Mina Farah has a point but she is not the only person that crossed the mountains to take shelter in India. If she was in India, I must have met her. What is surprising however is that after 35 years, something has awakened her from a deep sleep. She should know that after the liberation war, except the collaborators of 1971 who killed people, the rest were forgiven by Sk. Mujibur Rahman. Zia took it further and called everybody Bangladeshis. Now in the name of being Bengalis, we are no more promoting the Indian West Bengali interest but serving only Bangladeshis. After 35 years Bangladeshis are a little more smarter to understand this much international politics.From this perspective, in this very improvised country of 150 million people, what is urgently needed is to find solutions to the contemporary problems; Hasina- Khalida war, Indian dams drying up Bangladesh and destroying Bangladesh rivers/ transportation. It is also important to find out people who are corrupt and who in the name of the liberation war tend to promte Indian agenda. It is also important to find out Mina Farahs's types of motives. Bangladesh government should keep track of these distractors that find excuses to create anarchy in the country.
----- Original Message ----
From: Syed Aslam <Syed.Aslam3@gmail.com>
To: notun_bangladesh@yahoogroups.com; khabor <khabor@yahoogroups.com>; chottala@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 11:34:35 AM
Subject: [notun_bangladesh] Bangladeshi calls for war-crimes justice -Newsday [New York]
Bangladeshi calls for war-crimes justice
MERLE ENGLISH
Mina Farah remembers fleeing into the hills of northern India with her family and other refugees as thousands of their compatriots were killed.
It was 1971, when the people of East Pakistan - then a province of Pakistan - were engulfed in a nine-month war for independence. The result of the civil war was the formation of two states: Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Farah, 53 - an immigrant from Bangladesh and a Jackson Heights businesswoman, dentist, author, activist, wife and mother of four - was a teenager during her country's struggle for self-rule.An estimated three million people were killed, she said. Many women and girls were raped and tortured and fighters murdered by roaming death squads.
Today, Farah is seeking justice for Bangladeshis whose human rights, she said, were violated by other Bangladeshis who collaborated in the mass killings. She wants the United States and the United Nations to declare the slaughter to have been genocide. But above all, she wants collaborators - some of whom she said are living in Jackson Heights and elsewhere in New York City - brought to justice.
She is "making a noise about these war criminals to remind people of the history of all this so they can join the quest for justice," Farah said recently at one of several meetings she convened in Jackson Heights - a community with about 150,000 Bangladesh-American s - to drum up support for her crusade.
She visits Bangladesh every two months and has appealed to the government, she said, to "prosecute the war criminals. They are not hiding," she said. A room in her family's home in Bangladesh that was used as a jail and torture chamber is kept as "evidence of the injustice. The house was full of blood, ropes, things they used for torture," she said.
Shamshul Haque, consul general of Bangladesh in New York, said the issue "is for the courts to decide. The issue is going on in the community and in the political arena," he said. "I have no information right now what is the government's policy on those demands. That is a 36-year-long issue."
"There was a liberation war in 1971 when our freedom fighters fought against Pakistan," Haque said. "Definitely during the war atrocities were there, so there are matters that need to be looked into as legal issues. I cannot comment on legal issues."
Abdul Musabbir, a Manhattan travel agent who said he had been a freedom fighter, supports Farah.
"We support her, because she's doing a very good thing," he said. "As a Bangladeshi- American she wants real justice. The wives and mothers of the victims are crying the last 36 years for real justice. If the State Department wants information, they can contact me. I'll tell names."
Karl Duckworth, a State Department spokesman, would say only, "The issue of accountability is an important issue for the Bangladeshis to determine through their elected leaders."
Farah won't let up in her campaign against the "war criminals."
"There's a problem in our country [Bangladesh] ," she said. "We didn't punish them."
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