Bangladesh has a habit it cannot break. It survives its traumas without healing from them, and each generation inherits the unprocessed pain of the last. What we call a cycle of violence is a cycle of unhealed trauma, and it will not stop unless the country establishes a process to confront what happened.
Consider our record. The Liberation War of 1971 killed hundreds of thousands of people and scarred millions more. Half a century later, we have memorials, a national narrative and an International Crimes Tribunal that convicted some of the main perpetrators. What we have never had is a national process in which victims told their stories, perpetrators admitted what they did and the country confronted the war's human cost. The history of 1971 is still used as a political weapon.
In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, decades of conflict between the state and Jumma communities, with Bengalis caught in the middle, formally ended with the 1997 Peace Accord. But an accord signed in Dhaka does not heal villages in Rangamati. Land disputes continue, key provisions of the Accord remain unimplemented, and mistrust between Jumma communities and Bengalis grows. The fighting stopped, but there has never been a process for truth-telling or trauma healing.
Then came July 2024. A student-led revolution brought down a fifteen-year regime. The UN fact-finding mission estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed, many of them young people shot in the streets of Dhaka, Rangpur and Chattogram. The interim government promised trials, and trials matter. But prosecutions are proceeding while other questions go unanswered. Who looked away? What do the families of the dead need, beyond a verdict, to live with what happened?
Each time, Bangladesh has either done nothing or put people in jail. Neither has healed us.
Doing nothing is not neutral. When a society refuses to confront its wounds, they do not disappear. They go underground and harden into competing myths. Grievance and denial are passed down, and the next generation, working from half-truths, repeats the violence in a new form.
Punishment, while necessary, does not heal on its own. Even if every perpetrator went to prison, the country would still carry the wound. A trial determines whether an individual is guilty, and it is adversarial by design. The accused denies and the defence contests the evidence, so a national trauma is narrowed to an individual's liability. The International Crimes Tribunal convicted war criminals from 1971. Did those verdicts heal the families of the martyrs? Did they give Bangladeshis across party lines an account of what happened that they could all accept?
We do not need to invent an alternative. Transitional justice, a field developed in part through the work of legal scholar Ruti Teitel, has spent three decades studying responses to mass violence. One of its established approaches is the truth commission: a public, victim-centred, trauma-informed body that documents what happened and who suffered, and creates an official record that is difficult to deny later.
Priscilla Hayner's Unspeakable Truths, a comparative study of truth commissions, shows how the model, best known from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Desmond Tutu, has been adapted in many countries. It travels because the problem recurs across societies: trauma that is never spoken about or officially acknowledged does not fade.
There is local work to build on. Victims' participation should be central to how Bangladesh addresses past violence. I argued this in a 2016 study, "Victor's justice or restorative justice: exploring the value of participation for Bangladesh's future reconciliation process." More recently, in The Business Standard, Nousheen Sharmila Ritu and I proposed a restorative-transitional model combining truth-telling with reparations, accountability and psychological support ("Truth and Healing Commission for a post-conflict Bangladesh: A victim-centered approach").
In a follow-up with Barrister Tajriyaan Akram Hussain, "Does Bangladesh's current legal framework support a Truth and Healing Commission?", we argued that the existing inquiry law is too narrow for the task unless amended to protect victims and witnesses and provide for rehabilitation.
The name is truth and healing, not truth and reconciliation, and that choice comes from listening to victims. Reconciliation asks something of the wounded that many are not ready to give. Reconcile with whom? With perpetrators who have never confessed or apologised, or even admitted the crime took place?
When the state imposes reconciliation, it inflicts another injury on victims: a demand that they forgive on the state's timetable. Healing makes no such demand. It puts victims at the centre and promises that their suffering will be named, recorded and honoured whether or not those responsible ever face them.
The wording has precedent. In the United States, advocates have pressed Congress to create a commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. The order is the same: truth first, then healing. It is also a core principle of restorative justice. Howard Zehr, one of the field's founders, argues that justice should begin by repairing the harm done to victims, rather than focusing solely on punishing offenders.
Bangladesh needs three such commissions, independent of each other and each with its own mandate, because 1971, the Hill Tracts and July 2024 are different wounds.
The commissions should also decolonise transitional justice. Bangladesh should not replicate Eurocentric models. The process must grow out of our history, culture, traditions and social and spiritual life, guided by the restorative values of relationship, interconnectedness and responsibility. I made this argument in my 2021 article, "Decolonization and Restorative Justice: A Proposed Theoretical Framework", published in Decolonization of Criminology and Justice.
There, I proposed a "Decolonizing Tree", drawn from the insights of restorative justice visionaries and practitioners in Bangladesh. Its roots are trauma-informed and anti-oppressive, local communities form the trunk, and the branches represent cultural competency and local teachings.
The three commissions need not begin simultaneously. A practical plan would introduce them in phases: July 2024 first, then 1971, then the Chittagong Hill Tracts. This order says nothing about whose suffering matters more. A focused first commission would allow the country to build experience and public trust before addressing older and more complex wounds.
The July 2024 commission should begin soon, while evidence remains fresh and witnesses are alive. It should document every killing, disappearance and act of state violence during the uprising, establish who gave the orders, and build a public archive that no future government can rewrite. The martyrs of the July Revolution deserve more than hashtags.
The tribunal tried individuals. A 1971 commission would instead produce a comprehensive, victim-led account of the Liberation War's human cost: the killings, the systematic sexual violence, who collaborated and who resisted. That record should belong to no party and be taught as established history.
The Chittagong Hill Tracts will be the hardest, because no Bangladeshi government has yet established a process that both Jumma communities and Bengalis can trust. Its mandate must cover the unimplemented provisions of the 1997 Accord, land disputes, the militarisation of the hills and grievances on all sides. Without truth-telling, the CHT will remain what it has been for nearly thirty years: a conflict on hold.
None of this is an argument against trials. Perpetrators should face the law. But Bangladesh has tried silence and imprisonment, and neither has prevented further violence. It has never seriously tried what other countries' experiences suggest can help: telling the truth together so that healing can begin.
The wounds of July, 1971 and the Hills remain open. A truth and healing commission for each, introduced in phases, would not rewrite the past. It would help us stop reliving it.
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Dr Muhammad Asadullah is an associate professor of criminology at the University of Regina, Canada, and director of the Daffodil Legal Research Centre (DLRC) in the Department of Law at Daffodil International University, Bangladesh. He is an elected member of the Research Advisory Board of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) and a technical adviser to the Human Rights Development Centre (HRDC), Bangladesh.