The day after

OF late, there has been a groundswell of demand for trial of people who committed war crimes during the liberation struggle of the country some thirty-seven years ago. It is time, too.
There can be no doubt that perpetrators of crimes against humanity must be brought to book. It is rarely too late to put them in the dock. Those who killed, tortured, maimed, and raped to stop the emergence of Bangladesh must account for their conduct, no matter how long ago the crimes might have been committed.
Yet, the loud calls for action have tended to obscure many critical issues that war crimes trials alone will never resolve. The drumbeat, if you like, has drowned out many other sounds that need to be heard. It is also necessary to understand the mainspring and motivation of the demands for the trials.
To start with, who are calling for the trials? Many of them are undoubtedly motivated by the genuine pain of witnessing years of apathy about the matter. I dare say, there are also many whose wish to see justice done appears little more than skin-deep. The motley gathering of the late protesters is worth watching.
It includes many of those who had the power to bring the criminals to justice but did precious little about it. Many of them are from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Awami League, and the Jatiya Party (choose a faction), all of whom governed the country over the last thirty-six years at one time or the other. Of them, the longest tenure was of the BNP. Yet, many leaders of that party have now joined those calling for trial of the war criminals.
Perhaps the oddest thing is the frequent statements from leaders of these parties that the initiative for action "must come from the government." You might be forgiven if you doubted you were hearing right. Leaders who are now saying that it is the government, which must start the process of putting alleged war criminals on trial, were themselves the government. What had they been doing when in power? It all smells distinctly hypocritical.
Then why are these people so vocal in their call for war-crimes trials? The question can legitimately be asked about some of those demanding the trial, though certainly not about all. One answer readily suggests itself.
There has been a new awareness among the population of the enormous sacrifices made during the liberation war. Resurgence is probably too strong a word, but it is popular now to denounce war crimes. Some of the political leaders may simply have been playing to the gallery, the elections being on the horizon, or appearing to be.
But suppose a government comes into office that genuinely wants to put the war-criminals on trial. Suppose it hangs the guilty or jails them for life. What happens then? I do not believe that much will happen to the political landscape of the country.
This is because, like the pernicious iceberg, the question of hostility to the ideology of Bangladesh that led to the crimes lies mostly submerged, the trials calling attention only to its tip above water.
Today, there is little attention to the dangerous bottom nine-tenths; the day after the culprits have been punished will be no different.
One likely consequence of the trials may even be that political parties whose ideologies are opposed to the very idea of a secular Bangladesh will be able to claim that the punishment of the culprits of the past gives them a clean slate now.
If the matter is only one of punishment of individuals and not the parties they belong to, then the punishment of the individuals can be turned into an advantage by the parties.
With the culprits gone, the parties can claim to be squeaky-clean inheritors of the original idea of Bangladesh. This is a bizarre scenario, but not unlikely. Given that the number of the war criminals has inevitably been dwindling through death, these political parties could be in a happy state of claiming legitimacy in exchange for a relatively light penalty. A way must be found to deny them that claim.
The demand for war trials in the last few months has left out the far more important threat posed by the continuing spread of forces that are opposed to the idea of a secular Bangladesh. One feels the absence across the boardin speeches, statements, newspaper articles.
A recent speech by a noted intellectual-economist whom I admire is perhaps typical in this regard. Its theme was the failure of the nation to put the war criminals on trial and the consequences of such inaction.
Among our failures he talked of many things: our inability to achieve the goals of a just and democratic society, the failures of the political parties, growing gap between the rich and the poorit is difficult to see the connection between these very legitimate concerns and the trial of war criminalsbut there isn't a single mention of the threat to the secular ideology of Bangladesh. The killing and torture in 1971 were committed basically in the name of an anti-Bangladesh ideology. And we do not mention its menace when we call for trial of the perpetrators. That is the nine-tenths of the iceberg.
There is no greater or nobler raison d'être for the creation of Bangladesh than the ideology of secularism and pluralism that started to bloom during the language movement in the early 1950s.
Almost three decades ago, Professor Muzaffar Ahmed, a respected left-wing politician, said secularism in the context of Bangladesh was even more important than democracy. The comparison may well be disputed, but the point was spot-on.
The erosion of secularism in the political landscape of the country has often been mentioned, and has remained unheeded. This has gone hand in hand with the increasing Islamisation of public life in the country, and a continuing threat from radical political Islam.
Of the latter, the violent demonstrations around Baitul Mukarram not long ago to protest against the alleged anti-Koran stance of a new national policy on women recently approved by the government, is only the latest, and perhaps not among the most blatant, instance.
In the past couple of years, militants have gone on rampage around the country, with bombings, assassinations, and threats to religious minorities. They have stifled freedom of expression with violent demonstrations of self-inflicted outrage. After a relatively quiet past few months, they appear to be gathering strength.
More than incidentally, these people will not be anywhere near the purview of a war- crimes tribunal, and, yet, they are as much a threat to the secular ideology of Bangladesh as those who fought that ideology in 1971.
Nor will those who seek to Islamise public life in Bangladesh in "peaceful" ways. Nor will the calls for war crimes trials by themselves focus attention on the many subtle ways in which secularism has come under attack in the countrynot excluding seemingly innocuous pronouncements by many of the leaders of the country themselves, elected or presumptive.

Mahfuzur Rahman is a former United Nations economist and occasional contributor to The Daily Star.