by JALAL ALAMGIR BINA D’COSTA
For the last four decades, Bangladesh’s attempt to interpret the brutalities of 1971 has been couched largely in narratives of nationalist glory. This provided the unity of discourse that a war ravaged country needed. But combined with power politics, it also suppressed legitimate questions that should have been raised and resolved through public debate. Bangladeshis could not ask, for instance, why war criminals were suddenly forgiven after being pursued in the early 1970s. They could not investigate the shady deals that allowed the criminals a grand re-entry into politics in the 1980s and 1990s by Bangladesh’s own nationa list politicians. They could not understand why India, after bearing a huge burden of the war itself, let Pakistani war criminals go scot-free. They just knew that the war crimes of 1971 were covered up or brushed away by subsequent political crimes.
In the coming days, Bangladesh will begin trials for the 1971 war crimes. There is great public support for the trials, and great hope for closure. But the trials will be limited. They will be limited to local collaborators of the Pakistani army, and they will focus on war crimes only, not the associated political crimes in which many sides, local and foreign, were complicit. We argue that such limited trials can provide closure and reconciliation only by going beyond the pronouncement of a legal verdict; the trials should expose, through dispassionate scrutiny, the larger politics, open questions, and uncertainties that have clouded 1971 for the last 40 years. And in this, India and Pakistan have a crucial role to play, and a moral and political responsibility, if not a legal one.
EPW for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)