The courageous Pakistan army stand on the eastern front

[Icarus]

These Indians are making my blood boil again.

What kind of denial they live in? why is it so hard for these people to acknowledge a simple fact that they took advantage of the civil war, trained the Bengali fighters and invaded across the international border as any enemy should do.

Keep yourself under control, we are here for a civilized discussion. No need to become rash..........

 

[Jackdaws]

These Indians are making my blood boil again.

What kind of denial they live in? why is it so hard for these people to acknowledge a simple fact that they took advantage of the civil war, trained the Bengali fighters and invaded across the international border as any enemy should do.

It cuts both ways. Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that millions of refugees pored into India, India tried hard for a political settlement, implored the West to intervene and finally crossed the international border as a last resort?

---------- Post added at 12:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:26 AM ----------

But people, where are the Bangladeshi posters on this thread? They would probably have a less jaundiced perspective on the numbers we tend to throw at each other.

 

[rafay321]

It cuts both ways. Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that millions of refugees pored into India, India tried hard for a political settlement, implored the West to intervene and finally crossed the international border as a last resort?

---------- Post added at 12:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:26 AM ----------

But people, where are the Bangladeshi posters on this thread? They would probably have a less jaundiced perspective on the numbers we tend to throw at each other.

First decide..was it genocide that compelled India to act hero and save their lives or the refugee influx? or simply the temptation to harm your enemy..??

Going by the great Indian rules, if Pak invades Afghanistan or helps Kashmir fighters both will be valid. There is refugee influx on the west and fighters/genocide on the east, even though Kashmir is disputed and East Pakistan was international border nevertheless.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

he sould have resisted only a week UN would have ordered a ceasefire.... they should have trusted the burmese and regrouped in burma replenished weapons frm china through burma............. or shot arora nd himself while handing over his loaded pistol.

71 has poisoned us and the poison will remain till india or Pakistan is wiped.

 

[Jackdaws]

First decide..was it genocide that compelled India to act hero and save their lives or the refugee influx? or simply the temptation to harm your enemy..??

Going by the great Indian rules, if Pak invades Afghanistan or helps Kashmir fighters both will be valid. There is refugee influx on the west and fighters/genocide on the east, even though Kashmir is disputed and East Pakistan was international border nevertheless.

You do realize that the refugee influx was because of the genocide. The two are not mutually exclusive. The East Pakistanis were not happily fishing one day when one of them had a brain wave and said, "Let's seek refuge in India" and 10 million followed him.

We would actually welcome it if you invaded. If you are right, Allah will be with you and you will triumph. If not, we will. Good always triumphs over evil. Let's see.

 

[Rafi]

There was no genocide, there are classified assessments made by a number of countries, politics made the figure jump manifold.

 

[rafay321]

You do realize that the refugee influx was because of the genocide. The two are not mutually exclusive. The East Pakistanis were not happily fishing one day when one of them had a brain wave and said, "Let's seek refuge in India" and 10 million followed him.

We would actually welcome it if you invaded. If you are right, Allah will be with you and you will triumph. If not, we will. Good always triumphs over evil. Let's see.

Then why all the tantrums? Replace Mukti Bahani with Kashmir fighters, East Pakistan with Kashmir Pak india border with LOC and India with Pakistan Too hard isnt it? I know. Go back to

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

No.

You have an egg & chicken problem. There is no evidence in recorded history that the Bengali leadership of East Pakistan was stoking any separatism in any way. Mr Mujibur Rehman greatly admired Gandhi’s non-violence and had repeatedly called for maintaining law, order and peace even in the face of grave provocation. That is not to say minor riots or scuffles never broke out, but given the circumstances, it was nothing; certainly not the level of ‘violence, murder, atrocities and anarchy’ that would warrant the brutal crackdown by PA on that fateful day of March, or for that matter the continued slaughter of Hindus. Pakistan published a White Paper later on in distasteful attempt to justify their brutality, but failed to provide any evidence of such wanton ‘violence, murder, atrocities and anarchy’.

It is not a 'chicken or the egg' argument at all ...

1. Call to Arms: the Bengali Nationalist Rebellion Prior to Military Action

"There are two basic problems here", wrote Henry Kissinger in a secret memo to

President Nixon on 13 March, 1971, "1) Rahman has embarked on a Gandhian- type non-violent non-cooperation campaign which makes it harder to justify repression; and 2) the West Pakistanis lack the military capacity to put down a full scale revolt over a long period."[3]

Kissinger was right about the second point, but dead wrong about the first. The rebel movement in East Pakistan led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman bore no resemblance to the path of non-violence advocated by Gandhi against British rule in India. Despite some rhetorical calls for restraint, the movement was openly, and proudly, armed and militant.

Personal memoirs of the time recount large public meetings in Dhaka since 1 March, with the crowds carrying bamboo sticks and iron rods, calls to 'take up arms', incidents of bomb-throwing and shooting, and military-style parades carrying weapons both real and dummy. Images of such gatherings and parades are displayed in the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka. Some aspects of the movement are similar to the violent revolutionary movement in Bengal against the British in early 20th century and the 1930s, not Gandhian non-violence.[4] Kaliranjan Shil, a Communist Party activist who survived the army's assault on Jagannath Hall in Dhaka University on 25-26 March, has written about the training for armed revolt, (using dummy rifles, according to him), that started on the university gymnasium field as soon as the parliament session was postponed on 1st March. Each trained batch would then train arriving recruits, while 'normal' students left the halls as the university was closed. He had trained as usual on 25 March.[5]

2. Mob violence by Bengalis on non-Bengalis Prior to Military Action

The postponement of the national assembly followed by the call to observe 'hartal' given by Sheikh Mujib led to widespread lawlessness during March, when the Pakistan government effectively lost control of much of the territory of East Pakistan. Many accounts, both Bangladeshi and Pakistani, have recorded the parallel government run on Sheikh Mujib's decrees.

Apart from sporadic incidents of violence in Dhaka, there was arson, looting and attacks by Bengali mobs on non-Bengali people and property in many parts of the province, some with casualties. The White Paper published by the Pakistan government in August 1971 lists such incidents, of which the worst loss of life appears to have occurred in Khulna and Chittagong in the first week of March. That "the government's writ had ceased to function in most parts of the province" and that there were attacks upon non-Bengalis by Bengalis on the rampage, is acknowledged by critics of the government too.[6]

Most of these attacks were on civilians and commercial properties, but some were directly on the army, which remained curiously unresponsive under orders. Mostly the army suffered from the refusal of Bengalis to sell them food and fuel, being jeered and spat at, and the widespread disregard of curfew orders, but some encounters were more deadly. "The murder of army personnel, caught in ones and twos, became an everyday occurrence," writes Maj. Gen. H. A. Qureishi, "In our area we lost Lt. Abbas of 29 Cavalry. With an escort of Bengali soldiers, he had ventured out of the unit lines to buy fresh vegetables for the troops. The escort was "rushed" by the militants, the officer was killed, weapons were
'confiscated' and the Bengali members of the guard sent back unharmed."[7]

"It speaks volumes for the discipline of the West Pakistan army," wrote Mascarenhas, "that its officers were able to keep the soldiers in check during what was to them a nightmare of 25 days."[8]

.....

Anatomy of Violence in 1971

…only after having gone through a process of verification and giving the accused an opportunity to defend themselves. Summary execution and kangaroo courts are not what civilized societies do. Neither does a civilized society sit in justification for it.

Depends upon the situation. The accounts sourced above clearly indicate a territory spiraling out of control with the terrorists/insurgents/separatists engaging in wanton violence against civilians and military alike, primarily on ethnic grounds. The Pakistani leadership chose to respond in the same coin in an effort to quell the rebellion.

Unbelievable.

Not at all. It is a credible and verifiable means of calculating casualties.

I am tempted to ask you, what figures? Did I mention any figure?

You used the term 'genocide', which in its classical definition, given the numbers of Hindu's or Bengalis (whichever you wish to argue) in East Pakistan, clearly points to what speculative death count balderdash you wish to propagate.

Anyway, since you asked, in case of genocides or mass murders of nature that East Pakistan saw, informed speculation is the only manner that a ball park figure of deaths, rapes and victims of human right violations can be arrived at. It is impossible to count corpses in case of genocides because the perpetrators almost always manage to figure out a way to make the corpses disappear. (PA found a novel way. Other than burying the corpses in mass graves, which continue to be discovered every now and then, they would ditch the bodies into the rivers and tide would carry them away into the sea). Getting an estimate on the basis of post conflict rehabilitation programs also is not possible in case of East Pakistan, because the victims were Hindus and they had fled to India (if they weren’t already dead along with their entire village). Only eyewitness accounts are what remain.

'Informed speculation' is nothing but speculation, i.e. unverifiable and largely anecdotal and therefore lacks credibility and verifiability. If you do not have any scientific means to offer any credible and verifiable estimate of the casualties, then the casualty claims accepted by the Bangladeshi government remain one of the more credible estimates of casualties, which is in the range of the 50,000 casualties estimated in the HR Commission report, which in turn was based on extensive interviews with military and civilian personnel involved in East Pakistan and field and After Action reports submitted by the various military units.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Pakistan: The Ravaging of Golden Bengal
Monday, Aug. 02, 1971

No one can count them precisely, but Indian officials, by projecting camp registrations, calculate that they come at the rate of 50,000 a day. Last week the estimated total passed the 7,500,000 mark. Should widespread famine hit East Pakistan, as now seems likely, India fears that the number may double before the exodus ends.

'No one can count them', so lets take the word of Indian officials that were supporting and training terrorists in East Pakistan and adding to the instability and violence in order to drum up a pretext for full fledged invasion and bifurcation of Pakistan.

Lets not peddle propaganda by an involved party, with a vested interest in showing the situation to be as bad as possible, as some sort of factual estimates of the numbers involved.

Life has been made even more miserable for the refugees by the monsoon rains, that have turned many camps into muddy lagoons. Reports Dr. Mathis Bromberger, a German physician working at a camp outside Calcutta: "There were thousands of people standing out in the open here all night in the rain. Women with babies in their arms. They could not lie down because the water came up to their knees in places. There was not enough shelter, and in the morning there were always many sick and dying of pneumonia. We could not get our serious cholera cases to the hospital. And there was no one to take away the dead. They just lay around on the ground or in the water." High-pressure syringes have speeded vaccination and reduced the cholera threat, but camp health officials have already counted about 5,000 dead, and an estimated 35,000 have been stricken by the convulsive vomiting and diarrhea that accompany the disease. Now officials fear that pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis will also begin to exact a toll among the weakened ref ugees. Says one doctor: "The people are not even crying any more."

That is unfortunately what happens often in war and with refugees - given that the refugees were suffering in these miserable conditions in Indian territory, India should have had paid heed to their plight and not exacerbated the situation by supporting and training terrorists and insurgents and prolonging and increasing the violence.

Perhaps because what they flee from is even worse. Each has his own horror story of rape, murder or other atrocity committed by the Pakistani army in its effort to crush the Bengali independence movement. One couple tells how soldiers took their two grown sons outside the house, bayoneted them in the stomach and refused to allow anyone to go near the bleeding boys, who died hours later. Another woman says that when the soldiers came to her door, she hid her children in her bed; but seeing them beneath the blanket, the soldiers opened fire, killing two and wounding another.

That is rhetoric - we have two accounts here, not an account from 'each refugee' as the journalist tries to suggest. If the journalists did indeed collect accounts from thousands (even if not millions) then those accounts should be verified and put into a database that serves as part of a credible estimate of the casualties.

According to one report from the Press Trust of India (P.T.I.), 50 refugees recently fled into a jute field near the Indian border when they heard a Pakistani army patrol approaching. "Suddenly a six-month-old child in its mother's lap started crying," said the P.T.I, report. "Failing to make the child silent and apprehending that the refugees might be attacked, the woman throttled the infant to death."

Press trust of India says it all right there. No doubt one major success on the part of India was the propaganda offensive and the ability to manipulate and distort the narrative to suit its nefarious goals of supporting terrorists in East Pakistan and breaking Pakistan apart.

The evidence of the bloodbath is all over East Pakistan. Whole sections of cities lie in ruins from shelling and aerial attacks. In Khalishpur, the northern suburb of Khulna, naked children and haggard women scavenge the rubble where their homes and shops once stood. Stretches of Chittagong's Hizari Lane and Maulana Sowkat Ali Road have been wiped out. The central bazaar in Jessore is reduced to twisted masses of corrugated tin and shattered walls. Kushtia, a city of 40,000, now looks, as a World Bank team reported, "like the morning after a nuclear attack." In Dacca, where soldiers set sections of the Old City ablaze with flamethrowers and then machine-gunned thousands as they tried to escape the cordon of fire, nearly 25 blocks have been bulldozed clear, leaving open areas set incongruously amid jam-packed slums. For the benefit of foreign visitors, the army has patched up many shell holes in the walls of Dacca University, where hundreds of students were killed. But many signs remain. The tank-blasted Rajabagh Police Barracks, where nearly 1,000 surrounded Bengali cops fought to the last, is still in ruins.

Along with the excerpts in my last post on the events in East Pakistan and the violence and atrocities perpetrated by the Bengali insurgents and terrorists, there is this:

The truth about the Jessore massacre​

by 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.

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Look

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

You do realize that the refugee influx was because of the genocide. The two are not mutually exclusive. The East Pakistanis were not happily fishing one day when one of them had a brain wave and said, "Let's seek refuge in India" and 10 million followed him.

We would actually welcome it if you invaded. If you are right, Allah will be with you and you will triumph. If not, we will. Good always triumphs over evil. Let's see.

Anywhere between 5.5 to 7 million Afghan refugees were residing in Pakistan and Iran combined in the late eighties as a result of the civil war and instability in Afghanistan - that is over 35% of the entire Afghan population at the time were refugees. There was no 'Afghan genocide' being perpetrated at that time - the refugee exodus was purely a result of the violence and instability in the country.

There is nothing to substantiate the argument that the East Pakistani refugees streaming into India did so as a result of genocide perpetrated by the PA, instead of attempting to escape the violence of a civil war in which India was supporting and training terrorists and insurgents on one side.

 

[Jackdaws]

Anywhere between 5.5 to 7 million Afghan refugees were residing in Pakistan and Iran combined in the late eighties as a result of the civil war and instability in Afghanistan - that is over 35% of the entire Afghan population at the time were refugees. There was no 'Afghan genocide' being perpetrated at that time - the refugee exodus was purely a result of the violence and instability in the country.

There is nothing to substantiate the argument that the East Pakistani refugees streaming into India did so as a result of genocide perpetrated by the PA, instead of attempting to escape the violence of a civil war in which India was supporting and training terrorists and insurgents on one side.

There is a lot to substantiate it - please see videos on Youtube of British MPs visiting refugee camps and testimony of refugees.

 

[LaBong]

There is a lot to substantiate it - please see videos on Youtube of British MPs visiting refugee camps and testimony of refugees.

Sharmila Bose was born and brought up in USA, but her 'research' holds more truth than eyewitnesses account and videos for some people. Talk about living in denial.

 

[LaBong]

Personal memoirs of the time recount large public meetings in Dhaka since 1 March, with the crowds carrying bamboo sticks and iron rods, calls to 'take up arms', incidents of bomb-throwing and shooting, and military-style parades carrying weapons both real and dummy. Images of such gatherings and parades are displayed in the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka. Some aspects of the movement are similar to the violent revolutionary movement in Bengal against the British in early 20th century and the 1930s, not Gandhian non-violence.[4] Kaliranjan Shil, a Communist Party activist who survived the army's assault on Jagannath Hall in Dhaka University on 25-26 March, has written about the training for armed revolt, (using dummy rifles, according to him), that started on the university gymnasium field as soon as the parliament session was postponed on 1st March. Each trained batch would then train arriving recruits, while 'normal' students left the halls as the university was closed. He had trained as usual on 25 March.

Crowds with bamboo stick and iron rods and dummy rifles! Wow must had beeen very scary for close to 1 lakh professional armed forces with latest US weapon. Enough reason to carry out a planned orgy of rape and murder.

Apart from sporadic incidents of violence in Dhaka, there was arson, looting and attacks by Bengali mobs on non-Bengali people and property in many parts of the province, some with casualties. The White Paper published by the Pakistan government in August 1971 lists such incidents, of which the worst loss of life appears to have occurred in Khulna and Chittagong in the first week of March. That "the government's writ had ceased to function in most parts of the province" and that there were attacks upon non-Bengalis by Bengalis on the rampage, is acknowledged by critics of the government too.[

Mob unrest and ‘some’ causalities, there, Indian terrorism is proven beyond the doubt!

"The murder of army personnel, caught in ones and twos, became an everyday occurrence," writes Maj. Gen. H. A. Qureishi, "In our area we lost Lt. Abbas of 29 Cavalry. With an escort of Bengali soldiers, he had ventured out of the unit lines to buy fresh vegetables for the troops. The escort was "rushed" by the militants, the officer was killed, weapons were
'confiscated' and the Bengali members of the guard sent back unharmed."[

One soldier was killed, so it’s also proven that West Pakistanis were being systematically wiped out by Bengalis.

 

[roach]

@AM: Thanks for the articles posted above, they are illuminating. It seems there is a decent bit of padding of statistics and dramatization of events.

A lot like present-day Kashmir, if I may add.

 

[LaBong]

In September Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad delivered a speech at Columbia University amidst much protest. The protests stemmed from his views on the Holocaust. Under questioning Ahmedinejad conceded that the Holocaust had indeed happened, but he was calling for further “research” to “approach the topic from different perspectives.” In doing so, Ahmedinejad was engaging in the modern form of Holocaust Denial. Ahmedinejad’s “different perspectives” were on display last year when he called for a conference on the Holocaust. At the time, his spokesman declared, “I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated.”

Modern Holocaust Denial has three key elements. The Deniers argue that the Nazis did not kill five to six million Jews; that the Nazis did not have a systematic policy of killing Jews; and, that the genocide was not carried out in extermination camps. Ahmedinejad and others call for further “research” to investigate one or more of these key elements. Their goal is to diminish the genocide by, first, questioning its extent and then by arguing that whatever killings took place were part of the normal savagery of war and not as a result of any systematic campaign by the Nazis. Holocaust Denial is anti-Semitism in the cloak of “scholarship.” Over a half century after perhaps the most well-documented act of genocide in the history of mankind, Holocaust Deniers still persist in trying to diminish its horrors.

Holocaust Denial is an example of the phenomenon of genocide denial that crops up to challenge almost every accepted case of genocide. The genocide committed by the Pakistan army during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 is no exception. Because of the scale of the atrocities in 1971 against a civilian population of 70 million people it has proved impossible for genocide deniers to claim that the atrocities did not occur. Instead, they have focused on two tactics used to try to deny the Holocaust: that the scale of the genocide was not that great, and that the Pakistan army had no systematic policy of genocide.

Most estimates of the 1971 genocide put the death toll between 300,000 and 3 million Bangladeshis dead, with between 200,000 to 400,000 women raped. R.J Rummel, in his book Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, puts the death toll at around 1.5 million. According to Gendercide Watch:

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).

Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, puts the number of women raped by the Pakistan military and their local collaborators, the Razakars, between 200,000 and 400,000. She writes:

Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to beauty. Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually assaulted … Pakistani soldiers had not only violated Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of hundreds and held them by force in their military barracks for nightly use.

On March 25, 1971 the Pakistan army unleashed a systematic campaign of genocide on the civilian population of then East Pakistan. Nine months later a defeated Pakistan army left in its wake one of the most concentrated acts of genocide in the twentieth century.

After the Bangladesh Liberation War the government of Pakistan produced a report on the actions of the Pakistani army during 1971 known as the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report. While the report acknowledged that the Pakistani army had indeed committed atrocities in Bangladesh, it downplayed the extent of the atrocities and denied that there was any systematic policy of genocide:

31. In the circumstances that prevailed in East Pakistan from the 1st of March to the 16th of December 1971, it was hardly possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the toll of death and destruction caused by the Awami League militants and later by the Pakistan Army. It must also be remembered that even after the military action of the 25th of march 1971, Indian infiltrators and members of the Mukti Bahini sponsored by the Awami League continued to indulge in killings, rape and arson during their raids on peaceful villages in East Pakistan, not only in order to cause panic and disruption and carry out their plans of subversion, but also to punish those East Pakistanis who were not willing to go along with them. In any estimate of the extent of atrocities alleged to have been committed on the East Pakistani people, the death and destruction caused by the Awami League militants throughout this period and the atrocities committed by them on their own brothers and sisters must, therefore, be always be kept in view.

32. According to the Bangladesh authorities, the Pakistan Army was responsible for killing three million Bengalis and raping 200,000 East Pakistani women. It does not need any elaborate argument to see that these figures are obviously highly exaggerated. So much damage could not have been caused by the entire strength of the Pakistan Army then stationed in East Pakistan even if it had nothing else to do. In fact, however, the army was constantly engaged in fighting the Mukti Bahini, the Indian infiltrators, and later the Indian army. It has also the task of running the civil administration, maintaining communications and feeding 70 million people of East Pakistan. It is, therefore, clear that the figures mentioned by the Dacca authorities are altogether fantastic and fanciful.

33. Different figures were mentioned by different persons in authority but the latest statement supplied to us by the GHQ shows approximately 26,000 persons killed during the action by the Pakistan Army. This figure is based on situation reports submitted from time to time by the Eastern Command to the General Headquarters. It is possible that even these figures may contain an element of exaggeration as the lower formations may have magnified their own achievements in quelling the rebellion. However, in the absence of any other reliable data, the Commission is of the view that the latest figure supplied by the GHQ should be accepted. An important consideration which has influenced us in accepting this figure as reasonably correct is the fact that the reports were sent from East Pakistan to GHQ at a time when the Army Officers in East Pakistan could have had no notion whatsoever of any accountability in this behalf.

[Emphasis added.]

The Report’s estimate of 26,000 dead stands in stark contrast to every other study of the death toll, which put the death toll between 300,000 to 3 million. The Report was an attempt by the Pakistani government and army to dictate the narrative before the true extent of the genocide became evident to the world. The Pakistani Report has nonetheless stood as the document of last resort for most 1971 genocide deniers.


[Sarmila Bose.]

Following up on her 2005 paper denying the extent of the 1971 genocide published in the Economic and Political Weekly, Sarmila Bose has now published a paper denying the extent of the rapes of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistan army and the Razakars. In her paper entitled “Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh War” she states in the introduction:

That rape occurred in East Pakistan in 1971 has never been in any doubt. The question is what was the true extent of rape, who were the victims and who the perpetrators and was there any systematic policy of rape by any party, as opposed to opportunistic sexual crimes in times of war.

At the very beginning of her paper, she lays down the two tactics familiar to all genocide deniers: she questions the extent of the rape and questions whether there was any systematic policy of rape. Ms. Bose argues that claiming “hundreds of thousands” were raped trivializes “the possibly several thousand true rape victims” of the war. She however does not offer a good explanation as to how she reached the “several thousand” number other than saying that so many rapes would not be possible by the size of the Pakistani army in 1971. She also, unsurprisingly, quotes the passage from the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report that I cited above to support her assertion that so many rapes could not have occurred.To try to bolster her argument that the Pakistani forces in Bangladesh could not have raped so many women, she claims:

The number of West Pakistani armed forces personnel in East Pakistan was about 20,000 at the beginning of the conflict, rising to 34,000 by December. Another 11,000 men — civil police and non-combat personnel — also held arms.

…

For an army of 34,000 to rape on this scale in eight or nine months (while fighting insurgency, guerrilla war and an invasion by India), each would-be perpetrator would have had to commit rape at an incredible rate.

[A Pakistan stamp depicting the 90,000 PoWs in Indian camps. This stamp was issued with the political aim of raising the POW issue at a global level in securing their release.]

The actual number of Pakistani forces at the end of the war, and taken PoW by the Indians, was 90,368, including over 54,000 army and 22,000 paramilitary forces. It is not unreasonable to conclude that a force of 90,000 could rape between 200,000 to 400,000 women in the space of nine months. Even if only 10% of the force raped only one woman each in nine months, the number of rapes are well over “several thousand” claimed by Ms. Bose. Since Ms. Bose does the math in her paper, I will do the macabre calculation for the total force here. To rape 200,000 Bangladeshi women a Pakistani force of 90,000 would have to rape 2 to 3 women each in nine months. Not only is this scale of atrocity possible by an army engaged in a systematic campaign of genocide, it also has parallels in other modern conflicts (for example, the rape of between 250,000 to 500,000 women in Rwanda within 100 days).Ms. Bose also paints a picture of the Pakistani military as a disciplined force that spared women and children. She writes:

During my field research on several incidents in East Pakistan during 1971, Bangladeshi participants and eyewitnesses described battles, raids, massacres and executions, but told me that women were not harmed by the army in these events except by chance such as in crossfire. The pattern that emerged from these incidents was that the Pakistan army targeted adult males while sparing women and children.

[Blood Telegram.]

However, her “field research” is contradicted by all available evidence. From the early days of the war, women and girls were targeted for rape and killed. On March 30, 1971 the American Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to the State Department recounting the Pakistani atrocities in Dhaka. In it he wrote:

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,(...) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

The continuing rape of Bangladesh