The Roorkee Internment Camp

[peagle]

For your information I am the prime source of the OP, and my post is based off a special phone interview with the person who now lives in North America. I called the person up through a contact, because I wanted to verify other online accounts I have read, and this would be a good way to find out. With her permission I recorded the interview, and edited the notes to preserve her privacy and identity. The person will not be living much longer, but she was coherent, her memory was sharp, and she didn't contradict herself. She is not an illiterate transfer from Geneva camp to Orangi ( one slum to another ), but a highly educated person and the spouse of a prominent businessman ruined by the Civil War. The conversation continued to how she restarted her life in Karachi from zero, and how her daughter started working and how her children coped with the trauma. They eventually recovered to become a professional working family and moved to North America.
It was a good to hear her account, and I believe her. I checked out her claim of Indian Muslims getting involved in helping the POWs which is also retold in Major Shamshuddin's narrative.
Isn't this a better way to learn about the past ?

You cannot reply to an assumptions,
my contention was in reference to different points and you have chosen to provide a different answer, that's not right, clarity in a discussion is important, otherwise truth, lies and misunderstandings rule the roost.

I was very clear in my objections. I never said it is all lies, I clearly said lies mixed with the truth. It would help if you objectively read my replies and not allow emotions to colour them.
It is me, who holds the view that we should keep our doors open to South Asia including India, most here including yourself want to look to West Asia. You cannot pick and choose and say see here you go an example and its hunky dory, its bloody awesome, great, good. That's not how it works.

Objective analysis include unemotional evaluation of evidence at hand is important, and limiting personal opinions. I never had problems with any of the issues you highlighted above. My objections were different, you should know them, the fact you have ignored them shows you have allowed emotions to colour your judgements.

Plus, my overall objection was when lies are mixed with the truth, lies can be unintended, just because a person believes a thing does not make it true when lies colour the story the story becomes irrelevant, because it has been tarnished. The story provides an overview about something. That story paints the picture of good Indians and bad Pakistanis, they were not kept in a prisoner camp by force but in a holiday camp because Pakistan refused to take back it's people, what a load of BS.

I told you I wont be reply any further and I have provided 2 more replies, this will be my last and I will appreciate that you do not include me any more 1971 fantasies you are stuck with. It is obviously something that bothers you, and I feel for you, I hope you find peace, but it is for you to deal with, going around in other threads to highlight it at every opportunity is unfair and please do not include me again. Objective discussion is one thing, but for you this is something personal, I do not wish to be involved in a personal vendetta.

A vast majority of Pakistanis including myself have no guilt of any kind, no issues of any kind regarding 1971, except for people who suffered on all sides. Mine and our only regret is that we did not beat the f... out of India in 1962. But now we know, America and UK saved India.

It is your generation that allowed the 3 million killed and hundred of thousand of rapes narrative to exist, that failed to present Pakistan's point of view. Facts about America saving India in 1962, and so many other narratives, for that your generation is responsible. That generation failed miserably, their defeatist thinking is dead and buried, and good riddance.

 

[Baibars_1260]

@Baibars_1260, nice accounts, dear sir.

Actually, Dr. Khwaja Azimudin interned in the same camp as a boy has written a whole book ( See my post # 6 in this thread ) and as he says it very accurately in his book:
( The Boy Refugee) .

“The Indians knew that if they abandoned them, the Biharis would be killed in masses, and fearing international condemnation, they felt obligated to protect us, at least for the time being. And so, by a twist of fate, our enemy became our savior and protector.”

Thank you for appreciating. I am trying to be dispassionate..
I seem to keep pizzing off citizen's from all three countries. You are one of the rare ones who stay cool.
@magra

 

[magra]

The Roorkee Internment Camp


The following account is based off a recent interview I had with a 87 year old survivor of the Pakistan Civil War who was interned for two years by the Indian Army from December 1971 to January 1974. To protect the identity of the person certain personal details have been omitted. Some PDF members may have surviving relatives who were interned in the same camp, and thus may be able to identify this person. It is requested that the person's privacy be respected.

1. Tell us about your life immediately before the Civil War?

I was born in the former Indian state then known as the United Provinces in the city of Gorakhpur. I was educated in Lucknow. My husband belonged to Faizabad from the same province.
Both our families were prosperous and educated with significant urban and rural properties. Partition violence saw our families divided . My own family stayed in India, though at the time of my marriage in 1952, my husband's entire family had moved to Karachi in West Pakistan.
Shortly after my marriage, my husband and I moved to Dacca, then East Pakistan in late 1952.
My husband, an engineer by profession set up a business both manufacturing, and dealing in industrial spare parts serving the industries there. We prospered and were living comfortably in the Gulshan area of Dacca in our own home. I had three children.

In early 1971 my eldest daughter had just finished her intermediate science from Dacca University

2. Where were you towards the end of the Civil War and how did you survive the aftermath ?
We were unprepared. My husband was apolitical and he felt that the horrible Civil War would soon be over. As a civilian, and a prominent businessman with substantial business and social contacts within the Bengali community, he didn't feel threatened. We had nothing to do with either armed factions of the civil war. It was only towards mid December 1971, that a friend of ours warned us that our lives were in danger. There was imminent danger of ethnic cleansing. My husband still did not believe we were in danger. Even if India had won the war we would simply be reverting to becoming Indian citizens, or becoming Bangladeshi citizens.

A Pakistani Army truck turned up at our house on 16th December 1971 with a Pakistani officer and a few troops. The officer asked us to leave our home immediately and get into the truck. We were to move to the Cantonment.

"But you have surrendered " my husband said.

"Yes, we have. The Indian Army has asked us to assist in evacuating civilians, and we are retaining our weapons and transport till all endangered civilians can be moved to safety. Please don't waste time and get your family into the truck. "

As we were getting into truck an armed mob rapidly collected outside our house, but were held off by the soldiers who pointed their weapons. As we moved out I looked back, and saw the mob descend on my house and begin looting it.

Further down the road we were stopped by a larger and more heavily armed mob which even our soldiers would not have been able to fend off. We were saved by an Indian Army truck that instantly turned up and began following us. The Indian Army escorted us all the way into the Cantonment area. When we arrived at the cantonment it was packed with civilians and families of Pakistan Armed Forces personnel. There were a few Indian Army personnel present. The Pakistani troops still had their weapons. The Indian Army officers advised us not to leave the premises under any circumstances. Shortly afterwards more Indian troops arrived, and the Pakistani troops surrendered their weapons. We were informed we were officially Prisoners of War. We stayed in the cantonment for a few days until the Indian army told us of their plans for us. Armed forces personnel would be treated as Prisoners of War under the Geneva Convention. As enemy civilians we would be moved temporarily to an internment camp under Indian Army protection and International Red Cross supervision for quick repatriation to Pakistan. There was much confusion as to who exactly was a civilian, and who was an armed forces person as officially the wives and children of the soldiers were also civilians.

We were eventually told that civilians like us who had no connection with the armed forces, would be treated separately, and would be transferred quickly to West Pakistan. We were put in separate trains in batches. A large batch of about 2000 of us were in a train traveling towards Delhi when the train was diverted to the town of Roorkee. We were told that Pakistan had closed the border to traffic, and our repatriation would have to wait till the issue could be sorted out through negotiations. Till that time we would be interned. We arrived in Roorkee towards the fourth week of December 1971. We had no idea then we would be interned for two long years.

3. Were you or your husband able to contact your respective family members ?

No, there was no way for either me or my husband to contact our respective families. My parents and all my brothers and sisters were in India, and my husbands parents, and siblings were in West Pakistan. Because our whereabouts were not known we were presumed dead by both our families.

4. So what happened when you arrived at Roorkee?

It was a large camp, one of the many that India has set up to imprison almost 100,000 of its enemy civilians. The Roorkee camp was one of the larger camps was probably an army barrack, or a government worker's housing establishment of some kind that had been converted as an internment camp. It was very spread out over 20 to 30 acres , with a number of separate single story buildings in rows, called "halls".
The camp was fenced in with double rows of barbed wire fencing with one outer and one inner entry gate. There was a commandant's office outside.

This was a civilian camp for upper and upper middle class internees who were from diverse backgrounds. There were doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, police officers, merchant marine officers, private sector individuals from tea garden managers, to export import business houses, insurance, employees of foreign airlines. There were a small number of government officials, and civil service officials as well.

5.Were there any injured or sick amongst you ?

Yes, some were injured, and the last we saw of them after we got off the train was being whisked away in an army ambulance to a hospital.

6.So how did the Indian Army organize the camp ?

Only the unmarried men were separated and housed separately. The families with the parents and children were kept together in separate halls. Single unmarried or widowed women, shared a hall with a family.

We were two to three families to a "hall", but since the rooms were large and airy we didn't feel cramped. We were provided beds and blankets. It was very cold there. There were separate washing and toilet facilities.

The "halls" and inner area were strictly out of bounds to Indian Army personnel, who only patrolled the outer perimeter. There was a Colonel who was the camp commandant who turned up every morning and evening to enquire if there were any complaints. This was not an armed forces camp, so the Indians were not worried about us attempting to escape, nor did they feel threatened by us. We had nowhere to go..

7. What about your food and clothes...?

At first the food was frugal and monotonous, but still adequate . Every morning there was tea and two puris with some sort of bhaji given to each person in the morning. Children under 12 years were provided half liter of milk. The day meal and night meal was the same basically a little daal, a vegetable curry and roti . The food was strictly vegetarian.

We had no clothes other than what we had been wearing when we left and these deteriorated rapidly.

8. So it was like this for two years...?

No, after the first month the Indians asked us to organize ourselves and informed us that we were not going home soon. So we literally set up a whole colony.
We had our own kitchen, our own tailoring shop to repair our clothes and our own school, our own clinic.

The doctors amongst us were supported by hastily trained female members of our camp who delivered babies ( yes, a few of our female camp members were pregnant when we got interned.). The Indian Army and International Red Cross provided basic medical supplies, and basic educational material for children. Food was brought in to our kitchen and we prepared the food ourselves in a langar style. There were engineers amongst us including my husband, who took up the maintenance work of the utilities whenever there was a breakdown repairing the systems themselves. The Indians provided tools and spares. Basically the Indians left us to ourselves for the first 6 months. But things began to change...

9. Were there any deaths in the camp...?
Yes, of course, very frequently. Women died in childbirth, others sickened and died , some died of natural causes. Roorkee had an Indian Muslim population nearby in a village with a graveyard. When someone died the Indian Army would requisition the bier ( taboot) from the village and drag the imam over to perform the namaz e janaza and carry off the body in a truck .. A few immediate relatives if available were allowed to accompany the body to the graveyard for burial, but sometimes it was a single person and the Indian Army would simply ask the villagers to perform the last rites.

10. How did your situation change.

( To be continued...)

Excellent post.
You should submit the interview to some kind of official archive for posterity's knowledge.
You said you recorded the interview. Can you post that too (you can edit portions that reveal the identity)?

The Roorkee Internment Camp


The following account is based off a recent interview I had with a 87 year old survivor of the Pakistan Civil War who was interned for two years by the Indian Army from December 1971 to January 1974. To protect the identity of the person certain personal details have been omitted. Some PDF members may have surviving relatives who were interned in the same camp, and thus may be able to identify this person. It is requested that the person's privacy be respected.

1. Tell us about your life immediately before the Civil War?

I was born in the former Indian state then known as the United Provinces in the city of Gorakhpur. I was educated in Lucknow. My husband belonged to Faizabad from the same province.
Both our families were prosperous and educated with significant urban and rural properties. Partition violence saw our families divided . My own family stayed in India, though at the time of my marriage in 1952, my husband's entire family had moved to Karachi in West Pakistan.
Shortly after my marriage, my husband and I moved to Dacca, then East Pakistan in late 1952.
My husband, an engineer by profession set up a business both manufacturing, and dealing in industrial spare parts serving the industries there. We prospered and were living comfortably in the Gulshan area of Dacca in our own home. I had three children.

In early 1971 my eldest daughter had just finished her intermediate science from Dacca University

2. Where were you towards the end of the Civil War and how did you survive the aftermath ?
We were unprepared. My husband was apolitical and he felt that the horrible Civil War would soon be over. As a civilian, and a prominent businessman with substantial business and social contacts within the Bengali community, he didn't feel threatened. We had nothing to do with either armed factions of the civil war. It was only towards mid December 1971, that a friend of ours warned us that our lives were in danger. There was imminent danger of ethnic cleansing. My husband still did not believe we were in danger. Even if India had won the war we would simply be reverting to becoming Indian citizens, or becoming Bangladeshi citizens.

A Pakistani Army truck turned up at our house on 16th December 1971 with a Pakistani officer and a few troops. The officer asked us to leave our home immediately and get into the truck. We were to move to the Cantonment.

"But you have surrendered " my husband said.

"Yes, we have. The Indian Army has asked us to assist in evacuating civilians, and we are retaining our weapons and transport till all endangered civilians can be moved to safety. Please don't waste time and get your family into the truck. "

As we were getting into truck an armed mob rapidly collected outside our house, but were held off by the soldiers who pointed their weapons. As we moved out I looked back, and saw the mob descend on my house and begin looting it.

Further down the road we were stopped by a larger and more heavily armed mob which even our soldiers would not have been able to fend off. We were saved by an Indian Army truck that instantly turned up and began following us. The Indian Army escorted us all the way into the Cantonment area. When we arrived at the cantonment it was packed with civilians and families of Pakistan Armed Forces personnel. There were a few Indian Army personnel present. The Pakistani troops still had their weapons. The Indian Army officers advised us not to leave the premises under any circumstances. Shortly afterwards more Indian troops arrived, and the Pakistani troops surrendered their weapons. We were informed we were officially Prisoners of War. We stayed in the cantonment for a few days until the Indian army told us of their plans for us. Armed forces personnel would be treated as Prisoners of War under the Geneva Convention. As enemy civilians we would be moved temporarily to an internment camp under Indian Army protection and International Red Cross supervision for quick repatriation to Pakistan. There was much confusion as to who exactly was a civilian, and who was an armed forces person as officially the wives and children of the soldiers were also civilians.

We were eventually told that civilians like us who had no connection with the armed forces, would be treated separately, and would be transferred quickly to West Pakistan. We were put in separate trains in batches. A large batch of about 2000 of us were in a train traveling towards Delhi when the train was diverted to the town of Roorkee. We were told that Pakistan had closed the border to traffic, and our repatriation would have to wait till the issue could be sorted out through negotiations. Till that time we would be interned. We arrived in Roorkee towards the fourth week of December 1971. We had no idea then we would be interned for two long years.

3. Were you or your husband able to contact your respective family members ?

No, there was no way for either me or my husband to contact our respective families. My parents and all my brothers and sisters were in India, and my husbands parents, and siblings were in West Pakistan. Because our whereabouts were not known we were presumed dead by both our families.

4. So what happened when you arrived at Roorkee?

It was a large camp, one of the many that India has set up to imprison almost 100,000 of its enemy civilians. The Roorkee camp was one of the larger camps was probably an army barrack, or a government worker's housing establishment of some kind that had been converted as an internment camp. It was very spread out over 20 to 30 acres , with a number of separate single story buildings in rows, called "halls".
The camp was fenced in with double rows of barbed wire fencing with one outer and one inner entry gate. There was a commandant's office outside.

This was a civilian camp for upper and upper middle class internees who were from diverse backgrounds. There were doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, police officers, merchant marine officers, private sector individuals from tea garden managers, to export import business houses, insurance, employees of foreign airlines. There were a small number of government officials, and civil service officials as well.

5.Were there any injured or sick amongst you ?

Yes, some were injured, and the last we saw of them after we got off the train was being whisked away in an army ambulance to a hospital.

6.So how did the Indian Army organize the camp ?

Only the unmarried men were separated and housed separately. The families with the parents and children were kept together in separate halls. Single unmarried or widowed women, shared a hall with a family.

We were two to three families to a "hall", but since the rooms were large and airy we didn't feel cramped. We were provided beds and blankets. It was very cold there. There were separate washing and toilet facilities.

The "halls" and inner area were strictly out of bounds to Indian Army personnel, who only patrolled the outer perimeter. There was a Colonel who was the camp commandant who turned up every morning and evening to enquire if there were any complaints. This was not an armed forces camp, so the Indians were not worried about us attempting to escape, nor did they feel threatened by us. We had nowhere to go..

7. What about your food and clothes...?

At first the food was frugal and monotonous, but still adequate . Every morning there was tea and two puris with some sort of bhaji given to each person in the morning. Children under 12 years were provided half liter of milk. The day meal and night meal was the same basically a little daal, a vegetable curry and roti . The food was strictly vegetarian.

We had no clothes other than what we had been wearing when we left and these deteriorated rapidly.

8. So it was like this for two years...?

No, after the first month the Indians asked us to organize ourselves and informed us that we were not going home soon. So we literally set up a whole colony.
We had our own kitchen, our own tailoring shop to repair our clothes and our own school, our own clinic.

The doctors amongst us were supported by hastily trained female members of our camp who delivered babies ( yes, a few of our female camp members were pregnant when we got interned.). The Indian Army and International Red Cross provided basic medical supplies, and basic educational material for children. Food was brought in to our kitchen and we prepared the food ourselves in a langar style. There were engineers amongst us including my husband, who took up the maintenance work of the utilities whenever there was a breakdown repairing the systems themselves. The Indians provided tools and spares. Basically the Indians left us to ourselves for the first 6 months. But things began to change...

9. Were there any deaths in the camp...?
Yes, of course, very frequently. Women died in childbirth, others sickened and died , some died of natural causes. Roorkee had an Indian Muslim population nearby in a village with a graveyard. When someone died the Indian Army would requisition the bier ( taboot) from the village and drag the imam over to perform the namaz e janaza and carry off the body in a truck .. A few immediate relatives if available were allowed to accompany the body to the graveyard for burial, but sometimes it was a single person and the Indian Army would simply ask the villagers to perform the last rites.

10. How did your situation change.

( To be continued...)

Do you know why all non-Bengalis in East Pak were not taken away in the same fashion. Clearly it would have helped them instead of getting stuck in BD as stateless people. Were upper middle class civilians given a priority and the poor were left behind?

Why did Pak not accept those yet?

"Those who have origins in India, and were born here have the right to remain in India as Indian citizens and after registration with the civil authorities we could walk out of the camp tomorrow. "
He pointed to me as an example. He wanted a head count as to how many people would stay back.
No one raised their hands.

People who had family in Pakistan would not have wanted to separate from them.
Also, the Colonel should have asked people individually in privacy rather than in front of everyone. It is difficult to overcome peer pressure.

 

[Baibars_1260]

Do you know why all non-Bengalis in East Pak were not taken away in the same fashion. Clearly it would have helped them instead of getting stuck in BD as stateless people. Were upper middle class civilians given a priority and the poor were left behind?

It is a good question and this requires a separate thread.

Both Indian and Pakistani political scientists and historians have researched this angle thoroughly.
Let us go back to events immediately after the Civil War ended.
Post 1971 India's victory soured, because India was left responsible for 93,000 Armed Forces POWs of which half were technically civilian families of the fighting men. In addition there were another 100,000 non-military related civilian internees that had willingly preferred an internment under Indian Army protection in India to torture and a horrible death in Bangladesh . This was in addition to the 400,000 Urdu speaking population interned in camps in Bangladesh guarded precariously by the Indian Army.

The first priority of the Indian Army was stopping a massacre of the Stranded Pakistanis after they left; so they got every international agency like the UNHCR and Red Cross involved.

There were political and diplomatic reasons for this.
India at that time was under a Congress government that had a lot of goodwill with Indian Muslims, a sizable section of which had relatives in the Bangladeshi detention camps . Apart from the internal political impact of the massacres, India would have had an extremely bad international image. India was already facing two UN resolutions asking for all Pakistani POWs to be repatriated and guaranteed security of the Stranded Pakistanis .
What happened next is depressing.
It is sad that a combination of diplomatic juggling, cynical real politick, shameful petty political games, doomed the Indian origin Stranded Pakistanis into a generation of torture and animal level existence. I am told that your Dharavi slum is a paradise compared to Geneva camp in Mohammedpur Dhaka.

I India had started a back door diplomacy with Pakistan with a significant agreement on the release and repatriation of Mujibur Rahman to Bangladesh. But India was stonewalled on Pakistan's initial refusal to accept Stranded Pakistanis on the basis that the Urdu speaking stranded population of Bangladesh, was a linguistic minority there and was the responsibility of Bangladesh not Pakistan. While on the face value the argument seemed logical, this was a willful neglect of the realities to keep India on the back foot.
Eventually Pakistan linked the repatriation of civilian stranded Pakistanis to the return of Pakistani Armed Forces personnel . This was to keep India under pressure. India could not feed and house so many prisoners indefinitely , and nor could it suffer international condemnation for holding prisoners much longer. India was hoping to keep Bangladesh happy by promising to hand some prisoners over for war crimes. But under Geneva conventions a POW can only be repatriated back to its parent country and war crimes trials can only happen on the territory the crimes were committed. Pakistani troops had committed no war crimes against India or its people. Eventually India cracked under pressure, and did what it had long wanted to do for a long time. India wanted it's own prisoners in Pakistan back home.
It dumped Bangladesh, warning it to not harm the Stranded Pakistanis, and sent everyone of the prisoners in its own camps home.
Meanwhile in Bangladesh the problem of the Stranded Pakistanis remained.
During my brief stay in Bangladesh I spoke to a few survivors in the Mohammedpur camp.
There were the labor class, self employed artisans like masons, car mechanics, drivers, and railway clerks, loco drivers, track mostly hailing from United Provinces, CP, West Bengal and Bihar.
As always wars affect the poor and disadvantaged the most. When the Cantonment filled up the Indian army made safe zones for people of Indian origin all over Bangladesh and brought all of them into camps which they guarded. The people of Indian origin identifying as West Pakistanis were informed that they couldn't be guarded indefinitely and that they should move out with the Indian Army to India where they would be safer. The camp inmates were also offered a "right of return" back to their places of origin.

But the camp committees had fallen prey to the chaudhrygiri or what you would call, netagiris so prevalent in the sub-continent. A particular former ex-Indian then ex-Pakistan railway trade union leader by the name of Nasim Khan became the local leader, and formed the Stranded Pakistani Rapatriation Committee with the slogan Hamara Muqam hai Pakistan ( Trans: Our destination is Pakistan) implying that they should be repatriated back to Pakistan directly from Bangladesh, Additionally his demand was a separate area near Karachi to pack 400,000 persons.
Pakistan had no resources nor any diplomatic communications with Bangladesh to move so many people out of Bangladesh. The Indian overland route with the help of the UNHCR and Red Cross with the permission of the Indian authorities was the only sensible way out. The stupid demand by a selfish midget of a politician for an area to be carved out inside Sindh was bound to provoke a Sindhi nationalist backlash which was not long in coming .
Pakistan had taken back its civilian nationals from the other provinces ( Sindh, Baluchistan, Punjab and NWFP ) without any demands but then these people had only been deployed in East Pakistan, and were not resident there. Their numbers were far smaller, and they chose to go to India, and eventually be repatriated. Those injured were flown out on Red Cross chartered planes almost immediately.

Pakistan also made the condition of return of the Stranded Pakistanis to the return of an equal number of Bengali speaking residents in Pakistan. This was again unrealistic. There was no civil war in West Pakistan, and the Bengali speaking residents were not living in internment camps, and were spread out all over Pakistan. They were peaceful loyal citizens, and no way in danger of a massacre.

India was satisfied it had prevented the massacres and let Bangladesh handle the matter while looking the other way at the tiny number of "Biharis " who trickled back into India, and melted in with their relatives .The vast majority continued to live in Bangladesh in squalor and misery hoping to go back to Pakistan directly. With a full blown Sindhi nationalist movement raging Pakistan could not publicly encourage a non-Sindhi migration into Karachi. Mr. Nasim Khan became a false voice of the Stranded Pakistanis with more strident demands.
When Pakistan said it needed resources to settle the Stranded Pakistanis there was considerable international support. Lord Ennels a UK politician raised a huge sum of money for the repatriation $40 million ( about $ 200 million today( which would have covered the cost of transportation and temporary housing. Other nations such as Malaysia, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and most of the 51 OIC countries offered financial help and also offered to absorb some of the population. The solution was tantalizingly close .
But because of one extremely selfish and narrow minded politician Nasim Khan who wanted his little Empire carved out from Sindh the stranded Pakistanis turned down the offer of relocation and condemned themselves to misery.

As the years passed disease malnutrition, and age took their toll and the original generation died off. Some came out of the camps, accepted Bangladeshi citizenship to get a passport, and then made it to Pakistan where they destroyed their passports and merged into the population of Orangi Creek. Bangladesh accorded a blanket citizenship to all Stranded Pakistanis but did not give them passports. 5 decades later these stateless people have at last been given passports, Pakistan has waived visas for Bangladeshi nationals. It is obvious who benefits most from this policy. Slowly the next generation of the once "debris of war" are coming home.

 

[Baibars_1260]

Excellent post.
You should submit the interview to some kind of official archive for posterity's knowledge.
You said you recorded the interview. Can you post that too (you can edit portions that reveal the identity)?

Thank you. I began searching for survivors of the 1971 civilian evacuation from Dhaka, after I read online accounts ( Dr. Khwaja Azimudin's book) . The thread here in the Bangladesh sub-forum "History of Looting of the Indian Army in Bangladesh" aroused my interest. Through contacts I traced the survivor out and interviewed her. I cross checked with my own conversations with survivors in the camp in Dhaka ( though this was in a different population segment). I also cross checked other online accounts. I personally knew one Major in the Army who is now deceased who was a POW in an officer's camp. The accounts were similar though the armed forces camps obviously had a different environment., Basically I was looking for any evidence of the Indian Army's atrocities on POWs, looting, or mistreatment of civilian prisoners. I confess I have so far found no evidence. Not even the Stranded Pakistanis in the camps in Bangladesh complained of ill treatment at the hands of the Indian Army although they were enemy civilians and not entitled to the same treatment. The only instances of "looting " I found was the exchange of consumer durables by Pakistani civilians in return for protection from the Mukti Bahini. We have discussed this earlier.
I am sorry but I only recorded the audio for notes and I can't upload it here. She may be identified by her voice alone. The camp survivors are a very small group now and most are in touch with one another.I am not a professional journalist or historian. History to me is a hobby.
The identity of the camp survivors must be protected.
There is one account written of one of the camps by an Indian Army officer named V. S. Salunkhe. I haven't read the book but it deals with armed forces personnel. I hope to read the book and find out what was different.

 

[magra]

Thank you. I began searching for survivors of the 1971 civilian evacuation from Dhaka, after I read online accounts ( Dr. Khwaja Azimudin's book) . The thread here in the Bangladesh sub-forum "History of Looting of the Indian Army in Bangladesh" aroused my interest. Through contacts I traced the survivor out and interviewed her. I cross checked with my own conversations with survivors in the camp in Dhaka ( though this was in a different population segment). I also cross checked other online accounts. I personally knew one Major in the Army who is now deceased who was a POW in an officer's camp. The accounts were similar though the armed forces camps obviously had a different environment., Basically I was looking for any evidence of the Indian Army's atrocities on POWs, looting, or mistreatment of civilian prisoners. I confess I have so far found no evidence. Not even the Stranded Pakistanis in the camps in Bangladesh complained of ill treatment at the hands of the Indian Army although they were enemy civilians and not entitled to the same treatment. The only instances of "looting " I found was the exchange of consumer durables by Pakistani civilians in return for protection from the Mukti Bahini. We have discussed this earlier.
I am sorry but I only recorded the audio for notes and I can't upload it here. She may be identified by her voice alone. The camp survivors are a very small group now and most are in touch with one another.I am not a professional journalist or historian. History to me is a hobby.
The identity of the camp survivors must be protected.
There is one account written of one of the camps by an Indian Army officer named V. S. Salunkhe. I haven't read the book but it deals with armed forces personnel. I hope to read the book and find out what was different.

I hope the audios can be de-classified in later years when identity protection is no longer a concern.