The government talks of banning Jamaat and the opposition is becoming more aggressively Islamist
Mar. 23.─ In 1961 Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and put him on trial for crimes committed 20 years earlier. Eichmann had been secretary at the Nazis' Wannsee conference that led to the Holocaust. His trial in Jerusalem was a model of meticulous process. The prosecutor was Israel's attorney-general; the defence lawyer, a leading German attorney; the proceedings were broadcast. They were everything the Holocaust was not: open, subject to evidence and challenge, and legal.
Now consider the trials under way at the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. There too, men are being tried for dreadful crimes committed many years ago, in this case in 1971, during Bangladesh's war of independence from Pakistan. The defendants have been accused of genocide, mass murder, mass rape and attempting to exterminate whole groups of people. But their trials have fallen a long way short of Israel's model of due process.
The government has interfered in the court's deliberations. Public discussion of the proceedings has been restricted. The number of defence witnesses was curtailed. One was even kidnapped on the steps of the court. In one case, the presiding judge resigned and the death sentence was handed down by three men who had not heard all the witnesses. In another, the defendant was represented by a lawyer who did not have nearly enough time to prepare a case. That also ended in a death sentence. These are profound judicial failings, falling short not only of the standards of the Eichmann trial but also of the requirements of Bangladeshi law. They contradict repeated government assurances that the trials would be models of judicial process.
The ostensible and laudable aim of these trials was to help Bangladesh come to terms with its past by bringing to justice those responsible for the crimes that marred the nation's birth. By this measure, the trials have been an utter failure. Because most of the accused are linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist group allied to the main opposition party, the court process has become enmeshed within the country's internecine politics ...