Old mistakes, new lessons . . .

Now that Ghulam Azam has been taken into custody, our expectations of a proper, fair and full trial of the war criminals of 1971 take a newer, happier dimension. We do not mean to prejudge the course of the trial of those who have been brought into the net of the law and those who might be picked up at a later stage. The good bit in the war crimes story is that every effort has been expended into making sure that the process of the trials meets internationally accepted legal standards, that indeed no questions are raised about the transparency of the trials. Those who have been accused of crimes committed in the course of the War of Liberation must be satisfied that it is justice, not revenge, the state of Bangladesh means to pursue. For those of us who have not forgotten the manner in which the Pakistan army and its local collaborators went about killing, raping and burning, the goal remains an attainment of justice as a means of bringing the past to an end through letting the war criminals know that while they may have got away with their notoriety in the past four decades, history is now about to catch up with them. Finally.
Ah, but for a people conscious of history we have in all these years since Bangladesh emerged into freedom and sunlight often fallen foul of history. And we have often been rendered weak and pusillanimous where battling the demons intent on humiliating us in this free land is concerned. Begin with Ghulam Azam again. He entered the country in 1977 on a Pakistani passport stamped with a Bangladesh visa. The visa soon expired and yet the Ziaur Rahman regime did nothing to have him leave Bangladesh or pay the penalty for overstaying his allotted period. That inaction was and remains inexcusable, considering that the Jamaat leader went travelling across the Arab world and Europe even after 1971 propagating the cause of a "reunification of East Pakistan" with the rest of Pakistan. He stayed on in Bangladesh. Anti-history took a new turn in the early 1990s when Ghulam Azam was informed that he could be a Bangladesh citizen after all.
There are all the ironies we have seen taking shape and form before us. A pretty good number of Bengali officers of the Pakistan foreign service were not loath to serve under the Bhutto government after 1971. For these individuals, Bangladesh was a tentative arrangement and it would only be a matter of time before the renegade province of East Pakistan would return to the embrace of a brotherly West Pakistan. By 1974, however, Bhutto saw little need for these Bengalis to remain in the service of Pakistan. They came back to Bangladesh and were with alacrity absorbed in the new country's foreign service. That was a mistake, for it is always suicidal to expect one who has not been properly loyal to his land to turn around, suddenly, and proclaim his new patriotism. Do not forget that these men subsequently rose to high niches in the government, especially in those dominated by soldiers who had, Pakistan-like, commandeered the civil administration.
Which reminds you once more of the amazement with which Fidel Castro heard Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman tell him that all Bengali civil and military officers trapped in Pakistan had finally returned home to serve in the government of Bangladesh. The Cuban leader's surprise was not so much in knowing that these officers had come back home as in discovering the fact that they had all been taken into the service of the new state without any screening. Let us face it. Not every Bengali who served under the central authority of Pakistan was enamoured of Bangladesh. As the late Syed Najmuddin Hashim would have you know through his diary Bondishala Pakistan, a fairly good number of Bengali civilian officers, detained in camps in Pakistan post-1971, were furious about Pakistan's break-up and about Mujib governing Bangladesh. And yet these very men were to climb some of the tallest ladders in a country they had not approved of, to hold some of the highest positions in administration.
So these mistakes were made and no matter how sweetly you try to paper them over, you know very well of the damage that has been done. Within the span of ten years -- and that was the first decade of Bangladesh's freedom -- all our brilliant, brave freedom fighters in the armed forces were done to death. Go back to the statistics. Beginning with the death of Khaled Musharraf and ending with the officers hanged in dubious manner in the aftermath of Ziaur Rahman's assassination in 1981, it is a list of murdered freedom fighters you have before you. Nothing was to happen to those repatriated from Pakistan, except for Brigadier Jamiluddin Ahmed (who died trying to save Bangabandhu in August 1975). It makes you think. And you wonder too why after all these years no government, no military establishment in Bangladesh has thought it necessary to rehabilitate the officers murdered in the name of a so-called Sepoy-Janata revolution in 1975 as also those executed later, all the way from 1976 to 1981.
When you speak of the war and of the havoc it caused in our lives, you have good reason to ask why the 195 Pakistani military officers earmarked for trial in Bangladesh were let off by Bangabandhu's administration. You may not agree all the time with Pakistan's politicians, but when men like Imran Khan tell you that had Pakistan learnt lessons from 1971 conditions would be different in Islamabad today, you cannot but agree. Had we in Bangladesh insisted on placing, indeed placed those 195 officers on trial for the crime of having committed genocide, we would not be dealing with the old local quislings of the Pakistan occupation army today.
But the satisfaction is all, despite these forty years of chaotic silence on our part. And it is that we have as a nation finally begun the process of reclaiming our history. The trial of the war criminals, like the trial of Bangabandhu's assassins, must be a lesson for us -- that untruth must not be indulged, that it must be put to flight. A nation which blurs the distinction between patriots and traitors is condemned to perdition.

The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
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