by JALAL ALAMGIR AND TAZREENA SAJJAD
If asked to identify the five most known 20th-century genocides, most informed citizens would probably start with the Nazi holocaust and go on to name Cambodia, Rwanda, Armenia, and Darfur. There is little likelihood that they will include the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh – a tragedy that has become largely invisible in much of the world’s public discourse about genocide.
It is an extraordinary act of forgetting. For the bloodbath in March-December 1971 – when the Pakistani army massacred a largely unarmed Bengali population in the then integral part of Pakistan’s state known as “East Pakistan”, in an effort to quash the region’s demand for autonomy – was at the time the biggest story in the world’s media.
The killing-spree began with the slaughter of around 10,000 civilians within three weeks; by June 1971, headlines in the Sunday Times and New Statesman in Britain were referring to “genocide”. In a pattern familiar from earlier experiences of genocide, specific categories of people were targeted: non-combatant Bengali men and boys (who were killed en masse); Bengali intellectuals, prominent artists, and cultural icons (who were rounded up by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators in door-to-door searches and taken away for mass execution); Hindus; and women. Ten million refugees sought safety in India.
The treatment of women was horrific. An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 were raped and sexually violated. Many, including girls below 10 years of age, were kept as sex-slaves in military camps.
An accurate count of the victims has never been established; but it is estimated that these nine months saw at least 1 million people slaughtered, and perhaps as many as 3 million. Even the lower figure would make Bangladesh among the fastest as well as the largest modern genocides – comparable to those in Rwanda (800,000 killed in May-June 1994) and Indonesia (between 1-1.5 million killed in 1965-66).
An elusive accounting
Bangladeshis achieved their independence in 1971, but in subsequent years they were unable to find psychological or emotional “closure” on the violent birth of the new state. Pakistan has not issued any formal apology for the atrocities its forces committed, although some elements of Pakistani civil society acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated against the Bengali people. India repatriated 90,000 Pakistani soldiers whom it had detained during the conflict, under the terms of the Simla peace accord; but neither they nor their commanders ever faced trial.
There was an initial effort to establish a process of accountability, when – within six weeks of independence – the post-liberation government announced the Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order. This was followed in July 1973 by the passing of the War Crimes Tribunal Act which allowed for the prosecution of individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In these early years of the new state, the government also arrested several thousand individuals suspected of war crimes. But in November 1973, amid fear of turmoil if the issue was pursued, prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman abruptly issued an amnesty order that released most alleged collaborators and made no further provision for ensuring accountability.
The decision to permit the re-entry of the Jamaat-i-Islami into Bangladesh’s political scene was an additional blow to the prospects for justice over the events of 1971. The Jamaat had opposed Bangladesh’s independence; it had organised the dreaded al-Badr and al-Shams death-squads that were responsible for mass killings; and it was led by people who had committed war crimes.
The party took advantage of its restored status to position itself as a kingmaker. It made an alliance with the rightwing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), gained the support of key military generals, and in 2001 saw its leaders inducted into the ruling cabinet. It eventually became the third most powerful party in the country, and used its strong links to the middle east to import radical ideas into Bangladesh’s national-political discourse.
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(Submitted by reader)