SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, representing 1,000+ journalists in the US and Canada, present their latest SAJA Briefing.
Join Anup Kaphle, digital foreign editor of the Washington Post and Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia University's Chief Digital Officer as we discuss one of the biggest crises in four decades of Bangladeshi history.
Our speakers: Maneeza Hossain, senior fellow at Hudson Institute, specializing in prospects of democracy in South Asia and the Middle East and has written extensively on Bangladesh; and Zain Al-Mahmood, a journalist based in Dhaka, covering Bangladesh for WSJ. His interests are politics, human rights and sustainable development.

For the last 4 weeks, Bangladesh has been convulsed by the Shahbagh movement. What started as the protest of bloggers against a back-door deal between the government and the opposition Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, has mushroomed into continuous street protests against the war criminals of Bangladesh's 1971 liberation war. During the brutal war that gave birth to Bangladesh, the genocidal campaign of the Pakistan army was assisted by local Bengali collaborators, known as "razakars." In 2011, the Awami League government began long-delayed war crimes trials against some of the alleged razakars, most of whom are now top ranking leaders of the country's largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami. But the unexpectedly lenient sentencing of Quader Mollah, known as the "Butcher of Mirpur," set off the protests that snowballed into Shahbagh, filling the streets with up to 500,000 protesters, mos