Bangladesh’s Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence for a top leader of an Islamist party for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the country’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971. Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed, secretary general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was convicted in 2013 on charges of genocide, killing intellectuals, torture and abduction during the war. The court had earlier issued verdicts in three war crime cases. Jamaat assistant secretaries general Abdul QauderMolla and Mohammad Kamaruzzaman were sent to the gallows after it upheld the death sentences awarded to them for crimes against humanity. But it reduced punishment for top Jamaat leader Delwar Hossain Sayedee from death to life imprisonment.
The mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in East Pakistan in 1971, accompanied by widespread torture with rapes designed to affect the ethnic balance and the subsequent exodus of millions of refugees, has a special place in the history of the world’s unrequited horrors. There was genocide, too, aimed at extinguishing or extirpating the large minority (10 million) Hindu population. The war crime trials had started immediately after the liberation of the country but stalled after the assassination of prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in a 1975 military coup.
It is not surprising that Sheikh Rahman’s daughter, prime minister Sheikh Hasina, decided to reopen the trial of war crimes and bring their perpetrators to justice in 2010. Two Jamaat leaders have been executed, one in December 2013 and another in April after an open trial by the tribunal and confirmation of their sentence by the Supreme Court. While the US, the UK and some European countries have raised questions about fairness of the trials and the Jamaat leaders have described them as an attempt to eliminate political rivals, Sheikh Hasina has dismissed these allegations. India has rightly supported the Bangladesh government’s attempt to deliver justice to the families of lakhs of civilians who were killed or maimed by Pakistan Army and its collaborators in Bangladesh’s liberation war.
