REHABILITATION OF MUSLIM WORLD IN COMITY OF NATIONS

By Kazi Anwarul Masud (former Secretary and ambassador)

ARTICLE FOR SUNDAY THE 4^TH APRIL 2010

 

The infamy of 9/11 that turned Islam, a religion of peace like those of the others, to one scorned as “Islamofasicism” and forcing the Muslim Diaspora in the West to negotiate a precarious life of a second class citizenship in the countries of their birth, has to change if the world is to become one again and not one of historian Nial Ferguson’s fragmented spheres of gated affluence and “disposable” misery afflicted   greater part of humanity. In discussion on Islam the very usage of the term “moderates” implies that “extremism’ is the norm in Islam who has to be defeated by force. Undeniably the Islamists who would like to establish the illiberalism of the puritanical days of the pre-modern era and envelop mankind under one culture-oriented system of governance keeping no room for tolerance and dissent cannot be the wish of humanity after having traversed from the Dark Ages to the Flat Earth post-modern era of today. Despite historian Bernard Lewis’s lamentation about the rage of the Muslims and Samuel Huntington’s oracle of confrontation among different cultures and religions the survival and the strengthening of politico-economic progress of mankind calls for Henry Kissinger’s geopolitics, a euphemism  for power politics, in the management of international relations. Many in Bangladesh would like to try Henry Kissinger for thanking mass murderer General Yahaya Khan of Pakistan for his “delicacy and tact” during the genocidal war of liberation in 1971, as the Chileans would like to follow suit for Kissinger’s planning the bloody overthrow of President Salvador Allende, for scuttling peace talks with Vietnam in 1968, persuading Richard Nixon for widening the Vietnam war with massive bombing of Cambodia and Laos causing the death of about one million civilians, and assuring President Suharto in 1975 that the US would not recognize East Timor. Yet the brilliance of Kissinger lay in emulating his idol Prince Metternich’s in bringing a vast era of peace in Europe through the exercise of geopolitics. Effectively Kissinger’s realpolitik recognized the existence of various power centers that have to be treated with respect giving way to compromise when needed. The First World War came about not because of unstable power balance created by competing alliances but because Germany was no longer interested in maintaining a power balance. The Second World War came about due to the reluctance of the victorious powers in restoring the balance. When Kissinger found Soviet Union not as a friend but as a competing power he wholeheartedly followed George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George Kennan’s “containment” policy of communism as an update of traditional balance of power (Michael Howard-Foreign Affairs-May/June 1994). Kissinger, therefore, sees the US as a power in a complex world to interact with others that the US can neither ignore nor dominate. The global quest is for finding a “good society” where all can live in peace. Harvard Professor Michael Walzer disagrees that there has to be one good society given the immense variety of human cultures. Walzer would describe a good society as one that is constituted “by the peaceful coexistence of all the societies that aim at goodness…the good society can be imagined as a framework that encompasses all versions of goodness”. As the preeminent problem facing the international community  is the unremitting violence let loose by Osama bin Laden’s variety of al-Qaeda, reportedly holed up in caves near Pak-Afghan border due to heavy military pressure by the NATO forces, but giving away franchise to other militants bent upon taking revenge against the West where “degradation abounds” for real (unresolved Palestine issue) or imagined injustices meted out to them, it is essential that the Islamic world be at one with the rest of humanity in the destruction of this Frankenstein, initially created by the US and Pak intelligence agencies to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.  British columnist Nick Cohen (2007) found in Sayeed Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda, a love for European fascism that soon became a state ideology in Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Bush the younger’s administration peopled by neo-conservatives goaded President Bush to the invasion of under false premise that created a chasm between two great religions and cultures.  On the flip side is the US National Intelligence Estimate’s suggestion that forces of Jihadism has been significantly bolstered by Iraq war.

The recent reports in Bangladesh press about international terrorist groups using our country as a transit and training place is disturbing. More so it is alleged that terrorists may try to disrupt the forthcoming trial of people accused of genocide and crimes against humanity committed during our war of liberation. While the international community, particularly the US has fully supported the trial only one country and some miscreants are opposed to the trial. The government is fully alive to the threat and is prepared to meet should such an eventuality arise. The war crimes trial is a non-dissenting demand of the people of Bangladesh as it will remove from our national conscience a blot of deliberate machination by the beneficiaries  of the brutal 1975 political changeover and for  the souls of the victims to  forever rest in peace but will remain alive in our hearts and minds. The trial that would assuage our thirst for justice will also help bridge the North-South  value chasm as it would be a follow up of Nuremberg, Tokyo, Rwanda, Hague, and Charles Taylor’s trial and put Bangladesh on the same page with all others for the pursuit of justice.