The exaggeration of 1971 statistics

[Apprentice]

I earlier made a thread about the alleged figures of rapes in 1971. For some reason it was moved out of my reach to the Senior section.


There was a post by @Solomon2 which said that the figure of 300,000 killed was a low range estimate. And the source @Solomon2 provided was R.J. Rummel.

However an academic, Christian Gerlach, has said that R.J Rummel's figures are 'sensationalist' and exaggerated. So R J Rummel is not an accurate source.

Christian Gerlach explains that Rummel ‘arrives at exaggerated death figures for most “democides” by so-called bracketing; instead of primary research, he takes the mean of available published estimates, mostly out of works of general character and therefore secondary quality, and from scholarly and journalistic accounts, to determine mortality’: Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, p. 468. Other scholars have also found that Rummel’s ‘method of estimation is fundamentally flawed’ (Anton Weiss-Wendt, also citing Tomislav Dulic, in his ‘Problems in Comparative Genocide Scholarship’, in Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, p. 46).

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Anyways there are also some journalists comments from that time period:

Peter Gill, a western journalist, said: “Sheikh Mujib's wild figure of three million Bengalis killed during those 10 terrible months is at least 20 times too high, if not 50 or 60.”

Source: Peter Gill, Pakistan Holds Together, Daily Telegraph, London, 16 April, 1973.

Reporting from the Noakhali district Abdul Muhaimin, well-known author, Awami League MCA and long time friend of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had this to say:

“As a Member of the Constituent Assembly I was entrusted with the responsibility of finding out the casualty figure for the whole of Noakhali district. After contacting different Police Stations and Unions the figure I had was less than seven thousand. Even after adding up the number of Razakars killed, the total did not exceed seven and a half thousand. At that time, Bangladesh had 19 districts. All these districts were not equally affected by the war. Noakhali was one among the districts which had seen severe fighting. If the figure obtained from Noakhali was seen as the mean average for the rest of the districts, even then the total killed would not exceed more than one hundred twenty five thousand.”

Source: Yahya Mirza, Interview with Mr Abdul Muhaimin, The Tarokalok, Dhaka, 1 March, 1990 cf. also cf. Jauhuri, ibid: 48-49.

William Drummond of The Guardian said:

“The figure of three million deaths has been carried uncritically in sections of the world press. My judgement, based on numerous trips around Bangladesh and extensive discussion with many people at the village level as well as in the government, is that the three million deaths is an exaggeration so gross as to be absurd.”

On 6 June 1972, William Drummond reported:

"Since the third week of March, when the Inspector General's office in the Bangladesh Home Ministry began its field investigations, there have been about 2,000 complaints from citizens about deaths at the hands of the Pakistan Army have been received."

Later, sources in Bangladesh reported that the draft report showed an overall casualty figure of 56,743. When a copy of this draft report was shown to the Prime Minister, "he lost his temper and threw it on the floor, saying in angry voice

'I have declared three million dead, and your report could not come up with three score thousand! What report you have prepared? Keep your report to yourself. What I have said once, shall prevail."

Source: William Drummond, The Missing Millions, The Guardian, London, 6 June, 1972.

Peter Gill of the Daily Telegraph said

“The Pakistan soldiery in the East during 1971 was suppressing a rebellion, and not in occupation of a foreign country. Sheikh Mujib's wild figure of three million Bengalis killed during those 10 terrible months is at least 20 times too high, if not 50 or 60. And what of all the killing that the Bengalis did whenever they had a chance?”

@WAJsal

One must also take into account the inclusion of combatant casualties. Additionally, scholars like Christian Gerlach ague that the majority of deaths were due to hunger and malnutrition, not due to direct army killings.

 

[Kambojaric]

Sarmila Bose (Indian Bengali)

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

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Serajur Rahman, Retired deputy head, BBC Bengali Service (Bangladeshi)

I explained that no accurate figure of the casualties was available but our estimate, based on information from various sources, was that up to "three lakh" (300,000) died in the conflict.

To my surprise and horror he (Mujib) told David Frost later that "three millions of my people" were killed by the Pakistanis.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/mujib-confusion-on-bangladeshi-deaths
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Dr. M. Abdul Mu’min Chowdhury (Bangladeshi)

Many myths have been formed around the creation of Bangladesh. Among them is the fiction that the defeated Pakistan Army savagely killed three million people and raped three hundred thousand women during their less than nine months unsuccessful fight to preserve the integrity of a united Pakistan.

http://www.storyofbangladesh.com/ebooks/myth-of-3-million.html

 

[Thəorətic Muslim]

There's no doubt, as in any war, civilians die. Some soldiers take their anger out on the most vulnerable.

But the 71 War, unlike the Holocaust can't and probably will not be confirmed. It all comes down to who has the louder voice to spread their claim the furthest.