Remembering the martyrs of 1971

Haroon Habib
Published : 13 Dec 2016, 06:01 PM
Updated : 13 Dec 2016, 06:01 PM

Beginning with Operation Searchlight on March 25, 1971 in Dhaka, the Pakistani army perpetrated widespread violations of human rights with support from its local collaborators. The massacre and mass rape in 1971 were the most incredible and calculated crimes in the 20th century.

Indiscriminate killing, rape and torture of unarmed civilians and destruction of properties by the occupation army and their local agents continued throughout the nine months. The marauding army and its local goons, who were mostly the members of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, carried out systematic executions as part of their plan to suppress the quest for national independence by the Bengalis.

The well-known researcher RJ Rummel published a book in 1997, titled 'Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900', in which he states:

"In East Pakistan (Bangladesh) [General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals] also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to ensure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan (now Pakistan) for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide."

The crimes were horrendous: some three million people were killed, nearly half a million women were raped and over 10 million people were forced to flee to India to escape military persecution. Justice has not yet caught up with the perpetrators. This has had a profound effect on Bangladesh's society in the last four and a half decades.

In mid-December 1971, when the Mukti Bahini and their Mitra  Bahini  were advancing  to Dhaka, liberating most occupied cities and towns along the way, the  Pakistani forces   were quickly abandoning their camps sensing imminent  defeat .

On the eve of their unconditional surrender to the Bangladesh-India Joint Command, on December 16, the local agents and abettors of the occupation army, under a carefully thought-out plan, eliminated hundreds of leading intellectuals, ostensibly to destroy the intellectual underpinning of this nation.

Philosophers, professors, writers, poets, journalists, doctors, engineers and social thinkers were among those best known personalities who were picked up from their houses, blindfolded and taken to various desolate pits in Dhaka's suburbs, only to be tortured and slaughtered. The bodies of those martyrs lay for days in those slaughter grounds till they were spotted after the surrender of the Pakistan army in Dhaka.

While the largest number of killings took place in Dhaka on December 14, the marauding army and its killing squads — al-badr and razakar — butchered thousands of individuals almost in all parts of the country. The list is quite long. The records show that only on the night of December 14, over 200 intellectuals were murdered in Dhaka alone.

In observance of Martyred Intellectuals Day on December 14, Bangladesh will remember those patriotic sons of the soil. Streams of people will visit the Martyred Intellectuals Monument at Mirpur and Rayer Bazar, where a memorial was built on a mass killing ground. Political, cultural and civic forums will commemorate the dire tragedy that took place just before the fall of the Pakistani army.

The people of Bangladesh faced the worst genocide in the twentieth century in the name of Islam and Pakistan in 1971. Innumerable women were tortured, raped and killed.  The Pakistani soldiers kept thousands of Bengali women as sex slaves in their camps and cantonments. Susan Brownmiller, who conducted a credible study on the subject, has estimated the number of raped women at being over 400,000.

With the formation of the War Crimes Tribunal, following a unanimous resolution passed in Parliament in 2009 to try the war criminals, the government of Sheikh Hasina inaugurated what has turned out to be a new chapter in Bangladesh's history. I would rather call the phase a 'new liberation war'. With the trials of the war criminals getting under way and with five war criminals having already been executed following the judgement of the War Crimes Tribunal, the rule of law and process of justice have once more become part of our collective life as a nation.

In fact, the process of the war crimes trials is a resumption of the process that was set in motion after Bangladesh's emergence. On January 24, 1972, the Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order was promulgated. The government led by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman constituted 73 Special Tribunals   for trials of those who were directly involved in crimes like murder, rape, arson, loot and abduction. Till October 1973, those tribunals had disposed of 2,848 cases and sentenced a total of 752 persons to various terms of imprisonment.  An estimated 11,000 accused were in jail.

But the process was sabotaged after Bangabandhu's assassination and the murder of four national leaders in 1975. Gen Ziaur Rahman, who seized power in November 1975, quickly repealed the Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order 1972, on December 31, 1975, only three months after the bloody changeover of 1975, and  released all the convicted and under trial prisoners from prison.

Despite a widespread national desire to see justice done, in the three decades after 1975, a succession of military regimes swept aside all attempts at justice. The period also saw a planned rehabilitation of the war criminals and their supporters in politics.

The trials that have been going on are a rejuvenation of the Spirit of 1971 on the basis of which East Pakistan became Bangladesh. It also makes a moral point: that the rule of law must prevail and justice must be dispensed in the case of those who committed the crimes.

There was an earlier civic attempt to hold the much needed trial. On 29 December 1991, one of the leading figures accused of war crimes, Ghulam Azam, became the ameer  of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist party that had taken up arms to oppose the country's independence from Pakistan. Led by Jahanara Imam, a national committee  was formed to lead a countrywide  campaign.

On February 14, 1992, the Ekattorer Ghatak-Dalal Nirmul Committee was formed to bring Ghulam Azam, who was the chief of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1971, and his associates, to trial. An open court, Gonoadalot,  was formed and, on 26 March 1992,  a verdict  against Ghulam Azam and others  was pronounced. Sheikh Hasina, then the main opposition leader, moved a motion in Parliament to begin the formal prosecution of those who had committed war crimes in 1971. But the move did not bear fruit due to resistance from the then ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The completion of the war crimes trials could bring to a close a painful episode in Bangladesh's history. On the one hand, it will establish the rule of law; on the other, it will be able to help the new generation become aware of the sufferings the nation went through in its struggle for independent nationhood and understand how religion can be abused to justify heinous crimes like murder and rape.

The trials, therefore, are no ordinary ones. They are an answer to the innermost urges of an aggrieved nation. They also address the travails of countless bereaved families, widows and orphans, those who were wounded and maimed.

The irony is that those who committed the crimes as henchmen of the Pakistan army four and a half decades ago became established political leaders, well-entrenched businessmen or highly connected Islamists, all of whom had their own agenda. The war criminals of 1971, many of whom left the country at the dawn of independence but returned and were rehabilitated, thanks to the military and pseudo-democratic rulers, became organised and powerful.