1971 Bangladesh genocide

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The Bangladesh Liberation War (Bengali: মুক্তিযুদ্ধ Muktijuddho), also known as the Bangladesh War of Independence, or simply the Liberation War in Bangladesh, was a revolution and armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement in what was then East Pakistan and the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. It resulted in the independence of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The war began after the Pakistani military junta based in West Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight against the people of East Pakistan on the night of 25 March 1971. It pursued the systematic elimination of nationalist Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, religious minorities and armed personnel. The junta annulled the results of the 1970 elections and arrested Prime minister-designate Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The war ended on 16 December 1971 after West Pakistan surrendered.

Quotes

• Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, (...) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.
  • Archer Blood, "The Blood Telegram" (U.S. Consulate (Dacca) Cable, Dissent from U.S. Policy Toward East Pakistan, April 6, 1971, Confidential, 5 pp. Includes Signatures from the Department of State. Source: RG 59, SN 70-73 Pol and Def. From: Pol Pak-U.S. To: Pol 17-1 Pak-U.S. Box 2535;) DISENT FROM U.S. POLICY TOWARD EAST PAKISTAN (PDF) April 6, 1971

• The very first Hindu grievance is that Hindus are being killed: in Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Kashmir, during bomb attacks... Among lesser-known types of anti-Hindu aggression, note the use of riots, targeted assassinations and minor forms of pestering... The Hindu death toll in post-Independence riots in East Bengal already outnumbers the Muslim death toll in Hindu-Muslim clashes in the whole of South Asia by far. ... All these riot data are, moreover, dwarfed by the East Bengal genocide of 1971. The first Bangladesh Government estimated the number of people killed by the Pakistanis... at three million. (...) Moreover, Western as well as Indian observers notices that the prime target group were Hindus. (...) The Nehru-Liaqat Pact of 1950, concluded with Pak Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan amid mass killing of Hindus in East Bengal, prevents the Government of India from any form of interference when Hindus are maltreated in Pakistan and its partial successor state Bangladesh.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. pp 507-509, 519

• "Genocide" means the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic community, or by extension any community constituted by bonds of kinship, of common religion or ideology, of common socio-economic position, or of common race. The pure form is the complete extermination of every man, woman and child of the group... Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as their most wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most writing about Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of its serious implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted: the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims.... While India-watchers wax indignant about communal riots in India killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus. Even apart from the 1971 genocide, "ordinary" pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.
  • Koenraad Elst, "Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?" [1]

• Nandan Vyas ("Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan", Young India, January 1995) has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the 1971 genocide was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In comparing the population figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the observed natural growth rhythm into account, Vyas finds that the Hindu population has remained stable at 9.5 million when it should have increased to nearly 13 million (13.23 million if the same growth rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for Muslims). Of the missing 3.5 million people (if not more), 1.1 million can be explained: it is the number of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to the genocide. The Hindu refugees at the time of the genocide, about 8 million, all went back after the ordeal, partly because the Indian government forced them to it, partly because the new state of Bangladesh was conceived as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu refugees into India only resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards islamization of the polity were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus to be explained. Taking into account a number of Hindu children born to refugees in India rather than in Bangladesh, and a possible settlement of 1971 refugees in India, it is fair to estimate the disappeared Hindus at about 2 million.
  • N. Vyas quoted in Koenraad Elst, "Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?" [2]

• The victims of the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in 1971 (of whom the big majority were Hindus, while the Bengali Muslims too were killed for anti-Hindu reasons, viz. for being "half-Hindu renegades"), like those of the Sultanate and Moghul regimes, have never been properly counted; careerwise, it is suicidal for a scholar to calculate the magnitude of Islam's crimes against humanity. The figure of 3 million is probably too high, but as it was given by a Muslim secularist (Bangladesh founder Mujibur Rahman), and as the secularists themselves have thrown their full weight against a proper study of the magnitude of Islamic massacres of Hindus, they cannot fault us for provisionally sticking to it.
  • Elst, Koenraad. (1997) BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence

• On the borders of what was to become East Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim violence in 1947 was far smaller in scale. What happened there was that after a relatively peaceful transition to independence, the Partition process of religious cleansing took place anyway but drawn out over decades. During this "prolonged Partition", there has been a constant trickle of Hindu refugees from East Bengal to India, which became a flood in times of crisis. The biggest crisis was of course the Bangladesh war of 1971, when the Pakistani army and its Bengali and immigrant-Bihari collaborators hunted down Hindus along with Muslim Bengali nationalists. The official death toll as claimed by the Bangladeshi government was 3 million; foreign observers settle for 1.5 million. All disinterested observers agree that Hindus were the first and largest among the victim groups. As for the Muslim victims, they were not killed by Hindus but by Pakistanis and their Jamaat-i-Islami collaborators who killed them for not being Muslim enough.
  • Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, in: Elst, K. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.
  • Yahya Khan at a meeting in February 1971
  • See A history written in blood by The Daily Star, When the Black Night fell, 46 years ago by The Hindu, The war Bangladesh can never forget by The Independent

• I wouldn't put out a statement praising it, but we're not going to condemn it either.
  • Richard Nixon refuses to condemn atrocities in Bangladesh. See, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence, Foreign Relations, 1969-1976, Volume XI, South Asia Crisis, 1971, and

• To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.
  • Oriana Fallaci, Rage and the Pride

• 'Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh
  Where so many people are dying fast
  And it sure looks like a mess
  I've never seen such distress
  • George Harrison, "Bangladesh"

• And the students at the university
  Asleep at night quite peacefully
  The soldiers came and shot them in their beds
  And terror took the dorm awakening shrieks of dread
  And silent frozen forms and pillows drenched in red
  Bangladesh, Bangladesh
  Bangladesh, Bangladesh
  When the sun sinks in the west
  Die a million people of the Bangladesh
  • Joan Baez, in the Song for Bangladesh (1971)

• 200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped. Eighty percent of the raped women were Moslems, reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and Christian women were not exempt. ... Hit-and-run rape of large numbers of Bengali women was brutally simple in terms of logistics as the Pakistani regulars swept through and occupied the tiny, populous land ...Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to beauty... Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually assaulted ... Pakistani soldiers had not only violated Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of hundreds and held them by force in their military barracks for nightly use.... Some women may have been raped as many as eighty times in a night
  • Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

• The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final toll.
  • R. J. Rummel, Death By Government, p. 331.