Pakistan’s genocidal strategies. Moreover, in its declaration of the formation of the new government on 17 April 1971, it based its claims on, and specifically referred to, ongoing genocide on four separate occasions. Immediately after the war, mob anger was turned indiscriminately on the alleged collaborators, and instant violent justice was meted out, which on many occasions resulted in killings (D’Costa interviews, 1999-2003). Although the government tried to control public passions through repeated announcements that the public should not take the law into its own hands, these were largely ignored. The Bihari community in particular faced the wrath of the public.

After the initial settlement, the Bangladesh government issued executive orders to arrest collaborators. No evidence suggests that, even at this stage, there was any well-formulated plan by which to deal with war criminals. Moreover, the government’s strategies had one fatal flaw: distinguishing between the Pakistan Army and the local collaborators, despite the fact that both carried out the genocide and rape. In 1972, the Bangladesh government promulgated the Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order; but although this provided a new forum, it was required to deal with the aftermath of a revolutionary situation with peacetime legal norms that proved completely unsuitable. Furthermore, as critics have indicated, other than imprisonment or death, the new law did not frame any additional form of punishment. Not every collaborator actively carried out genocide or rape, but many were involved in acts that ought to have seen them forfeit some of their future political rights, such as participation in political activities.

In July 1973, the Parliament passed the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, aimed at bringing to trial members of the Pakistani armed forces. The Act also recommended the creation of a special tribunal. With regards to the war-affected communities the official rehabilitation programmes were likewise disorganised, although the government did recognise the suffering of the survivors and the need for financial compensation, psychological help and so on. The local and foreign disaster-and-relief organisations working in Bangladesh at the time diverted their energies to disaster management and the rehabilitation of the affected people, rather than calling for justice. However, despite the lack of any consolidated movement, many survivors nonetheless maintained hope that they would eventually receive justice (D’Costa interviews, 1999-2003).

As noted earlier, the release and return of pro-Pakistani actors in the political space commenced soon after the war.  Khaleq Majumdar, the alleged killer of the distinguished author Shahidullah Kaiser, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1972. However, he was released after the general amnesty in November 1973, along with Maulana Mannan, Shah Azijur Rahman and many members and leaders of the Peace Committee, the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim League, and of the para-militia forces such as the Razakaar and the Al-Badr. The Dalal Aain (‘Collaborator’s Act’) was abolished during Zia’s rule and as a result, the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Nijami Islami, the Islami Democratic League and the Muslim League, all of which had been banned, were able to reorganise and rehabilitate themselves into fully functioning, lawful political forces. One of the most notorious collaborators of 1971, Shah Azijur Rahman, was appointed prime minister in Zia’s cabinet; and Maulana Abdul Mannan, who was one of the top leaders to form the Peace and Welfare Council in 1971 that organised the Razakaar and Al-Badr membership, was appointed minister for religious affairs in Ershad’s cabinet. Abdul Alim, who in 1971 had allegedly lined up innocent civilians and bayoneted them to death, also became a minister.

Public resentment grew despite the strict control of information, banning of any commemorative rituals other than those sanctioned by the authoritarian states. What could be remembered and what must be forgotten were strictly regulated. However, the anti-autocratic movement that eventually brought down the Ershad regime also inspired people of different generations and political loyalties to come forward with their demand for justice.

In December 1991, Golam Azam was appointed amir (chairperson) of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Possibly the most notorious collaborator with the Pakistan Army, Azam had fled East Pakistan just before it became Bangladesh. In 1978, however, he returned with a Pakistani passport, and has lived there as a Pakistani national ever since. Yet against his return, public sentiment eventually coalesced into a popular movement. Jahanara Imam, mother of a martyr muktijodhya named Rumi and an eminent author who wrote Ekatturer Dinguli (Those Days of ‘71), organised the National Coordinating Committee for the Realisation of Bangladesh Liberation War Ideals and Trial of Bangladesh War Criminals of 1971. Popularly known as Shahid Jononi (Mother of Martyrs), she began a crusade directed specifically against Azam.

This massive movement intensified with the creation of the Ghatok Dalal Nirmul Committee (Committee for the Elimination of the Killers and Collaborators of ‘71 and the Restoration of the Spirit of the Liberation War), commonly referred to as the Nirmul (Elimination) Committee. In Jahanara Imam’s words, ‘Prompted by our commitment to the values of the Liberation War and love for our country and aggrieved by the failure of the government to try the war criminals,’ the Committee vowed to work to unearth ‘evidence of complicity of all collaborators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, killings and other activities’.  In 1999, the Committee set up the National People’s Enquiry Commission, vested with the responsibility to investigate selected individuals. The Commission eventually published two reports on 16 war criminals and collaborators; by 26 March 1999, it was also supposed to publish a third report on another seven, though this was never done. Regardless, in general the quality of the Commission reports was very poor – the language emotive rather than reasoned, and lacking details that could have possibly led to criminal prosecutions.

The movement also came to be seen as a watershed opportunity by the then-opposition Awami League, which decided to use the popular uprising to embarrass the BNP government. A number of BNP officials, fearing that any trial would lead to a domino effect of additional investigations of other collaborators, opposed the movement strongly – especially President Abdur Rahman Biswas, who had been a member of the Barisal Zilla (in the south) Peace Committee that had helped the Pakistan Army in 1971. Therefore, from the beginning the movement and the Gono-adalot (People’s Court) were studiously ignored by the government, before it finally retaliated by filing a sedition case against 24 People’s Court organisers, though this was later withdrawn.

The long overdue Liberation War Museum, opened its doors in March 1996 and through its archives consisting documents and testimonies of wartime experiences and public events, plays a crucial role in education and remembrance projects. In addition, with limited resources but sharing the same goal, a number of other organisations – for example, Ain-O-Shalish Kendra (ASK) and Projonmo Ekatttur – also documented wartime experiences of civilians and organised public events. In 2000, ASK published its seminal work titled Narir Ekattur, highlighting women’s narratives of 1971 (English translation published in 2012). In addition, Bangladeshi media published investigative reports based on the war; regularly highlighted commemorative projects carried out by various networks and organisations; and reported on high-profile protest campaigns, particularly at times when Pakistani ministers come on state visits.

The ‘Righteous’ on the war path
The on-going smear campaigns launched by the Islamic right claim that the push for trials of the alleged war criminals came from those who are ostensibly against Islam. This is similar to the Pakistani state’s propaganda to justify its crackdown in Bangladesh. This issue is crucial to respond to, given that the history of Partition, the violent memories of Hindu-Muslim riots, and the subcontinent’s religion-based identity politics have all contributed to the framing of Islamic identity in Bangladesh as an oppositional force, one perceived to be counter to the demand for justice. In reality, however, there were many clerics and Islamic leaders who supported the national movement for an independent Bangladesh and subsequent demand for justice.

But there were also those East Pakistani religious leaders who emphasised the idea of Pakistan through a brotherhood of men, India as the archenemy and, finally, commending the brutality of the Pakistani state’s action in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Anecdotal evidence suggest that the some Islamic clerics issued fatwas during the conflict to the effect that it was permissible to rape Bengali women, especially Hindu women, as the conflict was to be considered a holy war against infidels.

Many of these preachers and other leaders who directly or indirectly supported the Pakistani state’s violence in 1971 had resettled comfortably in post-conflict Bangladesh. Sarsina Pir, for instance, had followers in the influential political parties, and was given the Liberation War Award (Shadhinota Podok) during BNP rule. The former military dictator Hussain Mohammad Ershad (1983-90) was a follower of the Atroshir Pir of Faridpur, who was also known for his pro-Pakistan stance during the conflict. Others have done well for themselves in the Diaspora. For instance Lutfur Rahman, the imam at the Bordesley Green Mosque in Birgmingham, UK; Chowdhury Mueen Uddin, Al-Badr’s operations-in-charge in Dhaka, was the vice-chairman of the East London Mosque. Testimonies by a number of victims regarding specific allegations of rape, abduction, the intentional killing of Hindus and land-grabbing have also been made against Delwar Hossain Sayedi, a self-proclaimed Islamic preacher from Pirojpur who was popular in the UK and the US for his preaching.  Sayedi is on trial at the moment.

Jamaat-e-Islami, a key party in the BNP-led four-party alliance that was in office till 2006, was visibly nervous about any kind of justice mechanism, as it was believed that some of its central members would face war-crimes charges. Throughout the nine months of conflict, a number of political and religious leaders publicly supported the Pakistan Army, drawing on the Islamic identity of East Pakistan to legitimate its excessive force, and there exists allegations of war crimes against specific Jamaaat and BNP leaders. For example, Matiur Rahman Nizami was the all-Pakistan chief of the Al-Badr high command, the paramilitary force of the Pakistan Army. While addressing the assembly of the paramilitary forces at the Razakaar district headquarters in Jessore, a district bordering India, Nizami stated, ‘In this hour of national crisis, it is the duty of every Razakaar to carry out his national duties to eliminate those who are engaged in war against Pakistan and Islam’ (Daily Sangram, 15 September 1971). Another party leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid was the East Pakistan chief of the Al-Badr, and allegedly responsible for carrying out the order to kill intellectuals on 14 December 1971, two days before Pakistan’s surrender.

To be continued…