Not guilty.
Innocent, but executed.
Guilty, but not executed.
The papers here and in Bangladesh were abuzz with the court proceedings of July. My facebook timeline is lit up with parallel discussions, Zimmerman and Ghulam Azam. My Bangladeshi friends know the name Zimmerman, but my American friends have no idea who Ghulam Azam is.
Here in the US, the broken lives, the anger, the pain is real. However, the jury has spoken. The verdict has been delivered.
There, the atrocities will be long remembered. The crimes against humanity that snuffed out so many bright lights may never be redressed. The judges have spoken.
So what’s left?
Questions.
On February 26, as the causes and the reach of fate swirled around Trevor Martin, a 17-year-old high school student. Trevor was staying temporarily in a “gated community”, and the neighbourhood watch coordinator, George Zimmerman, didn’t recognise the young man. Although Martin was not doing anything wrong, Zimmerman thought the youth’s movements were suspicious. He called the police who advised Zimmerman not to pursue. Zimmerman did, and only about sixty meters from Martin’s front door, a fight broke out, Zimmerman pulled his gun, and shot Martin.
So many questions.
Did Zimmerman accost Martin? Did Martin attack? And if he did, why did Zimmerman consider it necessary to pull a gun and shoot the youth fatally. I mean, I think if the kid was a punk, a shot in the thigh, or a shot of mace should have been sufficient.
The Florida jury, all women, five white and one black, decided the case. They reached the only verdict they could based upon the charges and the arguments of the prosecution: Not guilty. The prosecution had been less than zealous. Professor Alan Dershowitz, a very famous law professor at Harvard University said that the weak prosecution was a ploy by the prosecutor to get re-elected. Angela Corey, the prosecutor, then threatened to sue Dershowitz and Harvard, which only proves how little she knows about the law.
Meanwhile, our eloquent President made a heartfelt speech. “Travon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago. . . There are very few African American men in this country that haven’t crossed a street and hearing locks click on the doors of cars. . . There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting onto an elevator, and a woman clutching her purse nervously.”
In other words, the President knows what it is to be profiled, and where profiling can lead.
If President Obama were to read this missive, I wonder if he could empathise the same way if he were to understand that his own policies have created this monster. The way Zimmerman, was responding, the way he described being treated as an African American male, is a response that the Obama Administration calls “responding to signature behaviour”. What this means is that analysts, sitting at a computer, can make snap decisions about a target based upon observed indicators, and using those indicators as evidence, drone those people to death.
Photo: Reuters
The behaviour that the President describes when he says that Travon Martin could have been him 35 years ago, is the same type of behaviour that leads me to believe that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old US citizen killed in a drone attack could have been my son, had we lived in the Middle East. He was profiled and killed with less provocation than Martin. If that drone attack had been brought before the court, no jury in the country would have returned a verdict of Not Guilty.
Obama’s popularity is sinking in the polls, even among his supporters. Zimmerman was unlikeable from the beginning of this whole affair.
What makes him so antipatico?
I think we want to see remorse, even though Zimmerman was exonerated, wouldn’t it be nice to at least apologize for taking a life? Trevor Martin didn’t have to die. Where did we get the idea that if an aggressor throws a rock at us, we have the right to kill him?
And why do we do so with so little regret?
I read the article in Rolling Stone about the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I think, as we read the article, we see a very damaged individual who responded in a very sick way to what he perceived were the injustices of the world. Somehow, he’s so damaged by his life that sucked as he was into his brother’s dysfunction, and now three people are dead, including a seven-year-old child, and scores are injured. And yet, I am confident that Tzarnaev will feel remorse one day, if he doesn’t feel it already. And that possibility makes me feel differently about him. Maybe he’s not a monster. Maybe he’s just another victim.
Photo: Reuters
Remorse, the asking for forgiveness is such a simple act, and it’s so healing to the psyche of both victim and aggressor, as Bangladeshi Rais Bhuiyan taught us by forgiving the Texas man who shot him through the eye on September 11, 2001.
Which brings me to the case of Ghulam Azam.
Um. . .
It’s been almost two and a half years since I’ve been covering news in Bangladesh, and I thought I was beginning to understand how things work over there.
But…
Am I reading this incorrectly? I mean I was reading it in English, after all. It is my understanding that a three judge panel determined that the man, even though he deserved death, was too old for the death penalty?
But. . . But. . .
I mean, if you deserve the death penalty, how can you get off for the condition of your health? I mean isn’t that the whole point of the death penalty to make the condition of your health that much worse?
I mean. . .
It’s like saying, “Well, you can’t hang me. I’m allergic to jute!”
What does that mean?
Doesn’t it mean that he was older than Delwar Hossain Sayeedi and Muhammad Kamaruzzaman when these crimes against humanity occurred?
Kamaruzzaman was 19-years-old when he committed his atrocities, the exact age of Dzokhar Tsarnev. Delwar Hossain Sayeedi was 31. That’s still young enough to formulate regrets. Ghulam Azam was my age when he perpetrated heinous crimes against humanity, and probably led younger people toward the kind of action for which they will now face the noose. When you approach 50, believe me, you act with a great awareness of what you have to lose or gain. You are not innocent. Not by a long shot.
The judges also seemed to contradict themselves, first by saying that Azam deserved the death penalty and then by saying that there was no evidence tying Azam to a crime scene.
Look, honestly? I don’t know if justice will be served by slipping the noose around the neck of a 90-year-old man. At 90, life supplies its own noose soon enough. But since the sentence has already been passed, what would it hurt for him to make a more complete apology, show some remorse before his curtain comes down?
This is a topsy-turvy world. A US President relies upon, and decries profiling, allows human beings to be found guilty from thousands of miles away. A Hispanic man racially profiles, and executes a boy whose only crime was to get involved in an altercation based upon his being profiled in the first place. A disturbed young man executes a handful of innocent people in payback for the drone strikes, and in every case, someone is dead. But at the top of the totem pole, this old intellectual, the daddy of all Razakars who gets the strangest sentence of all.
He is alive because we don’t kill frail old people.
Even when they are political leaders convicted of war crimes.
I wonder how many intellectuals Azam spared because of their advanced age back in 1971.
We can be outraged, we can throw our hands up and do nothing, and we can continue to rail in the press and in the social media. And we’ll get bitter, I suppose, and maybe we’ll get so bitter that some of us will go out and do something stupid, something so immoral that we lose our humanity because of it. Justice demands an eye for an eye. The repayment of a bad action is an equivalent bad action. But maybe we who are better than those vigilantes and profilers and Razakars out there need to understand that to live in a world of incredible forgiveness, we must, ourselves be willing to pardon and put things right.
In such a world, Zimmerman would have talked to Martin, Obama wouldn’t be raining death from the sky, Tsarnev would be going into his junior year in college, and Ghulam Azam would have refused to pass the names of the intellectuals to the Pakistani generals.
If you accuse me of being too much of an idealistic dreamer, I guess I would have to plead guilty.
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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called “You Think What You Think And I’ll Think What I Know.” He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, “Learning Little Hawk’s Way of Storytelling”, teaches the native art of oral tradition storytelling.
Source: UNBConnect
