Ghulam Azam and our revenge paradox
DEATH solves all problems -- no man, no problem,” Joseph Stalin is quoted as saying in Anatoly Rybakov's 1987 novel Children of the Arbat. If the late Russian ruler had indeed said those words, he must be turning in his grave since Ghulam Azam died last Friday. Death didn't solve all problems for this high priest of Jamaat-e-Islami even after he was no longer of this world.
The authorities ignored his family's request not to perform an autopsy on him. His last wish to have one of his party colleagues to conduct his funeral prayer went unattended. Tensions built up and bombs exploded, while someone threw a shoe at the hearse carrying his mortal remains. Activists threatened to resist his funeral prayer and others made the outlandish demand not to bury him in this country and send his body to Pakistan where it belonged.
Laid to rest at long last, Ghulam Azam's problems haven't gone away. Like reputation precedes a man, his notoriety will succeed him for a long time to come. The people of this country won't forgive and forget him in the foreseeable future. Memories of his crimes against humanity, his countrymen, will continue to rankle in sensitive minds.
Someone asked me if the Jamaat leader would go to heaven or hell. I told him about Robert Ervin Howard's 1930 poem to answer that question. After a certain John Farrel was hanged in the market place, a man named Adam Brand came at dusk and spit him in the face. He then told his neighbours that Farrel's fate had proved “the hempen noose is stronger than man's hate.”
It has been conversely true for the most despised war criminal of this country. He escaped the hangman's noose but the hatred of men proved stronger. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison as if it was a ploy to extend the life of this 92-year-old man so that he suffered more hatred.
Only Ghulam Azam and his minions would have known if it worked. He never repented his role in 1971. He never explained how in his wildest imagination he expected us to believe that rape, murder and arson were going to pave the road to God's work. We don't know how he sorted out heaven and hell in his own freakish mind.
In death, however, the man has thrown that challenge to us. Now it's for us to sort out that distinction and decide what we would like to do with this country, liberated at the cost of the blood of millions. No matter what his fate will be in the next life, our fate in this life hinges on when and where we're ready to draw the line, sorting out heaven and hell in our own imagination.
At some point, a nation has to heal its wounds. The example of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is widely known. France quickly dealt with the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy period, some punished and others given amnesty under the Fourth Republic. The country, however, tried some of its war criminals for a second time in the 1980s. After the American south was thoroughly beaten in the civil war, Abraham Lincoln had offered pardon and amnesty to all persons who took an oath of allegiance to the United States, except the confederate government officials and high ranking officers.
A recent Unicef survey found that children, who are victims of violence, have brain activity similar to soldiers exposed to combat. Minds marinated in rage are bound to absorb its horror. Kevin Carlsmith, a social psychologist at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, writes about the revenge paradox in his study, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in May 2008. He argues that rather than providing closure, revenge does the opposite: It keeps the wounds open and fresh.
Now that Ghulam Azam is dead, should this nation take this opportunity to start the healing process? Should we stop the corrosion of hatred before it corrodes us further? Hatred's distribution has gone from wholesale to retail. Mutual contempt has gone to our blood.
Whether we love or hate this man is no longer relevant. Perhaps it was never relevant for him in the first place. He returned to this country as if nothing had happened. He never showed a twitch of guilt for diabolically opposing the creation of this state where he has lived and died!
The best revenge on him and his band of brothers could have been a prosperous, peaceful, and democratic Bangladesh thrown in their face. Instead, the hatred they sowed in nine months of 1971 proved contagious for us. Ghulam Azam may have had the last laugh because, infected by the virus he masterminded, we've been fighting against each other for 43 years.
The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
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