[Reader-list] Bangladesh Disruptions Creating Dangerous Void

[Shambhu Rahmat]

Got this note from a very observant friend in Dhaka in response to
this article. I havent read the Prothom Alo article. The list if it
exists, is a  very direct attempt by Jamaat and its sympathizers to
establish themselves as a source of alternative history of 1971. The
political cover provided by this military govt & pragmatist
technocrats is very insidious indeed.
-RK

<<today's prothom alo carries a column by zafar iqbal. he asks the
crucial question, why is jamaat making the statements today. he
doesn't draw a direct link but leaves it to implication, but he goes
on to mention a document that is circulating among all the tv
channels. it is a list of intellectuals that the tv stations are asked
(ordered?) to invite at least one from for their talk shows. he asks
the press to publish this list. he says it is full of ultra right wing
individuals. you can draw your own conclusions.... >>

CAUTIONARY TALE - Disruptions in Bangladesh are creating a dangerous void

    Swapan Dasgupta
    The Telegraph
    http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071102/asp/opinion/story_8501825.asp

    In April 1972, while walking aimlessly down Free School Street, a
    friend and I chanced upon a hawker selling forms that would enable travel
    between the newly-liberated Bangladesh and India. Being plain bored -
    it was that waiting period between the end of school and beginning of
    college - we completed the formalities, secured the necessary
    endorsements and persuaded our parents that a trip across the
border would be
    educative.

    Just four months after the Pakistani army surrendered, Dacca (as it was
    then spelt) was a city on a permanent high. The turbulence of the past
    year dominated the conversations at the Dacca University campus. There
    were chilling stories of Pakistani high-handedness and an equal number
    of boastful accounts of Mukti Bahini "action". We heard passionate
    discussions centred on the role of particular individuals: were they
     "collaborators" or just frightened souls who had either "obeyed
    orders" or kept their heads down after the imposition of Martial Law?
    In the drawing rooms of Gulshan we heard accounts of post-December 16
    recriminations against "Biharis" - how an entire family living in
    the adjoining lane had been killed the previous month and their
    possessions distributed among Awami League activists.

    On the final night of our week-long stay, there was a flurry of
    excitement when the women of an adjoining house began yelling "dakait"
    (dacoit). The younger brother of our host fished out a gun and rushed out.
    The next thing we knew was that a crowd had collected around a
    frightened man. They began hitting him with lathis and metal pipes. Soon
    someone exclaimed "razakar" and the intensity of the assault increased.
    In about 15 minutes, the assailant was dead.

    The incident left us shaken. Was the dead man truly a razakar - a
    member of a vigilante squad promoted by the Pakistan army to safeguard
    East Pakistan from the secessionists? Our hosts couldn't be sure. They
    assured us, however, that these were just the type of riff-raff who had
    been recruited and issued uniforms by the Pakistani authorities to
    terrorize people into submission.

    There was no mistaking the visceral hatred of the average Bangladeshi
    for the collaborators, particularly the lumpen razakars. After
    liberation, many razakars were killed either by the victorious
Mukti Bahini or
    by local people; some, particularly the Urdu-speaking ones, fled to the
    new refugee camps in Mirpur; and others tried to worm their way back
    into society.

    The initial ferocity of post-liberation recriminations in Bangladesh
    was understandable, given the bestiality of the Pakistan army after March
    25, 1971. After the December 16 surrender, some 92,000 Pakistani
    soldiers were sent to prisoner-of-war camps across India. Despite their
    inglorious record, the soldiers were treated with dignity and released
    after the Simla Accord.

    Initial noises about establishing a war crimes tribunal
    notwithstanding, no action was taken by either India or Bangladesh
against soldiers.
    In 1973, those soldiers from East Pakistan, like Hossain Mohammed
    Ershad, who had remained loyal to the Pakistan army during the war of
    liberation, were allowed to make a seamless transition into the
new Bangladesh
    army. The consequences were ominous.

    The civilian collaborators fell into two broad categories: the razakar
    rabble and the Bengali-speaking ideological upholders of Pakistan. On
    January 24, 1972, the Bangladesh government promulgated a special
    tribunal order that led to the arrest of nearly 37,000 collaborators. The
    bulk of them comprised razakars and members of peace committees promoted
    by the Martial Law authority, but a significant minority included
    members of the Al Badr group which waged its own distinctive ideological war
    for upholding Pakistan. The Al Badr's most notorious act was the
    identification, arrest and massacre of anti-Pakistan intellectuals in the
    final days of East Pakistan.

    On April 18, 1973, the government stripped Golam Azam, the head of the
    East Pakistan wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the most notorious of the
    ideological collaborators, and a few others of their citizenship.
    Although Azam had left for West Pakistan in late-November 1971 and,
    therefore, wasn't in Dacca at the time of liberation, the act was deeply
    symbolic.

    In 1974, as part of the infant state's attempts at national
    reconciliation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman announced an amnesty that led to the
    release of 26,000 erstwhile collaborators. A grey area surrounded the
    remaining 11,000, which included Azam's right-hand man, Motiur Rahman
    Nizami ("Moitta Rajakar"), the head of Al Badr, and Abbas Ali Khan, both
    stalwarts of the Jamaat. On December 31, 1975, the military
    government, which organized the ouster of the Mujib regime,
rescinded the act
    governing collaborators. Since then, the entire Jamaat top brass,
    including Azam and Nizami, have returned to active politics and even become
    ministers in a government headed by Khaleda Zia.

    I returned to Dhaka earlier this week to discover that interest in the
    razakars remain as potent after a gap of 35 years. Last week,
    Bangladeshi nationalists were incensed over a remark by the
secretary-geeral of
    the local Jamaat-e-Islami, General Ali Ahsan Mohammed Mojaheed, that
    there were no war criminals in Bangladesh. Mojaheed was the president of
    the Jamaat's Islami Chhatra Sangha in 1971. Adding fuel to the fire,
    the former Islami bank chairman and Jamaat sympathizer, Shah Abdul
    Hannan, described the events of 1971 as a "civil war", and not a
     "liberation struggle".

    In suggesting that public opinion in East Pakistan was divided between
    those who wanted independence and those who preferred remaining in a
    united Pakistan, the Jamaat has sought to make the formation of
    Bangladesh a contested history. Apart from the implication that
the scales were
    tilted in favour of Bangladesh solely by Indian intervention, the
     "civil war" theory seeks to marry the legacy of Bangladesh with the
    Islamic inheritance of Pakistan. The Jamaat does not deny it was in favour
    of maintaining the unity of Pakistan but insists this was part of a
    political debate that had nothing to do with a war of liberation.

    For the Jamaat, the most important aspect of this intervention is the
    denial of the bloody events that began with General Tikka Khan's
    operations on March 25, 1971. Jamaat supporters have consistently peddled
    the view of Pakistan's Hamoodur Rahman commission report that only
    26,000 civilians died in the nine-month conflict. In other words, if the
    claims of "genocide" and the murder of three million people are
    wildly exaggerated, it follows that accusations of people like Azam, Nizami
    and others being war criminals are baseless.

    The Jamaat's attempts at acquiring a respectable pedigree shouldn't
    be brushed off as just an attempt to rewrite the history books. It is
    an important pointer to the fact that the organization now has the
    requisite self-confidence to believe it can emerge as one of the
    distinctive poles of Bangladesh politics - the other being the Awami League.
    Organized along the lines of the Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim
    Brotherhood in Egypt, and riding the crest of global Islamism, the Jamaat
    has systematically infiltrated every wing of the state, but particularly
    the bureaucracy and military. Hannan, for example, is a former
    secretary to the government and Azam's son, Kaifi Azmi, is a mid-ranking
    officer in the army. Its network of mosques and madarsas is elaborate, and
    Jamaat leaders enjoy the patronage and protection of Saudi Arabia.

    The forcible suspension of politics by the military-backed caretaker
    government may have given Bangladesh a respite from bouts of mindless
    disruption, but it is also creating a vacuum. The void may well be filled
    by Islamist organizations that have different mobilizing strategies. At
    this rate, the razakars won't remain history; they are likely to
    resume their old ways.