War Criminals

I was beginning to think that I had run out of steam, with nothing more to say, My silence has been induced by illness though. Without going into gory details I suffer from gout. Suffer is the operative word. It's not just the pain but also the general misery that gets you down. The pain can be unbearable - exceeded only by childbirth I am told. But what has this got to do with war criminals?

Even when I'm ill I read. One thing I read with interest over the week was a paper by my friend and colleague Asiuzzaman, currently doing a PhD at Monash. Zaman, who was a journalist is trying to make sense of the landslide win by the Awami League in the 2008 election. His thesis, which I think is very plausible, is that the media and concerned groups ran a well organised 'anti war criminal' campaign in the months leading up to the election that reinserted Bangladeshi nationalism as a political factor in the debate. The Awami League is the party associated with nationalism, despite the name of the BNP, especially by the young, most of who were born after independence in 1971. At the heart of the campaign were the calls to punish the 'war criminals'.

For an outsider there is a problem here; who are the 'war criminals' and why are they still hanging around 38 years after independence? If they are war criminals why haven't they been caught and punished.

The simplistic explanation is that they are members of the Bangladeshi Ismlamicist organisations (such as Jamaat - e-Islami, Jamaatul Mujahudin, Jamaatul Muslemin, or Majlish-e-Tasmuddin) who are well organised and generally affiliated with the BNP. Through their political clout they have managed to avoid prosecution. It is alleged that members of these organisations, and others like them, actively worked for the Pakistanis during the struggle for independence for a complex range of reasons. For these people Islam was the over-riding issue and them did not wish to fracture the umma, nor support a secular state. Some were so out of step that they supported the Pakistani drive to make Urdu the national language over Bengali. The Language Movement, that is the institutionalisation of Bengali as the language of East Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh, was the ideological lynch pin of independence. Not to support language movement was to fly in the face of reason!

Much of the feeling of the events around the late 1960s and early 1970s is caught in the films of Tareq and Catherine Masud. Their most recent, Noroshundor (The Barber) (2009) deals specifically with this issue. Norosh is a brief film (17 minutes) that tells the story of young man on the run from the Pakistani army. He is denounced as a secularist and miscreant by a religious person. He escapes but his parents are tortured and the doctor who treats the injured father is also arrested by the army. In the meantime the young man hides in a barber's shop. Much is made of cutthroat razors and mirrors to build up tension until the army arrives. When they ask about the 'miscreant' the proprietor of the shop proclaims that all present are good Pakistanis. The army leaves and the young man escapes, temporarily at least.

The irony, obvious to all Bangladeshis watching the film, is that the barbers are Biharis, displaced Urdu-speaking Muslims who came to East Pakistan at the time of Partition. In the popular imagination the Biharis are frequently seen as fifth columnists and not true Bangladeshis and the expectation would be that the barbers would betray the young man. Like other films by the Masuds (The Claybird, Muktir Gaan), the independence era is more complex than the popular myths and I think they make the point quite nicely in the film.

Two observations about the film: at 17 minutes it seems like a fragment, possibly a segment of a portmanteau film and Urdu is used widely, something not common to other films, even if they about the War of Independence.

Today's Daily Star carried a short article on the Biharis. They are the subject of a documentary, Swapnobhumi (The Promised land) (D: Tanvir Mokammel). There are still 160 000 Biharis living in 116 camps all over Bangladesh, although the majority in Dhaka live in Mirpur, As I understand it they do not have Bangladeshi citizenship nor do they have any rights beyond those normally applied to refugees.

As I see it all of these are related to issue of nationalism and national identity in Bangladesh and when you begin digging, even superficially, things become more complex than the popular accounts allow. I still find it hard to identify the war criminals and even more difficult to understand why 38 years down the track the issue can still have such enormous electoral appeal. But then, as my friends and students point out, I'm not a Bangladeshi.