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