Al Jazeera favours Jamaat?

A top researcher of Bangladesh’s Liberation War has accused Al Jazeera of working in favour of war criminals facing judgment in Bangladesh.

Shahriar Kabir said the Doha-based news channel carried out ‘two clear offences’ in its news - by reducing the number of people killed during the 1971 war and also airing with it an unrelated footage.

Al Jazeera reporter in Dhaka, Maher Sattar, claimed around 300,000 to 500,000 people were killed in the war against Pakistan, while he reported on the Appellate Division’s verdict that upheld death for war criminal Mohammad Kamaruzzaman on Nov 3.

Soon, an unrelated footage appeared on screen. Some discernibly white men and women in foreign clothes – men in shirt-pants and women in skirts – were seen running towards something.

With that on Al Jazeera’s screen, Sattar said - “Historians estimate 300,000 to 500,000 were killed in the nine months by Pakistani military and local collaborators.”

Kabir, who are among those who spearheaded the movement to take 1971 war criminals to trial, said, “Any foreign or local media should use official statistics while handling a story as sensitive as this. Three million were martyred, says the government data.”

“What is the source of the information they used instead of the official count? These types of information serve the purpose of those who were involved in the genocide.”

bdnews24.com emailed Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar to learn about his source, to which he sent over a link for blog: bangladeshwarcrimes.blogspot.com.

The blog in question is run by none other than David Bergman, the British national facing contempt for blogging ‘adverse comments’ about the war crimes tribunal.

Al Jazeera also interviewed the New Age reporter along with Jamaat lawyer Toby Cadman and Mofidul Hoque, co-founder and trustee of the Liberation War Museum, for its programme ‘Inside Story’.

Titled ‘What's behind Bangladesh's war crimes trials?, the programme was ran after Kamaruzzaman’s final verdict.

Going back to the footage aired by Al Jazeera, Kabir said, “It can never be from our war! That footage can no way represent Bangladesh’s Liberation War!”

Considering the easy availability of footages of the war, Kabir, also a documentary filmmaker, said it was a serious crime that Al Jazeera used a completely unrelated footage and claimed it was from Bangladesh during 1971.

But Al Jazeera’s public relations said that it was from the Liberation War, but failed to give its location or the time when it was captured.

“The mentioned footage is genuine archive footage shot by Reuters TV from the 1971 war in Bangladesh, as confirmed by Al Jazeera’s archive team,” said an email from Al Jazeera public relations to bdnews24.com.

“There is law for distorting information in our country,” said Kabir. “I will demand that measures be taken against Al Jazeera under that law.”

“Al Jazeera in 2008 made an extraordinary documentary on the 1971 genocide. But ever since the International Crimes Tribunal was formed in 2009, they have been running reports, programmes based on what Jamaat-e-Islami has been alleging. They are working as Jamaat’s spokesperson!”