The courageous Pakistan army stand on the eastern front

[GUNNER]

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.

Not true, Abir. There were many incidents of Mukti Bahini targeting civilians, as well as deserters from EPR killing officers.

 

[Jackdaws]

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.

And despite Pakistani claims of feeling for the Biharis - it is fact that they have refused to take back tons of Biharis who declared loyalty to Pakistan - these stateless citizens live in Geneva camps in Bangladesh and refuse to be taken in by Pakistan. Their reward for loyalty.

 

[LaBong]

Not true, Abir. There were many incidents of Mukti Bahini targeting civilians, as well as deserters from EPR killing officers.

But Mukti Bahini was a Guerrilla force mainly operated in rural part. West Pakistani civvies were mainly lived in cities where PA still had good presence even when they surrendered.

Mukti Bahini targeting civs doesn't make much sense, and anyway there was no way to differentiate a group of local Bengalis from Mukti Bahini soldiers.

Urdu speakers may have been targeted by native Bengalis but then again who would have remained peaceful after experiencing such race-based violence.

 

[Rafi]

It was a civil war at the time, there was no genocide.

 

[LaBong]

It was a civil war at the time, there was no genocide.

Does genocide invalidate itself if it's been committed in a civil war?

 

[Pagla Dashu]

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".

And the names of the books are....? Why this hesitancy in naming the books?

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.

If that article leaves you with the impression that reporting of during the time can't be trusted, then you should read it again. Ms Bose, the messiah, has actually used reports of two foreign newspapers, particularly of Nicholas Tomalin, in an attempt to establish her BS.

 

[Rafi]

No, but as Ms Bose so eloquently has proved there was no genocide, I think india and the post war leaders of bangladesh, also did a dis-service - to their cause by wildly inflating the figures, I mean three million in 6 months claims, totally discredited all their claims.

Also if it was a genocide, why was their no Nuremberg type war crimes commission, as most of the military were POW's at the time.

---------- Post added at 05:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:24 PM ----------

30,000 is the most accurate figure, killed in the civil war.

 

[Saleem]

THe mukti bahini was a indian trained terrorist force, training of the muktis is acknolwedged by indian officers. their targeting of civilians makes sense because their goal was to provoke retaliation by loyal pakistanis. the attacks on civilians were initiated and expanded by the muktis unnder direct supervision by indians. indian terrorists were captured disguised as muktis and bengali civilians in direct operations on pakistan territory. much like today they are operating in various areas of west pakistan.

indian offical figures give the figure of pakistan army regulars at surrenger as some 55,000. the figure of 90,000 inclused various police, civil armed forces (paramilitary) and real civilians. there were only 32 regular infantry battalions in east pakistan at its peak i.e. less than 16,000 actual rifle carrying troops. it physically impossible for them to do the scale of violence indicated in indian propoganda.
there was a lot of misbehavior by pakistan troops, they are not saints, but not on the scales suggested.. the majority of the terror was by indian and indian directed terrorists.

Any human rights investigation should include an investigaiton of indian and awami league terrorists.

the "liberation" of east pakistan was an indian military operation.

I do not deny that the east pakistan muslims were mistreated - but it is no different from the rest of pakistan - we see it here in west pakistan as well. it was not ethnic - it was just plain simple plunder by crooks and robber barons who stuffed their families and cronies and then blamed everything on the other ethnicities etc. to cover their rapacity - typical of third world tyrants everywhere. same as now in sind blames punjab, "south punjab" blames "north punjab" and so on.

 

[LaBong]

No, but as Ms Bose so eloquently has proved there was no genocide, I think india and the post war leaders of bangladesh, also did a dis-service - to their cause by wildly inflating the figures, I mean three million in 6 months claims, totally discredited all their claims.

Also if it was a genocide, why was their no Nuremberg type war crimes commission, as most of the military were POW's at the time.

---------- Post added at 05:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:24 PM ----------

30,000 is the most accurate figure, killed in the civil war.

So now you went back to your genocide denial mode. May be a thorough reading of last two pages can help!

As far as Ms Bose is concerned, read this slowly so next time you remember this.

Ms Bose was born and brought up in US of A with no first hand experience of Bangladesh Liberation War, and her thoughtful research on the subject, which based on Pakistani sources and Hamidur Commission Report as confirmed by her, means zilch next to astronomical evidences, footages, videos, neutral foreign sources, eyewitness's recollections etc etc.

Also if it was a genocide, why was their no Nuremberg type war crimes commission, as most of the military were POW's at the time.

Eh? Am I talking to someone with no knowledge whatsoever on the subject being discussed?

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

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.

Testimony of refugees is anecdotal evidence, and even if taken at face value does not substantiate genocide, but only the individual events they claim happened. Only a vetted archiving and analysis of these 'testimonies', graves, claims etc. would offer a credible view on the actual numbers killed.

Therefore, there is at this point no credible substantiation of the genocide claim, and as I pointed out with the Afghan refugee example, mass numbers of refugees do not automatically indicate genocide.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

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.

Selective reading - the article posted quite clearly illustrates that university campuses were being used for training insurgents and terrorists to use violence, and that subsequent to the military crackdown mob violence and attacks on West Pakistani civilians and soldiers were rampant, which necessitated a military crackdown.

The use of campuses for training insurgents also justifies the PA's initial response to attack the campuses.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

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

The HR Commission report based its casualty figures on reports submitted from the field, and its conclusions are in the range of the claims made to the newly formed Bangladesh's program to collect claims by Bangladeshis affected in the war (30,0000). Both these numbers come from verifiable methods, unlike the 'guesstimates and speculation' that results in the '300,000 to 3 million killed' claims.

Now if 'eyewitness testimonies and accounts' have been verified and compiled into a credible estimate by some neutral entity, please provide that evidence to support the claims of larger numbers killed - otherwise such claims are just speculative balderdash.

The same applies to the claims on the numbers raped - no conclusive or verifiable evidence to support those claims has been provided either.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Documents from March to December 1971 include intelligence assessments, key messages from the US embassies in Islamabad and New Delhi and the Consulate General in Dhaka, responses to National Security Study memoranda and full transcripts of the presidential tape recordings that are summarized and excerpted in editorial notes in volume XI.

The historian branch of the State Department held a two-day conference on June 28 and 29 on US policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972, inviting scholars from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to express their views on the declassified documents.

During the seminar, Bangladeshi scholars acknowledged that their official figure of more than 3 million killed during and after the military action was not authentic.

They said that the original figure was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million.

Shamsher M. Chowdhury, the Bangladesh ambassador in Washington who was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in 1969 but had joined his country’s war of liberation in 1971, acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake. Instead, he suggested that Pakistan and Bangladesh form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report.

Almost all scholars agreed that the real figure was somewhere between 26,000, as reported by the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, and not three million, the official figure put forward by Bangladesh and India.

Prof Sarmila Bose, an Indian academic, told the seminar that allegations of Pakistani army personnel raping Bengali women were grossly exaggerated.

Based on her extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, the study also determines the pattern of conflict as three-layered: West Pakistan versus East Pakistan, East Pakistanis (pro-Independence) versus East Pakistanis (pro-Union) and the fateful war between India and Pakistan.

Prof Bose noted that no neutral study of the conflict has been done and reports that are passed on as part of history are narratives that strengthen one point of view by rubbishing the other. The Bangladeshi narratives, for instance, focus on the rape issue and use that not only to demonize the Pakistan army but also exploit it as a symbol of why it was important to break away from (West) Pakistan.

Prof Bose, a Bengali herself and belonging to the family of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, emphasized the need for conducting independent studies of the 1971 conflict to bring out the facts.

She also spoke about the violence generated by all sides. “The civil war of 1971 was fought between those who believed they were fighting for a united Pakistan and those who believed their chance for justice and progress lay in an independent Bangladesh. Both were legitimate political positions. All parties in this conflict embraced violence as a means to the end, all committed acts of brutality outside accepted norms of warfare, and all had their share of humanity. These attributes make the 1971 conflict particularly suitable for efforts towards reconciliation, rather than recrimination,” says Prof Bose.


Sheikh Mujib wanted a confederation: US papers -DAWN - National; July 7, 2005

 

[LaBong]

Testimony of refugees is anecdotal evidence, and even if taken at face value does not substantiate genocide, but only the individual events they claim happened. Only a vetted archiving and analysis of these 'testimonies', graves, claims etc. would offer a credible view on the actual numbers killed.

The collective 'individual events' of million plus people substantiate the claim of genocide specially when all the individual events happened for a single cause/reason. Also there's neither a way to determine the actual numbers killed, nor knowing actual numbers killed validates/invalidates a genocide claim.

WHAT IS GENOCIDE?

Genocide is foremost an international crime for which individuals, no matter how high in authority, may be indicted, tried, and punished by the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to Article 6 of the ICC Statute, This crime involves, "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Sure Pakistan fits the bill.

Genocide:Meaning and Definition


Also there's a whole lot of archive regarding the deeds of PA in Bangladesh, let's not open the Pandora's box in this forum.

Therefore, there is at this point no credible substantiation of the genocide claim, and as I pointed out with the Afghan refugee example, mass numbers of refugees do not automatically indicate genocide.

The refugees points out a war like situation in the country from where people had to flee for safeguarding their life, as there's no other countries but India and Pakistan were involved in Bangladesh, and the refugees took refuge in India, so it's can be said with a certainty that refugees were fleeing from Pakistan Armed forces. That once again points to widespread violence that had been done on civilians by Pakistan Army.

Also as the main refugee influx happened at the initial stage when the war didn't took it's pace(note, I'm not even implying refugees caused the war), so it's also can be said that refugees weren't a result of collateral impact of an ongoing war.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The collective 'individual events' of million plus people substantiate the claim of genocide specially when all the individual events happened for a single cause/reason. Also there's neither a way to determine the actual numbers killed, nor knowing actual numbers killed validates/invalidates a genocide claim.

Where is the verified and vetted database of 'individual events of a million people'?

Sure Pakistan fits the bill.

Genocide:Meaning and Definition

It does not, since there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that the PA tried to either eliminate all Bengalis or all Hindu's in East Pakistan. Violence and atrocities were committed by both sides in the course of the war, but there is nothing to suggest that the PA was operating to eliminate all Bengalis in East Pakistan.

Various insurgent groups supported by India were however massacring non-Bengalis under the slogan of 'Bangladesh for Bengalis', which does amount to genocide.

Also there's a whole lot of archive regarding the deeds of PA in Bangladesh, let's not open the Pandora's box in this forum.

As pointed out above, please show where a vetted and verified collection of all of these individual accounts supporting the claim of hundreds of thousands or millions killed by the PA exists. Just posting a few dozen links of anecdotal accounts which have not been verified by any authoritative and independent source does not justify your claims.

The refugees points out a war like situation in the country from where people had to flee for safeguarding their life, as there's no other countries but India and Pakistan were involved in Bangladesh, and the refugees took refuge in India, so it's can be said with a certainty that refugees were fleeing from Pakistan Armed forces. That once again points to widespread violence that had been done on civilians by Pakistan Army.

The refugees were fleeing violence, violence that was a result of the insurgents and terrorists creating instability through attacks on the PA and non-Bengali civilians. And violence that was supported and perpetuated by India training and support for the insurgents and terrorists. The PA was responding to a violent uprising by terrorists and insurgents, much as it is responding to the Taliban terrorists and insurgents in FATA, which has also resulted in refugees, but in lower numbers given lower density of population in FATA.

The invasion of Afghanistan by NATO also resulted in a few more million refugees pouring into Pakistan and Iran - refugees alone do not indicate genocide.