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Mollah hanging, an irate Erdogan

Syed Badrul Ahsan
The government of Turkey, led by its Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan, has been spewing venom against Bangladesh over the execution of the war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah. Hours before the hanging of the convicted collaborator of the 1971 Pakistan occupation army, Erdogan called Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to ask her that Mollah's execution be stopped. The Bangladesh leader refused to entertain his request.
That snub, followed by the execution of the Jamaat politician, had the Turkish authorities hit the ceiling. Speaking at a rally in Izmir province last Friday, Erdogan served the warning that history would not forgive Bangladesh for committing what he called a mistake. In similar vein, deputy prime minister Bekir Bozdag had this to say: "Justice, human rights and the law have been trampled."
Soon after the execution of the war criminal in Dhaka, the Turkish government issued a statement severely condemning the action. In its words, "the execution of the death penalty sentence given to one of the leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Quader Mollah, despite all concerns and suggestions voiced by the international community, including our prime minister, has led to agravesadness FROM PAGE 1
and indignation. We harshly condemn this execution. May God have mercy upon him."
At the Izmir rally, Erdogan called on the people of Bangladesh to cany- on, in his words, the struggle and not to 'abandon the political fight.' He was obviously being provocative. And clearly suffering from the false notion that the people of Bangladesh had been deeply wounded by the hanging of a war criminal who had caused, in association with the Pakistan army, hundreds of innocent Bengalis to be sent to a gory and premature death.
Turkey's prime minister and indeed Turkey's government have demonstrated a woeful lack of knowledge about the history behind the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state. Or they have willfully and cunningly ignored the realities of 1971, those that led to an initiation of the war crimes trials in Bangladesh. And now, by publicly registering their anger over an act that falls clearly within the parameters of Bangladesh's internal affairs. Prime Minister Erdogan and his government have committed a deed that ought not to be allowed to go unanswered.
That said, there is the record of how Turkey itself has over the decades perpetrated acts not conducive to decent politics or human rights within its territory as well as in terms of its links with the rest of the world. Its record over the treatment meted out to its Kurdish population has consistently been appalling. The Kurds, who populate wide regions of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, have always been subjected to brutal treatment by successive governments in Ankara. In the period 1937-38, anywhere between 50,000 and 70,000 Kurds were killed by the Turkish state. The killings, or ethnic cleansing, have continued well into the twenty first century.
Turkey is upset that Bangladesh sentenced a war criminal to death, of course after a trial which went through a detailed legal process. Yet the fact remains that when the leader of the leftist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, was abducted in Nairobi in 1999 with help from Israel's Mossad and flown to Ankara, the
Turkish authorities lost little time in passing a sentence of death on him. To be sure, the sentence was later commuted to imprisonment for life because Turkey wished to be part of the European Union. Ocalan remains in jail, with the authorities showing little interest in reaching a deal with him and his party.
The Turkish authorities, with their record of being behind the systematic killings of the country's Armenian population — close to 300,000 Armenians were murdered in 1895; no fewer than 30,000 Armenians were put to death on a single day in 1909; and even now the persecution goes on — should have remembered how 3,000,000 Bengalis were killed in the genocide perpetrated by the Pakistan army and its local collaborators in 1971. Or was it a convenient way for Erdogan to go into a denial of history mode, both about Turkey's own record and that of Pakistan?
Then again, let it not be forgotten how the Turkish army undertook military action against Cyprus, an independent country, in July 1974, effectively partitioning the island into two zones. Since that time, Cyprus has remained an issue of international concern.
All of this is a record that does not do Turkey proud. Erdogan, in his frenzied reaction to the Mollah execution, did not deem it proper to go over the facts. Bangladesh's people, who have consistently demanded justice in the matter of those abducted and killed in 1971, wonder why the Turkish government did not do the simple thing of studying the record, the documents and the evidence related to the Mollah trial. Through their attitude, the Turkish authorities have given the impression of how deeply antagonistic, indeed how less than diplomatic they are towards the government and people of Bangladesh. They would have done better had they gone into the historical background of the war crimes trials before commenting on them.
Will the Bangladesh Foreign Office, now that it has taken action against Pakistan's position on the Mollah issue, move to tackle the Turkish government — quickly, firmly and purposefully?