A War Crimes Court and a Travesty of Justice - NYTimes
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Latitude
Views From Around the World
A War Crimes Court and a Travesty of Justice
By Tom Felix Joehnk
November 29, 2011 2:11 am
DHAKA, Bangladesh On the fourth floor of a nondescript pale-blue government building in Old
Dhaka, clerks are stapling together copies of depositions from witnesses to the crimes committed during
Bangladeshs 1971 war of secession from Pakistan a conflict that may have killed up to three million
people, according to the Bangladeshi government. Above them on the wall is a map showing the 11 sectors
of what was then called East Pakistan.
In the office next door sits Abdul Hannan Khan, the chief investigator for the International Crimes
Tribunal in Bangladesh, a court set up by the Bangladeshi government in March 2010 to try and punish
any individual or group of individuals, or any member of any armed, defence or auxiliary forces,
irrespective of his nationality who committed crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes, among
other things, in 1971. Khan, a former police inspector general, is an affable man, in control and in no rush,
who seems remarkably uninterested in politics. He says that his agency has finished investigating seven
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people. On Nov. 20th, the first of them, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist
party opposed to Bangladeshs independence, was charged with a slew of crimes. He will soon be joined in
the dock by nearly the entire Jamaat leadership, including its former chief, the 89-year old Ghulam Azam,
and two prominent members of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
No trial has yet taken place, but it already seems clear that the International Crimes Tribunal is an
international tribunal in name only. Its exclusive focus on the Bangladeshis who bloodied their hands
assisting the main perpetrators the Pakistani military makes the court look like an government
appendage eager to settle a domestic score. Trying and punishing members of the former Pakistani Army is
too sensitive politically for the current Bangladeshi government to even contemplate: it could cause a
complete breakdown in relations with Pakistan. It would also be impractical, because there is noextradition treaty between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
More arrests are sure to follow. Khan is investigating 10 other suspected collaborators, including another
six members of the Jamaat and two of the BNP. There is also Ashrafuzzaman Khan, an American, and
Moinuddin Chowdhury, a British citizen, both alleged leaders of the pro-army paramilitary body called Al
Badr, which massacred Bengali intellectuals in December 1971. Khan says that Khan lives in New York and
Chowdhury in UK, London. Their being far away might seem like a serious obstacle, but according to onepolitical analyst (who wishes not to be identified), even those cases will be a slam dunk because the two
men will probably be tried and convicted in absentia.
The tribunal is shaping up to be a travesty of justice. The government seems to be using the court
simply to rubberstamp a predetermination that the accused are guilty. For most Bangladeshis, that truth
has been established since 1995, when a self-appointed panel of eminent citizens, headed by the current
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justice minister, compiled evidence of war crimes against 16 individuals, including the seven men
currently awaiting trial before the International Crimes Tribunal. The Jamaat members defense team has
asked one of the judges to step down because he sat on the 1995 panel. If, as is nonetheless expected, nearly
the entire leadership of the Jamaat is convicted and hanged within two years, the Bangladeshi oppositionwill be conveniently weakened in time for the next parliamentary election in 2013.
Such a nakedly partisan exercise of justice would make it much harder for an accurate history of
Bangladeshs birth to ever be written. According to M. A. Hasan, of the War Crimes Fact Finding
Committee, an independent body investigating the 1971 massacres, 95 percent of the atrocities were
committed by Pakistani soldiers who resisted secession and were under orders to kill to prevent it on
the theory that the Islamic unity of the two wings of Pakistan must not be compromised.
Yet none of them will be in court. Nor will any member of the pro-independence militias be charged
for massacring tens of thousands of Bihari migrants who sympathized with Pakistan. The current list of
accused looks so conveniently expedient for the Awami League of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina that for
the sake of appearance alone Hasina might have better served herself, and Bangladesh, by making a greater
show of endorsing an independent war crimes trial subject to international standards. The defense teams
do count some high-caliber international lawyers, but the government has effectively barred them from
being present in court by making it hard for them to even get into the country.
In the midst of all the politicking, Hasan has somehow managed to adopt an impartial position. A few
years back, he submitted to the government a list of 1,775 suspected war criminals, including the accused
currently on trial but also collaborators from the Awami Leagues coalition partners and members of the
former Pakistani military. At the end of a visit to his office last Tuesday, during which he bemoaned
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continued impunity, Hasan produced what he called a genocide map of Dhaka. It showed 48 mass graves,
with latitudes and longitudes.
Tom Felix Joehnk is a journalist in Bangkok.
2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytco.com/