More than half a century after the Liberation War of 1971, the blood-soaked memories of genocide and betrayal remain vivid in Bangladesh’s collective conscience. The nation once dreamt of healing through justice—but recent events have upended this vision. The very institutions once tasked with delivering reckoning have been hollowed out: captured, corrupted, and weaponised against the spirit of independence. Bangladesh now stands not on the threshold of renewal, but at the edge of a perilous regression.
In the dead of night on 25 March 1971, the Pakistan Army launched “Operation Searchlight”—a monstrous campaign to extinguish Bengali aspirations. Entire neighbourhoods were razed, civilians massacred, women raped, and intellectuals executed. Jamaat-e-Islami and its armed militias—Al-Badr, Al-Shams, and the Razakars—played the role of eager collaborators, chanting slogans like “Naray-e-Takbir! Allahu Akbar! Pakistan Zindabad!” as they butchered their fellow countrymen. I witnessed these horrors firsthand: the unburied corpses, the echo of children’s cries silenced by bullets, and the ghastly pride of the perpetrators.
In the aftermath of independence, the founding ideals of Bangladesh were clear: secularism, democracy, and justice. The creation of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in 2009 was a bold stride towards fulfilling this moral imperative. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the ICT delivered long-awaited verdicts against war criminals. One such figure, ATM Azharul Islam—an Al-Badr commander—was convicted of executing over 1,400 civilians. His death sentence, upheld in 2019, marked a milestone in the pursuit of justice.
Yet, in a grotesque twist of fate, this pursuit now finds itself under siege. On 25 February 2025, the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division reopened Azhar’s case—a shocking development under the regime of Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus and his aide, Waker. Allegations abound that the judiciary has become a puppet of the new regime, allegedly installed through a carefully orchestrated coup backed by foreign intelligence interests—including the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI—and facilitated by local collaborators, including elements within the military and Jamaat-e-Islami.
The ICT, once a beacon of truth, now teeters on the edge of farce. Its leadership—judges, prosecutors, and notably Chief Prosecutor Advocate Tajul Islam—is widely perceived to be under the sway of Jamaat loyalists. The court’s credibility lies in ruins. Can justice truly emerge from an institution now infiltrated by the very forces it was created to judge?
The political storm reached its crescendo on 5 August 2024. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina—Bangladesh’s longest-serving leader and daughter of the Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—was deposed in an illegal military coup. This audacious takeover, allegedly orchestrated by a network of foreign and domestic conspirators, marked a chilling return to the tactics of autocracy. The ghosts of 1971 had returned—not as insurgents, but as bureaucrats, judges, and ministers cloaked in legitimacy.
A key actor in this drama was former US Ambassador Peter D. Haas, whose tenure in Dhaka was marked by open political bias. In defiance of diplomatic norms, he fraternised with opposition forces, particularly Jamaat and BNP—the latter a product of military rule. His subsequent departure from diplomacy to join a US energy conglomerate confirms a disturbing pattern: hybrid warfare masquerading as democracy promotion.
In July and August 2024, a seemingly spontaneous student protest against a government quota system spiralled into chaos—by design. Beneath the surface, a sinister plot unfolded. Credible reports suggest that madrasa students, slum dwellers, and street children were abducted, stripped of their identities, dressed in Western attire, and massacred—framed as victims of state violence. The perpetrators? A malevolent cabal: Jamaat zealots, BNP operatives, and mutinous elements within the armed forces rose in concert, echoing the harrowing spectre of 1971. This unholy alliance was not born of chaos but orchestrated by the veiled hands of the CIA, ISI, and their collaborators on our soil.
Under the Yunus–Waker regime, Bangladesh is descending into darkness. As noted earlier, government institutions are now occupied by anti-liberation forces. The judiciary, the police, the education system—once bulwarks of progress—have been overrun. More than 50 politically motivated cases have been lodged against Sheikh Hasina and her party, while the true instigators roam free. This is not justice. It is vengeance disguised as governance.
Perhaps most terrifying is the regime’s attempt to rehabilitate war criminals like Azhar. These men are being rebranded—not as murderers, but as misunderstood heroes. They invoke religion to shield their crimes, distorting Islam’s message of justice and mercy into a political weapon. This narrative is not only revisionist—it is repugnant. It resurrects the discredited ideology of the two-nation theory, which Bangladesh rejected through immense sacrifice.
The stakes could not be higher. Bangladesh was on the cusp of becoming a regional powerhouse, celebrated for its development strides and social progress. That promise now lies in jeopardy. Censorship tightens. Fear spreads. Truth is buried beneath a mountain of propaganda. The ghosts of the past are no longer spectres—they are decision-makers.
Yet all is not lost. Sheikh Hasina remains the constitutionally elected leader; she has neither resigned nor relinquished her mandate. Her endurance is not merely symbolic—it is a rallying cry for all who believe in the values of 1971. The people of Bangladesh have risen against tyranny before. They can—and must—rise again.
The review petition for Azhar must be rejected outright. The wheels of justice must not turn backward. These men committed crimes against humanity. They are not political dissidents—they are architects of genocide. No rebranding can erase their atrocities. The gallows await—not out of revenge, but as a reckoning long overdue.
The international community must awaken to this crisis. Silence is complicity. Allies of Bangladesh must speak out—not merely in support of Sheikh Hasina, but in defence of history, truth, and justice. The victims of 1971 demand nothing less.
This is not merely a political struggle. It is a moral battle. A test of whether justice, once won at great cost, can be preserved against the tide of revisionism and extremism.
Bangladesh stands once again at a crossroads. Let history not repeat itself as tragedy once more. Let the unembellished truth of the July–August 2024 events—suppressed and buried beneath a shroud of silence for over eight long months by the aforementioned sinister forces—finally be unshackled, so that the people may behold the naked reality and know the facts in full, untainted by deceit.
The entire nefarious machinery of these malefactors must be laid bare before the unblinking gaze of the public eye. Stripped of shadow and subterfuge, they must face the full majesty of lawful reckoning—and receive their due beneath the scales of justice.
