History of Betrayal

By Ajab Ali

"ek shagor rokter binimoye,

banglar swadhinotaa aanlo jaaraa,       

aamraa tomaader bhulbo naa....."

No more than the whisks of humming birds wing in the long history of mankind can a few nine months be expected to produce much change. Yet, a horrifying nine months did transform our time – transformed it violently. At that time in 1971, the country was in arresting beauty- a green carpet of knee-high paddy, dotted with small glassy pools and elevated clusters of tiny cottages. Spreading all the way to the horizon. On both the sides of village roads were dazzling patches of red as the flame of the forest came to full bloom. Mango and jackfruit trees were heavy with buds. The nature was at its best being adorned with spring. Only the fate of man was grotesquely distorted in the land of Bangladesh whose meadows and fields, plains and marshes were suddenly turned into a mass-graves, whose flower-perfumed breeze carried the profound sigh of the raped Madonnas and Virgins and the piercing cry of the unfortunate persons who have been shot at; the genocide spread its wing upon the fate of Bangladeshis like a blood-greedy vulture. Within the envelope of the night of 25^th March, 1971, the faces of conspiracy, betrayal, brutality and genocide was concealed. With the sounds of automatic weapons the curtain was removed to show the face of devilish death that gave a clean verdict: East Pakistan is now dead and buried under a mountain of corpses. 

History has not witnessed since the creation of mankind a greater brutality committed by a people in cool brain against another citizen under the pretext of so-called “ National Integrity and Solidarity”.

On the black night of 25^th March, 1971, Pak Army unleashed its hideous onslaught. It was a deliberate, unwarranted and treacherous attack on the armless Bengali people. The barbarous Army went into action and at the early stage in Dhaka, the brute Hordes attacked police barracks, East Pakistan Rifles camps and the student campuses. The whole city was shivering with thunderous uproar of machine-guns, cannons and tanks. People began to flee in fear of their lives leaving everything behind.

The Para-military forces of Pak Army: Al-Badr, Al-Shams, and their collaborators (Razakars) picked up innocent people from roads, trains, launches, offices and in many cases from their residence, tortured inhumanly in different concentration camps, killed and threw them in the rivers or lakes by tying their hands behind. Many a time persons killed were all put into huge graves in the same ground. The greedy Razakars and Pak Army carried a systematic campaign of arson. Thousands and thousands of women lost their chastity to their beastly frenzy atrocities. People could not breathe freely, weep at the loss of the dear ones and talk freely.  No word is sufficient to express the woe and harassment of the people. Innocent people were killed for the false plea of the Mukti Bahini.

In the name of Integrity, the Razakars and Pak Army killed children before the very eyes of their mothers, shot to death the husbands in front of their wives, bayoneted the babies in the lap of their mothers, brutally raped the daughters before their parents. There are families that do not have a single soul alive today to narrate the miserable deaths of the members of their families. The whole country turned into a hell. To cripple the intellects of Bangladesh, the heinous fanatics - Al-Badr, Al Shams systematically murdered a number of Bangladeshi Intellectuals who were the luminaries of the country.

The unprecedented blood bath, the indomitable will that worked behind the struggle for liberation; the sacrifices, torments, agonies and patient sufferings of the people; their faith and conviction, their heroism and courage finally led Bangladeshis to victory and glory in 16^th December, 1971.

The rivers of Bangladesh murmured by, but its murmuring still re-echoes with groans and sobs, shrieks and cries of hapless innocent people, who fell victims to Razakars, Al-Badr, Al-Shams and Pak Army’s gruesome pogrom of Bangladeshis on the banks. The rape, the arson, the torture, the killing- an universal cry rendered the air to bring the devil criminals to trial for crime against humanity but that never materialized.