Shahiduzzaman

The killers of the intellectuals slain toward the end of the war of independence in 1971 have not been tried yet although the requisite law was enacted, special tribunals were formed and special prosecutors were appointed. The families of the martyred intellectuals still wait with the faint hope that justice will be done even though the records remain untraceable.
   After the promulgation of the Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order 1972, widely known as the collaborators order, on January 24, 1972, the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman set up 73 special tribunals, including 11 in Dhaka, to try Razakar, Al-Badr and Al-Shams forces, defined as collaborators in the order.
   The families of many martyred intellectuals filed cases under the order. As of March 28, 1972, 42 cases were filed, according to an announcement of the police then. The number kept rising till November 1973, ‘but never actually reached 100 although thousands of cases were filed under the order’, said Abdul Khaleque, then home secretary and also inspector general of police, when talking to New Age on December 7, 2005.
   No specific information on the fate of the cases could be found as the old files and police records were untraceable. Officials of the home ministry, Criminal Investigation Department, Ramna Police Station, district and sessions judge’s court, chief metropolitan magistrate’s court and the deputy commissioner’s office fear the files and the records may have gone missing.
   Whatever information could be gathered from the families of the martyred intellectuals, the lawyers of the cases and the newspapers of those days suggests that only six cases have so far been disposed of and five persons convicted. The trials started in June 1972 before a special tribunal with the case of Abul Kalam Azad, a slain professor at the Institute of Advanced Science and Technology Teaching. The charge sheet in the case was submitted on June 13, 1972.
   However, the verdict the tribunal delivered first, on July 1, 1972, concerned the abduction and murder case of Shahidulla Kaiser. Abdul Khaleq of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison.
   ‘Khaleq was sentenced to seven years in prison as he was convicted on the charge of abduction only,’ said Khandker Mahbub Hossain, chief prosecutor of the cases under the collaborators order, when talking to New Age on December 6, 2005. ‘We failed to prove the murder charge because of the lack of witness and evidence.’
   The verdict in the Azad murder case came on October 5, 1972 with the tribunal sentencing Maqbul, Ayub Ali and Zubayer of Al-Badr to death for the abduction and murder of the academic. The High Court later acquitted Maqbul and Zubayer and sentenced Ayub to imprisonment for three years for abduction only, said Abdur Rezak Khan, then special public prosecutor and now the additional attorney general.
   The tribunal also convicted Al-Badr member Khalil for abducting and killing journalist Sirajuddin Hossain and sentenced him to life-term imprisonment, said Mahbub.
   No information on conviction in any other case for murders of the intellectuals has so far been received.
   In two more cases, however, governor Abdul Malek and his cabinet colleague Jasimuddin Ahmed were sentenced to life-term imprisonment for their involvement in the conspiracy and execution of the selective killing of the martyred intellectuals.
   Shyamali Nasreen Chowdhury, wife of the slain Dr Abdul Alim Chowdhury, also filed a case against Maulana Mannan, later a minister in HM Ershad’s cabinet.
   ‘When I came to the court on the third day of the hearing, I came to know that the case had been dismissed,’ she told New Age. She still does not know why the case was dismissed.
   The collaborators order was, meanwhile, amended three times in 1972, narrowing the application of the order to the collaborators — disheartening and discouraging the victims of the collaboration in general, and the families of the martyred intellectuals in particular.
   The process of trial and conviction was, however, impeded by a general amnesty for the collaborators, declared by the then prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, on November 30, 1973. The declaration came despite his repeated expression of determination about the trial of the collaborators, observed Mahbub and Rezak.
   Under the general amnesty, about 26,000 out of the 35,000 people held or convicted under the collaborators act were released. While the amnesty did not apply to those charged with murder, rape or arson, most of the collaboration cases, especially those of the bigwigs, involved abduction and other general collaboration charges, and hence the accused were released. A large number of persons charged with murder, rape or arson, including prominent collaborators, were also released.
   After the general amnesty, no case was filed under the Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunal) Order, said Mahbub and Khaleq.
   Mahbub said that he was not consulted before the announcement of amnesty although he was the chief prosecutor. Most of the cases, including that of Dr Alim Chowdhury’s abduction that was filed by his wife, were also rejected without any consultation with him, he said.
   Terming the whole issue a conspiracy, Mahbub, an expert in criminal law, observed that the collaborators order was defective in the first place, containing a wide definition of collaborator that included almost all the people who had been in the country during the war but had not directly joined the war.
   A meeting, presided over by Khondokar Mushtaq Ahmed, drafted the order ignoring the opinions of a number of criminal law experts, he said.
   The then home secretary, Abdul Khaleque, also expressed similar views saying the order was made bypassing the draft prepared by the Mujib Nagar government in Kolkata, in which the formation of an investigation commission, comprising a judge, a secretary, criminal law experts and intelligence officials, for investigation for collaboration charges had been suggested.
   The collaborators order was finally revoked on December 31, 1975 and almost all of the collaborators convicted were released in the early days of the regime of Ziaur Rahman, burying the process of the trial of the collaborators.