The Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) is up in arms, this time against the decision by the Bangladesh courts to sentence the Bangladesh JI chief, Motiur Rahman for war crimes and atrocities committed in 1971. Staging a protest demonstration in Karachi on Friday to express its displeasure at this verdict, JI members demanded that the Pakistani government and army take immediate notice of this “unjustified act” by the Bangladesh government. Motiur Rahman faced 16 charges of murder, genocide, torture and rape for which he is now facing the death sentence. These charges have been proved without a shadow of a doubt by a war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh and it has been established that Motiur Rahman is a war criminal. To protest this judgment is something one can expect from the JI seeing that it is one of their own who is now on death row, but what one cannot discount is the fact that at the end of the day, finally some sort of justice is being served for crimes that occurred when Pakistan broke into two in 1971.
We in Pakistan seem to only want the other side to “forgive and forget” everything that happened in 1971 and not “open old wounds,” or so Chaudhry Nisar, our interior minister, would have us believe. Until quite recently, Pakistan’s Foreign Office (FO) and federal government have been quite restrained in their comments about this verdict by the Bangladesh tribunal but Chaudhry Nisar’s statement seems to be the result of the government’s kowtowing before the JI’s protests. Since the atrocities committed in 1971, Pakistan has been in denial about everything that took place. We have omitted any mention of the crimes perpetrated by the likes of Motiur Rahman by blacking them out of our textbooks and revising our history. We have denied that there were ever any victims in 1971. Now that Bangladesh is doing something about it, we are accusing them of digging up old graves. Well, we never did, and now that there is a democratic government in Bangladesh after that country’s long sojourn with military rule, we are not happy that they are doing so as well.
Justice has to start somewhere and the first strike has been played by Bangladesh with Motiur Rahman’s death sentence. It is hoped Pakistan’s FO will keep its good graces and, if it does not have anything conducive to say, should not say anything at all.
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