Criticism of 1971 war crimes trials is misplaced
As expected, following Bangladesh’s execution of two Islamist leaders —Jamaat-e-Islami’s Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid and Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s Salauddin Quader Chowdhury — convicted for committing war crimes during the 1971 liberation war, Dhaka has come under much criticism from the international community and a host of human rights NGOs. And as expected, the Sheikh Hasina Government has ignored them all. This is as it should be. On its part, India has done well to stand firmly in support of Bangladesh — not only because of historical and moral factors but also because it’s the right thing to do in the contemporary political space. There is no doubt that both men who were executed on Sunday, as well as the two others who have been hanged to death on similar charges before, deserved the punishment they were given, and that this has served the larger cause of justice. If the executions make some elements in the West squeamish, then so be it. The sensitivities of bleeding hearts have little meaning for those who have seen the bloodbath orchestrated by the Islamist army of razakars in 1971; indeed, such manufactured concerns are downright offensive to those who have known the genocide of Bengalis that was carried out during the war. The pleas, chidings and condemnations of the US, the UK, the EU, the UN as well as the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch were dismissed when Abdul Quader Mollah was executed in December 2013 and Mohammad Kamaruzzaman hanged to death in April this year; and now they have been wholly trashed yet again. The critics’ old argument that the trials were not fair, that the accused weren’t allowed due process, has become so stale, that it barely made its presence felt in the inside pages of daily newspapers. Still, in Bangladesh’s defence, one can reiterate the fact that the tribunal, set up in 2010 to specifically deal with the 1971 war crimes, was hearing crimes that had been committed four decades ago; that in the intervening years many of the accused held high positions in Government and within the establishment and, thereby, had ample opportunity to manipulate the system and clean their tracks; or that it is hypocritical to hold the Dhaka trials to a higher standard than those that were applicable to the Nuremberg trials or the Tokyo trials.
But these arguments, oft-repeated already, are not of much significance outside newspaper editorials. What is of import though is that the West, despite its ongoing trouble with radical Islam and homegrown jihadis, doesn’t seem to realise that the 1971 war crimes trial is an important pushback against exactly those vile ideologies that now wreak havoc around the world. Instead, it sees the trials, which unsurprisingly have full domestic support, as a politically motivated campaign by the Prime Minister to decapitate her Opposition — ignoring the fact that the Opposition is already a stunted force.