Photo: Hassan Bipul

I am tired of Shahbagh activists claiming they are not political. The truth is they are immensely political. What they mean, I believe, is that they are not party-affiliated, that they are not career politicians and want to have nothing to do with the corrupt political institutions and the violent political culture the Bangladeshi parties have bred. In a democracy a widespread movement such as Shahbagh is always political and their clear stance that they will not be hijacked by political parties is also political. The sovereign has taken to the streets.

I also disagree with those, who ask that Shahbagh remains focussed on a small set of objectives: bringing 1971 war criminals to justice and seeing them hanged. The recent murder of the blogger “Thaba Baba” has shown that Shahbagh has become the focal point of a much deeper conflict, rooted in Bangladeshi history. I believe Shahbagh needs to become a place to discuss the past, to make out what really happened in 1971, in order to envision a better future. A future in which activists will be proud to claim that they are political. Shahbagh needs to become a place not for abstract generalities, but for the specifics. It needs to become the place for tough questions.

We need to talk about the past

So far my impression is that Shahbagh is reproducing the story of independence that we have been taught through school: that in 1971 the country was split neatly into Pakistani Army and collaborators on one side and Mukti Bahini and the general population on the other; that one side perpetrated heinous crimes and the other fought heroically to glorious victory.

However, war is never glorious and never neat: Yes, the Pakistani army and their collaborators committed terrible crimes against civilians, turning the freedom fighters into heroes is doing them injustice. In 1971 children and teenagers became soldiers, adults and children survived terrible inhumanities or witnessed these firsthand and others who had been farmers, fishermen and students and teachers learnt to kill. The war left millions traumatized and we have seldom spoken of their pain or how they learnt to go on living.

The truth is many didn’t. I know of decorated freedom fighters who died alcoholics and others, who became soldiers as young as fourteen, whose pain came back to haunt them and whose lives have fallen apart around them. I am grateful that my father, who was a guerrilla fighter, but who was also a minor when he became a soldier, who was a prisoner of war and faced with the possibility of death every day of his imprisonment, who was tortured in ways he refuses to talk about to this day, is today an opponent of war and violence. Things could have ended differently.

At the same time the resistance of the population was not neat, but a diverse effort and a place of intense political contest. Political groups fought in the war, envisioning a future very different from Sheikh Mujib’s amalgamous political vision — among them more stringent socialists or Maulana Bhashani’s NAP, which based itself in a far more tolerant and democratic vision of Islam than Jamaat’s hate-filled ideology today; at the same time the war itself created its own leaders and factions, who formulated their own ideas about the future. This diversity needs to be talked of, because it is the root of the turmoil that followed the war, the dictatorships and assassinations.

They are also the roots of Bangladeshi society today and we need to discuss them before moving on.

We need to talk about the future

Already Shahbagh has become the focal point of discussions about justice, capital punishment and secularism. By demanding justice it is not only confronting the past, but also posing a challenge as to the place and justification of Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh. The call for justice directly challenges a party whose central leaders are probably war criminals; the widespread involvement of women at Shahbagh challenges a party, whose reactionary view of women imagines them outside the public sphere; the call for unity regardless of religious views challenges a party that is so closely linked to violence against religious minorities in Bangladesh and envisions a state, in which a single religion will reign supreme.

This struggle has already begun with the murder of a firmly secular activist (even if his assailants remain unknown) and the call for the ban of Jamaat — a ban that would probably be comfortably within the bounds of political freedoms as formulated by the Charta of Human Rights.

But Shahbagh has also begun challenging fundamental political institutions in the country. Party politicians who regularly babble about this or that being the will of the people suddenly find themselves driven away by those very same people. Institutions that believed they could continue their corrupt ways with impunity, suddenly find themselves challenged. The call for the death penalty is as often a call for vengeance as it is the fear of a corrupt judiciary and executive taking back the sentence now spoken when the political winds change. “I would support life imprisonment”, many say. “If there were a guarantee, that Quader Mollah would actually spend his life in prison.”

The irony of these words is that it protests corruption in the political system, but then demands justice of that very same system. Who can guarantee that a convicted war criminal actually spends his life in prison? If it is not the government or political parties, then perhaps a sovereign people, now mobilized, that ensures an uncorrupted, independent judiciary. The road to that end will be long — and this is why Shahbagh needs to formulate broader political ideas. Bangladesh is full of activists and civil organizations doing important work, but always staying away from the sphere of political institutions. This needs to change.

Why “Tui Rajakar” is so powerful

A first step would be for Shahbagh to emancipate itself from Awami League government that sees fit to align itself with the movement at this time. Instead of naming only the Rajakars that the government has brought before court, Shahbagh needs to start naming all of them — even those that have found their way into political institutions and parties. Their names need to be compiled, witnesses heard and their deeds listed. Shahbagh needs to stop demanding the government and politicians to do a better job and instead formulate its demands directly towards the judiciary.

It needs to hold the Chief Prosecutor accountable to dragging every one of the accused in front of a court; it needs to hold the International Crimes Tribunal accountable to holding the most fair and immaculate trials Bangladesh has ever seen; it needs to hold the jailers accountable to keeping their prisoners in until their sentence is served – and it needs to guarantee the accused that they will be heard in court, but also that justice will be done.

Far more deterring than the death penalty, is guaranteeing criminals regardless of who they are or know that they will be found, they will be put in front of court and they will be named and punished for what they are. This is what Nazis and their collaborators experience these days when Nazi-hunters all over the world drag them before courts. It is irrelevant that they are often too broken, sick and old to stand trial and many of them die of old age before the sentence is spoken. However, they end their lives knowing they have been found, identified and will be remembered for what they are: torturers, murderers and war criminals.

This is why Shahbagh’s slogan of “Tui Rajakar” is so much more powerful and promising than “Fanshi chai“.

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Lalon Sander is a Bangladeshi-German journalist.

Mat Honan is hardly a beginner when it comes to the Internet – and got hacked. His story shows how seriously we need to be taking privacy and sensitive information on the Internet. When communicating via the Internet, it’s usually best to assume that everything is public. When writing on Facebook, imagine your post turning up on the front page of the newspaper the next day. When accessing your Gmail account, remember that Google’s programmes are reading through every message to generate advertising for you. And when talking on skype, imagine the whole world is listening in.

Justice Nizamul Huq would have done well to remember all this when discussing the cases before the International Crimes Tribunal with Ziauddin Ahmed via skype and exchanged messages via e-mail. The reports had me facepalming at the naive belief, that this would somehow be a secure channel on which such sensitive issues could be discussed.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that Justice Huq got what he deserved. It is always wrong to get robbed, but you should seriously consider not leaving your front door unlocked. Especially, if you have valuables at home that would be irreplaceable if lost. A judge using unencrypted e-mail and skype* to correspond regarding one of the most important trials in the history of Bangladesh was essentially doing exactly that.

E-mail is like a postcard

This is because skype and e-mail – as generally used – are some of the most insecure forms of communication available.

The real-world equivalent of an e-mail is a postcard. E-mails are usually passed from server to server in the clear and any administrator of any one of these servers can read through the message, if he or she likes. Your e-mail company does this to weed out spam, if you’re living in certain countries your government is probably reading your messages and even in countries like Germany, ISP’s are obliged by counter-terrorism laws to search their users’ e-mail correspondence for certain keywords.

Same with skype. Forget that skype has repeatedly given out user data to security firms and national agencies. It’s been only a few weeks since reports surfaced about how a skype account could be stolen by anyone using only the e-mail address of their victim (Security hole allows anyone to hijack your Skype account using only your email address). The hole has since been plugged, but you really don’t want to be using skype to make sensitive calls.

Both e-mail and chat/voice conversations on the Internet can easily be made much more secure by using programs that support a form of public key encryption (Public-key cryptography). What it does is scramble the communication so that it can only be accessed by someone who is in possession of the right key. Since you generate your own keys, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be completely secret – unless your computer has somehow been compromised. In which case there’s not much hope anyway (if you think this is the case, format your hard drive and reinstall your operating system).

The pitfalls of “Digital Bangladesh”

But the problem in Bangladesh is broader. This government’s catchphrase of a “Digital Bangladesh” conjures up ideas of technological progress, but fails to remember that living with the Internet and with a widespread computerization of our daily life also means that people need to be aware of what risks they’re getting themselves into. More importantly, the government needs to be putting in place standards that protect privacy and personal data – and enforcing them.

This, however, is hardly the case. One part of the “Digital Bangladesh” project seems to be a massive overhaul of the government’s websites. This has, shockingly, included the publication of thousands of sensitive data points. The fact that you can find the residential phone numbers of all the officers of the foreign ministry (including the minister’s) online, is just the tip of the iceberg. What is far more concerning is that many government institutions have published their employees’ “Personal Data Sheets” online – a record that includes sensitive contact information (including postal addresses, e-mail and mobile numbers), their National ID numbers, details on their education and details on their parents.

Remember Mat Honan? His hackers had far less information on him and took apart his life.

*I have absolutely no knowledge whether Mr. Huq was using encryption. I assume he wasn’t.

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Lalon Sander is a Bangladeshi-German journalist.