The atrocities in the 1971 civil war

[eastwatch]

East Pakistani Soldiers during Operation Searchlight

This is a very good thread with the infusion of historical facts based on reality and without bias towards any of the contending parties. I wish people would have kept on contributing in that thread. One thing, the articles should not have been posted serially one by one in a short time. These should have been posted after the posters almost completed discussions on the already posted articles. In this way, the thread life could have been lengthened.

 

[eastwatch]

---------- Post added at 03:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:18 PM ----------



3 million? you believe tht? if you fo i bet you also believe in tooth fairy.

3 million is certainly a propaganda figure.

 

[Kambojaric]

Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One lakh, in other words, at most. One cannot say that she absolutely proves this, but her evidence points in that direction, and, in any case vastly away from the figure of 3 million still proclaimed in Bangladesh and India. The wider revision of the conflict's history she implies exonerates the Pakistani government of any plot to rule the east by force, suggests that the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle but could not control it, and insists that the conflict was a civil war within East Pakistan. The killings by Bengalis of non-Bengali minorities, of Bengalis who stuck with the idea of a united Pakistan, and even of some Hindu Bengalis – all of whose deaths were attributed at the time to the Pakistani army – needs to be reckoned in any fair balance. The notion that the Bangladesh movement was non-violent, even Gandhian, was always fantastical. Bose has written a book that should provoke both fresh research and fresh thinking about a fateful turning point in the history of the subcontinent.

Dead Reckoning by Sarmila Bose - review | Books | The Guardian


Seriously Bangladeshis need to get over this or be honest, its a war, atrocities happened no doubt and i would apologize for them but honestly millions? who on earth are you trying to kid? If you wish to lie like that then dont expect any apology!

 

[Kambojaric]

Sir do you know the background of this s.bose ? she is a known maoist saympethisizer and so called intellectual bangalies who ruled west bengal for more than 30 years & she had written this book in order to win over muslim(Illeagel bangladeshi )votes which started to drift towards trinamool & some regional muslim parties . secondly even if 1-1.5 lakh people died just for baised land reforms & some man's lust for power do you really think it was worth it .

I know her very well, here you have a short biography from Oxford University

"She has taught and held research positions at Harvard, George Washington University, University of Warwick"

Pretty prestigious academic institutes wouldnt you say?

Sarmila Bose | Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

 

[Awesome]

wasnt the land given to his father or grandfather by the british for being a traitor to his own people

Great great grandfather I think... I can't comment on being a traitor, but at that time in Sindh The British had given the offer of whoever can till the land as far as they could, they would be declared land owners. This was Doda Khan Bhutto.

ZAB > Shahnawaz Bhutto > Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto (not BB's brother) > Khuda Baksh Bhutto > Doda Khan Bhutto...

Before that the Bhutto's founded the village of Garhi Pir Baksh some insanely long time ago by of course Pir Baksh Bhutto. No known history of them before that.

 

[Awesome]

So according to me what my freinds(bengali origanally from area naer nawakhali) told me that in 1971 the main problem was land owned by hindu bengalies been ditribeuted to bihari muslims by westrn pakistanies & bengalies were unhappy as they were promised it in 1947 but for politics it was done in a wrong taste ,(and what freinds on this forum believe) bengalies became angry & ZAB lost the elections , to save his skin from millitary he played a cruel game with MUR and he MUR fell for it & thus millitary+ bihari muslims +ZAB started in operation to crub bengally revolt by operation searchlight & such which morphed into Genocide and Evil India played games with muktibahini & East BenGal/East pakistan became Bangladesh , kindly please correct me & give your inputs , thanks .

These were side issues - Mujib didn't breakaway on these issues, he and the Bangladeshis fought them. But the real problem occurred when the basic democratic right to them was denied by ZAB - then of course the army action sealed the deal.

 

[Kambojaric]

OK , now whats your comment on the second part & my post#45 .

I dont see whats the point in pondering over whether the past was worth it or not, whats happened has happened, both sides need to move on, Pakistanis have. Bangladeshis still want apologies for some ridiculous numbers, that's where my problem lies.

 

[extra terrestrial]

The number of dead in Bangladesh in 1971 was almost certainly well into seven figures. It was one of the worst genocides of the World War II era, outstripping Rwanda (800,000 killed) and probably surpassing even Indonesia (1 million to 1.5 million killed in 1965-66). As R.J. Rummel writes,

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. Some estimates of the democide [Rummel's "death by government"] are much lower -- one is of 300,000 dead -- but most range from 1 million to 3 million. ... The Pakistani army and allied paramilitary groups killed about one out of every sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan is annualized over the years the Yahya martial law regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971), then this one regime was more lethal than that of the Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan under the military (even through World War II). (Rummel, Death By Government, p. 331.)
The proportion of men versus women murdered is impossible to ascertain, but a speculation might be attempted. If we take the highest estimates for both women raped and Bengalis killed (400,000 and 3 million, respectively); if we accept that half as many women were killed as were raped; and if we double that number for murdered children of both sexes (total: 600,000), we are still left with a death-toll that is 80 percent adult male (2.4 million out of 3 million). Any such disproportion, which is almost certainly on the low side, would qualify Bangladesh as one of the worst gendercides against men in the last half-millennium.

Gendercide Watch: Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971

Nevertheless, for me the most hatred part of the genocide is the killing of the brightest sons of the nation in 14th December, 1971 to make the nation brainless!! It definitely pushed the nation few decades back!!

 

[Awesome]

Merging this with the primary Bangladesh thread.