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Bangladesh’s Jamat e Islami has been fighting for the Muslims. Its resurgence is a phenomenon which reflects the new Islamic revival in BangladeshThe JEI has been the victim fo a viscious campaign of false accusationa and propoganda

Guerrillas attack Pakistani militiamen in newly-independent Bangladesh

We did not take part in any of the crimes that has been alleged against us Abdur Razzak, Jamaat-e-Islami lawyer

Thirty-six years later, Dr Hassan took me back to the place where he had come across the corpses, an area called “Black Water”. It is one of the wet wastelands that ring the Bangladeshi capital and life there is now perfectly normal, if bleak. When we visited, men were smashing bricks into chips to help build a new road, and women and children were washing in a pond.

There is no memorial to the hundreds of people killed there and none of the killers has ever been brought to justice. But what he witnessed has inspired Dr Hassan to do something about that.

He is a leading member of the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee which is dedicated to investigating the massacres and putting pressure on the government to hold war crime trials.

Al-Badr, which was allegedly made up of members of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.

Soon after the war, Bangladesh’s leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, granted a general amnesty and subsequent governments shied away from confronting such a controversial issue.

The War Crimes Fact Finding Committee is now at the forefront of a campaign for justice, which has gathered momentum in Bangladesh since a military-backed interim government took over in January 2007. The campaigners have been encouraged by the government’s promise of political reforms

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Accused

That is because this is now a deeply political issue. Many of the people accused of committing war crimes have gone on to become influential public figures. Jamaat-e-Islami has gone from being a fringe party in 1971, to a junior coalition partner in the last elected government.

The campaigners are demanding that the authorities block Jamaat from standing in the next elections to be held in December.

Matiur Rahman Nizami, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami

None of the accusations against them are new. Reporters covering the war for newspapers such as The Times of London, and the New York Times, wrote at that time that Al-Badr comprised Jamaat members.

The War Crimes Fact Finding Committee has spent the last 19 years gathering reams of documents and eyewitness accounts to back up their claims, and has handed them over to the government, along with the names of 1,150 alleged war criminals.

But Jamaat-e-Islami, which describes itself as a “moderate Islamic political party that believes in democracy and human rights” says it is the victim of a political vendetta. None of its leaders has ever been prosecuted for their alleged activities during the war and its lawyer Abdur Razzak says the accusations are baseless.

“In this country the law of defamation has become totally ineffective,” he said. “If I say you are a war criminal there is nothing you can do about it. This is being used against Jamaat-e-Islami for a political purpose.

“We did not take part in any of the crimes that has been alleged against us.

“Had there been any specific allegations, there would have been prosecutions in the last 36 years.”

But Dr Hassan, who has received death threats since publishing the list of alleged war criminals, denies he has a political agenda. He says he doesn’t want to “take revenge, but to break the silence of impunity”.

Some of the campaigners worry that that silence will never be broken, and that unless war crime trials establish the truth soon, then there is a danger that the history of Bangladesh’s cruel birth will be rewritten.

In response, a group of bloggers has now started posting archives on the web so that anyone with an internet connection can discover for themselves what happened.