Justice remains elusive for Hasina killing machine's victims

Asia Times

21-04-2025

Alliance for Witness Transparency, a US-based human rights organization, has published a series of interviews with individuals coerced by Hasina into giving false testimonies against top opposition leaders handed out life sentences by Hasina's judiciary.
'I hope he forgives me. Can God forgive someone whom only a human being has the right to forgive?' a teary-eyed poverty-stricken old Bengali Muslim man in the Northwestern Bangladeshi district of Rangpur, a couple of hundred kilometers far from the capital city of Dhaka, said, speaking in a local Bengali dialect.
The man's name is Mokbul Hossain. During the 1971 civil war in former East Pakistan, Mokbul saw his mother mortally wounded by Pakistani military men as the mother and son were fleeing to safety. He had to leave his dying mother behind.
They had fled to escape the wrath of the army unleashed on the Bengali-Muslim-majority East Pakistan by West Pakistan's secularist, pro-Soviet leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto dreaded the idea that military ruler Yahya Khan would transfer power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a Bengali Muslim bagging the 1970 general elections, as Bhutto himself wanted to be the premier, notwithstanding the election results.
Almost five decades after the civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh from the ashes of East Pakistan, the Bangladeshi government contacted Mokbul and asked him to testify in his mother's murder trial.
The accused was not a member of the Pakistani army, as the killer had been, but a key opposition Bengali Muslim leader combatting Hasina's increasingly authoritarian turn – so much so that she would need a bloody revolution in 2024 to oust her after she removed all democratic means to depose her.
Mokbul had no say in who had to take responsibility for his mother's death. He could only testify against this politician by the name of A T M Azharul Islam, the then Secretary General (Acting) of the country's second-largest opposition party, Jamaat-e-Islami.
Mokbul's hands were tied. He did not witness the involvement of Azhar or any Bengali man in his mother's brutal death, but Hasina's forces in uniform chased him down and terrorized him into testifying that the young Mokbul saw Azhar present alongside the army during the incident.
In addition, Hasina had Mokbul testify that Azhar was involved in a mass killing in Dhappara, Rangpur.
Based on Mokbul's testimony, in 2014 a court that Hasina had set up in Dhaka to try whomever she labeled collaborators of the Pakistan army pronounced Azhar to death. After that, Azhar languished in a death row cell in Bangladesh's horrifying prison system. Now, although Hasina is gone, Azhar remains imprisoned.
Azhar is lucky, however, to survive the Hasina regime. Hasina executed six of his colleagues – all top leaders from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its ally Jamaat – between 2013 and 2016. Several others died in prison.
After Hasina fled to India – her prime backer in consolidating and retaining her authoritarian regime – on August 5, 2024, following the student-led July Revolution, Mokbul appeared on camera and recalled his experience of being forced by Hasina to be a party to the misery of a man he considers innocent.
Deeply suffering from moral and spiritual crises, Mokbul now seeks redemption – for both himself and the man his testimony almost sent to the gallows.
Others have come out and recalled to the public how Hasina instrumentalized their grievances into unjustly murdering – or attempting to murder – opposition politicians. Alliance for Witness Transparency (AWT), a US-based rights group, has so far interviewed five individuals, including Mokbul.
Ainul Haque, the first person interviewed by AWT, was hanging out at a local tea stall when he was picked up by Hasina's police officers and then forced to testify against Matiur Rahman Nizami, the then-chief of Jamaat, in a war crimes case. Nizami was later executed based on Ainul's testimony.
Ainul now claims that he barely knew Nizami back in 1971 and he did not witness Nizami involved in the events in which Hasina implicated Nizami but had to falsify his testimony due to the pressure from the state.
Mahtab Hawlader and Altaf Hawlader told AWT that they were targeted by Hasina's police to put another senior opposition leader with Jamaat, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, to death. Sanaullah, a police officer, held the Hawladers at gunpoint and threatened to dispose of them in the Buriganga River if they refused to testify against Sayedee, a wildly popular preacher and two-time member of the parliament.
Training the Howladers in what to tell the court were state minister Kamrul Islam, former top leader of Bangladesh's most influential communist student body Golam Arif Tipu; prosecutor and Hindu communal leader Rana Dasgupta; and prosecutor-turned-politician Barrister Sumon, the duo told AWT.
As if forcing them to lie were not enough, the top judge of the court, Nasim, assured the Howladers that they should not worry about lying since he was in charge of sending Sayedee to the gallows.
The Howladers' testimony made Sayedee out to be complicit in rape, murder and persecution of the Hindu minority during the 1971 civil war. That triggered Sayedee's death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment following country-wide protests condemning the death sentence.
Hasina had over a hundred pro-justice protesters massacred, prompting the opposition leader Khaleda Zia to term the brutality a genocide.
The irony of the matter is that Hasina's judges did not need to coerce these individuals to perjure themselves in the first place. Such was the law under which these trials were conducted that individuals could have been convicted based on unsubstantiated news reports and dominant caricatures of these individuals masquerading as 'facts of common knowledge.'In other words, this court was a specifically designed killing machine.
From the tragedy arise the stories of Prodip Kumar Dev and Sukhranjan Bali, two Bengali Hindu men who dared to speak truth to India and its lackey Hasina. While Bali's story has attracted the attention of rights groups, Dev's story has recently been made available to the public by AWT.
In his interview with AWT, Dev tells a story of state-sponsored kidnapping, coercion and illicit offers (of a million Bangladeshi taka, approximately US$8,500), all of which he defied on the day of his testimony against Nizami. Although Hasina presented Dev as a witness against Nizami's alleged war crimes, Dev informed the court that he had no knowledge of Nizami's wrongdoing, thereby forcing Hasina to declare Dev a hostile witness.
Although Dev's heroic efforts could not help Nizami, the leader of the country's largest Islamist outfit, escape the death penalty, his standing up against the oppressive state shattered the Indian narrative that Hasina was the friend of the Hindu and the likes of Nizami, the enemy.
Dev's bravery can be better appreciated when we look at Bali's experience and understand what Dev was up against.
Hasina charged Sayedee for the murder of Bali's brother during the civil war and enlisted Bali as a witness to the incident. When Bali refused to play ball and, instead, offered to be a witness to Sayedee's innocence, Hasina had him picked up in front of the courthouse.
Bali was later found in an Indian prison, underscoring India's complicity in judicial killings of politicians critical of Indian hegemony in South Asia and enforced disappearances in Bangladesh.
A committee set up by the interim government of Nobel laureate Yunus to investigate the allegations of enforcement disappearances during Hasina's rule has found over 3,500 cases of enforced disappearances. India was involved in many of them.
Even nearly a year after Hasina's ouster, Azhar remains in prison. Those who were executed through this judicial killing machine still remain the villains in the dominant narrative, as well as on paper.
The reason for this is that the India-sponsored nationalist history of Bangladesh has made the 1971 civil war a sensitive issue. Anyone perceived to have supported Pakistan during the civil war is automatically rendered a war criminal.
On the other hand, Bangladesh has given blanket immunity to pro-India forces for their crimes committed between March 1, 1971 and February 28, 1972. The indemnity order, put into effect by Hasina's father in 1973, prevents prosecution of the non-Bengali genocide and other crimes against humanity that pro-India forces in East Pakistan engaged in before, during and after the war that lasted from March 25, 1971, until December 16 the same year.
The famous Anthony Mascarenhas report on the atrocities of the Pakistani army, dubbed by BBC 'one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism' after it was published in The Sunday Times, tilted global public opinion against Pakistan during the civil war. The same report claimed that anti-Pakistan forces had initiated the Bihari genocide much before the Pakistan army's 'counter-genocide' began and massacred hundreds of thousands Biharis within a few weeks.
Amnesty International called for bringing to justice everyone who violated human rights during the war irrespective of their allegiance. But pro-India forces in Bangladesh responded heavily to this demand and claimed that only Pakistan was responsible for war crimes in 1971.
Although India's proxy Hasina was ousted in the July Revolution, justice for Azhar and non-Bengali victims of the long civil war, be they Bihari or Chakma, us still denied because the hegemonic Indian narrative cannot see beyond the 'good India, bad Bangladesh' dichotomy. Insofar as Azhar and other victims of the continued battle over the war's narrative are categorized as pro-Pakistani, it is difficult for any Bangladeshi government to deliver justice to them lest the pro-India forces wreak havoc in the country.
Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim has a first degree in International Relations and Global Affairs from Mahidol University, Thailand, and an MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Leeds, UK. He is currently a graduate student of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He can be reached at [e-mail]