The Pakistani Army strategized the genocide into three phases over the course of 1971
by Anwar A. Khan
April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. The word genocide brings to mind the well-known horrors of the Holocaust, Bangladesh, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia; yet, numerous atrocities that have gone unnoticed and unmentioned.
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| Vultures on remains of slain Bengali at the bank of the Brahmaputra river in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. October, 1971 |
I will focus on dehumanization, extermination, and denial for this write-up to bring awareness by shedding light on and bearing witness to the history of the Bengali people. For clarity, dehumanization is defined as when one group denies the humanity of another group, extermination is the action of mass killing itself, and denial refers to the perpetrator’s effort to disprove that the genocide ever occurred.
The refugee Bengali men and women to the tune of 10 million of all religionstook shelter in different parts of India in 1971 when the savage Pakistan’s army started slaughtering our innocent people who lookedso sad - a grim picture… shockingly repellent; inspiring horror!
During those times, a colossal genocide took place in present-day Bangladesh. The death toll numbers to nearly 3 million. The systematic annihilation of the Bengali people by the Pakistani army during the Bangladesh Liberation War, targeted Muslim and Hindu people, mostly Hindu people, academics, and professionals and subjected nearly 400,000 Hindu and Muslim women to rape and sexual enslavement.
Bangladesh, as a nation, did not exist prior to 1971 because it was part of an area called “East Pakistan”. The pursuit of independence for Pakistan came following India’s independence from Britain in 1947. At the time, religion and culture separated the East and West sections: West Pakistan was populated by mostly Muslim Punjabis, while East Pakistan was more diverse with a considerable population of Hindu Bengalis.
West Pakistan looked down upon their eastern neighborus, calling the area “a low-lying land of low-lying people” who “polluted” the area with non-Muslim values. This is a clear demonstration of dehumanization which Stanton says “overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder” by equating the victimized groups to vermin and filth.
Lacking empathy for their disregarded neighborus, the people of West Pakistan abused their eastward neighborus economically and through lack of aid. West Pakistani elites, living and working in the political center of the country, siphoned most of the country’s revenue, initially generated by East Pakistan.
Additionally, West Pakistan neglected to send adequate aid following the Bhola Cyclone that ravaged East Pakistan, and left close to 500,000 dead in 1970. The amalgamation of denied human rights contributed to the commencement of the Bengali independence movement. In response to the Bengali’s call for independence by Pakistan’s majority party leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, West Pakistan military developed ‘Operation Searchlight’ to annihilate us from our own soil.
‘Operation Searchlight’ carried out West Pakistan militaryon the night 25 March, 1971 is seen by many as the first step in the Bengali genocide. Per the Bangladesh Genocide Archives, this operation resulted in the death of between 5,000 and 100,000 Bengalis in a single night.
Forces of the Pakistani Army targeted academics and Hindus, specifically murdering many Hindu university students and professors. The goal of the operation was to crush the Bengali nationalist movement through fear; however, the opposite occurred.
Enraged at the actions of the Pakistan Army, Bangladesh declared its independence immediately thereafter. Over several months, the Pakistani Army conducted mass killings of young, able-bodied Hindu and Muslim people. According to R.J. Rummel, “the Pakistan army sought out those especially likely to join the resistance — young boys. Sweeps were conducted of young men who were never seen again. Bodies of youths would be found in fields, floating down rivers, or near army camps.”
Refugees were also found sitting in cement pipes, while other refugees cook in various jungles of India.
Men became primary targets (almost 80 percent male, as reported by the Bangladesh Genocide Archives). The abduction and subsequent rape of women, especially Hindu womenby Pakistani soldiers took place in camps for months. Many more were subject to “hit and run” rapes. Hit and run rape explains the brutality of forcing male family member–before their own death–view the rape of their female family member by soldiers.
The use of rape, as a weapon of war by Pakistani forces, violated almost 400,000 Bengali women during March and December 1971. The high number represents the complicity of so-called Muslim religious leaders who openly supported the rape of Bengali women, referring to victims as “war booty.”
Archer Blood, a high ranking official of American Consulate to Dhaka, communicated the horrors to US officials. Unfortunately, the United States refused to respond because of Pakistan’s status as a Cold War ally. President Nixon, taking on a flippant and discriminatory attitude, regarded the genocide as a trivial matter, assuming a disinterested American public due to the races and religions of the victims. His belief was that no one would care because the atrocities were happening to people of both the Muslim and Hindu faiths, created an uninformed and disconnected America concerning the Bengali genocide of 1971.
Archer Bloodwrote to the Nixon-Kissinger administration of USA, “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities… Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.”
The Pakistani Army strategized the genocide into three phases over the course of 1971:
Operation Searchlight was the first phase as discussed earlier, which took place from late March to early May. It began as a massive murder campaign during the night of March 25, 1971. The indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in urban areas, particularly in Dhaka, killed many, including Hindu and Muslim students and scholar teachers at Dhaka University.
Search and Destroy was the second where Pakistani forces methodically slaughtered villages from May to October. This is the longest phase because this is when Bengali forces mobilized and began to fight back; rebel Bengali forces “used superior knowledge of the local terrain to deny the army a chance to dominate the countryside”. This was also the phase in which the Pakistan army targeted women to rape, abduct, and enslave.
“Scorched Earth” was the third phase beginning in early December, and targeted and killed more than 1,000 intellectuals and professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers in Dhaka. The Pakistani Army surrendered to Bangladesh-India JointForces days later, ending the genocide on December 16, 1971. Though Bangladesh established its initial independence directly following Operation Searchlight, the people of Bangladesh established themselves and their nation as a peaceful country.
The American government has never acknowledged the actions of the Pakistan Army as a genocide. Henry Kissinger never termed it to be genocidal. The horrible acts that occurred to the Bengali people was clearly a genocide under the terms of the UN Convention on the Convention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 (CPPCG). The CPPCG defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
To this day, Pakistan and its local mango-twigs, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami mass-murderers have continued to explicitly deny the occurrence of a genocide in the land of Bangladesh. Despite this, the atrocities that mark the journey to Bangladesh’s independence have not swayed the Bengali people; their rich culture and flourishing country provide clear evidence.
Today, Bangladesh is a prosperous country, ranking 46th of 211 countries in terms of GDP. They are one of the largest contributors to UN Peacekeeping forces, and the Global Peace Index ranks them as the third most peaceful country in South Asia behind Bhutan and Nepal.
The truth is that killing innocent people is always wrong - and no argument or excuse, no matter how deeply believed, can ever make it right. No religion on earth condones the killing of innocent people; no faith tradition tolerates the random killing of our brothers and sisters on this earth. The Pakistani goons and their mango-twigs who carried out the mass murders in Bangladesh in 1971, they must infer that there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of their killing of innocent people.
It is said that genocide is the responsibility of the entire world. Some scientists have even gone so far as to assert that genocide leads to the extinction of Neanderthal man or homo-sapiens boorish. It is a positive reinforcing stimulus that Bangladesh parliament on March 11, 2017 nem-con espoused a declaration stating emphatically and authoritatively that March 25 to be observed as the Genocide Day in the country.
Now the country wants the UN to recognise the 1971 genocide globally, in commemoration to the barbarities carried out by the Pakistan’s army along with their local collaborators in the soil of Bangladesh starting on the same day in 1971. Bangladesh now would reach out to the UN for this purpose. From now onwards, the country will fete March 25 as “Genocide Day” all across the world.
I saw their ferocious nature long before 1971 and during our 1971 war. Many Biharis or the non-Bengalis are still living in Bangladesh, but they do not recognise the country, Bangladesh; they still think that it is their country and it is a part of their beloved Pakistan, but the despicable Pakistanis are still not agreeable to take them to Pakistan. Rather, they consider them as treacherous people.
Pakistan’s Military President Yahya Khan government’s double-faced or Janus-faced vicious game-bag full of zest or vigour zingy diddled and defrauded the whole caboodle nation or res-publica designedly happed most high-pitched in the guise of pretension in March 1971 with BangabandhuMujib and his lieutenants. Like the Nazi Holocaust, drunkard, philanderer, double-dealer and brute Yahya Khan and his clique including deceitful character and deft schemer like ZA Bhutto took Adolf Hitler’s philosophy of “final solution to the Jewish question” to decimate us in 1971.
Every genocide, regardless of its scale, is a tragedy of epic proportions – the loss of a people, a culture, and a language is an extinction that hits far too close to home. I personally watched these massacres happened in 1971: savage Jamaat-e-Islami goons used our holy Religion-Islam and pronouncing the holy words “Naray-e-Takbir, Allah-hu Akbar. Pakistan Zindabad and Pakistan is the holy place of Islam” and then slaughtered our freedom-loving people pitilessly. They did never permit for burial of those dead bodies. Instead, they then vauntingly allowed those lamentable dead bodies to eat by the vultures, jackals, dogs and other human flesh eaters and thus celebrated such brutal darts with all unkindness.
Synonymous with the word “genocide”, Gen Yahya khan junta and his coterie were responsible for one of the most systematic and nauseatingly efficient genocides in history in 1971. Combining all of his concentration camps disgorges, and mass executions together led to a death toll in the three of millions. Today, however, we can see how wrong the Pakistani military junta and some political leaders were and just how merciless their reign of terror was. Bangladesh Genocide is known as the one of the most gruesome genocides in the history. The crimes committed by Pakistani troops during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 were unfortunately remaining somewhat unknown in the greater world even today.
The move by Pakistan army also sought to get rid of Hindu Minorities in Bangladesh who used to be one of the biggest communities in Bangladesh. Because of that ground, whenever we came across them, they with their red eyes on the first instance enounced the words, “Tum Hindu Hai” (you are a Hindu). Like so many people, I had to show my genital organ on many junctures to prove my Muslim identity at gun points by the Pakistan’s military and their local heinous collaborators-the Bangla-speaking Pakistanis and the Bihari Muslims. Even I narrowly escaped murder attempts five times at their hands during that time. The killings were estimated 3 million which is a huge number considering the fact that the killings took place during the 9 months of Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The genocide led to the fleeing of 10 million refugees towards India which caused huge economic hardships for her and forced India’s PM great Indira Gandhi to seek international support for recognition of Bangladesh and conduct training of MuktiBahini (Freedom Fighters).
Finally, Bangladesh came into being on 16 December 1971 as an independent and sovereign country. But Pakistan never has regretted the mass-scale genocide they committed in Bangladesh in 1971.There is nothing sane, merciful, heroic, devout, redemptive, wise, holy, loving, peaceful, joyous, righteous, gracious, remotely spiritual, or worthy of praise where mass murder is concerned.Albert Camus wrote, “No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.”
The End –
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
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