It’s time politicians paid attention to real issues

It’s a depressing landscape in the Muslim world. From Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq and Egypt, it is the same story. Extremism, intolerance and violence have emerged as existential threats.

While the rest of the world is a nervous wreck as it battles the ever-deepening economic crisis, Muslim countries are haunted by the same old phantoms. It’s as if they exist on a different planet and in a different century, forever obsessing over what the rest of the world considers inconsequential and irrelevant.

While everyone else is anxious about the loss of employment, the Muslim world is bickering over issues that haven’t been settled in a thousand years. Religion that began as a blessing and hope to mankind has been so divided and distorted by so-called defenders of the faith that early believers will find it hard to recognise it as their own. Take Bangladesh’s example. It seems to hunting for trouble, inventing disasters where none exist. It has refused to draw any lessons from its own brief history and the violent separation from Pakistan.

The kangaroo trial of Jamaat-e-Islami’s top leaders, with two of them being awarded the death sentence for alleged war crimes, including executions and rape, hasn’t just outraged Muslims around the world, it threatens to plunge Bangladesh back into the kind of chaos that haunted it in the 1970s and ‘80s.

What happened in 1971 was no doubt shameful. It was the hubris of men in khaki and the opportunism of politicians, who refused to concede the clear electoral mandate won by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman in the 1970 elections that sowed the seeds of the 1971 catastrophe. Given the physical distance and unequal, exploitative relationship between the two wings, perhaps it was a doomed marriage from the start.

It wasn’t merely a body blow to the idea of Pakistan, 1971 also marked a dark chapter in Muslim history. The stories of savagery and barbarism make you shudder even today. Thousands perished in the war that pitted the Pakistani army against the combined force of the Mukti Bahini and Indian Army.

Pakistan tends to view India as the architect of the 1971 split. A crafty Indira Gandhi, looking to fortify her position at home, certainly played a decisive role in the birth of Bangladesh. But the neighbours could have done little if the Bengali population hadn’t sprung up in defiance.

It’s brought out in detail by two riveting books I recently read — Maine Dhaka Doobte Dekha (Witness to Surrender) and Hama Yaran Dozakh by Siddique Salik who died in the 1988 plane crash with General Zia ul Haq. As the army’s spokesperson in Dhaka directly reporting to Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi, the last governor and military commander of East Pakistan, Salik had a ringside view of history. And it’s a history that most Pakistanis understandably would like to forget.

Even the Bangladeshis, the sane majority, would rather forget the appalling past and look to a more forgiving future — if their politicians let them. The anti-Pakistan and anti-Islamist rhetoric and obsessing over the past has become an alternative to good governance and a ploy to deflect attention from misrule.

Opposition parties including Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have accused the Awami League of turning Bangladesh into a fascist state by using the 1971 events for political oneupmanship and targeting its political opponents. The open war on the Jamaat has crossed all limits and the sham trial of its top leadership by the International Crimes Tribunal has been universally condemned by rights groups, the United Nations, UK’s House of Lords, independent jurists and Islamic scholars.

The Jamaat has been a soft target for standing up for a united Pakistan and thus against an independent Bangladesh. But then that original sin was also committed by the Muslim League, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Communist Party and thousands of other individuals. Essentially a religious movement, the Jamaat insists it didn’t run death squads to aid the Pakistani Army, as charged by the tribunal. And given its long history and its approach to politics, it is believed to be stating the truth.

None of the accused figured in the list of suspects who were to be tried by the first war crimes tribunal, which was constituted by Rahman, but was later abandoned following an agreement between Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. The farsighted father of Bangladesh and of Shaikh Hasina chose to close the chapter by issuing a general amnesty in 1973 in the interest of peace and reconciliation.

Indeed, following Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh and Rahman’s 1974 visit to Lahore for the second Islamic Summit, Dhaka decided not to press for the trial of 195 Pakistani officials, held in India with 93,000 other prisoners of war, on charges of war crimes.

This is why it’s important for Bangladesh to bury the past and move on at least in the interest of national unity and reconciliation. This trial has deeply divided Bangladesh and threatens to seriously destabilise it undoing all the good work it has done in the past couple of decades for a new beginning. Already, scores of innocent lives have been claimed by the violence and chaos following the tribunal’s summary verdicts.

As the Economist, which has extensively covered this trial and exposed its dubious nature, warns: “If the reaction thus far is any guide, something much uglier is yet to unfold.”

So let sleeping dogs lie. Else Bangladesh risks opening a Pandora’s box and unleashing the kind of chaos that Pakistan has been battling. Both Bangladesh and Pakistan need to make a conscious effort to turn away from the past and look to the future. It’s time for a new beginning. It’s time to move on.

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf based writer. Follow him on twitter.com/aijazzakasyed