Jamaat should stand down

Jamaat's insistence to remain in the government's negotiating team will frustrate the expectation of the nation to bring to an end multiple crises now being faced by Bangladesh. No responsible political party, least of all an Islamist party with transnational connections, has the moral right to keep a nation hostage indefinitely to political and economic uncertainty.

Jamaat should be reminded that one of the reasons that its leaders could not be tried for genocidal acts in 1971 was because the Genocide Convention which came into force as international law in 1951 was ratified by only two of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and it was not until after the last of the five permanent members ratified the treaty in 1988 and the Cold War came to an end, that the international law on the crime of genocide began.

As such, an international tribunal never investigated allegations of genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Had it not been so, then Jamaat could have found itself on the dock along with Slobodan Milosevic and Rwandan war criminals.

Christopher Hitchens in his book The Trials of Henry Kissinger used the term "genocide" as appropriate for the war crimes committed in Bangladesh in 1971 and castigated Henry Kissinger for downplaying the aspirations of the Bengali nation for independence. Susan Brown Miller and Pierre Stephen and Robert Payne in their books Massacre and Against Our Will and the Archer Blood telegrams to the US State Department (now declassified) have documented the genocidal acts by the occupation army and Jamaat's anti-liberation wings: namely Razakars, Al-Badr, Al- Shams, etc.

If the worry of the international community is to safeguard its values and its way of life against the onslaught by Islamic fundamentalists' inflexible and nihilistic war of attrition, then care should be taken of Jamaat's politics in Bangladesh.

One can argue that Jamaat's representation in the parliament has been through democratic elections and its inclusion in the government is a prerogative of the parties which won the elections; but then the world, and no less the Islamic world, with intermittent democracy, should be made aware of the so-called Islamic Free Election Trap in which the fundamentalists use democratic means to get to power only to abolish democratic practices through legislation.

Fusion of military and spiritual authority and Quranic literalism as opposed to the concept of the separation of the Church and the State is intrinsic to Jamaat's political philosophy. Problem with Islamic political parties like Jamaat in Bangladesh is "the persistence of ambiguity" suffered by Islamists almost everywhere.

Marina Ottaway and others define this ambiguity as "tensions remaining between the old goals of creating Islamic states and enacting uncompromising versions of the Sharia and the new goal of becoming influential players in a pluralistic, democratic system."

Jamaat's spiritual Guru Maulana Maududi described the movement's purpose "to initiate the deen in the form of a movement so that religiosity does not become static in our personal lives, but we struggle to implement this deen and also try to crush those forces that are against its implementation."

On another occasion, Maulana Maududi declared "we take a person in Jamaat when he understands the meaning on Kalima-e-Tayyiba and makes it mandatory that he fulfills the minimum criteria of Islam."

Evidently Jamaat's philosophy does not allow inclusiveness of other religions or democratic norms. This partly explains Jamaat's initial opposition to the Muslim League's demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims in British India, and its opposition to Bangladesh liberation movement can be seen from Jamaat's perspective as dismemberment of a Muslim state caused by the machination of a Hindu India. That the occupying Pakistani army was brutalizing Bengali Muslims (along with Hindus) was seen as "collateral damage" that must be borne if the Bengali Muslims were to be freed from the contagion of Hindu influence.

Jamaat's current acceptance of democratic pluralism and female leadership in the stewardship of the country is tactical and was undertaken when Jamaat was convinced of the irreversibility of the existence of Bangladesh as a sovereign and independent state.

The character of Jamaat-e-Islami is not only apocalyptic, it is nihilistic. The confessional statements made by the terrorists relating to terrorism committed on August 17 have proved unambiguously their connection with Jamaat or its student wing at some point during their political career.

Many of these terrorists were trained by Pakistan Intelligence and the CIA through President Zia-ul-Huq of Pakistan to fight the Soviet invasion resulting in the placement of brutal Taliban regime that swore to forsake modernity in favor of a return to a sacred past with disastrous consequences for Afghanistan and beyond.

Effectively Taliban supported Al-Qaida attacks on the US mainland have practically defined the dawning of a new era in world politics and placed Islamist extremism at the centre stage of international political conversation.

One suspects that the Western psyche, nourished by centuries of opulence may not be adept to detect the serpentine and subterranean Eastern way of thinking not borne out of moral vacuity but resultant of interminable struggle with poverty. A case in point could be the recent advice given by the EU ambassadors that it is not important with whom the 14 party combine conducts the political dialogue but that dialogue has to take place to break the current impasse.

While the advice is well intentioned, its simplicity beguiles the Bangladeshi mind. It is difficult to accord further legitimacy to the governance of the country to a group which reluctantly accepted the emergence of Bangladesh but may very well be behind the Islamist terrorism in the country. Perhaps the Europeans, more than others, are acutely aware of the fact that religion has been often used to justify violation of human rights by postponing temporal justice to divine judgment.

In sum, the problems faced by Bangladesh today, though political in nature, have blockaded our economic growth and progress to a knowledge-based society so essential to exist in the 21st century.

In order to encourage a process to arrive at an overlapping consensus, avoidable obduracy on inclusion of political elements -- about which a large number of Bangladeshis holding a variety of socially embedded, reasonable, but widely divergent views, have serious reservation -- should be avoided.

One hopes that good sense will prevail on the authorities to positively consider and implement the proposals made by the opposition combine which are essentially meant to create a level playing field for all political parties in the next general elections.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.