Bangladesh Supreme Court to hear Islamist leader’s death sentence appeal in April
About 86 percent of Bangladeshis are Muslims (about 12 percent are Hindus), so the tensions between the ruling Awami League and the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh are tensions between two Muslim factions.
The Awami League was founded in 1949 by Bengali nationalists, and was first called the All Pakistan Awami Muslim League. Among its founders was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the party during the war of independence and the first president of Bangladesh. The current prime minister is his eldest daughter
The Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh – which, in 1971, was called Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan – emphasized Islam rather than Bengali nationalism, and opposed the independence of Bangladesh, calling instead for East Pakistan to remain part of Pakistan. During the 1971 war, many Jamaat leaders and members collaborated with the Pakistani Army in its operations against Bengali nationalists and pro-independence intellectuals and public figures. Many Jamaat activists were recruited into Pakistani-organized and equipped paramilitary forces, and these forces were notorious for the atrocities they committed against Awamy League flowers and ordinary Bengalis.
The Hindus constituted a small minority in East Pakistan, but the Jamaat paramilitaries were especially harsh toward them.
International human rights groups and legal experts specializing in war crimes have criticized the Bangladesh war crimes tribunal’s procedures as falling short of international standards, and of standards followed by similar tribunals in other countries.
The government has rejected the criticism.
The territory of East Pakistan broke away from Pakistan in 1971 to become independent Bangladesh. The Pakistani military, supported by Jamaat paramilitary militias, conducted a brutal, scorched-earth campaign of terror and reprisals against Bangladeshi nationalists and Hindus. Eventually India intervened on the side of the Bengali nationalists, and Pakistan withdrew its forces, facilitating the emergence of an independent Bangladesh.
The Pakistani military and its local Jamaat supporters perpetrated atrocities on a large scale, aiming to weaken the Bengali independence movement and demoralize the Bengali population. The most extreme cases of targeted killing of intellectuals took place during the last few days of the war, after the Pakistani army had already decided to withdraw from East Pakistan. Working from lists prepared by Jamaat operatives, the Pakistani army and Jamaat militias rounded up professors, journalists, writers, poets, doctors, artists, engineers, and other members of the cultural and economic leadership. They were blindfolded, taken to torture centers in different locations around the country, and made to suffer before they were executed en masse.
Tens of thousands of Bengali women were brutally raped by Pakistani soldiers.
The precise number of people killed in the 9-months war is not known, but historians and demographers who studied the issue dismiss the official Pakistani government’s figure (26,000) as too low, and the official Bangladeshi government figure (3,000,000) as too high. Both figures bear no relationship to reality, and were manufactured by the respective governments for propaganda purposes.
Serious students of the issue, who are not affiliated with either side in the conflict, have concluded that the number of people killed is between 200,000 and 300,000.
Donald Beachler, in The Genocide Debate: Politicians, Academics, and Victims (2011), puts the figure at 300,000, as do Richard Sisson and Leo Rose in War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (1991).
Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, in “Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey program,” British Medical Journal (26 June 2008), conclude that the number of Bengali civilians killed was 269,000.
CIA analysts reached a similar conclusion, saying that the number of civilians killed in 1971 was around 275,000.
