The courageous Pakistan army stand on the eastern front

[LaBong]

self delete

 

[Pagla Dashu]

What I find strange is that you are quoting the same author whose integrity and scholarship I am questioning, and that too from that piece which has been widely trashed by not just Mukti Bahini veterans but by several scholars. Shouldn’t you be quoting from someone else to first establish that Ms Bose even has some credibility. Or is it that you couldn’t find any one else to quote.

Anyway.

‘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.’​

Ingeniously, Ms Bose doesn’t identify this ‘crowd’. The reader is left wondering if she is talking of the Bengalis (Mukti Bahini was not formed then) or the pro-Pakistan, pro-PA East Pakistanis. In fact it was the later group, later came to be known as Razakars, who would parade along with the Police and Army, with steel rods and machetes, as a show of solidarity with their masters and to bully the Bengalis into submission, and right before the March 25 would mark the doors of intended targets with chalk so the Army would have no trouble finding who to slaughter.

‘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.’​

Kaliranjan Shil was a member of the Communist party, which at that time dreamed of armed communist revolution, like the Naxals of West Bengal, and had their own agenda. (The Naxalbari movement was already gathering storm in West Bengal) They indeed trained in arms and it is no secret. What Ms Bose doesn’t tell the readers is that they were entirely different from the Mukti Bahinis, although they collaborated later on. Mujib was himself wary of these communists. As was Ms Gandhi and the US.

‘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’​

It is nice, for a change, to hear an acknowledgement that the incidents of violence were ‘sporadic’ and not systematic or organized so as to indicate a grand plan. But as usual she fails to mention that these attacks were fairly retaliatory and was ignited by the Razakars looting and vandalizing shops owned or run by the Bengalis. (refer Sissone and Rose). ‘Worst loss of life’ did happen in Chittagong on 3rd March and it is corroborated by independent sources. The White Paper pegs the death toll at ‘300 persons’. Again, the reader is left wondering how many of them were the Bengalis and how many were the razakars.

‘"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."​

Any independent corroboration of such ‘everyday occurrence’ of ‘murder of army personnel, caught in ones and twos’ or are we supposed to take the words of the accused to be axiomatic. Oh, I forgot, Ms Bose, by her own admission, had depended entirely on Pakistani archives for her research. Cross checking or referencing? Well, that’s not part of her research process.

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.

I am not commenting on this. I am just taking a snap of this comment. Might come in handy in Kashmir related threads.

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

Even when it is clearly evidenced that the families of the victims either didn’t survive the massacre or no longer live in their own country?

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.

So this is how you argue. First you raise a strawman and then try to bluff your way through non-sequitors. Whats next?

'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.

So how do you propose to count the corpses that don’t exist anymore; those which were thrown into rivers and wells and mass graves which are still being discovered every now and then. Btw, HR commission, by their own admission, interviewed just 213 persons, and none of them were the victims (they never visited Bangladesh) and depended heavily on a book written by a Pakistani reporter. A fine commission it was.

 

[Pagla Dashu]

'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.

The reporter (and many others including representatives of various international organizations) was present at the camps witnessing first hand the inflow of refugees, relentlessly throughout day and night. I don’t think one had to do a headcount to get a ballpark estimate of the flow. If the Indians were claiming 50,000 whereas in reality it was just 5,000, I have a feeling that it would have been noticeable. But hey, when clutching at straws why bother with rationale.

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.

Yes, you got that right. It must be the Indians.

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.

Oh yes, the high standards of ‘each and every’. Have you counted ‘each and every’ corpse? No? Then there was no genocide. Have you counted ‘each and every’ refugees? No? Then there wasn’t that many refugees. Have you interviewed ‘each and every’ refugee? No? How about ‘thousands’ of them? No? Then it is rhetoric. At best isolated incidents. Yes, I agree, the reporter should have filled the pages, in fact written issues after issues, of Time, just to make the point of intense sufferings that ‘courageous’ PA was subjecting them to.

Btw, there are actually thousands of eyewitness accounts in Bengali literature.

I like the way you reject all Indian sources but insist on taking Hamoodor Rehman Commission report and Ms Bose’s ‘scholarship’, which is based entirely on Pakistani sources, as evidence. Way to go buddy. But is it absolutely necessary to look this desperate?

 

[Pagla Dashu]

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.

Yes, US declassified documents, ICJ findings, eyewitness accounts of foreign citizens, foreign reporters, foreign activists, representatives of foreign institutions like World Bank, thousands of eyewitness testimony of victims and survivors of atrocities mean zilch.

Hail Ms Bose.

 

[Pagla Dashu]

All you need is a transcript for the meeting. I would present you with one myself but I am unsure of where I could find a soft copy.

In other words you have pulled that magic number from thin air. So next time don't quote something that you can't substantiate.

As for newspaper reports, I can't believe them. They will obviously print what they got from the field of battle, and since the battlefield lay with the Indians and separatists, the reports will be heavily in favour of them. It's bound to be that way, if Pakistan had won 71, you would have probably been blamed for those 30,000 murders.

Not really. Many of those reports are by foreign journalists who had sneaked into East Pakistan or as in most cases taken on tour by PA themselves. Some are by a Pakistani journalist. He had to pay the price for his reports, though.

 

[Icarus]

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.



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



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

Did you even bother to read the given material ? Or did you just pick lines at random to right completely irrelevant rebuttals to ?

 

[Icarus]

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:



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:



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:

[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:




[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:




[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:




The continuing rape of Bangladesh

We started from 3 million, down to 1.5 million, then to 7,500,000 and now your stated article talks of the numbers of victim's being in "Seven Figures"(Unspecified number)................we're gonna end up at 30,000 to 300,000 eventually.

 

[Icarus]

In other words you have pulled that magic number from thin air. So next time don't quote something that you can't substantiate.


Not really. Many of those reports are by foreign journalists who had sneaked into East Pakistan or as in most cases taken on tour by PA themselves. Some are by a Pakistani journalist. He had to pay the price for his reports, though.

I do not have a "SOFT COPY" which means a copy which exists in the form of computer readable data. I do have books which carry the "MAGIC NUMBER".
As for the journalists you talk about, I believe AM's article about the Jessore massacre tells plenty about the type of reporting being done in East Pakistan.

 

[Icarus]

you are lieing just shut your mouth and leave that forum

No he shouldn't, this is a public forum, he has as much right to present his point of view here as you do. And please do mind your language, such direct attacks are not appreciated and if you keep that up, you won't last long......
Anyways, welcome to PDF.............

 

[Icarus]

why you are spreading negative propganda against pakistan you are looking like propaganda expert.which are indians ofcourse no doubt you indian are coward you can not fight in front of us thats you are posting these bloody posts.

Not appreciated..........

 

[LaBong]

Did you even bother to read the given material ? Or did you just pick lines at random to right completely irrelevant rebuttals to ?

I did read the article and the lines I picked from the article are only lines which specifically points to West Pakistani causalities. Don't expect me to write a rebuttal to things that has been attributed to 'some' Bangladeshi, 'a mob of people' or alleged communist activities which had no relation whatsoever with Mukti Bahini.

I actually took Henry Kissinger and his recollection of 'personal memories' for granted despite his bitchy(no pun intended) remarks on then Indian PM!

 

[LaBong]

We started from 3 million, down to 1.5 million, then to 7,500,000 and now your stated article talks of the numbers of victim's being in "Seven Figures"(Unspecified number)................we're gonna end up at 30,000 to 300,000 eventually.

Look it's something between 30,000 and 3 million but a huge number nevertheless if we take into consideration the eyewitnesses and credible sources. The truth lies somewhere between the Pakistani frenzied attempt at denial and Indian wide eyed innocence.

 

[Icarus]

Look it's something between 30,000 and 3 million but a huge number nevertheless if we take into consideration the eyewitnesses and credible sources. The truth lies somewhere between the Pakistani frenzied attempt at denial and Indian wide eyed innocence.

I could agree to that, just add the systematic slaughter of West Pakistani and Urdu speaking populations of the East by the hands of the Nationalist Militias. There were whole villages of people who had migrated from India called Mohajirbastis or in many cases named on the ethnicity of the people living there i.e: Bihari Basti that were devoid of their occupants(through murder) by Nationalist Militias when the towns wee captured because according to them "Bangladesh was for the Begalis".

 

[Jackdaws]

I could agree to that, just add the systematic slaughter of West Pakistani and Urdu speaking populations of the East by the hands of the Nationalist Militias. There were whole villages of people who had migrated from India called Mohajirbastis or in many cases named on the ethnicity of the people living there i.e: Bihari Basti that were devoid of their occupants(through murder) by Nationalist Militias when the towns wee captured because according to them "Bangladesh was for the Begalis".

There is truth to that. Infact, after the Pakistani soldiers surrendered and gave up their arms Indian troops had to ensure that the surrendered Pakistani troops did not become the victims of mob justice. Bangladeshis wanted to kill the Pakistani soldiers on the Race Course itself.

 

[LaBong]

I could agree to that, just add the systematic slaughter of West Pakistani and Urdu speaking populations of the East by the hands of the Nationalist Militias. There were whole villages of people who had migrated from India called Mohajirbastis or in many cases named on the ethnicity of the people living there i.e: Bihari Basti that were devoid of their occupants(through murder) by Nationalist Militias when the towns wee captured because according to them "Bangladesh was for the Begalis".

There was no systematic slaughter of West Pakistani. Yes some Pakistani faced the backlash of general Bangladeshi people’s anger but Mukti Bahini never targeted civilians.

You gotto to remember most West Pakistani civilians lived in cantonments under army watch. It was not possible to systematically slaughter them without facing PA. The main reason behind PA's surrender was to ensure safety of Civilians and Indian Army made it sure after PA surrendered.