List of 1971 Bangladesh war “traitors” in the offing
August 9th, 2020 at 10:54 pm
Special Correspondent ;
Dhaka – A list of 1971 Bangladesh war “traitors” is in the offing and a panel of parliament members have been entrusted to do the job, officials here said Sunday.
The “traitors” are those who collaborated with the Pakistani Army during the war in carrying out one of the worst genocides in human history.
The parliamentary standing committee on the Ministry of Liberation Affairs assigned six of its members to prepare the list and publish it as well.
A number of political parties, including the fundamentalist Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party, opposed the 1971 struggle for independence and helped the Pakistani army kill at least three million people and rape 250,000 women.
People from different walks of life demanded a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami party that opposed creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – Photo by Kanak Hyder
The Islamic party had mobilized its leaders and activists to militia groups calls Razakar, Al-Badr and Al-Shams among others.
The parliamentary panel was formed eight months after the ministry drew censures when a flawed list of the collaborators was published in December last year.
The list included many freedom fighters as collaborators of the Pakistanis prompting the ruling Awami League party, which under Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman fought for freedom, to protest against the faulty list. The minister in charge AKM Mozammel Haque apologized.
Former shipping minister Shahjahan Khan, MP, also the chairman of the standing committee, will lead the new six-member panel to list the “traitors”.
The panel will take help of all the commanders of the freedom fighters across Bangladesh to prepare the list, the committee chairman said after a meeting at the National Parliament building.
The committee has however no specific timeline to finish its work.
Bangladesh prosecuted leading figures of the Jamaat-e-Islami party for the crimes against humanity committed during the war, but a long-pending public demand to publish the list of the collaborators remained unresolved for a long time.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took the initiative to prosecute the collaborators in 2010. The process was called off after the assassination of Bangabandhu Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh Hasina’s father, in 1975 along with most of his family in a military putsch and had started under his Awami League government.
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