Razakar (Pakistan)

Razakar Urdu: رضا کار, literally "volunteer"; Bengali: রাজাকার) was an East Pakistani paramilitary force organised by General Tikka Khan in then East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh, during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. Since the 1971 war, it has become a pejorative term (implying traitor) in Bangladesh due to the atrocities allegedly committed by the Razakars during the War. The Razakar force was composed of mostly anti-Bangladesh and pro-Pakistan Bengalis and Urdu-speaking migrants who lived in Bangladesh at the time.

Quotes

• More ominously, for Bangladeshis whose relatives were murdered, is the exclusion in the new BNP sponsored textbooks of the role played by the Jamaat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist organizations that supported razakars, Islamic terrorist squads implicated in the murders of intellectuals in Dhaka on December 14, 1971. The controversial sentences that blamed the Jamaat-i-Islami in the Awami League era text books were immediately expunged when the Jamaat-i-Islami came to power in a coalition government with the BNP.
  • Y Rosser, Indoctrinating Minds: Politics of Education in Bangladesh. 2004 page 20

• The new editions have re-embraced the view of Bangladeshi nationalism that was promoted by the military regimes. However, the BNP's efforts to vindicate the perpetrators of genocide have gone considerably further than even the former textbooks of Zia and Ershad's periods where the word "razakar" still appeared in reference to the murderers of the intellectuals on December 14, 1970. In 1996 era textbooks, the Awami League added "al-badars" and "al-shams" to the list of collaborators, specifically naming the "Jamaat-i-Islami" as culpable in the murder of the intellectuals. The new 2001 genre textbook leaves all of these names out of the narrative and simply blames the deaths of the intellectuals on themselves and on the Pakistani Army. After October 2001, eliminating references to razakars and certainly the Jamaat-i-Islami was an imperative since former razakars and members of the Jamaat are now part of the ruling coalition. ... An important impact of the omissions and extractions is that the genocidal excesses of the infamous collaborators, the razakars are ignored and thereby excused. This deflection of guilt by the Jamaat-i-Islami was one of the first orders of business for the BNP/Islamists political dispensation that came to power in October 2001.
  • Y Rosser, Indoctrinating Minds: Politics of Education in Bangladesh. 2004 page 23