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Published : 20 Jul 2013, 01:14 AM
Inu dubbed former President Gen Zia as the ‘second father of the Razakars’ and Khaleda as their ‘patron’.
“Zia had sown the seed of communalism with the killing of Colonel (Abu) Taher,” the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal President said at a discussion in Dhaka on Friday.
“In order to nurture that seed, he (Zia) turned the army headquarters into a slaughterhouse and introduced a distorted form of democracy,” Inu alleged at the programme marking Col Taher Day.
Taher, a sector commander during the 1971 Liberation War, had orchestrated a socialist uprising on Nov 7, 1975 amongst the soldiers and freed the then army chief Ziaur Rahman. Taher was arrested only 17 days after Zia took over state power. A total of 33 people, including him, were tried in a secret court martial.
Four days after a tribunal sentenced him to death, Taher was hanged on July 21, 1976.
The High Court on May 20 this year said the hanging was a ‘cold-blooded murder’ as per Gen Ziaur Rahman's plan.
Inu, a freedom fighter who had fought by Taher’s side, said: “Zia reincarnated the Razakars only to serve as a shield and his wife Khaleda was patronised them.
“We saw the rebirth of the Razakars during Taher’s hanging. Today, we hear of Ahmed Shafi’s ‘tamarind’ theory as the war criminals are being tried.”
Chittagong-based Hifazat-e Islam chief Shah Ahmed Shafi in a recent sermon compared women with tamarind and advocated their confinement 'within the four walls’.
The Information Minister alleged Shafi’s statement was part of a plot by Khaleda Zia to save the war criminals.
He said verdicts by the two International Crimes Tribunals, dealing with Liberation War-time atrocities, had proven that the Razakar was not only a ‘person but also a political ideology’.
“There are plots to implement that ideology by attacking the spirit of the War of Independence.”
