US Secretary of State John Kerry called Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday to warn her that if convicted war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah goes to the gallows, Bangladesh's parliamentary elections might be derailed.

Decades ago, in 1977, one of Kerry's predecessors, Henry Kissinger, warned Pakistan's prime minister ZA Bhutto that if the latter went ahead with his nuclear plans, Washington would make a horrible example of him.

In 1974, as a fledgling Bangladesh sought to broaden its trade and diplomatic relations with nations around the world and from that perspective attempted to export jute to Cuba, the US administration made sure that Dhaka did not get the kind of food aid it sought to tide over a famine-like situation in the country.

In 1971, even as the whole world took note of the genocide being committed by the Pakistan army in occupied Bangladesh and condemned the Yahya Khan junta, president Nixon and Henry Kissinger looked the other way because they needed Pakistan's dictator to help Washington open up a route to Beijing.

All of the above is part of history. And now this telephone call by Kerry, a former senator and presidential candidate, to the leader of a free nation raises a number of questions. Those questions have to do with what the Obama administration, through both Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton, has not said about the role the Jamaat-e-Islami played in the nine months of the Liberation War seventy-five million Bangalees waged back in 1971 against a vicious occupation force.

At the time of the struggle, men like Edward Kennedy and Edmund Muskie and the US media observed it all and drew Americans' attention to the pogrom. The American consul general in Dhaka at the time, Archer Blood, systematically despatched graphic details of the gruesome killings of Bangalees the army and its quislings were committing to the State Department. His concerns were brushed aside.

The point is simple: Americans in responsible positions, back in 1971 and forty-two years later, knew and know what the local collaborators of the Pakistan army did in the war, how many Bangalees were murdered, how many Bangalee women were raped and how many towns and villages were destroyed. They know history. They know of the role the Jamaat and its leaders played in that period of darkness.

And yet today, when the state of Bangladesh tries to bring the perpetrators of the old repression to justice, tries to handle its domestic criminals under laws that take care to uphold international standards of crime investigation and trial, Secretary Kerry speaks of the need for a maintenance of global norms in the matter of dealing with such war criminals as Abdul Quader Mollah. Note that the secretary says nothing about the incontrovertible evidence that went into the judgment against the Jamaat leader.

Interestingly, this emphasis on international standards raises the very grave issue of what has been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan through an indiscriminate use of American firepower. Thousands of innocent men, women and children have perished in these two countries through drone attacks, protests against which have gone unheeded. The impunity with which US aircraft have been pounding away at the Taliban in Pakistani territory has clearly not been in consonance with the rules of international behaviour. People celebrating weddings in Afghan villages have been blown to pieces by drones.

Go back a decade. The lie, which Colin Powell presented in detail before the UN Security Council, on which the Anglo-US attack on Iraq was made contemptuously cast aside any and all thoughts of an upholding of international standards of behaviour.

And the lie? That Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam could employ them against his enemies in a mere 45 minutes. The weapons were never discovered, for they never existed. But in patent violation of international law, a beautiful country named Iraq was reduced to rubble.

Now, observe the confusion into which John Kerry has placed himself. He believes that hanging Mollah will put Bangladesh's election in jeopardy. Is he informing us that the future of our democracy depends on the way our justice system deals with a war criminal? Are we expected to persuade ourselves that what we saw the war criminals doing in 1971 was not real, was an illusion and that what the powerful men in Washington now tell us is the reality?

Think back on the alacrity with which Nazi war criminals were dispatched in Nuremberg and imperial Japanese war criminals were dealt with in Tokyo. International standards? Think too of the manifest injustice employed in the name of justice at Guantanamo and on those so-called rendition flights. What forms of international standards went into the eavesdropping of global leaders' telephone conversations by the National Security Agency?

For the people of Bangladesh, despite the divisive nature of their democratic politics, the truth holds that the war criminals committed unprecedented outrage within the geographical contours of Bangladesh in 1971, that it is the right of this republic to deal with such a domestic issue on its own and on a necessary underpinning of properly civilised, moral and legal behaviour.