The recent decision by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to issue arrest warrants in enforced-disappearance cases has reignited a bitter national argument: accountability versus institutional survival. That tension is real and unavoidable. Yet in the rush to score legal and political points, Bangladesh risks trading durable justice for a spectacle that could hollow out the state’s capacity to keep citizens safe — and, paradoxically, open space for the very extremists the nation fears.

Two simple facts frame the danger. First, the tribunal has issued arrest warrants against some thirty people in two disappearance cases — a move that has understandably captured public attention. Second, the prosecution has been led publicly by Chief Prosecutor Md Tajul Islam, whose office filed the charges now under scrutiny. Those are procedural realities. But what follows is an analytical judgment about ends and means: accountability is a public good; recklessly dismantling the cohesion and public confidence of our security forces is not.

When command responsibility becomes collective guilt

The problem is structural, not merely personal. The cases stem from deeply troubling episodes of secret detention and disappearances in 2016 and the surrounding years. Amnesty International and other observers documented instances of unlawful detention that were a national scandal; those facts merit transparent investigation and, where appropriate, prosecution. But there is a difference between targeted prosecution based on individual culpability and broad-brush indictments that treat entire lines of command as guilty by tenure. The latter risks transforming a tribunal of justice into an instrument of political retribution.

The logic underlying these arrests — according to arguments circulating in legal and military circles — appears to rest on an organogram theory of responsibility: anyone who held a particular post in a given period is treated as having command responsibility for crimes committed in that unit. That is a dangerously blunt instrument. Command responsibility is a legitimate doctrine in........

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