He is frail. He is 91 and he has just been found guilty of the most terrible crimes, committed 42 years ago as Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, broke away from West Pakistan. There can be no doubting the fact that Bangladesh's war of independence cost some three million lives and saw the violation of an estimate 200,000 women by government troops. Ghulam Azam, the leader of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, backed the government in Islamabad in its struggle to stop the 1971 secession. In the end, it was military intervention by India that brought the civil war to an end. It was not a crime to wish to support the status quo as Azam and many other East Pakistanis did at the time. However, it clearly was criminal to encourage supporters to terrorize and slaughter those wishing independence. Azam was found guilty of doing just this. However, it should be said that the evidence against him was thin, relying largely on reports of speeches that he had made, which were judged to be inflammatory. Human rights activists have maintained that there was no incontrovertible evidence connecting Azam directly with the violence. The fact that the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami organization that Azam led wanted the continuation of a united East and West Pakistan did not make Azam guilty. Yet his conviction following the earlier guilty verdicts against four other of his fellow party leaders has led to outrage among their supporters. The claim is that the prosecutions are politically motivated. They have been brought under legislation passed by the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed in 2010 establishing war crimes tribunals. Jamaat-e-Islami is a political ally of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by Begum Khaleda Zia. The two women are deadly rivals and their enmity has distorted Bangladeshi politics for too long. Therefore, the tribunal's findings are feeding into the normal political maw of recrimination and counter-recrimination. Yet surely all Bangladeshis, regardless of their political allegiances, should recognize that 42 years ago something very terrible happened during the birth pangs of their country. Until the Jamaat-e-Islami prosecutions, no one had really be called to account for the savage repression of the independence movement, nor indeed the sometimes no less brutal response of the supporters of an independent Bangladesh. It did not help that Azam and his fellow Jamaat-e-Islami leaders displayed little in the way of remorse at the bloodletting. The truth of course is that these prosecutions are flawed, not so much by the evidence that backed them, nor by the probable political motives behind them, but rather by the sheer passage of years, when no one was prepared to address the ugly issues around the independence struggle. There was no real attempt to prosecute anyone from either side, who had behaved barbarously during the civil war. Perhaps more significantly, there was no attempt at peace and reconciliation, for the simple reason that this process had not yet been tried in the UK's Northern Ireland nor in post-apartheid South Africa. How well it might have been pioneered in Bangladesh can only be guessed. What is surely certain is that the tardy prosecution of old men who may indeed have been guilty of terrible crimes is not going to help Bangladesh come to terms with its past, but rather imports those terrible wounds into its future.
