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Jamaat Leader Gave Fatwa Authorising raping Hindu women

Sayedee gave fatwa ‘legalising war booty including women’

The chief prosecutor on Monday told the International Crimes Tribunal that accused Delwar Hossain Sayedee during the liberation war had pronounced ‘fatwa’ (Islamic religious edict) legalising war booty, including goods, chattels and women, captured from the ‘enemies’ terming those ‘mal-e-ganimat (war boaty),’ reports UNB.

Closing the opening statement, chief prosecutor Golam Arif Tipu said accused Sayedee as an armed Razakar commander was a party to it.

People saw Sayedee wearing white panjabi tucked with his lungi like loin cloth carrying on his head and hands the war booty of goods and chattels, the chief prosecutor said, adding that the war booty were dumped in his father-in-law’s house.

About the captured women during the war of Liberation especially of the Hindu community, the chief prosecutor said the women war booty were kept reserved to be sexually enjoyed by the Pakistan occupation forces at Parerhat makeshift camp in Pirojpur.

At one stage, Sayedee had developed illicit relationship with a young girl, Bhanu Saha, daughter of Bipod Saha at Parerhat and regularly went to her house to have sex with her under duress, the chief prosecutor said.

The chief prosecutor further stated that ravished Bhanu left for India from her motherland and never returned to Bangladesh. Later, Bhanu got married there and now leads a family life, he added.

The chief prosecutor also stated that after the emergence of Bangladesh, Sayedee, had gone into hiding for long and reappeared at his locality after one-and-half-decades in 1986. Later, Sayedee started lecturing on religious subjects as ‘fake’ maulana, he said.

Earlier, the chief prosecutor, in a nutshell, gave horrendous descriptions of atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistan Army and its cohorts killing innocent freedom-loving people, including then Pirojpur Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO) Fayezur Rahman Ahmed, father of writer-brothers Humayun Ahmed and Zafar Iqbal, SDO-in charge Abdur Razzaq and district magistrate Saif Mizanur Rahman. They were captured from their workplaces and later gunned down. Their bodies were thrown into the Baleshwar River.

Sayedee had also helped recruit Razakars, an auxiliary force of the occupation army, and invited the army by establishing makeshift camps in Pirojpur for committing crimes against humanity, the chief prosecutor mentioned.

Nayeb-e-ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami Sayedee (71), was charged with crimes against humanity, including genocide, rape, arson attacks, looting, and forcibly converting Hindus into Muslims during the liberation war in collaboration with the Pakistani occupation forces. The charges fall under section 3 (2) and its sub-sections of the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act 1973.

The recording of evidence of the prosecution witnesses before the tribunal will start on December 7.

Courtesy » The Financial Express


Jamaat on trial

by Farooq Sulehria


Delawar Hossain Sayedee, leader of the Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, has been indicted with 20 counts, including 3,000 killings, rape and arson, during Bangladesh’s nine-month-long war of liberation.

If proven guilty, Sayedee could face the death sentence. He has denied all charges against him. Sayedee will now be tried by the International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic tribunal with no United Nations role, which was set up last year to investigate war crimes in 1971. The trial begins on Oct 30.

While the role of the Pakistani military has drawn some media criticism, the Jamaat’s role in East Pakistan in 1971 has gone largely unnoticed. …..

….. The Jamaat later on began to pay lip service to East Pakistanis’ concerns, like the language issue, or their under-representation in the military.

However, as the Jamaat saw it, the real problem was East Pakistan’s Hindus, who dominated the trade, and the communists. Maulana Maudoodi urged the ulema to rid the East Pakistani masses of what he called their ignorance of Islam, because “the influence of Hindu culture over their language, dress, habits and way of thinking is so big that they have lost all sense of its being an extraneous element in their life.”

The problem, so to say, was not exploitation at the hands of West Pakistan but what the Jamaat considered East Pakistan’s lack of Islamisation.

The Jamaat contended that Bengali literature was pervaded by Hindu ideas since Tagore was the major influence on it, while the similes and proverbs of Bengali reflected Hindu thought and social way of life. Besides, Bengali literature lacked what the Jamaat called Islamic politics, economics and way of life. ….

…. The pattern in both countries has been similar. In Bangladesh the Jamaat allied itself with the military junta when Gen Ziaur Rehman came to power. Gen Zia, like his Pakistani namesake and counterpart, began to revise history and textbooks. His purpose was to minimise the role played by Sheikh Mujib in the movement and project his own imagined role in it. A revision of history equally suited the Jamaat.

The Awami League and the left forces, however, kept campaigning for a trial regarding atrocities in the 1971 war. In the last general elections, such a trial became an election issue. The Jamaat stood exposed and lost the elections.

A similar process is necessary everywhere including Pakistan to correct distortions of history. A ‘Truth Commission’ investigating not just the 1971 war but all the wars including the “Afghan jihad” and the “War on Terror”, perhaps?

To read complete article » The News