Creation of Bangladesh

[roadrunner]

any link about Blood's retraction?

His memoirs.

The Mukti bahini was formed gradually.They were always on the run,hiding as Pak forces were superior in numbers and strength.I personally believe that they never had much time strolling into a Bihari house and rape the women there with Pak forces everywhere in the country.

Utter trash..The Mukti Bahini were prepared well in advance of the war and made collusion plans with Bharat well in advance. Meetings took place at Dhaka University where weapons training were given to Muktihi Bahini henchman.

 

[akzaman]

Pakistan plunges into Civil War

The man and his party are enemies of Pakistan. This crime will not go unpunished. We will not allow some power-hungry and unpatriotic people to destroy the country play with the destiny of 120 million people.-President Mohammed Yahya Khan

Come Out of your home with whatever weapons you have. … Resist the enemy forces at any cost … until the last enemy soldier is vanquished, and save the country from the ruthless dictatorship of West Pakistanis.
-Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

Until the very last moment, it looked as if the two proud men entrusted with Pakistan's destiny might still be able to avert a head-on clash. From the East Pakistani capital of Dacca came optimistic reports that President Mohammed Yahya Khan and Mujib-as the leader of secessionist-minded East Pakistan is known-were about to reach a compromise. But then, with stunning suddenness, the pieces of Pakistan’s complicated political puzzle flew apart. In the East Pakistani cities of Rangpur and Chittagong federal troops poured machine-gun fire into mobs of demonstrating Bengali nationalists. Swiftly, Yahya issued orders to his army to “crush the movement and restore the full authority of the government.” In his turn, Mujib proclaimed East Pakistan the “sovereign, independent People’s Republic of Bangla Desh [Bengal nation].” And with that, Pakistan was plunged into civil war.

Then, in the 24th year of Pakistan's existence, the bond that had held the eastern and western sectors of the country in tenuous union snapped. Because Pakistan's central government immediately imposed strict censorship on communications in and out of East Pakistan, early reports were sketchy. Still, even the fragmentary dispatches from neighboring India provided a dismal picture of bloody fighting that pitted a modern, professional army against rebels who were often armed with little more than passion and pitchforks. Hopelessly outgunned, the East Pakistani guerillas reportedly suffered thousands of casualties. But although by the end of the week it appeared that the federal army-Iargely composed of fierce Punjabis-had dealt its Bengali adversary a devastating blow, few people thought that the widely separated wings of Pakistan could ever be effectively reunited again.

What made the Pakistani upheaval so unexpected was that it occurred even as Yahya and Mujib were in the midst of private negotiations. On hearing the reports of "massacres" in Rangpur and Chittagong, an enraged Mujib accused the army of unleashing a reign of terror. Yahya's response was to quit the talks in a huff and leave Dacca unannounced to return to West Pakistan. Back in his home region, the President took to national radio to ban Mujib's Awami League, East Pakistan's dominant political organization. "Sheikh Mujib's action of stalling his non-cooperation movement is an act of treason," the President declared.

Shortly after Yahya left Dacca, the army's tough martial-Iaw administrator, Lt. Geri. Tikka Khan, slapped tight censorship over East Pakistan- All foreign correspondents were restricted to their hotels and then, after federal troops seized their notes and film, the reporters were expelled from the country. Among the correspondents forced to leave was NEWSWEEK'S Loren Jenkins, who filed this report:

From our windows in Dacca's modern Intercontinental Hotel, we watched a jeepful of soldiers roll up to a shopping center and, taking aim with a heavy machine gun, open fire on a crowd. While the firing was still going on, some fifteen young Bengalis appeared in the street about 200 yards away and shouted defiantly at the soldiers. The youths seemed to be empty-handed, but the soldiers turned the machine gun on them anyway. Then, the federal soldiers moved down an adjacent alley leading to the office of a pro-Mujib daily newspaper that had strongly denounced the army. The troops shouted in Urdu-a language which few Bengalis understand-warning anyone inside to surrender or be shot. No one emerged. So they blasted the building and set it afire. And when they emerged, they waved their hands in triumph and shouted "Pakistan Zindabad" ( "Long Live Pakistan").

By late in the week, firing throughout the city was heavy and flashes of 105-mm. howitzers in the night preceded the heavy crump of incoming shells which seemed to be landing on the new campus of Dacca University. I woke up one morning to the sound of six Chinese-made T-54 light tanks clanging down Airport Road. A gray pall of smoke hung low over the muggy sky. Soon new artillery blasts were heard and new fires were seen in the region of Old Dacca, a warren of narrow, open-sewered streets where most of the capital's population lives in cramped one-room homes.

The West Pakistani troops in Dacca showed all the signs of having the jitters. Many shot off random bursts of automatic weapons fire at the slightest noise. And when some of the reporters in the Intercontinental Hotel ventured outside - and asked to tour the city, an army captain stationed in front of the hotel threatened to shoot us. Ordering us back inside, he shouted angrily: "If I can kill my own people, I can kill you."

At the outset of the crackdown, the army ordered striking government workers either to return to work or face military trial, and imposed a 24-hour curfew. Meanwhile, a truckload of soldiers moved through the city, stopping in front of any house flying the new green, red and yellow banner of Bangla Desh. At every such building, the troops ordered the flag pulled down. In the area around our hotel, their first stop was a three-story brick house-where a woman in a sari slowly mounted to the roof and, under the menacing gaze of the soldiers, reluctantly lowered her flag.

With Jenkins and other foreign reporters expelled from East Pakistan, the world was left to the mercy of conflicting radio reports for its information. The official government radio in Karachi announced that the army had arrested Mujib. But a clandestine radio in Dacca identifying itself as the Voice of Independent Bangla Desh, proclaimed that Mujib was still safe in his underground headquarters. Under his leadership, said a rebel radio announced: "The people of Bangla Desh will shed more blood. .."

If Pakistan was disintegrating in division and violence, it had, in a sense, only moved full circle in its quarter-century history. For Pakistan emerged as a nation in 1947 out of divisions and strife. Propelled by Mohammed Ali Jinnah's driving vision of a Moslem homeland in South Asia, Pakistan was assembled from the predominantly Moslem areas of British India. But the partitioning of India touched off a six-month blood bath between Hindus and Moslems in which an estimated half million people perished. And it created a Pakistan with two distant wings separated by 1,100 miles of Indian territory.

This geographical handicap was serious enough. But to further complicate the matters, their shared devotion to Islam was virtually all that the two sectors of Pakistan have in common. West Pakistan is a land of deserts and mountains and a generally arid climate; the far more densely populated eastern wing is a humid land of jungles and alluvial plains. And the differences in racial personality between the Punjabis of West Pakistan and the Bengalis of the east are extreme (box below). A proud, martial people, the Punjabis look down upon the Bengalis and over the years have consistently exploited their countrymen in the east.

Clean Sweep: Ironically, President Yahya was the first West Pakistani leader to openly admit that East Pakistan never received its fair share of political power and economic resources in the Pakistani union. To rectify matters, Yahya provided Pakistan with its first national elections conducted strictlv on one-man, one-vote basis. But the resuIts of last December's voting turned out to be something of a shocker. In the east, Mujib's Awami League all but swept the boards clean. And because the more populous east had a larger allotment of seats in the National Assembly, Mujib's forces came up with a clear parliamentary majority as well.

During the campaign, Mujib proclaimed a six-point program aimed a diminishing the powers of Pakistan's central government while granting virtual autonomy to each province. Not surprisingly, it was a plan that the top vote-getting politician in West Pakistan, the mercurial, left-Ieaning ex-Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, found totally unacceptable. When Bhutto's Supporters refused to take part in the new National Assembly, Yahya was forced to postpone its openjng. This, in turn, prompted Mujib to launch a civil-disobedience campaign which virtually destroyed federal authority in East Pakistan and made him the region's effective ruler. And in the end, that left Yahya no choice but to grant the Bengali demands or to resort to force.

In branding Mujib an outlaw, Yahya slammed shut the door to further negotiations and opted instead for a military solution to his dilemma. But although the federal force in East Pakistan (whose size is variously estimated at anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000 men) was far superior in training and equipment to its e!1emy, it faced some severe problems. Lacking direct land links between West and East Pakistan, and banned from flying over India, federal army commanders had to move their men the long way around the southern tip of India by way of Ceylon. "For the short term," said a U.S. analyst, "Pakistan's army should be able to tear out of the Bengali landscape. But for the long term, they have a terrible logistics problem."

Guerrilla Haven: Against the federal forces, the Bengalis could muster barely 15,000 troops, most of them militiamen armed with obsolete World War II weapons. But while the Bengalis were no match for the federal army in the cities, military observers noted that the surrounding countryside, where 90 per cent of East Pakistan's population lives, is a virtual haven for guerrilla warfare. A maze of sunken rice fields, tea plantations, jute fields and banana groves, it is ideal ambush country reminiscent of South Vietnam's Mekong Delta. As a result, most foreign military analysts believe that prolonged military occupation of the east would put an intolerable strain on the Pakistani Army.

Nonetheless, if Yahya chose to indulge in wholesale slaughter, it was probable that he could stamp out the rebellion in East Pakistan, at least for the time being. And if the reports of Mujib's capture proved true, that would surely be a severe blow to the cause of Bangla Desh. But no matter how harsh the federal crackdown, Bengali resistance-whether in the form of civil disobedience or a Viet Cong-style guerrilla struggle-appeared likely to continue. Yahya, in fact, was seemingly faced with the ugly prospect of being a colonial ruler in his own country. For when the federal army opened up with tanks and automatic weapons in Dacca last week, it mortally wounded any remaining chance that the two disparate wings of Pakistan could ever live in harmony again.

A People Apart: The Complex Bengalis

To anyone acquainted with the character of the Bengalis, it seemed almost inevitable that some day they would try to form their own independent nation. Despite their incorporation into India and Pakistan when the British raj left the subcontinent in 1947, some 120 million Bengalis (70 million of whom live in East Pakistan and most of the rest in India's West Bengal) still consider themselves a race apart from-and above-their neighbors. Emotional and talkative, the dark-skinned Bengalis have more in common with each other than with their co-religionists, Hindu or Moslem, or with their compatriots, Indian or Pakistani. Says one Western expert; "They consider themselves to be. 'Bengalis first, Moslems or Hindus second and Pakistanis or Indians a poor third."

Culturally, ethnically, linguistically and spiritually, the Bengalis are different from their countrymen in Pakistan and India. For one thing, as Bengali scholars will inform all who pause to listen, the name Bengal is derived from the ancient kingdom of Banga, which goes back at least to the third century B.C. One of the oldest literary streams in Asia also flows in Bengal, whose Indo-Aryan language and recorded history date back at least a thousand years, Boastful of this long literary heritage, intellectual Bengalis was most eloquent on the subject of Rabindranath Tagore, their greatest modern literary figure. In his combination of mysticism and lyricism, Tagore may have been the quintessential Bengali. Poet, novelist and dramatist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

Talk: If the written language is one of Bengal's glories, the spoken one is one of its burdens. In the cafes of Calcutta and Dacca, Bengalis palaver endlessly, spinning out airy intellectual concepts and political schemes. An Indian joke goes like this: "Every committee must have four members: a Mukherjee, a Bannerjee, a Chatterjee (all Bengali names] and a Singh." Singh is a Sikh name. The Sikhs -unlike the Bengalis-are noted for their action, and the implication is that the lone Sikh is the fellow who will execute the program.

A people who have suffered hundreds of invasions and conquests, including that of the British in the eighteenth century the Bengalis long ago learned to cultivate the arts of accommodation. Unlike the proud Punjabi, his opponent in the current strife, the Bengali knew how to bow and scrape. Dressed in his dhoti, spouting flowery language, armed only with an umbrella, the Bengali was regarded by all as a reliable, efficient clerk. Fighting was best left to more martial people.

The other main cliche about the Bengalis portrays them as crafty fellows ready to outsmart you if given half a chance. "Watch it," a merchant might say. "He's a Bengali." The message is that the person in question is not only clever but possibly also capable of a little sharp practice.

And yet, despite their reputation as a guileful, docile people, the Bengalis have more than once demonstrated a dark, explosive side. The most ruthless, dedicated terrorists during the fighting against the British came from Bengal. And since partition, the Bengali regions of both India and Pakistan have been the scene of constant political turmoil and near revolution. "They may seem docile," says one American scholar. "But they are capable of violence when sparked the wrong way." And then, in words that may prove to be all too perceptive, he adds: "There is a side to the Bengali mentality that thrives on chaos."

Courtesy: Newsweek April 5, 1971; pp.31-34

 

[HK-47]

Utter trash..The Mukti Bahini were prepared well in advance of the war and made collusion plans with Bharat well in advance. Meetings took place at Dhaka University where weapons training were given to Muktihi Bahini henchman

well whether prepared in advance or not they had very few opportunities for committing so many atrocities as you allege.
How many Biharis were there in East Pakistan anyways?

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

RR,

Indeed, yes, very strong credentials you have.

I was reading an article on A laugh a minute! Surprising that chap also claimed he had solid credentials!

I'm not backing anything without strong credentials such as official meetings that lack the vested interests of people you quote as gospel like Simon Dring, the head of Dhaka TV in return for favours given during the war!

Yes, official meeting is true. Displaying the agenda does not indicate what they said.

The logic of displaying an agenda and the list of speakers and making claims of what they would have said is a fabrication, if nothing else!

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

On how and why the British brought in the concept of martial races and non martial races and the skulduggery involved, one should read "A Matter of Honour' by Philip Mason.

Bengalis are not men of action as per the Newsweek article. Good.

How is it that a non martial Bengali Mujib and non martial Bengalis of East Pakistan and the Mukti Bahini not only took on the 'martial races' and a whole country with all the power to destroy Mujib and his Bengali followers, including good old Nixon and his armada that was steaming in, still win hands down?

 

[roadrunner]

RR,

Indeed, yes, very strong credentials you have.

I was reading an article on A laugh a minute! Surprising that chap also claimed he had solid credentials!

The credentials of the people I quoted were Professors from America, Bangladesh, Bengal and an OBE. The people you quote are such greats as Simon Dring, the ex chief of Dhakka TV presented to him for his one sided services during the war of independence!!

Yes, official meeting is true. Displaying the agenda does not indicate what they said.

The logic of displaying an agenda and the list of speakers and making claims of what they would have said is a fabrication, if nothing else!

Not sure what you're saying here. Someone with an agenda would be more like an independent such as Simon Dring, his agenda being that in return for his reporting during the war in favour of the Muktihi Bahini, he would get a job as chief of Dhaka TV. What agenda does Bose have, or all the Bangladeshi experts on the war who admitted it was all propaganda. Are you saying there's a massive conspiracy amongst all the Bengali scholars with OBE's and professorships against poor old Bharat and in favour of Pakistan, now there's one to rival the Jewish conspiracy you're always harping on about

 

[roadrunner]

On how and why the British brought in the concept of martial races and non martial races and the skulduggery involved, one should read "A Matter of Honour' by Philip Mason.

Bengalis are not men of action as per the Newsweek article. Good.

How is it that a non martial Bengali Mujib and non martial Bengalis of East Pakistan and the Mukti Bahini not only took on the 'martial races' and a whole country with all the power to destroy Mujib and his Bengali followers, including good old Nixon and his armada that was steaming in, still win hands down?

Dude, this wasn't about fighting ability, this was about initially brainwashing and docility, and later on it came down to numbers. The hostile East Pakistani population was controllable for the PA without much of its Army armaments, the invading Bharatis simply provided extra numbers to overwhelm an ill equipped PA. PA were outnumbered probably around 20:1, that is why there was no point in fighting the onslaught.

Even though the martial race theory was a theory, it did have some evidence. The Bengalis generally werent willing to fight in PA. When Ayub Khan tried increasing recruitment of East Paks, noone attended the training colleges that were built there and they had to close them again.

 

[roadrunner]

well whether prepared in advance or not they had very few opportunities for committing so many atrocities as you allege.
How many Biharis were there in East Pakistan anyways?

They had plenty of oppotunities to commit the atrocities. PA did not get to East Pakistan until well after the first waves of Bihari massacres. There's plenty of evidence for it.

 

[akzaman]

Pakistan: Reign of Terror

Blealy-eyed from lack of sleep and emotionally drained by what they called their "ten days of terror," hundreds of Americans who had been trapped in war-ravaged East Pakistan finally got out to safety last week. Nearly 500 of them were evacuated by air from the East Pakistani capital of Dacca. Another 119 foreign nationals, including 37 Americans, were brought out by a British freighter from the battered East Pakistani port city of Chittagong. Most of them begged off from interviews, fearful that anything they said might endanger some 200 Americans-consular officials, businessmen and missionaries-who chose to remain behind in East Pakistan. But a few, unable to contain their outrage at the wanton slaughter they had witnessed, talked guardedly to newsmen. And their harrowing accounts tended to confirm earlier reports of savage repressions by the Punjabi-Ied Pakistani Army in its attempt to stamp out the Bengali rebellion in East Pakistan.

The Americans evacuated from Chittagong told NEWSWEEK'S Tony Clifton that the bitter fighting there had reduced East Pakistan's largest port to a ghost town. "In the first few days," recalled Neil O'Toole, a New Yorker working for a private charitable organization, "I actually saw Awami League people [supporters of Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] patrolling the streets with bows and arrows, and I wondered how they could possibly hold off the army with things like that.” Four days later, the reinforced Pakistani Army gained full control of the city and launched a reign of terror. "Some Punjabi soldiers called a kid over and hit him around the head and in the groin and then forced him to his knees," said Fritz Blankenship, a crane operator who had been employed by an American construction firm. “The kid was crying, begging and the soldiers just watched him for a minute.” Finally, according to Blankenship, “they just shot him out of hand and walked on.”

A similar wave of atrocities was reported by the Americans who had been in Dacca. As soon as the curfew was lifted, they said, at least a half-dozen Americans were met by nearly hysterical Bengali friends who told of a massacre at Dacca University. When three young Americans agreed to investigate the story, they found a staircase in a faculty building splattered with the bloodshed when five teachers were dragged out and coldly mowed down by gunfire. Still more shattering was the experience of Victor Chen, who had been visiting Dacca as a tourist when the war broke out and was led by a group of excited Bengalis to a shantytown set in the middle of Dacca’s sprawling racetrack. “The houses were burned down, and some were still smoldering,” he told NEWSWEEK'S Milan J. Kubic. "Literally dozens of dead bodies were strewn all over the place, many of them small kids, all of them riddled by bullets.” And another young American said in obvious disgust: "We just don’t see why the U.S. should go on supporting a regime that behaves in this fashion.”


Cautious: Indeed, Washington’s policy of calculated ambiguity on Pakistan has left the U.S. open to charges that official silence is tantamount to support for the martial-Iaw regime of President Mohammed Yahya Khan. Even touchier was the charge that U .S.-supplied Patton and Sabre jets were being used Pakistani Army to slaughter Bengalis. But State Department officials argued that the unsettled circumstances dictated a cautious policy. They also pointed out that no American weapons have been Delivered to the Pakistani Army since 1965. And last week, the department’s spokesman, Charles Bray 3rd, expressed "sympathy" to the "victims" and hoped that "it will be possible soon to alleviate the suffering caused by recent events" in East Pakistan. Though U .S. officials denied any implications beyond humanitarian concern, Bray's use of the word "victims..struck some Pakistani Government officials as a slap at the Yahya Khan regime, which has never conceded that there was much suffering going on in East Pakistan.

Washington, of course, was hardly alone in this dilemma. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China, the principal purveyors of arms to Pakistan since 1965, have only begun to choose their rhetorical stance-with Moscow urging Yahya to find a way to end the fighting and Peking edging toward Yahya's side. But by far the most difficult position was that facing the government of India, where popular sentiments remained overwhelmingly pro-Bengali and where pressures mounted for direct action. "It is neither proper nor possible for India to keep quiet [over the Pakistani situation)," said Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The watch-and-wait policy assumed by most foreign governments stemmed from a widely held belief that the Pakistani Army will ultimately fail in its attempt to subjugate 75 million East Pakistanis. Still, fears increased that the army was fully prepared to wreak bloody havoc even in a futile try. An American businessman who was evacuated from Dacca last week recalled asking a Punjabi major why the army was killing so many people. "There are millions of them, and only thousands of us," the major replied. "The only way we can control these people is by making them scared stiff." And from what he saw, the American said, "it looked as if the army went berserk. I can't help feeling sorry about the poor Bengalis in that hell."

Newsweek April 19, 1971; p. 52-54

 

[roadrunner]

These are all US consular officials my brainwashed cut & pasting friend. Archer Blood said much the same as them back in '71, and 30 years later said that actually he made a mistake. There was no genocide, and if there was, it was partly perpetrated by East Pakistanis/Bangladeshis. The evidence of East Pakistani/Bangladeshi massacres of West Pakistanis/Biharis is overwhelming. No out of date one sided reports by friends of someone that hallucinated a genocide was taking place on the basis of what Bharati officials were telling him is going to change that

 

[alamgir]

The truth about the Jessore massacre
The massacre may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists, reports Sarmila Bose

BITTER TRUTH: Civilians massacred in Jessore in 1971 ? but by whom?

RECOGNITION DENIED: Father and son killed in Dhaka in 1971
The bodies lie strewn on the ground. All are adult men, in civilian clothes. A uniformed man with a rifle slung on his back is seen on the right. A smattering of onlookers stand around, a few appear to be working, perhaps to remove the bodies.

The caption of the photo is just as grim as its content: ‘April 2, 1971: Genocide by the Pakistan Occupation Force at Jessore.’ It is in a book printed by Bangladeshis trying to commemorate the victims of their liberation war.

It is a familiar scene. There are many grisly photographs of dead bodies from 1971, published in books, newspapers and websites.

Reading another book on the 1971 war, there was that photograph again ? taken from a slightly different angle, but the bodies and the scene of the massacre were the same. But wait a minute! The caption here reads: ‘The bodies of businessmen murdered by rebels in Jessore city.’

The alternative caption is in The East Pakistan Tragedy, by L.F. Rushbrook Williams, written in 1971 before the independence of Bangladesh. Rushbrook Williams is strongly in favour of the Pakistan government and highly critical of the Awami League. However, he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had served in academia and government in India, and with the BBC and The Times. There was no reason to think he would willfully mislabel a photo of a massacre.

And so, in a bitter war where so many bodies had remained unclaimed, here is a set of murdered men whose bodies are claimed by both sides of the conflict! Who were these men? And who killed them?

It turns out that the massacre in Jessore may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists.

It is but one incident, but illustrative of the emerging reality that the conflict in 1971 in East Pakistan was a lot messier than most have been led to believe. Pakistan’s military regime did try to crush the Bengali rebellion by force, and many Bengalis did die for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence. Yet, not every allegation hurled against the Pakistan army was true, while many crimes committed in the name of Bengali nationalism remain concealed.

Once one took a second look, some of the Jessore bodies are dressed in salwar kameez ? an indication that they were either West Pakistanis or ‘Biharis’, the non-Bengali East Pakistanis who had migrated from northern India.

As accounts from the involved parties ? Pakistan, Bangladesh and India ? tend to be highly partisan, it was best to search for foreign eye witnesses, if any. My search took me to newspaper archives from 35 years ago. The New York Times carried the photo on April 3, 1971, captioned: ‘East Pakistani civilians, said to have been slain by government soldiers, lie in Jessore square before burial.’ The Washington Post carried it too, right under its masthead: ‘The bodies of civilians who East Pakistani sources said were massacred by the Pakistani army lie in the streets of Jessore.’ “East Pakistani sources said”, and without further investigation, these august newspapers printed the photo.

In fact, if the Americans had read The Times of London of April 2 and Sunday Times of April 4 or talked to their British colleagues, they would have had a better idea of what was happening in Jessore. In a front-page lead article on April 2 entitled ‘Mass Slaughter of Punjabis in East Bengal,’ The Times war correspondent Nicholas Tomalin wrote an eye-witness account of how he and a team from the BBC programme Panorama saw Bengali troops and civilians march 11 Punjabi civilians to the market place in Jessore where they were then massacred. “Before we were forced to leave by threatening supporters of Shaikh Mujib,” wrote Tomalin, “we saw another 40 Punjabi “spies” being taken towards the killing ground?”

Tomalin followed up on April 4 in Sunday Times with a detailed description of the “mid-day murder” of Punjabis by Bengalis, along with two photos ? one of the Punjabi civilians with their hands bound at the Jessore headquarters of the East Pakistan Rifles (a Bengal formation which had mutinied and was fighting on the side of the rebels), and another of their dead bodies lying in the square. He wrote how the Bengali perpetrators tried to deceive them and threatened them, forcing them to leave. As other accounts also testify, the Bengali “irregulars” were the only ones in central Jessore that day, as the Pakistan government forces had retired to their cantonment.

Though the military action had started in Dhaka on March 25 night, most of East Pakistan was still out of the government’s control. Like many other places, “local followers of Sheikh Mujib were in control” in Jessore at that time. Many foreign media reported the killings and counter-killings unleashed by the bloody civil war, in which the army tried to crush the Bengali rebels and Bengali nationalists murdered non-Bengali civilians.

Tomalin records the local Bengalis’ claim that the government soldiers had been shooting earlier and he was shown other bodies of people allegedly killed by army firing. But the massacre of the Punjabi civilians by Bengalis was an event he witnessed himself. Tomalin was killed while covering the Yom Kippur war of 1973, but his eye-witness accounts solve the mystery of the bodies of Jessore.

There were, of course, genuine Bengali civilian victims of the Pakistan army during 1971. Chandhan Sur and his infant son were killed on March 26 along with a dozen other men in Shankharipara, a Hindu area in Dhaka. The surviving members of the Sur family and other residents of Shankharipara recounted to me the dreadful events of that day. Amar, the elder son of the dead man, gave me a photo of his father and brother’s bodies, which he said he had come upon at a Calcutta studio while a refugee in India. The photo shows a man’s body lying on his back, clad in a lungi, with the infant near his feet.

Amar Sur’s anguish about the death of his father and brother (he lost a sister in another shooting incident) at the hands of the Pakistan army is matched by his bitterness about their plight in independent Bangladesh. They may be the children of a ‘shaheed,’ but their home was declared ‘vested property’ by the Bangladesh government, he said, in spite of documents showing that it belonged to his father. Even the Awami League ? support for whom had cost this Hindu locality so many lives in 1971 ? did nothing to redress this when they formed the government.

In the book 1971: documents on crimes against humanity committed by Pakistan army and their agents in Bangladesh during 1971, published by the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, I came across the same photo of the Sur father and son’s dead bodies. It is printed twice, one a close-up of the child only, with the caption: ‘Innocent women were raped and then killed along with their children by the barbarous Pakistan Army’. Foreigners might just have mistaken the ‘lungi’ worn by Sur for a ‘saree’, but surely Bangladeshis can tell a man in a ‘lungi’ when they see one! And why present the same ‘body’ twice?

The contradictory claims on the photos of the dead of 1971 reveal in part the difficulty of recording a messy war, but also illustrate vividly what happens when political motives corrupt the cause of justice and humanity. The political need to spin a neat story of Pakistani attackers and Bengali victims made the Bengali perpetrators of the massacre of Punjabi civilians in Jessore conceal their crime and blame the army. The New York Times and The Washington Post “bought” that story too. The media’s reputation is salvaged in this case by the even-handed eye-witness reports of Tomalin in The Times and Sunday Times.

As for the hapless Chandhan Sur and his infant son, the political temptation to smear the enemy to the maximum by accusing him of raping and killing women led to Bangladeshi nationalists denying their own martyrs their rightful recognition. In both cases, the true victims ?Punjabis and Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims ? were cast aside, their suffering hijacked, by political motivations of others that victimised them a second time around.




www.telegraphindia.com

 

[alamgir]

Excerpts from "Blood and Tears"
Book by Qutubuddin Aziz
read book reviews | buy books

Looking at the tragic events of March 1971 in retrospect, I must confess that even I, although my press service commanded a sizeable network of district correspondents in the interior of East Pakistan, was not fully aware of the scale, ferocity and dimension of the province-wide massacre of the non-Banglis.

I must stress, with all the force and sincerity at my command, that this bock is not intended to be a racist indictment of the Bengalis as a nation. In writing and publishing this book, I am not motivated by any revanchist obsession or a wish to condemn my erstwhile Bengali compatriots as a nation. Just as it is stupid to condemn the great German people for the sins of the Nazis, it would be foolish to blame the Bengali people as a whole for the dark deeds of the Awami League militants and their accomplices.

I have incorporated in this book the acts of heroism and courage of those brave and patriotic Bengalis who sheltered and protected, at great peril to themselves, their terror-stricken non-Bengali friends and neighbours. On the basis of the heaps of eye-witness accounts, which I have carefully read, sifted and analysed, I do make bold to say that the vast majority of Bengalis disapproved of and was not a party to the barbaric atrocities inflicted on the hapless non-Bengalis by the Awami League's terror machine and the Frankensteins and vampires it unloosed. This silent majority, it seemed, was awed, immobilised and neutralised by the terrifying power, weapons and ruthlessness of a misguided minority hell-bent on accomplishing the secession of East Pakistan.

The sheaves of eye-witness accounts, documented in this book, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the massacre of West Pakistanis, Biharis and other non-Bengalis in East Pakistan had begun long before the Pakistan Army took punitive action against the rebels late in the night of March 25, 1971. It is also crystal clear that the Awami League's terror machine was the initiator and executor of the genocide against the non-Bengalis which exterminated at least half a million of them in less than two months of horror and trauma. Many witnesses have opined that the federal Government acted a bit too late against the insurgents. The initial success of the federal military action is proved by the fact that in barely 30 days, the Pakistan Army, with a combat strength of 38,717 officers and men in East Pakistan, had squelched the Awami League's March-April, 1971, rebellion all over the province.


Typical of the open-air, human abattoirs operated by the Awami League-led rebels in East Pakistan in 1971 is this photograph of multiple-executions done by a Mukti-Bahini killer squad in Dacca Race Course. The pro-Pakistan Bengali and non-Bengali victims were tortured before being slain
The hundreds of eye-witnesses from towns and cities of East Pakistan, whose testimonies are documented in this book, are unanimous in reporting that the slaughter of West Pakistanis, Biharis, and other non-Bangalis and of some pro-Pakistan Bengalis had begun in the early days of the murderous month of March 1971.

Looking at the tragic events of March 1971 in retrospect, I must confess that even I, although my press service commanded a sizeable network of district correspondents in the interior of East Pakistan, was not fully aware of the scale, ferocity and dimension of the province-wide massacre of the non-Banglis.


I must stress, with all the force and sincerity at my command, that this bock is not intended to be a racist indictment of the Bengalis as a nation. In writing and publishing this book, I am not motivated by any revanchist obsession or a wish to condemn my erstwhile Bengali compatriots as a nation. Just as it is stupid to condemn the great German people for the sins of the Nazis, it would be foolish to blame the Bengali people as a whole for the dark deeds of the Awami League militants and their accomplices.

I have incorporated in this book the acts of heroism and courage of those brave and patriotic Bengalis who sheltered and protected, at great peril to themselves, their terror-stricken non-Bengali friends and neighbours. On the basis of the heaps of eye-witness accounts, which I have carefully read, sifted and analysed, I do make bold to say that the vast majority of Bengalis disapproved of and was not a party to the barbaric atrocities inflicted on the hapless non-Bengalis by the Awami League's terror machine and the Frankensteins and vampires it unloosed. This silent majority, it seemed, was awed, immobilised and neutralised by the terrifying power, weapons and ruthlessness of a misguided minority hell-bent on accomplishing the secession of East Pakistan.

The 170 eye-witnesses, whose testimonies or interviews are contained in this book in abridged form have been chosen from a universe of more than 5,000 repatriated non-Bengali families. I had identified, after some considerable research, 55 towns and cities in East Pakistan where the abridgement of the non-Bengali population in March and early April 1971 was conspicuously heavy. The collection and compilation of these eye-witness accounts was started in January 1974 and completed in twelve weeks. A team of four reporters, commissioned for interviewing the witnesses from all these 55 towns and cities of East Pakistan, worked with intense devotion to secure their testimony. Many of the interviews were prolonged because the Witnesses broke down in a flurry of sobs and tears as they related the agonising stories of their wrecked lives. I had issued in February 1974 an appeal in the newspapers for such eye-witness accounts, and I am grateful to the many hundreds of witnesses who promptly responded to my call.
A scene of Mukti Bahini mass murder of Biharis in Dacca on December 18, 1971. A rebel soldier lifts his boot to strike a bleeding bayoneted boy who showed signs of life. Dead bodies of other slain non-Bengalis lie in the foreground.
“I am the lone survivor of a group of ten Pathans who were employed as Security Guards by the Delta Construction Company in the Mohakhali locality in Dacca; all the others were slaughtered by the Bengali rebels in the night of March 25, 1971”, said 40-year-old Bacha Khan.

“I heard the screams of an Urdu-speaking girl who was being ravished by her Bengali captors but I was so scared that I did not have the courage to emerge from hiding” said a 24-year-old Zahid Abdi, who was employed in a trading firm in Dacca. He escaped the slaughter of the non-Bengalis in the crowded New Market locality of Dacca on March 23, 1971 and was sheltered by a God-fearing Bengali in his shop. The killers raped their non-Bengali teenage victim at the back of the shop and later on slayed her.

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“My only daughter has been insane since she was forced by her savage tormentors to watch the brutal murder of her husband”, said Mukhtar Ahmed Khan, 43, while giving an account of his suffering during the Ides of March 1971 in Dacca….“In the third week of March 1971, a gang of armed Bengali rebels raided house of my son-in-law and overpowered him. He was a courageous Youngman and he resisted the attackers. My daughter also resisted the attackers but they were far too many and they were well armed. They tied up my son-in-law and my daughter with ropes and they forced her to watch as they slit the throat of her husband and ripped his stomach open in the style of butchers. She fainted and lost consciousness. Since that dreadful day she has been mentally ill."

Shamim Akhtar, 28, whose husband was employed as a clerk in the Railway office in Dacca, lived in a small house in the Mirpur locality there.

She described her tragedy in these words:

“On December 17, 1971, the Mukti Bahini cut off the water supply to our homes. We used to get water from a nearby pond; it was polluted and had a bad odour. I was nine months pregnant. On December 23, 1971, I gave birth to a baby girl. No midwife was available and my husband helped me at child birth. Late at night, a gang of armed Bengalis raided our house, grabbed my husband and trucked him away. I begged them in the name of God to spare him as I could not even walk and my children were too small. The killers were heartless and I learnt that they murdered my husband. After five days, they returned and ordered me and my children to vacate the house as they claimed that it was now their property.”

Zaibunnissa Haq, 30, whose journalist husband, Izhar-ul-Haque, worked as a columnist in the Daily Watan in Dacca, gave this account of her travail in 1971:

A copy of the ads and the forms used for soliciting testimony from the victims.
“….On December 21, a posse of Mukti Bahini soldiers and some thugs rode into our locality with blazing guns and ordered us to leave our house as, according to them, no Bihari could own a house in Bangladesh. For two days, we lived on bare earth in an open space and we had nothing to eat. Subsequently, we were taken to a Relief Camp by the Red Cross.”

In Pubail and Tangibari, the Awami League militants and their rebel confederates murdered dozens of affluent Biharis. Shops owned by the Biharis were favourite target of attack.


“Four armed thugs dragged two captive non-Bengali teenage girls into an empty bus and violated their chastity before gunning them to death”, said Gulzar Hussain, 38, who witnessed the massacre of 22 non-Bengali men, women and children on March 21, 1971, close to a bus stand in Narayangang. Repatriated to Karachi in November 1973, Gulzar Hussain reported: "….On March 21, our Dacca-bound bus was stopped on the way, soon after it left the heart of the city. I was seated in the front portion of the bus and I saw that the killer gang had guns, scythes and daggers. The gunmen raised 'Joi Bangla' and anti-Pakistan slogans. The bus driver obeyed their signal to stop and the thugs motioned to the passengers to get down. A jingo barked out the order that Bengalis and non-Bengalis should fall into separate lines. As I spoke Bengali with a perfect Dacca accent and could easily pass for a Bengali, I joined the Bengali group of passengers. The killer gang asked us to utter a few sentences in Bengali which we did. I passed the test and our tormentors instructed the Bengalis to scatter. The thugs then gunned all the male non-Bengalis. It was a horrible scene. Four of the gunmen took for their loot two young non-Bengali women and raped them inside the empty bus. After they had ravished the girls, the killers shot them and half a dozen other women and children.”

She described her tragedy in these words:


As the victim did not die in a single bayonet strike, another Mukti-Bahini killer plunged his bayonet in to the writhing Bihari’s chest. Dead bodies of Bihari and Bengali victims lie strewn over the execution ground as Mukti-Bahini killers and their accomplices watch the butchery with sadist pleasure.
“On December 17, 1971, the Mukti Bahini cut off the water supply to our homes. We used to get water from a nearby pond; it was polluted and had a bad odour. I was nine months pregnant. On December 23, 1971, I gave birth to a baby girl. No midwife was available and my husband helped me at child birth. Late at night, a gang of armed Bengalis raided our house, grabbed my husband and trucked him away. I begged them in the name of God to spare him as I could not even walk and my children were too small. The killers were heartless and I learnt that they murdered my husband. After five days, they returned and ordered me and my children to vacate the house as they claimed that it was now their property.”



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Zaibunnissa Haq, 30, whose journalist husband, Izhar-ul-Haque, worked as a columnist in the Daily Watan in Dacca, gave this account of her travail in 1971: “….On December 21, a posse of Mukti Bahini soldiers and some thugs rode into our locality with blazing guns and ordered us to leave our house as, according to them, no Bihari could own a house in Bangladesh. For two days, we lived on bare earth in an open space and we had nothing to eat. Subsequently, we were taken to a Relief Camp by the Red Cross.”

Nasima Khatoon, 25, lived in a rented house in the Pancho Boti locality in Narayanganj. Her husband, Mohammad Qamrul Hasan, was employed in a Vegetable Oil manufacturing factory. Repatriated to Karachi in January 1974, along with her 4-year-old orphaned daughter, from a Red Cross Camp in Dacca, Nasima gave this hair-raising account of her travail in 1971:

A Bihari victim grabbed by Mukti-Bahini killers, begging for mercy.


“At gun point, our captors made us leave our house and marched us to an open square where more than 500 non –Bengali old men, women and children were detained. Some 50 Bengali gunmen led us through swampy ground towards a deserted school building. On the way, the 3-year-old child of a hapless captive woman died in her arms. She asked her captors to allow her to dig a small grave and bury the child. The tough man in the lead snorted a sharp ‘NO’, snatched the body of the dead child from her wailing mother and tossed it into the river”

The Awami League's rebellion of March 1971 took the heaviest toll of non-Bengali lives in the populous port city of Chittagong. Although the Government of Pakistan's White Paper of August 1971 on the East Pakistan crisis estimated the non-Bengali death toll in Chittagong and its neighbouring townships during the Awami League's insurrection to be a little under 15,000, the testimony of hundreds of eye-witnesses interviewed for this book gives the impression that more than 50,000 non-Bengalis perished in the March 1971 carnage. Thousands of dead bodies were flung into the Karnaphuli river and the Bay of Bengal.

Savage killings also took place in the Halishahar, Kalurghat and Pahartali localities where the Bengali rebel soldiers poured petrol and kerosine oil around entire blocks, igniting them with flame-throwers and petrol-soaked jute balls, then mowed down the non-Bengali innocents trying to escape the cordons of fire. In the wanton slaughter in the last week of March and early April, 1971, some 40,000 non-Bengalis perished in Chittagong and its neighbourhood. The exact death toll, which could possibly be much more will never be known because of the practice of burning dead bodies or dumping them in the river and the sea.


The uniformed killer puffing the cigarette to singe the eyes of the terrified prey. Eye gouging and burning the skin of victims was a favourite torture method of the rebels.


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http://www.statelesspeopleinbangladesh.net | http://www.strandedpakistani.org

 

[HK-47]

Awami League militants?do you refer to the Mujib bahini?

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

What agenda does Bose have,

The same agenda that Salman Ruyshdie had.

Get "famous" quick!

As far as the agenda you have produced, does it contain what was said?

Therefore, it is like a flyer for a movie without a movie being shown. And you saying the movie is contained in the flyer!

Unless you are being obtuse, it is simple to understand. I won't say even Chimps understand that too!

 

[roadrunner]

The same agenda that Salman Ruyshdie had.

Get "famous" quick!

As far as the agenda you have produced, does it contain what was said?

Therefore, it is like a flyer for a movie without a movie being shown. And you saying the movie is contained in the flyer!

Unless you are being obtuse, it is simple to understand. I won't say even Chimps understand that too!

Actually, Bose was already famous as being related to Subhash Bose. She even has a related part in a recent film about Bose. So she would have been famous with or without this research.