My friend’s father used to tell a story from the war: He was a teacher at a university in Dhaka, housed in the campus residence hall, in 1971. One day, he heard Pakistani soldiers talking in the open walkway outside his room. A man was walking by on the sidewalk below, and the soldiers debated killing him. They had no direct orders to do it, apparently; one soldier was in favour of it for his own enjoyment. The other argued against it, saying murder for sport was not right. Several stories below, the man heard nothing. The benevolent soldier convinced the sociopathic one not to shoot while the man passed by. The man in the courtyard survived in the same way he would have died – amid terrifyingly random danger, without any power over his own fate.
Such was the war of 1971.
This past week, Abdul Qader Mollah finally hung. For officials at Human Rights Watch, the UN, and the EU, the death penalty was a human rights violation. For some in Bangladesh, the execution came as a victory or as a relief. Irrespective of one’s view of execution, the deadly political conflict that arisen over the war crimes tribunal speaks volumes about the tribunal’s negative impact on Bangladesh.
Amid all this violence, it is possible to sense something far more troubling about the war crimes tribunal: the silencing of the victims of the war. Through endless hartals and entrenched disputes, the focus of the war crimes tribunals has been the prosecution of single individuals. But a process of justice for war crimes does not have to be focused around isolated murderers. In fact, a better justice process would follow the mould of previous successful efforts: it would be centred on the victims. The methods are easy to imagine.
Victim impact statements are written or spoken testimonies about the harm a crime has done. They are used in criminal courts in North America and Europe as a central part of victim-centred justice. They often help judges decide punishments after courts have determined perpetrators’ guilt. After the 2011 murder of 77 people in Utøya, Norway, for example, the court heard 77 short biographies written by the victims’ grieving families before giving killer Anders Breivik the longest possible prison sentence. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a successful post-conflict justice process, invited black and coloured South Africans to speak about how apartheid had harmed their lives. In Bangladesh, such a process would involve inviting people who lived through the war – like the man in the courtyard, who must have lived with an awareness of daily mortal risk – to describe what they have survived.
The war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh has included isolated witnesses, who have participated in the prosecution of the perpetrators. But these testimonies were not meant as a disclosure of personal suffering, and most of the details were not disclosed to the public. A victim-cantered process would allow affected people to describe their own lives and create public discourse about the war’s impact.
Such a process presents huge challenges. Here in Bangladesh, a special emphasis on safety is extremely important, as the conflict over the war crimes tribunal has now grown to lethal proportions. (Last week, a witness to the Sayadee case was murdered in retaliation for his speaking, for example.) It would be far safer if many people testify, rather than just a few, so that those who speak out cannot be isolated. It is even better to offer a way for testimony to remain anonymous – as in accepting written documents without names, and offering a chance for court official to interview survivors without proving their identity. (Verifying facts may be accomplished through comparing testimonies to each other and to historical records, and as with other accounts with many authors, the sheer volume of contributions will tend towards the truth.) Finally, willingness to hear perspectives from all sides of the conflict helps ensure safety by making everyone share an interest in the success of the process. It can also lead to better information. In South Africa, a willingness to allow former police officers to submit testimonies also led to several important admissions of guilt, including five policemen who confessed to murdering famous activist Steve Biko. Hearing this kind of admission in Bangladesh would be far more desirable than Quader Mollah’s flippant “victory” hand signal.
The risks of the process are not only about safety, but about psychological suffering. To speak about trauma can be very difficult for many people. In South Africa, the TRC found it was important to offer emotional support to all who testified, and in some cases additional assistance. Here in Bangladesh, a victim-centred war crimes process would require helping witnesses manage their anger and fear over past and present aggressions. We would need the assistance of international professionals, as there is a severe shortfall of trained professionals in the psychology field. (There are, however, Bangladeshis clinicians and NGO professionals who could anchor such an important effort.)
There is a point to all of this, and it is not the revenge or political conveniences of the current war crimes tribunal. Rather, the payoff of coming to grips with the past is peace and well-being. This comes through contextualization: using victim accounts, historical antecedents, and patterns of cause and effect to understand why crimes occurred. This is not to excuse perpetrators from accountability – the process reveals their guilt in much more detail than the current war crimes tribunal. Rather, it is to remove the sickeningly arbitrary quality of violence. Examining the many complex factors that lead to the atrocities (a quarter of a million women raped; a million people killed; ten million refugees) demonstrates the very low likelihood that such extraordinary horrors could come again. For those who live with intense memories of facing mortal danger just walking through a campus courtyard, this clarity can offer relief.
Such a process does not rule out prosecution, but would not preoccupy itself with it, either. It does not involve selecting the few accounts on which a conviction would hang, as the current war crimes tribunal does. Rather it allows people to describe their experiences at much greater length. Taking the focus away from convictions means that the killers would cease to gain enough attention to create upheaval in the country. Nor would they be at the centre of international debate about their human rights (rather than the rights of their victims). Nor would they once again silence the people they harmed so long ago, as the current war crimes tribunal is doing.
A victim-centred reconciliation process would let us hear, at last, from the man in the courtyard, rather than just the soldiers on the balcony. It would make him the centre of his own story, and at last grant him power over his own fate. In this way, it would finally end the war.
Source: Bd news24
