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Thursday, January 6, 2011

Bangladesh: The Forgotten Genocide

When people talk of modern day genocides, we get hear the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, Hutu's and Tutsi etc. But no one talks about what happened in Bangladesh back in1971. Anthony Mascarenhas (1986)in Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood. (Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-39420-X.)claims that 1-3 million civilians were killed by the Pakistani army. The Pakistani generals like Yahya and Tikka Khan ensured murders of the educated elites and Hindus so as to leave Bangladesh totally dependent on them. Now even if the genocide figures were on the lower end on the 1-3 million, it is probably the highest kill rate of all modern day genocides. These guys could have given a lesson or two to the Nazis in killing (who until then were the worst in the history of mankind).

The author of the attached article was there in Bangladesh at that time and saw all that first hand. He seems to have dissented as much as he could without risking a court martial. He describes how they were ordered to kill all the Hindus. The picture in the article which is posted here speaks volumes. He describes a very chilling incident in his words:

I ordered my subordinates to put the weapons away and ordered a tea-break. We remained there for hours. Somebody brought and hoisted a Pakistani flag. Yesterday I saw all Awami League flags over your village. I told the villagers. That was indeed the fact. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Later the main army column caught up to make contact. They arrived firing with machine guns all around and I saw smoke columns rising in villages behind them. What is the score? the Colonel asked.
There was no resistance so we didn’t kill anyone, he was informed.
He fired from his machine gun and some of the villagers who had brought us water, fell dead. That is the way my boy, the Colonel told this poor Major.

So what happened to the culprits of the genocide? The US needed the Pakistanis to make friends with the Chinese. Therefore they and the other western countries kept quiet (thus they all were culpable in the genocide). The Generals went on to live out the rest of their days in peace. The younger officers went on to progress and grow to become mirror images of their predecessors. Pervez Mushharraf who was a Company Commander in 1971, brutally put down a Shia uprising in Baltistan area as a Brigadier a decade later. We know what he did in Kargil. General Ashfaq Kiyani was active during the 1971 war and today he is in charge of a nuclear arsenal.

Knowing what we know about the 1971 genocide, how can we trust people who were involved with that? Those people are now the decision makers in Pakistan. How can we expect them to side with reason and human rights and anything that democracies stand for?

A khaki dissident on 1971by Colonel Nadir Ali“It is Mujib’s home district. Kill as many bastards as you can and make sure there is no Hindu left alive,” I was ordered. I frequently met Mr Fazlul Qadir Chaudhry, Maulana Farid Ahmed and many other Muslim League and Jamaat leaders. In the Army, you wear no separate uniform. We all share the guilt. We may not have killed. But we connived and were part of the same forceThe article can be read at: http://www.viewpointonline.net/a-khaki-dissident-on-1971.html

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