Bangladesh: Bringing a Forgotten Genocide to Justice
Two years ago, TIME met Ali Ahsan Mojaheed at the headquarters of his far-right Islamist party, nestled amid a warren of religious bookshops and seminaries in Dhaka. He welcomed this reporter by peeling a clutch of ripe lychees. "Our fruit is the sweetest," said the secretary general of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami, proffering a sticky hand. But the conversation soon soured. Asked about the traumatic legacy of Bangladesh's 1971 independence — when the territory then known as East Pakistan split from West Pakistan in an orgy of bloodshed — Mojaheed dismissed the need for a proper reckoning with the past. "This is a dead issue," he almost growled. "It cannot be raised."
But this month it finally has. Far from the protective, lackey-patrolled confines of his offices, Mojaheed and three other prominent Jamaat leaders (including the party's leader Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami) are under arrest, appearing for the first time in a war-crimes court to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and against peace — the last of which has not been invoked since the trials at Nuremberg. They rank among the topmost figures implicated in the systematic murder of as many as 3 million people in 1971 as the Pakistani army and ethnic Bengali collaborators attempted to quash a Bengali-nationalist rebellion. Their prosecution presents a watershed moment for this beleaguered nation of 160 million. A July 30 op-ed in the Daily Star, a leading Dhaka-based newspaper, says, "the trials will allow us to close the door, once and for all ... so that we are not forever fighting the battles of the past."
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But this month it finally has. Far from the protective, lackey-patrolled confines of his offices, Mojaheed and three other prominent Jamaat leaders (including the party's leader Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami) are under arrest, appearing for the first time in a war-crimes court to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and against peace — the last of which has not been invoked since the trials at Nuremberg. They rank among the topmost figures implicated in the systematic murder of as many as 3 million people in 1971 as the Pakistani army and ethnic Bengali collaborators attempted to quash a Bengali-nationalist rebellion. Their prosecution presents a watershed moment for this beleaguered nation of 160 million. A July 30 op-ed in the Daily Star, a leading Dhaka-based newspaper, says, "the trials will allow us to close the door, once and for all ... so that we are not forever fighting the battles of the past."