This is a good piece by Garga Chatterjee about the attempt to rehabilitate Ghulam Azam. He is absolutely right that Islamic groups are trying to rebrand him into a wise avuncular religious figure (see for example this terrible article in Huffington Post: huffingtonpost.co.uk/yasmin-khatun/ghulam-azam_b_6052544.html), when he should be known primarily for his role in 1971, as head of the Jamaat, supporting the Pakistan military, and involvement in setting up the Al Badr etc. However, and this is a small point in an important piece, I do take some issue with Gargas reference to the responsibility that he seems to place on the role of international human rights organisations in creating “victims” out of mass murderers. Issues of fair trial are one of the staple day to day concerns of international human rights organizations, and they criticize court processes in many different parts of the world all the time. (In fact often the HR organisation criticising the trial might have initially reported and investigated the crimes, but when the trial takes place, they are the first to seek certain standards). Inevitably in that process, if the HR organisations do criticse the trial process, the accused (even when they are clearly guilty) may come across as victims of that process. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the criticism - but if that is the case, the responsibility must surely principally lie with those responsible for the unfair trial process, rather than the HR organisations who are simply doing their job and pointing out the concerns that they have. Of course, it is quite possible that the HR organisations get things wrong, but that is a different matter for another day. dhakatribune/op-ed/2014/nov/12/who-was-ghulam-azam#sthash.azntowLn.dpuf
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 06:09:25 +0000
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