Bangladesh arrested an Islamist leader last Wednesday on charges of war crimes during the country's 1971 liberation struggle against Pakistan, lawyers said.
Ghulam Azam, 89, a former head of opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party, has been accused of creating and leading pro-Pakistan militias which carried out many murders and rapes during the nine-month war.
"He has been arrested after the International Crimes Tribunal rejected his (anticipatory) bail petition," said state prosecutor Syed Haider Ali. "He was the mastermind of all crimes against humanity during 1971."
Azam is the sixth and the most high profile Islamist to have been arrested since the nation's secular government set up the tribunal in 2010 to try suspects. He faces 62 counts of crimes against humanity.
Two senior members from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party are also facing war crime charges.
Both parties have dismissed the court as a government "show trial", while the New York-based group Human Rights Watch has said legal procedures used by the tribunal fall short of international standards.
Azam's lawyer Abdur Razzak slammed the arrest, which came after he was called to the tribunal.
"We don't know yet the charges against him, the order was not correct. He is also very old. Still, our bail petition was rejected," said Razzak.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which was called East Pakistan until 1971, has struggled to come to terms with its violent birth.
The current government says up to three million people were killed in the war, many murdered by locals collaborating with Pakistani forces.
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Atrocities can have no statute of limitations. Otherwise perpetrators imagine they can commit their outrages with impunity -- that they are beyond the reach of Humanity's morality and fundamental human rights standards. Therefore the age and frailty of a perpetrator cannot be invoked to excuse her/him from prosecution or inquest.
There are some valid questions about the prosecutions described in this article being properly conducted. That is another set of issues that needs to be resolved.
Why is the situation so bad? Many reasons. What has the role of US administrations and politicians been in this disgraceful reality?
One of the most damaging blows to human rights accountability and justice in our lifetimes was the withdrawal of the US from the International Criminal Court and its implementing Rome Treaty. President William Clinton and his administration's State Department signed the Rome treaty and pledged US cooperation and support for the International Criminal Court. However under Bush regime machinations the treaty and the court were demonized as a supposed "threat to US combat troops" and a "traitorous" compromise of US sovereignty. US legislators to challenge these twisted lies, even US Democratic Party Senate and House members remained cowed and silent. In the end, the Bush regime actually "UN-Signed" the Rome treaty, and further used threats of aid withdrawal and economic isolation to coerce dozens of other governments to guarantee that they would never support or cooperate with any International Criminal Court investigation or prosecution of any US official or soldier. This certainly was welcome news for serial atrocitaires like Rumsfeld and Cheney and their subordinate torturers and murderers. As a result the ICC was gutted, and remains a pale shell of what it was intended and might have been, and millions of dis-informed US citizens and voters believe that international human rights enforcement is some Satanic conspiracy to destroy US nationhood, and that patriotism requires US war criminals to be exempted from global Humanitarian law.
This shameful and ugly action was orchestrated and carried out by the handlers and operatives who surrounded and sustained George W. Bush: then-senator Jesse Helms, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, their crazed and hatefullhy warmongering ambassador to the UN John Bolton, and hundreds of lesser, more obscure accomplices and abettors, along with hard-line rightist propagandists who fed their lies to the public at large (Fox News and many lessser mouthpieces).
However it could never have occurred without decades of public mis-education and a jingoistic political culture of American exceptionalism and militarism. Our entire electorate, including mainstream journalists, local politicians and power-brokers, rightist educators and even clergy share blame for that underlying foundation of evil.
This intimidation and abandonment of Human Rights enforcement -- and the unGodly combination of malice, deceit and cowardice that brought it about -- demonstrate what a pathetic travesty of democracy currently exists in the US.
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