The party draws its strength from Ziaur Rahman's legacy, but it also has anti-liberation figures in its ranks. This dichotomy stands exposed after the conviction of one of its key leaders for committing war crimes
With the death penalty meted out to Bangladesh Nationalist Party lawmaker Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury for crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation War, the war crimes trials in Bangladesh have entered a decisive phase. He is the first sitting MP — one elected six times from Chittagong — to be asked to walk the gallows. But the six war criminals who were earlier awarded death penalties by the war crimes tribunals or (as in the case of Abdul Quader Mollah) by the Supreme Court, belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami, a party that supported the Pakistani war effort in 1971 because it believed in a united Pakistan. It was expected of the Jamaat to back Pakistan’s military machine in its campaign of mass murder, torture, rape and loot, for the sake of thwarting secession. So, when its leaders were blamed for the horrendous atrocities, it shocked none in Bangladesh or elsewhere in the world.
That is true of Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury as well. The son of a powerful Muslim league politician from Chittagong, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, his lead role in the mass murders around Chittagong, especially the brutal killings in the Hindu-majority villages, are too well-known for anyone in Bangladesh to forget or forgive. Over the years, as Bangladesh lived through military rule and slowly returned to democracy, Chowdhury remained unrepentant for all the crimes he is now convicted of. He survived the post-independence period with ease. As the country lost its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in the 1975 coup, Chowdhury came to be seen as a feared figure in and around Chittagong. Regardless of who came to power, none could touch him. This was the usual feeling in and around Bangladesh’s leading port city.
This is also precisely the culture of impunity that Bangladesh’s war crimes tribunals — and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami league-led Government which set them up — intended to end. The law, which makes these trials possible ,was promulgated in 1973, but Ms Hasina amended it twice during her current term to make the tribunals effective. Now she has taken the war crimes issue to the United Nations. Addressing the 68th UN General Assembly in late September, she reminded world leaders that the trial of war criminals responsible for the horrendous 1971 atrocities was “indispensable to establish justice, human rights and the rule of law”. She raised Bangladesh’s war crimes issue in the UN on a day when an international panel of appeals judges unanimously upheld a 50-year prison sentence given to former liberian President Charles G Taylor. That drives home the point that if the high and mighty elsewhere in the world can be tried for crimes against humanity, years after they were committed, Bangladesh is well within its rights to try the men behind the genocide of 1971.
Bangladesh’s war crimes trials have drawn flak from Western human rights circles and countries sympathetic to the Jamaat-e-Islami’s kind of radical Islamist politics. But Ms Hasina’s Government has persisted with the trials for obvious reasons. Starting war crimes trials was a key pledge in the Awami league manifesto before the December 2008 election. If she failed to get them off the ground after such a huge mandate, she risked alienating all pro-liberation forces that form the support base of her party. The passions that the trials have generated could be seen in the Shahbagh movement . So, this is one issue that can help Ms Hasina beat the inevitable anti-incumbency as she faces election in three to four months’ time.
That is why Chowdhury’s death penalty is such a huge embarrassment for the BNP. Unlike the pro-Pakistani Jamaat, BNP was founded by one of Bangladesh’s great war heroes, Ziaur Rahman. The party draws its strength from his credentials as the man who relayed Mujib’s declaration of independence to the world over radio from Chittagong in the first hours of the Pakistani military crackdown. But the BNP is also the party that is allied with the Jamaat and has leaders like Salahuddin Quader in its ranks — men who killed and raped their own people for the cause of Pakistan which has now shuts its door on them, at least publicly.
No wonder the BNP refused to issue a formal reaction to Chowdhury’s death penalty and several standing committee members of the party deflected the media by asking them to get in touch after they have confabulated with chairperson Khaleda Zia. The BNP’s Chittagong unit announced a day-long strike in the port city to protest the verdict — but that is Chowdhury’s home turf. The party did not go for a nationwide strike as the Jamaat had done when its leaders were awarded the death penalty. Supporting someone like Chowdhury could easily be construed as support for his war-time atrocities, which a ‘nationalist party’ — especially one founded by a war hero — can ill-afford in an election year. The BNP’s problem stems from it being more of an anti-Awami league platform that drew both liberation war figures as well as those strongly opposed to it. The Jamaat has been de-registered as a party for its war-time role in opposing Bangladesh’s independence. That spares Ms Zia the trouble of defending an alliance.
After Chowdhury’s verdict, the party has to handle the huge contradiction in-built in its public image, which will not be easy in an intensely polarised Bangladesh.
(The writer is Senior Editor with the Dhaka-based Bdnews24.com) (The accompanying visual is of Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury. AP photo by AM Ahad)