The agonies of Bangladesh come to London

Shahbag protests in Dhaka are reflected in the demonstrations in London

• 
• Nick Cohen
• The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2013
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Three men stand in Bangladeshi national colours in Shahbag square. Photograph: Kazi Sudipto/ Demotix/Corbis

The Shahbag junction in Dhaka has become Bangladesh's Tahrir Square. Hundreds of thousands of young protesters are occupying it and raging against radical Islamists. Even sympathetic politicians cannot control the movement. The protesters damn them as appeasers, who have compromised with unconscionable men.
Theirs is a grassroots uprising for the most essential and neglected values of our age: secularism, the protection of minorities from persecution and the removal of theocratic thugs from the private lives and public arguments of 21st-century citizens
Naturally, the western media show little interest in covering the protest. The indifference is all the more telling because the Shahbag movement is a response to a crime westerners once deplored, but have almost forgotten.
The young in Dhaka have revolted over the war crimes trials of members of Jamaat-e-Islami. That useful leftwing term "clerical fascist" might have been invented to describe what they did. In 1971, the oppressed "eastern wing" of Pakistan rose against its masters to form Bangladesh. The Pakistani army responded with a campaign of mass murder and mass rape, which shocked a 20th century that thought it had seen it all. George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, the Bonos of their day, organised benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden. The murder of Hindus and Christians, the flight of refugees and the chance to weaken Pakistan pushed Indira Gandhi into one of the finest actions of her murky career. She sent the Indian army to liberate the tortured land.
The Pakistani occupiers were helped at every stage by Islamist activists. Jamaat took its inspiration from Abul Ala Maududi who has as good a claim as anyone to be the founder of political Islam. Maududi wanted a global war to establish a caliphate. The break-up of Muslim Pakistan impeded the prospect of a world revolution. To prevent this reverse, his followers formed death squads to slaughter the intellectuals, engineers, administrators and teachers who could make an independent Bangladesh work. The outcome of a belated trial of handful of Jamaat war criminals has set Bangladesh on fire.
As with popular revolts throughout history, Bangladeshi liberals are in two minds about the Shahbag demonstrations. On the one hand, they cannot fail to admire the determination of the young to state loudly and clearly that "religion-based politics had poisoned society", as Zafar Sobhan, editor of the Dhaka Tribune put it. On the other, the demonstrators are saying with equal force that they want the death penalty, that most anti-liberal of punishments, applied to the war criminals without mercy.
Do I hear you say that Bangladesh is far away and the genocide was long ago?
Not so far away. Not so long ago. And the agonies of Bangladeshi liberals are nothing in comparison to the contradictions of their British counterparts.
The conflict between the Shahbag and Jamaat has already reached London. On 9 February, local supporters of the uprising demonstrated in Altab Ali Park, a rare patch of green space off the Whitechapel Road in London's East End. They were met by Jamaatis. "They attacked our men with stones," one of the protest's organisers told me. "There were old people and women and children there, but they still attacked us."
The redoubtable organiser is undeterred. She and her fellow activists are going back to the park tomorrow for another demonstration. Her friends are worried, however. They asked me not to name her after unknown assailants murdered Ahmed Rajib Haider Shuvo, one of the leaders of the Dhaka rallies, on Friday.
Whitechapel was where socialists and Jews confronted the British Union of Fascists in clashes that leftists mythologise as a grand moment of anti-Nazi solidarity. While they still talk about the Battle of Cable Street and remember 1936, it is far from clear to me where today's British left stands in relation to modern struggles against ultra-reactionaries.
Liberal muliticulturalism contains the seeds of its own negation. It can either be liberal or multicultural but it can't be both. Multiculturalism has not meant a defence of all people's rights to practise their religions and speak their minds without suffering racial or sectarian hatred. As events have turned out, it has led to official society picking the pushiest group of "community leaders" and honouring them.
In the case of British Islam, the anointed group was Jamaat-e-Islami, even though its British members included men accused of war crimes in Bangladesh. It was as if the establishment had decided that Opus Dei represented British Catholicism or Shiv Sena represented British Hinduism or the most bigoted form of orthodoxy represented British Judaism. The scoundrel left led the way down this murky alley, as it leads the way into so many dark places. Ken Livingstone and George Galloway have backed the Jamaat-dominated East London mosque, and Islamic Forum Europe, the Jamaat front organisation that now controls local politics in Tower Hamlets.
But to concentrate on the dregs of the Labour movement is to miss the point. Whitehall has been as keen on dealing with the allies of war criminals. Many East Enders have noticed that the Metropolitan Police seems less than anxious to follow up reports of menacing "Muslim patrols" or threats to drinkers at gay bars.
The moderate Muslims at the Quilliam Foundation told me that the status Britain had given to Jamaat helped push British Bangladeshis away from social democratic politics and towards radical Islam.
The British-Asian feminist Gita Sahgal launched the Centre for Secular Space last week to combat such indulgence of theocratic obscurantism. She told me that Jamaat perverts traditional faith and she should know. Not only did she name alleged Jamaat war criminals living in Britain for Channel 4 in the 1990s, she is also Jawaharlal Nehru's great niece and a distant relative of the Indira Gandhi who sent the army into Bangladesh. I admire Sahgal and Quilliam hugely, but they are mistrusted, even hated by orthodox leftwingers. The feeling is reciprocated in spades and perhaps you can see why.
Many do not want to talk about Bangladesh massacres that moved liberal opinion to outrage in the 1970s, just as many did not want to talk about Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds in the run-up to the second Iraq war. These are politically inconvenient genocides they would rather forget.
The most bracing effect of the demonstrations in Dhaka and London is that the terror is not being forgotten and liberals are being forced to pick sides. Let us hope that they stop picking the wrong one.
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Bangladesh parliament amends war crime law to challenge sentence

Change follows 13 days of protests demanding death penalty for prominent Islamist given life sentence by war crimes tribunal

• Reuters in Dhaka
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 February 2013 16.26 GMT
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Bangladeshis attend funeral procession of blogger Rajib Haider, who had been critical of the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Photograph: Pavel Rahman/AP

Bangladesh's parliament has amended a law allowing the state to appeal against the life sentence given to an opposition leader for his role in mass killings and rape during the 1971 war for independence.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators in central Shahbag Square cheered as the assembly approved the changes on Sunday.
Protesters have gathered in central Dhaka for the past 13 days demanding the death penalty for Abdul Quader Mollah, an assistant secretary general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, for war crimes. The prominent Islamist was given a life sentence by a tribunal last month, stunning many Bangladeshis.
The amendment will "empower the tribunals to try to punish any organisations, including Jamaat-e-Islami, for committing crimes during the country's liberation war in 1971", the law minister, Shafique Ahmed, said
The government is facing growing pressure to ban Jamaat-e-Islami and groups linked to it. Ahmed told reporters the government was considering such a ban.
Lawyers said Sunday's amendment sets a timetable for the government to appeal against Mollah's sentence and secure a retrial. The previous law did not allow state prosecutors to call for a retrial except in the case of acquittals.
The Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) of the former prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia and its allies were absent from the vote, having boycotted parliamentary sessions almost since Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League, took office in 2009.
On Sunday, the BNP held a rally outside the party's central office in Dhaka, calling for the next general election, scheduled for next January, to be held under a non-party caretaker administration.
"The government is trying to use the protests over the war crime trials to divert attention from critical national issues such as our demand for election under a caretaker authority to ensure a clean and unbiased vote," the BNP's acting secretary general, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, told the rally.
Other BNP leaders urged the demonstrators at Shahbag to speak out against "corruption, politicisation of the administration ahead of the polls and tampering the judiciary to persecute rivals".
Hasina and Khaleda have rotated as prime minister of Bangladesh since 1991 and their unending enmity has led to them being described as the "Battling Begums".
The two are likely to face off again in the next polls, party officials said.
The BNP also accuses Hasina of using the war crimes tribunal as a weapon against her opponents. She denies the accusation.
In its first verdict last month, the tribunal sentenced a former Jamaat leader, Abul Kamal Azad, to death in absentia for killing, murder and torture.
Eight other Jamaat leaders, including its current and former chiefs, are being tried by the war crimes court that Hasina set up in 2010 to investigate abuses during the 1971 conflict. Three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped.
Jamaat activists have called a country-wide strike for Monday, but demonstrators and many shopkeepers have pledged to resist any attempt to enforce such a stoppage.
The authorities deployed paramilitary soldiers in the capital on Sunday evening trying to prevent violence during and ahead of the strike.