Ghulam Azam becomes the fifth person convicted by the special Crimes Tribunal created by the Bangladeshi Government Ghula Azam, the former Jamaat chief, now 91, was found guilty on all five charges the prosecution stacked against him. He is considered the pivot of crimes and all the atrocities of the anti-liberation movement. He has been sentenced to 90 years in prison but according to the Tribunal, he deserves the death penalty, not given to him because of his advanced age. He joined the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1954 and served as its secretary from 1957 to 1960. He became ameer of the East Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami in 1969. He played a pivotal role in forming the Shanti (peace) Committee, Razakar, Al Badr, Al Shams (collaborator forces). Ghulam Azam is one of the front men who actively helped the Pakistani forces’ attempts to foil the birth of Bangladesh. He became a symbol of war crimes in Bangladesh. He met Pakistani General Tikka Khan, known as the “Butcher of Baluchistan”, ten days after the war started . Tikka was to earn similar notoriety as “Butcher of Bangladesh” on the night of March 25, 1971 in Dhaka. During the nine-month-long bloody war, Ghulam Azam and his party Jamaat-e-Islami, its student wing Islami Chhatra Sangha (later renamed Islami Chhatra Shibir) played a key role along with their other political partners to foil the independence struggle. The Pakistani forces and their Bangladeshi collaborators committed genocide and war crimes that left three million people dead and around a quarter million women violated, besides the planned elimination of some of the best of Bengali brains on December 14, 1971. On June 19, Ghulam Azam met Pakistan’s president Yahya Khan. After his meeting with Yahya, he addressed a press conference in Lahore. He told journalists, “The miscreants are still active in East Pakistan. People must be provided with arms to destroy them.” After victory on December 16, 1971, Ghulam Azam and many others like him found themselves Pakistan and returned only after the brutal assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family members in 1975. Ghulam Azam later visited Saudi Arabia in March 1975. He met King Faisal and told him that Hindus had captured East Pakistan, the holy Quran had been burnt, mosques had been destroyed and converted into temples, and Muslims had been killed. Even though he came to Dhaka on a three-month visa on Pakistani passport during the rule of president Ziaur Rahman in 1978, he never left Bangladesh. He became the Jamaat’s undeclared ameer, taking over from alleged war criminal late Abbas Ali Khan. It is not the first time that Ghulam Azam has been tried and convicted for crimes he committed during the Liberation War. He was first tried 21 years ago, not in a lawful court but in a Gono Adalat (people’s court) in the presence of several hundred thousand people. The country had never seen such a court or a trial before. The movement began in January 1992 after Ghulam Azam was appointed the Jamaat chief in December 1991. Ghulam was still then a Pakistani citizen and Jahanara Imam protested his appointment.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 16:38:41 +0000
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