by Farooque Chowdhury:

DECEMBER 16. The Bangladeshi people celebrate the day as Victory Day — a victory through vanquishing the armed forces of the neo-colonial state of Pakistan. The people tore down the state into two. The cost was wide streams of blood in the lush green land — a genocide that is yet to be recognised properly, which means the people’s suffering and sacrifice go unheard.

While the Bangladeshi people were paying prices with millions of lives and honor, they were also waging a heroic armed struggle for liberation, and an imperialist power — the United States — stood against the people’s struggle. The imperialist power was backing Pakistan’s political and military effort to keep the Bangladeshi people subdued. The genocide was part of that occupation war by Pakistan.

Chuknagar

INCIDENTS of genocide by the Pakistani armed forces are spread over the entire country of Bangladesh. The following narration tells about the pattern of killing the Pakistani armed forces in many areas:

‘They [the Pakistani troops] began herding the people in trucks, taking them to riverbeds, and then shooting them, dumping the bodies into the rivers, where the bodies would float downstream.’ (Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, The Bangladesh War and its Unique Legacy, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2016)

One such killing spree was at Chuknagar, a southern rural community. ‘According to local estimates, some 10,000 to 12,000 people were killed in the span of several hours.’ (‘Recognise Chuknagar Genocide, demand activists’, Dhaka Tribune, May 21, 2022, Dhaka]

Following is a narrative of the Chuknagar killing field:

‘For thousands of villagers living in inaccessible parts of the delta like Rampal, Sarankhola, Morrelganj, Fakirhat, Bagerhat, and Gopalganj, Chuknagar was the transit point to reach.

‘[….] On May 19, the Muslim League [one of the political parties standing with the state machine] followers came to Badamtola and killed more than a hundred people, but only twenty-three were identified because the rest were from other villages.

‘On the morning of May 20, Chuknagar was teeming with thousands of people [….] [The people gathered there were preparing, including hiring boats to go to India.]

‘Around 10 a.m. […] two trucks carrying Pakistani troops arrived in Chuknagar.

‘Nitai Chandra Gayen was a 24-year-old communist volunteer. He was to meet his family in Chuknagar. He ran to warn the people gathered on the grounds when he saw the soldiers moving towards them. [….] Nitai hid in a mosque, where many people were loudly reciting the namaz, as if to show the soldiers that they were devout Muslims and not Hindus. [….]

‘Gayen said the shooting went on for about four hours. After the soldiers had gone, he slowly went to the large tree where his family lay dead […] There were dead bodies everywhere’, Gayen told me [Salil, the author of the book] in Batiaghata at the college where Biswas taught. ‘In brush fire, it is easy to kill people. I can’t say with any certainty how many died, but at least a thousand, and may be many more, were killed. Wherever there were people, the Pakistanis shot at them. They even shot the people who jumped into the river to escape. The army then shot the boats so that they would drown. All I remember seeing are dead bodies’, he said.’  [Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, The Bangladesh War and its Unique Legacy, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2016]

Thana Para

ANOTHER was Thana Para, a rural community on the banks of the Ganga near a police training academy in the northern Rajshahi region. All male members of the community were asked to stand on a line, and then they were brush-fired. None of the villagers survived. There were only widows and children. [Personal enquiry]

Intellectuals

PETER Hazelhurst’s report in The Times says: ‘No one will ever know how many intellectuals, doctors, journalists, and young men, most of whom were not involved in politics, were rounded up and herded off to disappear forever.’ [‘Intellectuals butchered before surrender’, London, December 30, 1971]

The report, with a length of 10 paragraphs, added:

‘The Pakistani prisoners-of-war maintain that they know nothing about the atrocities, but evidence has been produced alleging that the Razakars [a paramilitary force the occupying Pakistan armed forces organised] were acting under the direct orders of a senior officer.’

The report mentions one mass killing of intellectuals, as it quoted Delwar Hussain, one of the prisoners in a prison camp:

Delwar Hussain ‘discovered that he was in a room with a score or so of other prisoners. Some of them had been tortured. Toe nails had been ripped off, and toes had been amputated.

‘After an hour, they were interrogated. The prisoners identified themselves as doctors, lawyers, professors, and journalists. They were forced into a bus and driven out to [a] marshland on the outskirts of Dacca [now Dhaka].

‘The Razakars led their victims to a big tree where about another 130 prisoners were huddled. Several prisoners asked the Razakars why they were killing fellow Bengalis. ‘One of them told us to shut up and gave an order’, ‘finish the bastards off’, Mr. Hussain said, ‘they started to shoot prisoners with rifles, and others were simply bayoneted to death. I managed to slip the rope off my wrists and make a dash towards the river. By a miracle, I escaped.’

S Pandit’s Dacca, December 19, 1971, datelined dispatch, published in The Indian Express, said:

‘In the last week before the surrender of the Pakistani occupation army, about 120 intellectuals, including top doctors, professors, and journalists, both men and women, were spirited away from their houses during curfew hours under military escort. Nothing was heard of them until about 36 bodies, with hands tied behind, were found dumped in the pits of some brick kilns.’ [‘Bodies of doctors, journalists, writers, and professors dumped in pits,’ December 20, 1971]

Sugar mill workers

IN THE North Bengal Sugar Mills at Natore in northern Bangladesh, 300 workers and staff were murdered in a single day. [Dainik Bangla, February 26, 1972, report by Sakhwat Ali Khan; later, he joined the Department of Journalism, Dhaka University, as a teacher.]

Similar incidents are hundreds, spread over the entire country — in towns and cities, in villages, rural market places, river and canal banks and banks of water bodies, in industrial areas; and many of those mass-murder incidents are documented in different forms, including witness’s or victims’ reports or mails to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, press reports, interviews, and memoirs. A part of these has been documented by a committee of experts and academicians and published as a document on the genocide. Moreover, a number of books have documented many of the killings by Pakistan in regions of the country in 1971. A few of the murder businesses are mentioned, but most of them go unmentioned.

How many Bengalis have you shot?

THE report of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission in Pakistan tells about Pakistan’s genocide practice in 1971in Bangladesh. A few parts from the report are mention-worthy:

Pakistan army’s Lt Col Aziz Ahmed Khan told the Commission the way Lt Gen Niazi, commander of the Pakistan army in then-East Pakistan, today’s independent Bangladesh, had ordered the genocide: ‘General Niazi visited my unit at Thakurgaon and Bogra [in the northern part of Bangladesh]. He asked us how many Hindus we had killed. In May, there was an order in writing to kill Hindus. This order was from Brigadier Abdullah Malik of the 23rd Brigade.’

Brigadier Iqbalur Rehman Shariff of the Pakistan army said: During a visit to formations in East Pakistan, General Gul Hassan [of the Pakistan army] used to ask the soldiers: ‘How many Bengalis have you shot?’

Brigadier Mian Taskeenuddin of the Pakistan army said: ‘In a command area (Dhoom Ghat) between September and October, miscreants [the Pakistan army/Pakistan authority used to identify the Bangladesh freedom fighters as ‘miscreants’] were killed by firing squads.’

The Commission stated that mortars were used to blast two residential halls at Dhaka University, thus causing excessive casualties.

The Commission mentioned ‘indiscriminate killing’ by the Pakistan army in Bangladesh. It specifically mentioned the Cumilla Cantonment [in the eastern part of Bangladesh] massacre on 27–28th of March, 1971 under the orders of CO 53 Field Regiment, Lt. Gen. Yakub Malik: ‘17 Bengali Officers and 915 men were just slain by a flick of one [Pakistan army] Officer’s fingers […]’ Other cantonments also witnessed similar massacres.

Incidents of indiscriminate arson, destruction of houses, shops, rape, and looting aren’t referred to here, as that’s another long tale of barbarity. The dastardly acts are so ugly and despicable that no one today admits any sort of involvement with them.

Kissinger

WHENEVER this genocide is referred to, the names that come to mind are those of Nixon and Kissinger, along with the Pakistani state or leadership. In an article written after the death of Kissinger, Arnold R Isaacs wrote in Salon:

‘The cataract of news and pontification about Henry Kissinger’s death reminds me of an email I sent out nine years ago with some notes on a book that chillingly documented — mostly from Kissinger’s own words — a piece of his record that should be getting a lot more attention. What follows is an edited and updated version of that 2014 email.

‘The book was The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J Bass, a former reporter turned Princeton professor. Its subject is Richard Nixon and Kissinger’s pro-Pakistan ‘tilt’ in the 1971 India-Pakistan war and their astonishing indifference to the slaughter of Bengali civilians in what was then called East Pakistan (and is now Bangladesh) carried out by troops sent by their great friend Yahya Khan, then Pakistan’s president and commander in chief of its army.

‘Bass documents his story largely from Nixon’s and Kissinger’s own words, as captured on the White House tapes that became notorious in the Watergate investigation. The telegram in his title, sent to the State Department by Archer Blood, the US consul general in Dhaka (then called Dacca), East Pakistan’s capital city, and signed by nearly all the rest of the consulate staff, documented the atrocities and objected — vainly — to the Nixon-Kissinger policy.

‘Bass is religious about not reading minds, not guessing at or speculating about Nixon’s or Kissinger’s consciousness or motivations, not going beyond the record of their words. He characterises what they said and did, not their character. But reading their words leaves little doubt that those two between them had about as much moral consciousness as a cockroach. They didn’t care about crimes against humanity or about human suffering on any scale. A revealing example is a Nixon quote from the White House tapes: talking to Kissinger in the Oval Office in May 1971, Bass writes:

‘Nixon bitterly said, ‘The Indians need — what they need really is a —’ Kissinger interjected, ‘They’re such bastards.’ Nixon finished his thought: ‘A mass famine.’

‘An astonishing comment. They might not have liked Indira Gandhi or Indian national policy, but what kind of person would wish mass starvation on the poorest and most powerless of India’s people?

‘In Kissinger’s case, it’s particularly hard to imagine how a man who started out as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis could be as conscienceless as he was about the slaughter in East Pakistan. But the evidence in Bass’ book of his moral blindness is absolutely convincing. The same goes for Nixon. Before reading it I would have bet quite a lot of money that my opinion of either of those two men — whose policies shaped the events and the enormous human suffering I personally witnessed on the ground in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the last three years of the Vietnam War — could not possibly get lower than it already was. But it did.

‘‘The Blood Telegram’ doesn’t just reveal Nixon’s and Kissinger’s moral thuggishness. It also explodes the tale that they and their supporters have pushed for all these years […]

‘In page after page of the discussions on Bangladesh reproduced in ‘The Blood Telegram’, there is not the slightest hint that Nixon and Kissinger were pragmatically weighing national interests and capabilities against human concerns. Instead, over and over, their words make unmistakably clear that the human consequences of their policies weren’t part of the equation at all. And it’s just as unmistakable that there was no pragmatic argument for those policies anyway. Nothing Nixon and Kissinger did was going to prevent East Pakistan from declaring independence, and that was obvious at the time. [….]

‘[H]e [Kissinger] and Nixon based their Pakistan ‘tilt’ in part on an expectation that the Chinese would be willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union in order to protect Pakistan from India (perceived as a Soviet ally at the time). [….]

‘[….] In fact, Nixon and Kissinger explicitly hoped the Chinese would threaten intervention to deter an Indian war against Pakistan. As that war began in early December of 1971:

Kissinger told the president that ‘we could give a note to the Chinese and say, ‘If you are ever going to move this is the time.’ Nixon immediately agreed. … The president argued that ‘we can’t do this without the Chinese helping us. As I look at this thing, the Chinese have got to move to that damn border. The Indians have got to get a little scared.’

‘The law-breaking — with the full awareness of UN ambassador (and future president) George H W Bush, deputy national security adviser (and future secretary of state) Alexander Haig, White House chief of staff H R Haldeman and others — involved getting Iran (then a US ally) and Jordan to give Pakistan US-supplied weapons from their arsenals, including aircraft, which was explicitly prohibited by US law. The tapes show conclusively that Nixon and Kissinger knew such a transfer would be illegal — and both the State Department and the Defense Department told them that, in categorical terms. But they did it anyway and spoke about it bluntly, with no apparent qualms about breaking the law.

‘When speaking with Nixon before a press conference, Kissinger said, ‘This military aid to Iran that Iran might be giving to West Pakistan. The only way we can really do it — it’s not legal, strictly speaking.’ Nixon and Kissinger recognised the need to conceal what they were doing: ‘We’ll have to say we didn’t know about it’, Kissinger said, adding that they could give Iran extra aid the following year in return for Iranian cooperation. On another occasion, Nixon bluntly told Haldeman: ‘We’re trying to do something where it’s a violation of law and all that.’

‘After State Department officials raised the legal issue in one situation room meeting, Kissinger said scornfully: ‘We shouldn’t decide this on such doctrinaire grounds.’ An interesting viewpoint, and one we have also heard from officials of a more recent administration: Obeying the law is doctrinaire?

‘Kissinger consistently reinforced Nixon’s impulse to ignore the law, but also took precautions to cover his own backside by getting Haig to compile memoranda showing that Nixon knew about and approved the illegal transfers.’ [‘Henry Kissinger and the genocide in Bangladesh: low point in a career of evil’, December 10, 2023]

Standing by the generals

ISHAAN Tharoor writes in the Washington Post: ‘Kissinger is remembered keenly in South Asia for the part he and Nixon played during the bloody period that led to the emergence of the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971.

‘[….] After 1970 elections yielded a democratic victory for Bengali nationalists, a crisis ensued that culminated in a vicious crackdown by the Pakistani military on East Pakistanis — a campaign that turned into a mass slaughter of minority Hindus, students, dissidents and anyone else in the crosshairs of the army and collaborator-led death squads.

‘Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times’s South Asia correspondent at the time, described the month-long Pakistani crackdown in March 1971 as ‘a pogrom on a vast scale’ in a land where ‘vultures grow fat.’ Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. Whole villages were razed, and cities depopulated. An exodus of some 10 million refugees fled to India. When all was said and done, hundreds of thousands — and by some estimates, as many as 3 million — were killed, their bodies left to rot in the rice paddies or flushed into the ocean down the region’s many waterways.

‘[….] The White House, though, stood on the side of Pakistan’s generals […] Kissinger […] did not care about the national aspirations of the Bengalis of East Pakistan. Crucially, as outlined in Gary Bass’s excellent book, ‘The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,’ he also ignored messages and dissent cables from US diplomats in the field, warning him that a genocide was taking place with their complicity.

‘Neither Nixon nor Kissinger exercised any of their considerable leverage to restrain Pakistan’s generals. Instead, they covertly rushed arms to the Pakistanis — in violation of a congressional arms embargo — as India and its Bangladeshi separatist allies gained the upper hand. ‘Throughout it all, from the outbreak of civil war to the Bengali massacres to Pakistan’s crushing defeat by the Indian military, Nixon and Kissinger, unfazed by detailed knowledge of the massacres, stood stoutly behind Pakistan’, wrote Bass in his book. [….]

‘‘Rather than reckoning with the human consequences of his deeds, let alone apologizing for breaking the law, Kissinger assiduously tried to cover up his record in the South Asia crisis’, Bass wrote in the Atlantic after Kissinger’s death. ‘As late as 2022, in his book Leadership, he was still trying to promote a sanitised view, in which he tactfully termed former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi ‘an irritant’— even though during her tenure he repeatedly called her ‘a bitch’, as well as calling the Indians ‘bastards’ and ‘sons of bitches’.’

‘Not surprisingly, news of Kissinger’s passing was treated dyspeptically in Dhaka. In remarks Thursday, Bangladeshi foreign minister A K Abdul Momen said Kissinger was ‘dead against the people of the then-East Pakistan’, chose to violate US laws in the support of Pakistan’s military, and failed to offer an apology to the Bangladeshi nation for the atrocities that took place on his watch. [‘The Bengali blood on Henry Kissinger’s hands’, Washington Post, December 1, 2023]

Keraniganj

REPORTS of mass murder and genocide visit one’s memory while one comes across the news of Kissinger’s death.

One such killing was near Dhaka city. On March 26, 1971, thousands of Dhaka residents took shelter in Keraniganj, on the other side of the Buriganga that flows through Dhaka city. This exodus of citizens from Dhaka city continued for days. The citizens assumed that the other side of the river was safe. But, on April 2, 1971, the Pakistani army cordoned Keraniganj and made an all-out assault in the villages of Keraniganj. Mainly three unions [the lowest tier of local government] — Jinjira, Shoobhadya, and Kalindi —were attacked. Along with acts of indiscriminate arson and dishonor, the mass killing went on. All the homes of the villagers were assaulted — set on fire, dwellers were brush-fired. After the killers left, reports began trickling — innumerable deaths, hundreds of dead bodies scattered around bushes, groves, irrigation channels, and ponds. Two such incidents occurred: [1] 60 dead bodies were lying near a pond by a road in Mandail, and [2] 11 women were killed in a home in Kalindi. [Dainik Bangla, April 3, 1972]

Against imperialism

THIS genocide is an integral part of the Bangladeshi people’s struggle for liberation.

In this war for liberation by the Bangladesh people, imperialism stood against the people, and the people’s war stood against imperialism. Imperialism’s interest, which is usually expressed as imperialism’s ‘geopolitics’ or ‘countering the Soviet Union.’ But imperialism’s geopolitics and moves to counter the Soviet Union aren’t isolated from imperialist interests. Rather, imperialist interest drives imperialist geopolitics. However, a number of questions related to this struggle against imperialism need to be answered. It should be mentioned, at least briefly, that the Soviet Union [today’s reorganised Russia] and the countries identified as Socialist Block should be supported materially and diplomatically by Bangladesh. At one stage, the Soviet Union stepped in with its military might to thwart an imperialist military move — the positioning of an aircraft carrier from the US Seventh Fleet near Bangladesh, which was going to emerge as an independent country. The imperialist move was to obstruct the emergence of Bangladesh.

Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.