As the next election rings a bell and cashing in the ongoing anti-government movement, Jamaat-e-Islami has started flexing muscles, with attacks made right on the target.
The witnesses in war crimes cases are at the top of the party’s hit list, apparently for testifying at the International Crimes Tribunal against the crimes committed by its front leaders during the country’s 1971 Liberation War.
In the judgements sentencing six Jamaat leaders to death and two others to different terms in prison, the two tribunals observed that Jamaat had been involved in war crimes as a political party. Jamaat lost its party registration couple of months ago for having provisions in its party charter contrary to the constitution.
“Where the hell is that son of a bitch! We will have his head. Do not you [victim] want to hang Sayedee? We will hang you,” Rina Begum quoted one of the attackers who vandalised her house on October 28. Over 200 activists of Jamaat and BNP went on a rampage in their house in broad daylight.
She is the wife of Mahbubul Alam Hawlader, plaintiff of a case and key witness against Jamaat leader Delawar Hossain Sayedee, who was sentenced to death on February 28. To save life, Mahbub took shelter in an under-construction floor while his wife Rina and their child at a dark corner.
The Dhaka Tribune reporter stayed in Pirojpur for a week to understand the experience the witnesses were going though in an area where Sayedee hails from and had been elected a lawmaker twice.
One of the witnesses went on to identify Pirojpur as “mini Pakistan,” given that Jamaat-BNP constituted almost three fourths of the area.
Many of the witnesses now spend their nights sleepless while some seek hideouts in the nights, in apprehension of an attempt on their lives. Some are jobless and their children living a life of fear, abandoned by their friends.
One of the prosecution witnesses called the reporter from Pirojpur on Sunday evening. His voice was trembling in fear as he talked about the attack that came in the day’s wee hours on another witness.
He said a group of Jamaat-Shibir cadres had a discussion at a shop nearby his house in Pirojpur town around 7:30pm. The shopkeeper alerted the witness as he overheard his name being part of the discussion.
Only hours later came the attack on Golam Mostafa, identified as a brave witness against Sayedee even by the district’s police superintendent.
The brave Mostafa and his family were sleeping when the attack was made around 3am on Sunday. Mostafa was hacked in the head. His son Hafizur Rahman recognised two of the three attackers as Jamaat-BNP activists.
Prosecutor Syed Haider Ali said they were concerned about the rise of attacks on the witnesses.
The wife of Shukharanjan Bali, a prosecution witness who allegedly turned hostile, occasionally hides at her sister’s house located in a remote area of Pirojpur. In her Umdepur residence, lives her only daughter Monika Mandal and her husband, almost abandoned by their neighbours.
An elderly Hindu said: “We are minorities. We are naturally scared. Now is the time of blockade. We do not know what awaits us in the future.”
The question of security is not limited to the issues of attacks or social reprisals, but also livelihood of the witnesses.
Ashish Mandal of Mandal Para has lost his business to his Jamaat-linked partner for being a witness against Sayedee. Though he had not turned up at the tribunal to testify, he would not get his business back.
He cannot even find a buyer for his land for some cash. He owes the house tutor of his children six months’ salary. “I need a job so badly,” said Ashish.
Some do not care given that all of this hardships and sufferings were about ensuring justice against Sayedee, better known as Delu Razakar in the area. Such a man is Manik Poshari, who receives threats consistently. “They [Hindus] will be wiped out by their generations,” he said.
Shilpi Molongi, sister-in-law of Sukharanjan Bali, shares the same fear. “As Sayedee has not been executed, we cannot say justice is delivered. We will be wiped off the earth by our generations now.”
Interestingly, the witnesses are apparently held in contempt even by many local AL activists and supporters. Though the attack on Mahbub’s house lasted for almost an hour in broad daylight, no resistance was put up by the local AL.
Rather, the police deployed in front of their houses or nearby had been withdrawn. The attack on Mahbub came only a week after the police protection had been withdrawn. Same was the case for Mostafa too.
Police withdrawal coincided with the countrywide intermittent blockades enforced by the BNP-Jamaat opposition alliance.
The war crimes trial began after the AL-led grand alliance assumed power winning the 2008 elections by a huge margin, apparently on its electoral pledge to try the war criminals.
The call for a witness protection law has long been unheard. The law ministry prepared a draft law titled “Witness Protection Act 2011” and sent it to the home ministry couple of years back. But since then, it had been lying idle with home ministry.