Let them confess

When the prisoner died, the police couldn't explain why. He was Bantu Stephen Biko, a black South African, and it was 1977, when apartheid was in full swing. Biko was a highly popular activist with a strong perspective against the racist regime. In September, he had been arrested at a routine traffic stop. A few days later, he was dead. Thousands attended his funeral in Johannesburg. Fearing riots, public officials forbade residents of other towns to travel for the event. They also insisted, implausibly, that the cause of his death was a hunger strike.

Years later, when apartheid had ended and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) begun, the question of Steve Biko's death arose again. The TRC offered the chance – but not the guarantee – of amnesty to the people who had committed crimes during apartheid. Five police officers applied, and what happened next has bearing for Bangladesh's war crimes tribunal today.

The five policemen explained what they had done to Biko. After his arrest, the officers had chained him to cell bars in a standing position for hours. While questioning him there, they had beaten him. Afterward, Biko, who had sustained severe head injuries, began to slur his words. His face swelled. The officers left him chained standing, but eventually called a doctor. Colluding with apartheid, the doctor claimed Biko was "shamming." A second doctor recommended hospital care, but backed down at the officers' refusal. Instead, the prison shipped Biko 700 km to another prison. He made the journey lying naked and shackled in the back of a van. After arriving, he laid on a concrete floor, chained to a grate, unconscious. A newly qualified doctor saw him, but did little. Without ever receiving care for his brain injuries, Biko died alone.

Steve Biko was among the most important of the anti-apartheid activists, in part because his death made him a martyr. In discovering the circumstances of his death, South Africans had an opportunity to better understand the horrors of apartheid. Perhaps to greater satisfaction, they heard the apartheid regime's nonsensical claim about Biko being responsible for his own death debunked by the killers themselves.

The offer of amnesty at the TRC led Steve Biko's killers to confess. But would the same kind of confession happen in a commission about Bangladesh's 1971 war?

It's entirely possible. In fact, to some extent, this has already happened.

A few years ago, Yasmin Saikia, an American university professor originally from Assam, India, published Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh. Most of the book concerns war heroines, whose stories, she says, have been poorly archived. But Saikia also interviewed Pakistani Army soldiers who had fought in the 1971 war. What they told her, surprisingly, is as clear a confession as the one Biko's killers made.

"Almost every soldier I spoke to brought the memories of East Pakistan to the center of his story. Many among them spoke with deep remorse and wanted to undo what had happened in Bengal. I had to listen to these stories because these men wanted to tell them," Saikia writes. Many described how perpetrators are damaged by the violence they committed. "Violence destroys but cannot obliterate the human capacity, these men reminded me. Recovering their destroyed self is a task that persists beyond the violence…"

Malik, a former Pakistani sepoy from an impoverished family, reports that he saw rape in Bangladesh. He never committed one himself, but felt guilt about his commanders' crimes. Interviewed in 2004, his mother said, "I know my son still thinks about East Pakistan and what he witnessed there. The memory cannot be erased. He has taken refuge in religion to seek Allah's forgiveness."

More powerful men did more. Sahabzada Yakub Khan, the commander assigned to East Pakistan, opposed the war. He tried to convince President Yahya Khan a military solution was unacceptable; his arguments ignored, he resigned his position as chief commander of the Pakistani Army in March 1971 as a conscientious objector.

Other Pakistanis felt the same way. Another enlisted soldier, Mohammed, said he knew from the start the war was futile: "The Bengalis were loyal to their land. Even when we took their families hostage and shot them, some of them died crying, 'Joi Bangla!' How can anyone conquer a people who love their land so much? No force can succeed against them."

While interred in a prisoner of war (POW) camp in India after the war, Mohammad began studying the Quran and praying for forgiveness, because he "was able to recognize his action [during the war] as gunah [sin]." He told Saikia, "Committing gunah can never be hidden behind the rhetoric of performing duty…. When we [Pakistani POWs] acknowledged our gunah, and did tauba [penance] from our heart, we became free." When she asked about also seeking pardon from his victims, Mohammed said, "I am ready to testify to my victims in Bangladesh and seek their understanding and forgiveness."

It is possible the same thought was in the minds of the five white South Africans who confessed to killing Steve Biko. Their confession was valuable – to society, and perhaps to them as people.

Of course, forgiveness is at the will of the people, not just at the contrition of the attacker. The TRC declined amnesty for Biko's killers. The identities of the policemen and doctors became public knowledge, placing heavy stigma upon them. They were not exonerated.

In the end, the mere opportunity for amnesty meant that their stories could be told. The telling meant that the full complexity of violence could be understood. The understanding was an opportunity for individuals to make their peace with the past. And making peace means being free. Creating a space where forgiveness was possible meant victims in South Africa could benefit from hearing the truth of what perpetrators did.

What was true for South Africa is true for Bangladesh today.

As Saikia writes in her book, Bangladesh has left much of the history about the war "damaged, dusty, dispersed, and scattered." Allowing more people to speak would not require letting go of the chance to punish criminals (although it would mean letting go of the insistence on automatic maximal punishment for anyone identified as a perpetrator). As the war crimes tribunal goes on, the focus could change to making more public truth-telling possible –for understanding, peace, and freedom.

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M. Sophia Newman, MPH, is a freelance writer and a public health researcher specialising in mental health.