Irony of fate

Shafi Imam Rumi

The fate of guerilla fighters Bodi, Jewel, Altaf Mahmud and Rumi were sealed only a few days before the Gen Yahya regime declared presidential clemency for freedom fighters captured by the Pakistani forces in 1971.

Freedom Fighter Zahir Uddin Jalal, who was at the same camp where those guerillas were kept, 42 years later told the court about the role Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed and Matiur Rahman Nizami played in having them executed.

Jalal described how the two war criminals advised Pakistan army Captain Kayyum to shoot the five to death and make their bodies disappear before the president granted clemency on September 5.

Though Jalal was freed from the concentration camp, Bodi, Rumi, Jewel and Altaf Hossain were killed sometime between August 30 and September 5. Their bodies were never found.

Forty-four years later, a strange turn of fate brought Mojaheed to his knees, seeking presidential mercy, begging for life.

On July 17, 2013, a special tribunal awarded Mojaheed death penalty for two out of five charges including the killing of intellectuals in 1971. This year the apex court upheld his death sentence for intellectuals' killing and rejected his petition for reviewing the death penalty.

In a desperate bid to escape the gallows, the war criminal sought presidential mercy. But it was rejected and he was hanged in Dhaka Central Jail early today.

Rumi's mother Jahanara Imam, who had let her 20-year-old son join the war, never sought mercy to the then Pakistani junta to save her son's life.

On September 5, 1971, she wrote in her diary how she and her husband decided not to seek presidential clemency for Freedom Fighter Rumi, captured by the Pakistani army with the help of local collaborators.

"Trying to save Rumi's life by seeking mercy from the murderous government would be insulting to Rumi's ideals …" she wrote quoting her husband Sharif Imam. [Source: Ekatturer Dinguli (Memoirs of the days of Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971)].

The mother, who had suppressed her grief to herself for two decades, raised her voice for justice not only for the murder of her son but for the thousands of others who were killed by the Pakistan army and their local collaborators.

In 1992, Jahanara Imam initiated a movement calling for the trial of war criminals after Pakistani citizen and war criminal Ghulam Azam was made the chief of Jamaat-e-Islami, which had acted against the country's independence.

She along with 100 renowned citizens constituted "Ekatturer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee", a platform that till date continues its campaign demanding trial of war criminals and a ban on fundamentalism and communalism-based politics.

Their years-long campaign began to bear fruit after the Awami League came to power in 2010 and formed the special tribunals to try the war criminals.

 Soon after Mojaheed was sentenced to death by a tribunal on July 17, 2013, Rumi's younger brother Saif Imam Jami had told The Daily Star that justice would remain incomplete until the verdict was carried out.

Yesterday, the long wait of Jami and thousand others, who had lost their loved ones to the crimes orchestrated by Mojaheed, finally came to an end.

But the mother, but for whom the justice might never have been served, could not witness it. On June 26, 1994, Jahanara Imam breathed her last after a long battle with cancer.

"I have been waiting for this day since 2013. My mother, martyr's mother Jahanara Imam had started a movement. Now we are witnessing its results and I specially thank Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. She [Hasina] had taken the initiative [to try war criminals] and we are now getting the results," Jami said yesterday told a private television channel.

Rumi was one of the first members of the Crack Platoon, a guerilla unit that fought the Liberation War under Sector-2, eventually becoming a group dreaded even by the well-trained Pakistan military.

On August 30, Rumi and his comrades along with his younger brother Jami and father Sharif were picked up from their Dhanmondi residence. Sharif and Jami returned a few days later. But Rumi didn't.

Rumi had secured admission to Illinois Institute of Technology in the USA after completing his secondary-level graduation but he decided to join the fight for his motherland instead of pursuing higher education abroad.

Justifying his choice, he had told his mother: "I may eventually leave [Bangladesh] if you insist on my studying abroad. But it will forever turn me into a hostage to my conscience. I may become a famous engineer on my return from America with a degree, but I will never be strong enough to face my conscience with my head held high."

For complicity in the killing of Rumi and his comrades, both Mojaheed and Nizami were awarded life sentence by the war crimes tribunal. The apex court upheld the sentence for Mojaheed while Nizami's appeal against the judgment is still pending before the Supreme Court.