The genocide waged by the Pakistani regime before Bangladesh's independence is a topic that has marked the history of our naition, and has scarred the national psyche of the population for 52 years. A bloody, nine-month rape of Bangladesh had lasted from March 25 to December 16, 1971. A brutal, reckless, and out-of-control army tried to impose a final solution to the transfer of power impasse following the first ever free and fair national elections held in Pakistan in 1970.
The election verdict had not favoured them. The unspeakable horrors that followed have left deep wounds which have not been laid to rest yet. At the root of this pain is the lack of acknowledgement of the cruel and degrading treatment we suffered, while the perpetrators were permitted to go scot-free. A dehumanizing culture of impunity had been sanctioned on the world stage simply to pamper certain Cold War geo-strategic interests.
This is my appeal to the international community to help us find closure.
The deafening silence
A deafening silence marked the unfolding genocide that began with “Operation Searchlight” on the night of the March 25 on the sleeping streets of Dhaka. Slums were burned down, Hindu localities in the Old Town were razed to the ground, Dhaka University campus provided the killing fields for the intelligentsia and students. Political figures were picked up and eliminated.
A gradual exodus began as the population of Dhaka began to look for shelter in anonymity in the countryside. Despite growing evidence of mass killings of Bengalis, targeted elimination of intellectuals and Hindus, the indiscriminate mowing down of slum dwellers and students, the violation of children and girls, the extermination of impregnated women, world leaders remained silent.
Archer Blood from the US Mission in Dhaka had kept on sending daily briefs and reports on the unfolding horrors. Various reporters, including the Pakistani Anthony Mascarenhas had revealed their devastating findings of genocide. The world citizenry was outraged. But world leaders uttered no condemnation. Pakistan was not held to account. Moral bankruptcy surrounded the UN system, which had capitulated to the super power pressures of the Cold War.
An unarmed population was being gunned down and left to fend for itself without any resources. The Bengalis of East Pakistan paid a bitter price for US-led Cold War geo-politics where humanitarian considerations played no role, whatever the consequences. The Nixon administration, under the advice of Henry Kissinger, planned to secretly forge alliances with China, for which the help of General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan was required, him being on good terms with China.
Pakistan was illegally rewarded for this help with weapons despite an arms embargo being in place since the 1965 Indo-Pak War. US weapons, tanks, and armour were used by Pakistan in its assault on Bengalis. The US refused to rein in Pakistan from its costly misadventure: Presumably, Nixon had also convinced himself that Pakistan was fighting communism in the East. He liked and trusted Yahya to do his bidding.
Pakistan had the backing of the US, China, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and various other countries of the Muslim world, which did not relish the idea of breaking up Pakistan. Realpolitik rather than humanity prevailed. With such support as these, Pakistan appeared to have had the full sway of the international system. This was to be a major hurdle in the search for justice, peace and closure for Bengalis in the long run.
After achieving independence, Bangladesh was propped up with aid as an international “basket case,” but was never given the political endorsement necessary to seek justice. By doing so, the international community continues the Cold War policy of isolation and erasing of memory.
It seemed that East Pakistan's Bengalis stood alone in 1971. But India came to their rescue, quietly opening up her borders to refugees fleeing for their lives, seeking shelter.
The India factor and armed resistance
A fledgling armed resistance had begun to form around segments of the Bengali units in the defense forces that had mutinied and refused to disarm when so demanded by Pakistani officers. Many were court-martialed and many escaped to become the focal points of Bengali resistance. Segments found themselves pushed towards the border with India, such as Major Khaled Musharraf, Major Ziaur Rahman, Major Jalil, Major Shafiullah and others.
With the formation of a provisional government under Tajuddin Ahmed as Prime Minister, on April 10, 1971 the Bangladesh Forces came to be organized under Colonel MAG Osmani, who was brought back into service from retirement to act as Commander in Chief. Bangladesh was divided into eleven sectors for purposes of operations command and control. These officers were appointed sector commanders alongside others to give direction to the resistance in their sectors.
The top leadership operated from the safety of 8 Theater Road, Calcutta in West Bengal. Exceptionally, Kader Siddique, led a guerilla force of 17,000 men called Kaderia Bahini that fought from within the independent Tangail region of Bangladesh. Notably, the armed resistance emerged as a response to the violations perpetrated by the Pakistani army.
India gave us a lifeline. Apart from assisting the resistance movement with training in guerilla warfare and light arms, India hosted millions of refugees at great cost to its treasury. The international humanitarian aid coming through was miniscule compared to the need. Disease, pestilence, and the stench of death marked the refugee camps. In fact, 10 million registered refugees have been accounted for, of which a million died in the camps.
India's reasons for her position were both humanitarian and geo-strategic. India's Bengalis in West Bengal shared an affinity with those of East Pakistan. Securing her western borders and having a friendly neighbour to the east would be desirable outcomes. But India's task was not easy, as it belonged to the Non-Aligned Movement, much hated by the US and its allies as pro-communist. Possibly, for this reason -- despite her generous assistance to Bengalis -- even India did not raise any questions or censure Pakistan at the UN.
It was clear that the world community was not going to intervene in order to stop Pakistan. It was left for India to do so. The cost of feeding the ten million refugees was crippling the Indian economy. India was not a rich country. Pakistan may well have deduced that a showdown with India was going to be inevitable. On December 3, 1971, it made pre-emptive air strikes deep into Indian territory (codenamed Operation Chengiz Khan) to destroy 11 of its airfields. India immediately declared war on Pakistan and invaded East Pakistan on December 4. She recognized Bangladesh on December 6.
Pakistan surrendered to the Combined Forces on December 16. Approximately 93,000 prisoners were taken to India, of which 81,000 were men in uniform and the rest were civilians, either family members or collaborators. It has also been observed by Asif Shahkar -- a Pakistani journalist and 1971 war protester -- that many abducted Bengali women were taken as slaves or war trophies by the Pakistan soldiers and passed off as their family.
Throughout this nine-month period of hardship and treachery, Bengalis had the heart and moral support of regular people worldwide: Cultural activists, musicians, journalists, academics, civil servants, including many from the US and Pakistan. For this, many Americans were professionally sidelined, their promotions stopped and publications seized or suppressed. Many Pakistanis faced arrest, torture and exile. There were concerts for Bangladesh in the UK, US, and elsewhere. World public opinion was that of shock and outrage. The morale of refugees and freedom fighters were uplifted by the BBC coverage that gave us hope and spurred our own efforts at self-help.
Periodically, we broke down, engaged in the occult or fortune telling to find reassurance.
Genocide and crimes against humanity
Among the most damning reports and eyewitness accounts of genocide came from the journalist Anthony Mascarenhas, who had been taken to East Pakistan to whitewash the image of Pakistan. But his conscience rebelled. Having secured safe passage for his family to London, Mascarenhas released his article “Genocide” to the Sunday Times on June 13, 1971: “‘We are determined to cleanse East Pakistan once and for all of the threat of secession, even if it means killing of two million people and ruling the province as a colony for 30 years,' I was repeatedly told by senior military and civil officers in Dacca and Comilla.”
Mascarenhas argues that Pakistan's actions were not an undisciplined or spontaneous reaction to the massacre of non-Bengalis, but a planned “pogrom.”
An oft-quoted passage notes that at a meeting on February 22, 1971, then Pakistani President General Yahya Khan was recorded as saying: “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.”
Three million out of 75 million people would be about one in every 25 persons in East Pakistan. However, Yahya must have had the adult male population in mind. So, as a proportion of the voting population that would be 1 in every 5 persons.
As a proportion of Awami League supporters, that would be 30% of the total 10 million or so who had voted for the party in 1970. In reality, the victims were not limited to the adult voting population but included children, pregnant girls, slum dwellers, the elderly, and people not involved in any ideological discourse.
They were simply Bengali.
The deduced objective of the Pakistani junta was to inflict such harm and chaos as to cripple the intellectual and political leadership, and to destroy the cultural identity and ideological orientation of the people. It sought to create a subordinate vassal entity with loyalists that could never raise its head on equal terms again.
That Bengalis were targets of intended genocidal atrocities is not a matter of doubt for any Bangladeshi, by whatever count or definition. The Muslims of Bengal were considered inferior and Hindus at heart, and therefore deserved annihilation. And the Hindus were held guilty of influencing the Muslims towards socialism and secession.
The onslaught on Bengalis was mindless, indiscriminate, and reckless. It did not follow any international rules of engagement in conflict situations. No due process was followed, no investigations made, no prisoners were taken. They were simply shot. And as the conflict raged on, a scorched earth policy of kill and burn was adopted.
In the first phase of the crackdown, the victims of murder were slum dwellers, Awami League members, Hindus, intellectuals, students, and academics. In the second phase, women, girls, and children were raped, tortured, and killed. In the last phase of the war, intellectuals, university teachers, and potential future leaders were assassinated by death squads.
The UN resolution 260 (iii) A of December 9, 1948 in its Article 2 defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, such as: Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and transferring children of the group to another group.
Moreover, Article 3 of the resolution stipulates the following acts to be punishable: Genocide; conspiracy to commit genocide; direct and public incitement to commit genocide; attempt to commit genocide; and complicity in genocide.
Political groups are often not included within this definition. In the case of Bangladesh, the “genocidal” aspect is still questioned as it was considered by some to be a secessionist movement or a “civil war” between East and West Pakistan, whereas in reality, an unarmed population was mowed down, which eventually rose up in resistance.
It can be argued that it was a political genocide that sought to alter the ideology and politics of a nation. The ICJ held that the charge of crimes against humanity could be argued. However, the Bengali perspective is that the ethnic killing of Bengalis, both Muslims and Hindus, and of the professional group of intellectuals, places the war of 1971 within the “category” of a genocide, being a state-organized total or partial extermination of perceived or actual communal groups.
Recognizing genocide and the International Committee of Jurists
The international alignments of the cold war prevented any discussion of the Bangladesh genocide in the UN. India, Russia, Poland supported Bangladesh but did not table any motion to hold Pakistan to account.
On his release from confinement, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the majority party, the Awami League, sought the help of the UN in 1972 to set up an International Crimes Tribunal to try the Prisoners of War. That help did not come. Instead he was advised to set up his own tribunal with a neutral team, notwithstanding the fact that the Nuremberg Tribunal was stacked with members of the Allied powers. Beleaguered Bangladesh was being asked to apply higher standards!
An international committee of jurists headed by Niall McDermot was set up to examine the evidence from a legal perspective to assess if the charge of genocide can be applied. The ICJ submitted its report in June 1972, making a number of debatable pronouncements that need to be revisited and re-analyzed in the light of new emerging evidence, which are likely to make their conclusions appear obsolete.
For example, the ICJ report argues that the intent of genocide of Bengalis may be difficult to prove in a court of law, but not that of Hindus. But as far as the Pakistan military was concerned, the Muslims of East Pakistan were really Hindus at heart, and therefore, dispensable.
The slum dwellers and children killed were not party members, and yet were indiscriminately exterminated, fuelled by hatred. Even significant numbers of political party supporters were not members of any political party. Intellectuals and students were not party members, but they were the future of a nation.
The ICJ lamented that there were no clear statistical figures of the numbers killed. However, in the last 50 years, 742 mass graves have been found with the remains of 1,000 to 10,000 bodies in each (accounting for 742,000 to 7,420,000 bodies).
The genocidal impact of Pakistan's war has not been fully accounted for. And it is hard to believe that the Pakistani generals had no knowledge of the implications of their actions. There were a million deaths in refugee camps. Pakistan's atrocities provoked fratricidal conflict between Bengalis and Biharis, again costing many lives.
The rape of 200,000 to 400,000 women, girls and minors, led to deaths, unwanted pregnancies, abortions and suicides. Daily, two girls went missing from every thana or police district accounting for some 400,000 abductions.
The ICJ did not treat rape as act of wartime genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 1994 ruled in 1998 that wartime rape was a genocidal crime (unctr.irmct.org), thus rendering the findings of the ICJ as partially redundant. The Rwanda Tribunal also revised the understanding of “intent” to include “knowledge” that a protected group was a target of destruction, and an “ulterior intent” to destroy a protected group.
ICJ does not consider such nuances either, largely because such understandings had not yet been arrived at in 1972.
Clemency for POWs by Bangladesh
An additional hindrance to seeking justice for war crimes and genocide, could be the fact that Bangladesh agreed to a clemency for the prisoners of war on humanitarian grounds. The stark reality was that Bangladesh was weak, had no resources, faced a devastated economy and had millions to feed. The international community did not endorse any trials of war criminals.
On the contrary, they pushed Bangladesh to seek recognition from Pakistan, in order to obtain recognition from other nations, particularly the Islamic world. Separately, Pakistan threatened to try the 400,000 stranded Bengalis in West Pakistan should the POWs be tried and drew up a list of 204 people for immediate action.
Bangladesh capitulated and agreed to offer clemency on the agreement that the prisoners would be tried for war crimes on Pakistani soil. That never happened. Instead, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission was set up to investigate how it was possible for such a highly trained, well resourced army to surrender within two weeks of the start of the Indo Pakistan war in December 1971.
The report vindicated the position of Bangladesh to an extent. It conceded that atrocities had occurred and that the Niazi government had got derailed into looting, debauchery, and self-aggrandizement alongside ruthless and arbitrary killings and acts of violence. But the report did not go far enough to call it a genocide. Pakistanis loathed him, and respected him for his conclusions: some dubbed him a traitor, others held him to be brave.
Elusive justice
Bangladesh has found its search for justice to be elusive. It had taken measures to try Bangladesh based war criminals from organizations which provided the auxiliary forces to the Pakistan army in East Pakistan, such as Razakar, Al-Badr and Al-Shams. It passed the Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order, 1972 to establish a tribunal to prosecute local collaborators who helped or supported the Pakistan army during the Bangladesh Liberation War and the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
It also enacted the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act 1973 (Act No XIX of 1973) to provide for the detention, prosecution and punishment of persons responsible for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes under international law. Trial preparations were initiated, but could not be completed.
In 1975, Bangabandhu was assassinated. The Collaborators Order was rescinded and all proceedings under that Order were dropped. The 1973 Act, which was a parliamentary statute, was not. However, subsequent military dictatorships and governments were unable or unwilling to take on this task.
It was only in 2009 that the International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh) was set up as a domestic war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute suspects for the 1971 genocide. The War Crimes Fact Finding Committee identified 1,600 suspects. Indictments were issued in 2010. By 2012 political stalwarts from two prominent political parties had also been indicted for war crimes. But the main offenders from the Pakistan army could not be held to account.
Initially, in 2009, Bangladesh had received some offers of expertise from the UN and the EU to set up the Tribunal. However, after the trials commenced there were criticisms from Human Rights Watch and certain individuals that the process was not fair, transparent, or impartial.
The student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir, called for a national strike on December 4, 2012 to scrap the tribunal altogether. Their protest erupted into violence. However, public opinion polls supported the implementation of the verdict even though it found the ICT to be unfair.
The war crimes trials of domestic perpetrators revealed how turbulent the issue is, and why the government treads with care. In February 2013, the Shahbag movement erupted over the life sentence verdict on Quader Molla. It was feared that he would be released if a new government was installed. The retaliatory movement in May at Shapla Chattor, by Hefazat-e-Islam, was essentially a counter offensive against the Shahbag youths.
But it was couched in the garb of demands to protect Islam from atheist bloggers by means of a blasphemy law. In the list of demands were included: Stop infiltration of alien culture in the name of freedom of expression and the release of all arrested ulema and students. Nevertheless, 17 cases were tried and disposed of in Bangladesh, providing partial relief to an old sore.
What do we want now?
Various organizations have recognized the Bangladesh genocide: Genocide Watch, Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies, and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Political opinions in various parts of the globe agree. In October 2022, a motion was tabled in the US Congress by the Republican Steve Chabot and the Democrat Ro Khanna to recognize the Bangladesh genocide. We need others to follow suit.
We need closure as our moral and human right. We want “never again” to mean never again. We want to question a global policy of realpolitik that offers humanitarian aid to ease gross suffering but does nothing to stop the cause of that suffering. In the interest of our humanity, we want acknowledgement of all that has been done to us. We cannot “forgive and forget” without restoring respect for our own dignity. We want an apology.
A majority population was mowed down by a minority military entity that was on the brink of handing over power to an elected civilian body. But instead, it illegally usurped power, flouted the constitution, and embarked on a suicidal mission to change the nature and fabric of that population through systematic genocidal violence, rape, and massacres.
The world must send a signal that this must never happen again. To this end, the international community could help Bangladesh to form an International Crimes Tribunal to try key Pakistani figures. Despite its promise to Mujib, Pakistan has failed to try soldiers on its own soil in return for clemency. Bangladesh has the moral right to do so now to assert its dignity and rightful place in the comity of nations.
For me personally, as a genocide survivor many of whose friends and relatives perished, getting acknowledgement and closure is very important. This bitter history haunts us to this day for it has mired our politics and our perceptions. The army had come looking for my academic father.
My mother had a shoot on sight order on her head for daring to speak out about the atrocities. We were internally displaced, we became refugees. It is a miracle that we survived. But we also owe a debt to those we have lost, and who believed in a beautiful golden Bengal. Therefore, we must keep alive the call for recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide and put our house in order.
Tazeen M Murshid, DPhil, is a historian and an author.
