Amnesty International is perfectly within its rights and mandate to proffer its opinion as to the credibility of the war crimes trials and other instances that fall within its ambit, such as recent restrictions on freedom of expression in Bangladesh.
But to criticise the government for failing to prosecute war crimes committed by pro-independence forces in 1971 is out of order and only serves to buttress the government’s claims that Amnesty just has it in for them.
No one is denying that such atrocities took place. However, to draw any equivalency between the two sides is willful blindness on the part of Amnesty, and to raise the issue in the context of the ongoing trials is a deliberate provocation that smacks of bad faith.
There is a world of difference between isolated human rights violations committed during a conflict and those which were committed with the full power of an occupying army behind the perpetrators and committed as a stratagem of war, intended to break resistance and sow terror.
The war crimes trials may have their imperfections, but the fact that they have not put on trial pro-independence perpetrators is not one of them. To suggest that the Bangladesh government has a duty to try pro-independence war crimes is to hold the process to an impossible and unprecedented standard.
In any event, whether pro-independence forces are put on trial or not has zero bearing on the cases at bar, and for Amnesty to raise the issue in the context of the ongoing trials does nothing more than to undercut its own credibility and lend credence to the view that it is not an honest broker on the subject.
No one has ever been put on trial for the fire-bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII to point out only the two most obvious instances.
To hold Bangladesh to a higher standard for its war crimes trials and to denigrate the process for not doing so is unacceptable and makes it hard to take Amnesty’s other critiques seriously.
If Amnesty wishes to be taken seriously on the war crimes trials, it needs to be far more even-handed in its approach. Its latest comments suggest that this is far from the case.