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| Bangladesh |
| Bangla group publishes list of alleged war criminals |
| 2008-04-05 |
| A group of Bangladeshi war veterans and intellectuals has published a list of alleged war criminals from the country’s 1971 independence struggle with Pakistan, an official said on Friday. The publication of the list of nearly 1,600 names comes amid growing calls for prosecutions, or at the least the setting up of a South African-style truth commission. Pak Army: “Out of the 1,597 people on the list, 369 were Pakistani army personnel; the rest were Bangladeshi collaborators,” said MA Hasan of the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, which has spent nearly two decades documenting wartime incidents, including rape, arson, and mass murder. Hasan said that around half of those listed were still alive. “We have been investigating for 17 years to compile the information; the list is on the basis of field level investigation, mass graves, and eyewitness statements,” he added. Earlier this year, Amnesty International asked Bangladesh’s military-backed government to establish a truth commission to investigate war crimes. The bloody nine-month conflict ended with Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan, emerging as an independent nation in 1971. A court in the capital Dhaka has also ordered police to submit a report on allegations against Matiur Rahman Nizami, the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and industries minister in Bangladesh’s then coalition government until October 2006. In a case filed by a former Bangladesh freedom fighter, Niazami – along with 12 others –is accused of helping the Pakistan Army plan a mass killing in which thousands of villagers died. The JI has dismissed the charge as an attempt to “defame” the party. Since the country’s emergency government came to power in January 2007, war veterans have led calls for prosecutions. “We will give this list to the government and the Election Commission,” said Hasan. “Our demand to the government is that those perpetrators should be punished and disqualified from the next election,” he added. The government has pledged to reinstate democracy by late 2008 after completing a clean-up of Bangladesh’s notoriously corrupt politics. Some Bangladeshis supported Islamabad during the war in order to prevent the break-up of Pakistan. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 Case Study: Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971 The mass killings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 vie with the annihilation of the Soviet POWs, the holocaust against the Jews, and the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated act of genocide in the twentieth century. In an attempt to crush forces seeking independence for East Pakistan, the West Pakistani military regime unleashed a systematic campaign of mass murder which aimed at killing millions of Bengalis, and likely succeeded in doing so. |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-04-05 07:50 |
| #2 Victims of rape by Pakistani soldiers |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-04-05 07:48 |
| #1 Video of Dhaka University massacre by Pakistani troops |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-04-05 07:44 |