No cause, however noble, can justify the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: Forty-two years is a long time: victims of Bangladesh’s war of liberation, which resulted in mass killings, have been waiting for justice all this time. Abdul Quadir Molla, president of the Islami Chhatra Sangha, the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami unit at Dhaka University in 1971, nicknamed the ‘Butcher of Mirpur’ for his role in the killings of hundreds of intellectuals, professors and teachers of Dhaka University, was hanged on December 12. His appeal against the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) was rejected by the Bangladeshi Supreme Court. Molla was a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami at the time of his arrest and trial in 2010 and is the first person convicted by the ICT to be executed.
Many in Pakistan will view this hanging as the death of someone who worked to keep Pakistan a united country. This may be the case but genocide is genocide whether it is in the name of religion, nationalism or ethnicity. No cause, however noble, can justify the indiscriminate killing of civilians. That said, the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh will try to gain political mileage by declaring the executed leader as a martyr and will resort to violence (in fact, this had already happened at the time of writing this). The execution is also likely to intensify polarisation in the country but this may be the price that it has to pay if it wants to punish those who killed hundreds of its innocent citizens.
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2013.
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