About two hundred persons have been arrested as per a list prepared by an NGO called the War Crimes Facts Finding Committee which had 1,597 names of those whom it described as “war criminals”. The list included the current top brass of the Jamaat-e-Islami from whose cadres were formed the pro-Army razakars, the al-Shams and al-Badr gangs of political activists and students. They entered Dhaka university on 14 December as the Indian Army and the Bengali resistance fighters of the Mukti Bahini were closing in on the capital and slaughtered hundreds of students and then went on a rampage in the in the suburbs looking for intellectuals, top professionals and the city’s elite as well as the Hindu population.
In declassified documents American Embassy officials in their communications with the State Department had used the terms “selective genocide” and “genocide” to describe what they had been witnessing in Dhaka and other major cities where they were posted. Later, in the thrall of the Nixonian tilt against India in which he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dispatched an aircraft-led task force into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India and try and prevent the creation of an independent Bangladesh. As it turned out Dhaka became the free capital of a free country well before the US Seventh Fleet could reach.
It is something Bangladeshi apparently have not forgotten or forgiven Washington for. Under-Secretary of State Richard Boucher’s recent offer to help Bangladesh conduct the war crimes trials has been greeted with scepticism and outright rejection by influential sections of Bangladesh civil society that still see Washington as an ally of the military establishment in Pakistan.
Clearly, the trials, whether they are conducted in the Nuremberg format where Nazi war crimes were adjudicated after World War II, or according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission instituted by Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa or according to format adopted for war crimes trials of former Yugoslav politicians and military personnel (currently underway at The Hague under the aegis of the new International Criminal Court jurisdiction), will have far-reaching consequences for geopolitics in the region.
Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence has been using the cadres of the Jamaat-e-Islami and other fundamentalist Islamic parties many of whom were prominent members of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party Government of Begum Khaleda Zia. The current Chief of the Pakistan Army General Ashfaq Kayani during his tenure as Director-General of the infamous ISI had forged direct links with the Bangladesh based Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Harkat-ul-Jamaat Islami (HUJI) and instigated them to step up infiltration through the unfenced portions of the Indo-Bangladesh border because the Indian security forces had very largely sealed the Indo-Pak border and made infiltration difficult. From then on infiltration from Bangladesh has increased exponentially with finance and instigation from the ISI during the Khaleda Zia regime which used the same style of deniability to absolve itself of charges of cross border terrorism that General Pervez Musharraf had made fashionable in Pakistan.
Bangladesh trial of war crimes will throw up lot of mud against Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan may get embroiled in allegations of direct involvement of the Pak Army in fomenting global terrorism. All this will not be to the liking of Islamabad as the trials would unequivocally confirm Pakistan as a State that sponsors terrorism. It will have to face the consequences of its actions past and present.
A collateral effect of war crime trials will be on the Islamist organisations that have thrived under the Khaleda Zia regime. The Jamaat-e-Islami will be decapitated if its top brass is indicted as per the evidence collected so far. It is therefore running around in circles over how to get out of a tight situation. One gambit the Jamaat leadership is contemplating is an apology to the nation for whatever happened in 1971 but there would be a total rejection of the charges of war crimes.
HUJI and the Lashkar-e-Taiba will also get hit badly given the close inter-linkages and networking among the several terrorist organizations acting at the behest of the ISI. They will be on the run. To the dismay of Pakistan and its army, the Bangladesh War Crimes trials may give a fillip to the campaign to expose the ‘epicentre of terrorism’ in Pakistan for peace and stability in the region as a whole.
