Nato ex-commander warns Pakistan on porous border

[TomCat111]

But we must admit the orders we followed against East Pakistan were quite horrible, and that is why the soldiers gave up their guns, few fought to keep the nation united.

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

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.

 

[Keysersoze]

To bring things back to the topic.......

The border CAN be sealed (as has been proved in several examples) I have even posted a article regarding this very subject in another thread.

https://defence.pk/forums/showthread.php?t=3298

Frankly Afghanistan can't have it both ways. It can either have a sealed border or not. I say seal the border and damn their objections.

 

[Bull]

He also says the modalities have to be worked out. Which means Nato has to pay for the bill. Pakistan has no issues with stopping cross border movement, we just believe its impossible. So if somebody else wants to do the impossible, go ahead, pay for it.

Ok thats good enough for me,the admission that your country is the source of terror.

 

[EagleEyes]

Ok thats good enough for me,the admission that your country is the source of terror.

Bull, good morning & smell the tea!

Cross bordering is not an issue for Pakistan because it doesn't effect it. We dont want to fence the border with our own money, it costs, and we dont have that money.

Pakistan is not responsible for the terrorism, whatever is created was created by the United States. Pakistan as an ally did what it was told to do.

 

[john_holmes]

Come on webby. good fences make for good neighbours.

 

[EagleEyes]

Come on webby. good fences make for good neighbours.

Forgive me. I failed to understand. Collaboration always helps.

 

[Bull]

Bull, good morning & smell the tea!

Cross bordering is not an issue for Pakistan because it doesn't effect it. We dont want to fence the border with our own money, it costs, and we dont have that money.

Pakistan is not responsible for the terrorism, whatever is created was created by the United States. Pakistan as an ally did what it was told to do.

Well yeah its not am issue for you.The 80 killed in a madrassa,who were they?With whom did PA sign a ceasefire?Why was Bugti killed?
Not an issue i see....

You have no money,well your GDP has doubled,per capita income has doubled, you have build a port in Gwadar thats going to work wonders, and you saying to me you dont have money to put up a fence.

 

[niaz]

Well yeah its not am issue for you.The 80 killed in a madrassa,who were they?With whom did PA sign a ceasefire?Why was Bugti killed?
Not an issue i see....

You have no money,well your GDP has doubled,per capita income has doubled, you have build a port in Gwadar thats going to work wonders, and you saying to me you dont have money to put up a fence.

It is impossible to seal 1750 Kilometre border specially in a mountainous region. You could fence parts only. India has already fenced most of their side of Kashmir border; why is India still creating all the noise about 'Cross Border' terrorism??

Lets us face the facts; Who are 'Taliban'? These are mostly Pushtun men who have studied in the various madrassas in NWFP and or in Afghanistan. There were 3-million Afghan refugees in Pakistan for a very long time, thus even though Afghan by birth, quite a few of them spent their early youth in NWFP and I am certain that they have friends in Pakistan who support them.

Large number of people across the Durand Line are of the same stock and many tribes such as Powendas are constantly moving acrross the border. Any Pushtun youth could be a Talib, no different than the situation in the Vietnam war. How many would you kill or stop?? US has not managed to stop illegal entry by Mexicans to this day even though they have been at it for a couple of centuries. Therefore IMO Coalition Commanders and Karzai are using infilteration as an excuse for their failure.

No one can impose a solution on Afghans unless they agree ; sorry to say but these people are not Kashmiris that you can coerce them by force. Besides, this is still a tribal society where the tribal ties supersede all national and ehtnic barriers.

Sooner or later the Allies have to talk to all the Pushtoons including Taliban and come to a poilitcal settlement. Sooner the Coalition realise, the better for all of us as the problem is hurting Pakistan more than Afghanistan as you have already pointed out ( Bugti etc)

 

[john_holmes]

Do not drag India in the middle. The fence issue is between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan has money to blow on importing yellow cabs, awacs, F-16s but no money for building a sturdy fence to protect it's citizens ??

 

[TomCat111]

Let’s clear the confusion. Of course, Pakistan can afford and had wanted to build the fence for a while. But the Afghan government is staunchly against it and had convinced the US to step-in for them on numerous occasions.

Afghan government is staunchly against fencing the border because,
1. Durand Line will become the de facto border.
2. Afghanistan’s life and blood, the drug trade will be hindered.
3. Afghanistan’s second most profitable trade of smuggled weapons and electronics into Pakistan and stolen goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan will be hindered.
4. 3 million afghan refugees will have to go back and stay in Afghanistan, hence increasing burden on already pathetic economy.
5. Most importantly, it will loose its best excuse for pointing fingers at Pakistan.

If the US can throw $10 billion down the Afghani drain without having a thing to show for, then why not let it become part of solution by sharing the bill for fencing? At least this way, they’ll have something to show for their money well spent.

 

[Neo]

Wellsaid TomCatt! :thumbsup:

 

[Neo]

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Afghan border to be fenced and mined :thumbsup:

* Foreign sec says project to prevent militant activity from Pakistan
* Pakistan does not need Afghan permission to build fence

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will build a fence and lay mines at “selected places” on its side of the border with Afghanistan to restrict cross-border movement, Foreign Secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan said on Tuesday.

“This is a part of our established policy. We are taking measures to prevent any militant activity from Pakistan inside Afghanistan,” Khan said in a press briefing at the Foreign Office. The Pakistan Army has been tasked to work out the modalities of the project. The 2,400-kilometre Pak-Afghan border has 700 crossing points.

Khan did not give any time frame for the completion of the project, nor mentioned the specific areas to be fenced or mined. However, he said that no foreign country was funding the project.

“Mining (the border) is easier and can be done expeditiously while fencing, of course, requires a huge budget and time. However, the decision will be taken after we get suggestions from the armed forces,” the foreign secretary said.

“There is an extraordinary situation which needs extraordinary measures,” he said. “Pakistan needs no permission or agreement with any country, including Afghanistan, while carrying out any such project within its territorial boundaries. We have publicly stated this many times.” He said Pakistan had also decided to strictly monitor Afghan refugees camps, expedite the registration and return of Afghan refugees, and relocate some camps close to the border. It had also decided to expand the Frontier Corps, increase the strength of Levies and their deployment along the Pak-Afghan border.

The foreign secretary said Pakistan opposed the UN Security Council’s sanctions on Iran. He said that the resolution only covered cooperation on nuclear issues and Pakistan was not cooperating with Iran on any such matter. “We believe that the passage of the UN resolution should not be a reason to abandon diplomatic efforts for a diplomatic solution of this crisis,” he added. About the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline, Khan said the three countries had agreed to appoint a consultant too suggest a gas price. He dismissed reports about US pressure on Pakistan to stop the project, saying “the only pressure we have is our growing energy needs”.

Khan appreciated Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s remarks welcoming President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s ideas on Kashmir and hoped that it might be possible to find ground for a final solution of the issue.

Afghanistan rejects plan

KABUL: Afghanistan on Tuesday reacted angrily to the decision by Pakistan to mine and fence the border between the two nations and demanded it fight “terrorists in a real manner”. “Rather than beating about the bush, we must confront terrorists in a real manner,” Khaliq Ahmad, a presidential spokesman, told AFP. “Fencing or mining the border is neither helpful nor practical,” he said. “We’re against it. The border is not where the problem lies.” afp

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\12\27\story_27-12-2006_pg1_1

 

[TomCat111]

Personally, I am against laying mines. They almost always end up hurting civilians...

 

[PakSniper]

Do not drag India in the middle. The fence issue is between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan has money to blow on importing yellow cabs, awacs, F-16s but no money for building a sturdy fence to protect it's citizens ??

Don't even get me started., you people blowing money on weapons also, how come ur not feeding your 400 million poor ?!?! Atleast were not poverty stricken.

 

[john_holmes]

Yes, we need help. Can Pakistan give us aid ?? Send a cheque to us please.