Bangladesh lawyer demands punishment for convicted war criminals of 1971
Speakers from different sectors with a common conviction to erase Jamaat-e-Islami party came together at a forum here on Tuesday.
They demanded punishment for those who have been convicted in the trial of war criminals of 1971 and said the punishment should not be reviewed under any circumstances and also presidential mercy must not be rewarded.
"We want to say it very strongly that there should be no place of any kind of pardon for those convicts (war of crimes) who are being awarded punishment and we also need to see that if we can do something so that the Presidential mercy can also be done away with, especially for these convicts," said prosecutor of war crimes tribunal, lawyer Tureen Afroz.
Afroz was addressing the 'forum for secular Bangladesh and trial of war criminals of 1971' organised on the occasion of the 42nd year of Bangladesh's Constitution.
Bangladesh's Supreme Court earlier on Monday upheld the death penalty for an Islamist leader over atrocities committed during the country's war of independence from Pakistan more than four decades ago.
In May last year, a special war crimes tribunal found Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, 62, an assistant secretary general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, guilty of genocide and torture of unarmed civilians during the 1971 war.
The tribunals have delivered death sentences for two Jamaat leaders, including its party chief and former minister, Motiur Rahman Nizami, over the past week.
Violent protests over the trials are one of the main challenges facing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who opened an inquiry into war crimes in 2010.
Defence lawyers said they would file a petition for a review but state prosecutors said a review was not an option.
Meanwhile, during his address to the gathering at the seminar, journalist and human rights activist Shahriar Kabir emphasised that until and unless Jamaat-e-Islami is rooted out from Bangladesh, the country will never be able to fulfill its dream of the dead soldiers who fought the war of liberation.
"If we care about all these, then we will not be able to say that we fought for Bangladesh Liberation War. If we had listened to what America had said, then Bangladesh would not have achieved freedom in 1971. If we would have listened to what Saudi Arabia and the gulf countries had said, then Bangladesh would never have been liberated," said Kabir.
"In 1971, with whatever conviction we had fought the Liberation War, with whatever conviction we accepted the constitution in 1972, we have to move back to the same conviction if we have to protect Bangladesh and if we would like to fulfill the dreams of 30,00,000 fallen soldiers," he added.
In September, the Supreme Court commuted to life imprisonment a death sentence for another top Islamist leader, Delawar Hossain Sayedee, convicted for similar crimes.
An Islamist politician was hanged in December, the first war crimes execution in Bangladesh, after the Supreme Court overturned a life sentence imposed by the tribunals.
The tribunals have angered Islamists who call them a politically motivated bid to persecute the leadership of Jamaat and weaken the opposition.
More than 200 people were killed in clashes last year, most of them Islamist party activists and members of security forces.
International human rights groups say the tribunal's procedures fall short of international standards. The government denies such charges.
What was East Pakistan at the end of British rule in 1947 broke away into independent Bangladesh in 1971 after a war between Bangladeshi nationalists, backed by India, and Pakistani forces. About three million people were killed in the war.
Some factions in Bangladesh, including the Jamaat, opposed the break with Pakistan, but the party denies accusations that its leaders committed murder, rape and torture.