Photo: Sadatuddin Ahmed

There are lies, big lies, that reason will and must do everything to put an end to. These are lies the old collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army in 1971 have been peddling for years together. Watch the Jamaat-e-Islami. It should have been wallowing in shame, in unadulterated embarrassment, over the murderous role it played in a season when we as a people struggled to free ourselves of Pakistan all those years ago.
Its leading figures, all of whom were complicit in the commission of genocide and rape by the Yahya Khan junta, should in the normal course of events have spent long spells in prison on charges of furthering the twisted cause of the enemy. That they escaped justice, that a counter-revolution in free Bangladesh in the mid-1970s made it eerily possible for them to make new and sinister inroads into our collective life, is a shame we cannot shed until we have seen them answer for their crimes.
How do we go about making sure that the old collaborators face justice? The answer is pretty simple. Get all this big plan of a trial of war criminals into a purposeful momentum, through making sure that no loopholes remain in the law on which the trials will be conducted. The evidence is there, our collective memory is there.
Of course, you could argue that the collaborators' act is not there. It was repealed by the nation's first military dictator in 1975. Ziaur Rahman did something else: he incorporated the infamous indemnity ordinance into the constitution through the notorious Fifth Amendment. Today, that amendment stands repealed. The point is this: if the law and constitutional politics can do away with an immoral act, they might as well bring forth, yet once more, a good, ethical principle that was set at naught by bad men.
Get the collaborators' act moving again, for the fundamental reason that if those who murdered and helped to murder Bengalis in 1971 get away this time, if this government is unable to complete the process of their trials before the next election, this country, this nation will find itself in unmitigated danger. The elements rehabilitated since 1975 will not let us live in freedom and dignity. That is the truth, an absolute one.
Observe how much of a danger we are in. Observe the lies being bandied around. The Jamaat tells us, without batting an eyelid, that it also took part in the War of Liberation, that its men are also freedom fighters. Observe the absence of shame here, the totality of it. And then note the brazenness. It pulls in Professor Kabir Chowdhury. If Chowdhury is a freedom fighter, so are the Jamaatis. Good logic? No way. Bad sophistry here. Chowdhury, like millions of other Bengalis, was an exile in his own country. Like tens of thousands of other Bengalis, he had nowhere to go but, like them, he waited for liberation.
And the Jamaatis? They picked off their own fellow Bengalis to kill. They killed Kabir Chowdhury's brother! They went around telling people that the Mukti Bahini were miscreants, that Bangladesh's War of Liberation was an Indian conspiracy to break up Mohammad Ali Jinnah's dream. In their hoarseness, they decried the "aggression" against Islam and Pakistan. Their goon squads, in the shadowy shape of al-Badr, al-Shams and Razakars, carefully and meticulously went around abducting some of our best and brightest even as their beloved communal state crumbled in a heap around them.
The Jamaat as freedom fighters? No freedom fighter ever had meetings with Tikka Khan and A.A.K. Niazi. But Golam Azam did. No freedom fighter went visiting the Middle East after 1971 spreading wicked propaganda against the state of Bangladesh. But Golam Azam did, per courtesy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's rump Pakistan.
Observe the lies, again. It was the Indian army, says the Jamaat, that bludgeoned Bengali intellectuals to death a couple of days before 93,000 soldiers of the world's "best fighting force" surrendered to the Mukti Bahini and the Indian army. That is interesting, this new wrapping over stale old lies. Do the Jamaatis take us for fools? Or has something of dementia come over it?
It is time for firmness. Let there be no going into academic points here over the ways in which we should be dealing with the old quislings of the Pakistan army. That these collaborators strutted around, post-1971, in their full glory thanks to the historical aberrations we went through all the way from 1975 to 1996 is no reason to think that their old sins have been forgotten and forgiven.
If the Nazis have paid a price at Nuremberg, if the Vichy regime remains a stigma in the history of the French republic, the Pakistan army, the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim League and the Nizam-e-Islam will find indelible mention, as perpetrators of crimes against humanity, in the pages of history.
Three million of our own went down to doom in 1971. It is morally wrong, ethically reprehensible and politically indefensible to let their murderers bask in the luminosity of a sun they once tried taking away from us.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
E-mail: [email protected]