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Bangladesh genocide

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During the Bangladesh War of 1971, widespread atrocities were committed against the Bengali population of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), at a level that within Bangladesh, ‘genocide’ is the term that is still used to describe the event in almost every major publication and newspaper [1] [2]. A smaller number of non-Bengali citizens were also killed in clashes with the Mukti Bahini. The actual extent of the atrocities committed is not clearly known, and opinions vary, as the next section discusses. However, there is little doubt that numerous civilians were tortured and killed during the war. A large section of the intellectual community of Bangladesh was murdered mostly by the Al-Shams and Al-Badr forces, at the instruction of the defeated Pakistani Army[3]. There are many mass graves in Bangladesh, and newer ones are always being discovered, such as one in an old well near a mosque in Dhaka located in the non-Bengali region of the city which was discovered in August 1999[4]. The first night of war on Bengalis, which is documented in telegrams from the American Consulate in Dhaka to the United States State Department, saw indiscriminate killings of students of Dhaka University and other civilians[5].

Casualties

The number of civilians that died in the liberation war of Bangladesh is not known with any reliable accuracy. There has been a great disparity in the casualty figures put forth by Pakistan on one hand (26,000, as reported in the Hamoodur Rahman Commission [6] ) and India and Bangladesh on the other hand (From 1972 to 1975 the first post-war prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, mentioned that 3 million died on a dozen occasions [7]). The international media and reference books in English have also have published figures which vary greatly: 5,000–35,000 in Dhaka, and 200,000–3,000,000 in the country of Bangladesh [8] [9]. According to the journalist Robert Payne on February 22, 1971 Yahya Khan told a group of generals, "Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands"[10].

The historian branch of the United States State Department held a two-day conference in late June 2005 on U.S. policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972. The State Department invited scholars from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to express their views on documents recently declassified by the State Department. According to Dawn, a Pakistani Newspaper, Bangladeshi speakers at the conference stated that the official Bangladeshi figure of civilian deaths was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million. Ambassador Shamsher M. Chowdhury acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake and suggested Pakistan and Bangladesh should form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report. "Almost all scholars agreed that the real figure was somewhere between 26,000, as reported by the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, and not three million, the official figure put forward by Bangladesh and India." [11][12]

In 1997 R. J. Rummel published a book which is available on the web called Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, In Chapter 8 called Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide - Estimates, Calculations, And Sources he states:

In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) [General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals] also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.[13]

Rummel goes on to collate the what considers the most credible estimates published by others into what he calls democide. He writes that "Consolidating both ranges, I give a final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000."

Atrocities on women and minorities

Numerous women were tortured, raped and killed during the war. Again, exact numbers are not known and are a subject of debate. Bangladeshi sources cite a figure of 200,000 women raped, giving birth to thousands of war-babies. Some other sources, for example Susan Brownmiller, refer to an even higher number of over 400,000. Pakistani sources claim the number is much lower, though having not completely denied rape incidents. [14] [15] [16]

Apart from Brownmiller's, another work that has included direct experiences from the women raped is Ami Virangana Bolchhi ("I, the heroine, speak") by Nilima Ibrahim. The work includes in its name the word Virangana (Heroine), given by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after the war, to the raped and tortured women during the war. This was a conscious effort to alleviate any social stigma the women might face in the society. How successful this effort was is doubtful, though.

The minorities of Bangladesh, especially the Hindus, were specific targets of the Pakistan army [17]. There was widespread killing of Hindu males, and rapes of women. More than 60% of the Bengali refugees that had fled to India were Hindus [18]. It is not exactly known what percentage of the people killed by the Pakistan army were Hindus, but it is safe to say it was disproportionately high[19]. This widespread violence against Hindus was motivated by a policy to purge East Pakistan of what was seen as Hindu and Indian influences. The West Pakistani rulers identified the Bengali culture with Hindu and Indian culture, and thought that the eradication of Hindus would remove such influences from the majority Muslims in East Pakistan [20].

At the historian branch of the United States State Department two-day conference in late June 2005 on U.S. policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972[11], Sarmila Bose (a Harvard-educated Indian academic related to the Indian rebel Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose), presented a paper suggesting that the casualties and rape allegations in the war have been greatly exaggerated for political purposes[21]. This work has been criticized in Bangladesh and her research methods have been attacked as shoddy and biased[22].

Killing of intellectuals

During the war, the Pakistan Army and its local collaborators carried out a systematic execution of the leading Bengali intellectuals. A number of university professors from Dhaka University were killed during the first few days of the war [23][24]. However, the most extreme cases of targeted killing of intellectuals took place during the last few days of the war. Allegedly, the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami and its paramilitary arm, the Al-Badr and Al-Shams forces created a list of doctors, teachers, poets, and scholars [25]. Some sources also allege the role of the CIA in devising the plan [26]. On December 14, 1971, only two days before surrendering to the Indian military and the Mukhti Bahini forces, the Pakistani army – with the assistance of local islamist leaders and groups that chose to ally themselves with the Pakistani military, most notably the Al Badr and Al Shams – systematicly executed well over 200 of East Pakistan's intellectuals and scholars. Professors, journalists, doctors, artists, engineers, writers were rounded up in Dhaka, blindfolded, taken to Rajarbag in the middle section of the city, and executed en masse. In memory of this event, December 14 is mourned in Bangladesh as Buddhijibi Hotta Dibosh ("Day of Martyred Intellectuals") [3] [27] [28].

Alleged genocide

After the minimum 20 countries became parties to the Genocide Convention, it came into force as international law on 12 January 1951. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were parties to the treaty, and it was not until after the last of the last five permanent members ratified the treaty in 1988, and the Cold War came to an end, that the international law on the crime of genocide began to be enforced. As such, the allegation that a genocide took place during the Bangladesh War of 1971 was never investigated by an international tribunal set up under the auspices of the United Nations, so the alleged genocide is not recognised as a genocide under international law. However, the word ‘genocide’ was and is used frequently amongst observers and scholars of the events that transpired during the 1971 war. Within Bangladesh, ‘genocide’ is the term used to describe the event in almost every major publication and newspaper.[1][2]

On December 16, 2002, the George Washington University’s National Security Archives published a collection of declassified documents, mostly consisting of communications between US officials working in embassies and USIS centers in Dhaka and in India, and officials in Washington DC[29]. These documents show that US officials working in diplomatic institutions within Bangladesh used the terms ‘selective genocide’[23] and ‘genocide’ (Blood telegram) to describe events they had knowledge of at the time. They also show that President Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger, decided to downplay this secret internal advise, because he wanted to protect the interests of Pakistan as he was apprehensive of India's friendship with the USSR, and he was seeking a closer relationship with China who supported Pakistan[30].

In his book “The Trials of Henry Kissinger”, Christopher Hitchens elaborates on what he saw as the efforts of Henry Kissinger to subvert the aspirations of independence on the part of the Bengalis. In elaborating, Hitchens not only claims that the term ‘genocide’ is appropriate to describe the results of the struggle, but also points to the efforts of Henry Kissinger in undermining others who condemned the then ongoing atrocities as being a genocide. [31]

References

  • Pierre Stephen and Robert Payne: Massacre, Macmillan, New York, (1973). ISBN 0025952404
  • Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will : Men, Women, and Rape, ISBN 0449908208
  • Nilima Ibrahim Ami Virangana Bolchhi ("I, the heroine, speak")
  • Christopher Hitchens The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Verso (2001). ISBN 1859846319

Further reading

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Editorial The Jamaat Talks Backin The Bangladesh Observer December 30, 2005
  2. ^ a b Dr. N. Rabbee Remembering a Martyr Star weekend Magazine, The December 16, 2005
  3. ^ a b Asadullah Khan The loss continues to haunt us in The December 14, 2005
  4. ^ DPA report Mass grave found in Bangladesh in The Chandigarh Tribune August 8, 1999
  5. ^ Sajit Gandhi The Tilt: The U.S. and the South Asian Crisis of 1971 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 79 December 16, 2002
  6. ^ Hamoodur Rahman Commission, Chapter 2, Paragraph 33
  7. ^ F. Hossain Genocide 1971 Correspondence with the Guiness Book of Records on the number of dead
  8. ^ Matthew White's Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century
  9. ^ Virtual Bangladesh : History : The Bangali Genocide, 1971
  10. ^ Pierre Stephen and Robert Payne References needs a page number
  11. ^ a b U.S Department of State South Asia in Crisis: United States Policy, 1961-1972 June 28-29, 2005, Loy Henderson Auditorium, Tentative Program
  12. ^ Anwar Iqbal Sheikh Mujib wanted a confederation: US papers, The Dawn, July 7, 2005
  13. ^ Rummel, Rudolph J., "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900", ISBN 3825840107, Chapter 8, table 8.1
  14. ^ Debasish Roy Chowdhury 'Indians are bastards anyway' in Asia Times June 23, 2005 "In Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller likens it to the Japanese rapes in Nanjing and German rapes in Russia during World War II. "... 200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped.""
  15. ^ Brownmiller, Susan, "Against Our Will : Men, Women, and Rape" ISBN 0449908208, page 81
  16. ^ Hamoodur Rahman Commission, Chapter 2, Paragraphs 32,34
  17. ^ U.S. Consulate (Dacca) Cable, Sitrep: Army Terror Campaign Continues in Dacca; Evidence Military Faces Some Difficulties Elsewhere, March 31, 1971, Confidential, 3 pp
  18. ^ US State Department, "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976", Volume XI, South Asia Crisis, 1971", Page 165
  19. ^ Kennedy, Senator Edward, "Crisis in South Asia - A report to the Subcommittee investigating the Problem of Refugees and Their Settlement, Submitted to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee", November 1, 1971, U.S. Govt. Press, page 66. Sen. Kennedy wrote, "Field reports to the U.S. Government, countless eye-witness journalistic accounts, reports of International agencies such as World Bank and additional information available to the subcommittee document the reign of terror which grips East Bengal (East Pakistan). Hardest hit have been members of the hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in some places, painted with yellow patches marked 'H'. All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad."
  20. ^ The Sunday Times, London, June 13, 1971, ""The Government's policy for East Bengal was spelled out to me in the Eastern Command headquarters at Dacca. It has three elements: 1. The Bengalis have proved themselves unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis; 2. The Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The - Islamization of the masses - this is the official jargon - is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan; 3. When the Hindus have been eliminated by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the under privileged Muslim middle-class. This will provide the base for erecting administrative and political structures in the future."
  21. ^ Sarmila Bose Anatomy of violence: An Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971, later published in the Indian Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, issue October 8, 2005
  22. ^ In this website, we tried to collate information concerning this paper including Sarmila Bose’s original paper, relevant Bangla articles and rebuttals of Bose’s paper on the Drishtipat web site. Drishtipatis a non-profit, non-political expatriate Bangladeshi organization
  23. ^ a b Blood, Archer, Transcript of Selective Genocide Telex, Department of State, United States
  24. ^ Ajoy Roy, "Homage to my martyr colleagues", 2002
  25. ^ Dr. Rashid Askari, "Our martyerd intellectuals", editorial, the Daily Star, December 14, 2005
  26. ^ Dr. M.A. Hasan, Juddhaporadh, Gonohatya o bicharer anneshan, War Crimes Fact Finding Committee and Genocide archive & Human Studies Centre, Dhaka, 2001
  27. ^ Shahiduzzaman No count of the nation’s intellectual loss The New Age, December 15, 2005
  28. ^ Killing of Intellectuals Asiatic Society of Bangladesh
  29. ^ Gandhi, Sajit (ed.), The Tilt: The U.S. and the South Asian Crisis of 1971: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 79
  30. ^ Memorandam for the Record(PDF) August 11 1971
  31. ^ Christopher Hitchens The Trials of Henry Kissinger References Pages 44,50
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