http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=45865
Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 07:01 AM GMT+06:00
EDITORIAL
Jamaat and Bangladesh's history
The party should repudiate its past to be acceptable
WE thought we have heard it all. We were wrong. The Jamaat-e-Islami
has now laid claim of a sort to the War of Liberation. For a party
which actively collaborated with the Pakistan occupation army, and
formed the al-Badr and al-Shams goon squads whose specific job was the
abduction and killing of Bengalis, this is quite a claim. The nation
would have been happy to see this new face of the Jamaat if meanwhile
it had done something about its past. To suddenly appear before the
country with a so-called Jatiyo Muktijoddha Parishad and tell people
that Jamaat sup****ted our Liberation War and it honours our freedom
fighters seems at best a joke and at worst a travesty of history. The
joke and the travesty both have been emphasised by the recent ugly
incident of a genuine freedom fighter being subjected to physical
assault at a meeting of the so-called parishad.
It is the terribly flawed past of the Jamaat which makes it hard for
us to share in its celebration of Bangladesh's freedom struggle in
1971. But, of course, thanks to the myopia of some of our rulers in
the mid 1970s and later, the party which felt no compunction about
trying to kill freedom and conspire against our war of independence
most cheerfully came back into the political arena. It has been the
Jamaat's good fortune, and the nation's ill luck, that the party
graduated to being a coalition partner of the BNP following the 2001
elections. How much more mind-boggling can irony get to be? If today
the Jamaatis are willing to turn a new leaf and persuade us into
believing that they are loyal, patriotic Banglade****s like the rest of
us, they are most welcome. But for their claim to be credible, they
must do a few things. They must repudiate the shameful role the Jamaat
played as an adjunct of the Pakistan army in 1971. The party cannot
suddenly cry hoarse about upholding the spirit of the Liberation War
without at the same time informing the country officially and publicly
that it has atoned for its sins in 1971. In the second place, the
Jamaat should move decisively about expelling all its leaders and
workers who took active part in the genocide of 1971 if it wishes to
have a respectable place in Bangladesh.
The options are clear before the Jamaat. If it desires to set itself a
new, nationally acceptable course in politics, it must publicly repent
its dark deeds in 1971. It must not try, as it has tried so recently,
to make a farce of the War of Liberation in any way. Public memory is
known to be short, but not that short that we will forget 1971. For
the Jamaat to suggest that it has freedom fighters under its banner is
to insult the sacrifices of three million Bengalis. But it surely can
make a new beginning, indeed reinvent itself, through joining in the
national call for a trial of the war criminals of 1971. That should
not be such a hard thing to do, is it, now?
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