A two-day nationwide shutdown called by the Jamaat-e-Islami began yesterday in Bangladesh against a Supreme Court verdict upholding the death penalty for its chief for the 1971 war crimes.
Hours after the court on Thursday dismissed the review petition of the party’s president Motiur Rahman Nizami, the party called a 48-hour
nationwide strike.
Nizami, the Jamaat chief since November 2000, now only has the option of seeking the president’s mercy to stall his imminent execution.
Despite the strike, traffic in and around Dhaka was almost regular. In other parts of the country too, the shutdown had almost no impact on people’s routine life.
Schools, offices, shopping malls and financial institutions operated as usual while transport operators said intercity buses, trains and ferries also plied as scheduled.
“We have kept a sharp vigil but no law and order situation was reported,” a police spokesman told reporters. Witnesses, however, said Jamaat activists tried to stage brief small street marches at parts of the capital carrying banners but quickly dispersed fearing police action.
Nizami, 72, served as the agriculture and industries minister in Khaleda Zia’s 2001-06 cabinet.
Nizami’s party said he was not given justice. But the government says the trial met proper standards.
Nizami is among the top Jamaat leaders who have been tried in two war crimes tribunals which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasian’s Bangladesh Awami League-led government formed in 2010 to bring the perpetrators of 1971 war to book.
Nizami was indicted in 2012 on 16 charges of crimes against humanity, including looting, mass killings, arson, rape and forcefully converting people to Islam.
The indictment order said Nizami was a key organiser of Al-Badr, an auxiliary force of the Pakistani army which planned and executed the killing of Bengali intellectuals during the war that led to the breaking away of East Pakistan and formation of an independent Bangladesh. He was particularly found guilty of systematic killings of more than 450 people alone in his own village home in northwestern Pabna, siding with the Pakistani troops.
Prison officials, meanwhile, said they expect the Supreme Court judgment to reach them anytime. They said they were prepared to execute the order soon after the copy of the judgment reaches them through the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD), which originally had handed down Nizami the capital punishment for committing crimes against humanity siding with the Pakistani troops during 1971 Liberation War.
“He (Nizami) heard himself the news that the Supreme Court has rejected his final review petition (seeking reversal of its own previous judgment) as he has been provided with a one-band radio at his cell, earmarked for death row convicts,” a prison official said, requesting anonymity. But, he said, the system would require prison authorities to serve him the death warrant formally once the verdict wrapped in a red cloth reached the prison.