General Harunur Rashid has been doing
an admirable job of keeping us all posted
on the need to resist the anti-liberation
elements which have, of late, been rearing
their heads. His careful and determined
handling of conditions, especially through
his efforts to organise the surviving
sector commanders of the War of
Liberation, is proof, if proof at all were
needed, that the spirit which informed our
view of the war and underlined our
participation in that war is yet alive,
and that it only needs men of courage and
patriotism to rekindle it in order for the
dark forces endangering our liberty to be
sent packing.
In these present times, when the quality
of leadership is often marred by
pusillanimity, and courage in the face of
adversity is all too conspicuous by its
absence, General Harun gives us reason to
hope. He thus reinforces the belief in all
of us that despite all the mistakes and
all the blunders we have committed in our
handling of war criminals, collaborators,
and others uncomfortable with the
emergence of this free Bengali state, we
still have it in us to run these elements
of elemental darkness out of town.
And how do we go about doing that? There
is a simple answer to that question: keep
anyone who even remotely questions the
genesis of Bangladesh's struggle for
independence at arm's length. The trouble
with us, with all of us, in these many
years since the fall of Bangabandhu Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman's government, has been that
we have somehow demonstrated little
enthusiasm about boycotting the local
enemies of freedom at the social level.
When you have a situation where a freedom
fighter has no problem serving as chairman
of a corporation under a minister whose
active collaboration with the Yahya Khan
junta remains a historical truth, you get
the sense that it is all right for
politics to compromise itself. That is a
bad way of handling things.
In history, modern history to be exact,
there is little evidence to suggest that
the Nazis or Fascists or any of their
quislings, after the collapse of the
system they had once foisted on society,
have come back to play a leading role in
society. You could even come closer to
your own times, those that you inhabit at
present.
No one will ever suggest, not even in a
whisper, that the Hutu brigands
responsible for the murder of tens of
thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in the
mid-1990s will be rehabilitated in
society. And that is how justice and fair
play are expected to work. In Nuremberg,
in 1949, it was justice coming full
circle.
So, has there been no instance of a former
oppressor, or friend of the oppressor,
emerging from the caves to carve out a new
career? Of course there has been, but have
you not noticed how, once their sordid
past caught up with such people, they were
quickly swatted down?
Remember, if you will, the activist
secretary general of the United Nations
that was Kurt Waldheim. The moment it was
discovered (and he was president of
Austria at the time) that he had been
linked to the Gestapo in the war years, an
outraged world came down on him. He was
unable to travel outside his country, for
no foreign government would give him a
visa. It was a pointless period that he
spent in office.
That kind of example, unfortunately, has
not been set in Bangladesh. Actually, we
did not need to go looking for the old
razakars, for they were all around us. And
we were, in the end, able to do nothing
that would make them feel ashamed of the
sins and crimes they had committed upon
their own people. Think of Khan Abdus
Sabur Khan. A bare two days before the
liberation of Bangladesh, he told a crowd
of Pakistan-lovers in Dhaka that if the
state of Bangladesh truly came into being,
it would be as an illegitimate child of
India.
It was the same Sabur Khan who, thanks to
President Ziaur Rahman, made his way back
to politics in a country he did not
support and had little cause to love.
And on his coattails came into politics,
and into the Jatiyo Sangsad, all those men
and women who saw nothing, heard nothing,
felt nothing of the atrocities their
Pakistani rulers inflicted on Bengalis in
1971. Begum Khaleda Zia, yes, felt no
tremor of guilt when she inducted two
Jamaatis into her government. Where her
husband had the Collaborators Act
repealed, she had the beneficiaries of
that regressive move sit in cabinet with
her. This demonstration of leniency and
love for people who have never loved their
country is quite inexplicable.
And today you have a situation where an
academic informs us, without batting an
eyelid, that there are no war criminals in
Bangladesh because the war in 1971 was
between India and Pakistan. And he is a
teacher? And he is a Bengali? Where was he
between March 25 and December 16, 1971?
For that matter, where was Syed Sajjad
Hussein in that year when Pakistan's
soldiers and their local collaborators
threw themselves into an orgy of killing
and raping? Of course he was here. His
colleagues at the university were being
taken away, day after day, murdered day
after day. And yet Hussein travelled
abroad, to tell people in the West that
life was going on apace in "East
Pakistan."
There are innumerable tales of how
Pakistan-loving Bengalis humiliated their
fellow Bengalis, and so humiliated
themselves through such denials of the
truth. Justice Nurul Islam and Professor
Deen Mohammad went abroad; and so did Shah
Azizur Rahman and Mahmud Ali. Moulana
Mannan's record, if you do not know
anything about it, is there with Shyamoli
Nasreen Chowdhury. Ask her. The al-Badr
gang that picked up Professor Ghyasuddin
and then murdered him is still out there.
We have not unmasked these men who, in
masked appearance, once went defending the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan through
spilling Bengali blood.
Now the time has arrived when, apart from
organising a powerful political movement
against these war criminals, we can do
certain other things that will shame them
into silence. The first step should be for
the media, print as well as electronic, to
boycott these elements and not publicise
anything they do or say. When you have
television invite an individual who thinks
the conflict in 1971 was a civil war; when
newspapers provide lengthy coverage to the
comments of a man who did not see any War
of Liberation in 1971; when you print
statements from senior journalists telling
you that your freedom fighters committed
war crimes too, you give them space they
do not deserve.
Points of view, their articulation, are
surely a part of politics. But when an old
collaborator tells you he too has a point
of view, don't listen to him and move on.
Men who have connived in genocide do not
any more deserve any quarter from us. They
can only have the law weighing the
enormity of their guilt. Which is why it
becomes important for us to identify
anyone and everyone who questions
Bangladesh's essence, even within our own
families, and isolate them.
We will not invite them to our homes, we
will not shake hands with them, we will
not be in the same room with them. We will
treat them as the people of Cambodia have
been treating the leaders of the Khmer
Rouge. Note that the Hun Sen government
has finally hauled in Khieu Samphan to
have him answer for war crimes and crimes
against humanity.
It is now for us, for the sector
commanders, indeed for all Bengalis, to
create the grounds for a future,
purposeful trial of the war criminals we
have not brought to justice since the dawn
of our freedom. These men of sinister
intent are in politics, in the
administration, in academia. It should not
be too difficult to locate them. They are
old, they are ageing. Criminality, they
say, cannot be concealed behind advancing
years.