by FAROOQ SULERIA
Delawar Hossain Sayedee, leader of the Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, has been indicted with 20 counts, including 3,000 killings, rape and arson, during Bangladesh’s nine-month-long war of liberation.
If proven guilty, Sayedee could face the death sentence. He has denied all charges against him. Sayedee will now be tried by the International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic tribunal with no United Nations role, which was set up last year to investigate war crimes in 1971. The trial begins on Oct 30.
While the role of the Pakistani military has drawn some media criticism, the Jamaat’s role in East Pakistan in 1971 has gone largely unnoticed.
The attitude of the Jamaat to the problems and issues raised by the East Pakistanis even prior to the military action was hostile at worst and ambiguous at best. Understandably, the Jamaat was never able to prosper in East Pakistan.
At the time of Partition, the Jamaat had only one member in East Pakistan. At the time of Bangladesh’s inception, it had 300-400 members (and roughly 2,100 in West Pakistan). However, it must be borne in mind that Jamaat’s membership was not open to everybody.
The Jamaat and the religious parties won a small percentage of the vote in West Pakistan in the December 1970 elections, in which they made an unexpectedly bad showing. In a bizarre twist of events, the Jamaat happened to come out a remote second, despite its tiny percentage, to the Awami League in East Pakistan. The League swept the elections in the province, winning all but two of the National Assembly seats there (neither of which went to the Jamaat).
Soon after the creation of Pakistan, the first expression of East Pakistan’s displeasure was the language riots. Jinnah wanted Urdu as the state language. East Pakistan wanted both Urdu and Bengali as state languages.
TN for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)