The Worst Genocide

The Worst Genocide (Part-1)

By Shafiq Ahmad

In response to

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/5751

Dear Lopa Tasneem:

I usually try to avoid writing about the severity of the genocide in Bangladesh, owing to two main reasons.

First, it causes me a profound pain to recount the horror stories that I have read over a long period of time sifting through countless pages of material on the matter of genocide in general and the Bangladesh genocide in particular.

My childhood and adolescence years were extraordinarily happy ones; a consumate reader of poetry and listener of magical Bengali lyrical music specially of Rabindranath Thakur, the world was nothing short of paradise to me. I was full of love and admiration of man. But later in life, when I had the misfortune of undertaking some research in our liberation war, I came face to face with the reality that man is the most vicious and the most sadistic animal in the known universe. The atrocity that ordinary humans can commit to fellow humans is unimaginable to say the least. I have spent countless hours in dark stacks of dust-covered books, newspapers, periodicals and other material in many different libraries in different countries. My psyche has been profoundly injured by this experience and now I try to know more. Quite frankly, I instantly deleted without viewing Fatemolla's slideshow after being forewarned what it contained.

The other main reason I try to avoid revisiting the Bangladesh genocide is the unbearble truth that we have been so ungrateful to our martyrs. A large section of our populace actively supports the rehabilitated Razakars, al Badars, al Shams and the like, while others doubt the severity and magnitude of the genocide, notwithstanding the undeniable evidence of countless gruesome pictures and even more victim and eye witness accounts. From my little readings, I know that perpetrators of genocides and their collaborators have eluded the hand of law in many different countries. But I am yet to come across a nation that has elected in national government and actively supported the comparables of the "Commander-in-Chief" of the Al Badar, the "special purpose" militia formed exclusively from the student wing of Jamate Islami, that was directly responsible for the kidnapping and brutal maiming and murdering of the most illustrious sons of the land. As Jibananda Dash so aptly and prophetically lamented "a strange darkness has come to this world today," we have lost the light of turth in our eyes and in our hearts and I do not know what we want from this darkness.

Fatemolla was not only eloquent but also dead right when he said "Comparing genocieds is not a good attitude, except for impersonal academic purpose. Each innocent victim is an individual ocean of pain, independent of headcounts. And that includes Jenin, our killed innocents in 1971, Jews boys/girls in a party, the farmer of Kosovo, the destroyed Muslims in Gujrat, the burnt Hindu women/kids of Sabormoti train and million other mass graves around the world.

The moment we say one is the worst, we insult the other victims. We have no scale to weigh the tears and blood, we should not have one.

If all the water of all the oceans become ink, and all the trees become pens, you will not be able to complete the painful story of even a single of those million broken hearts of human history."

This world is an enormous graveyard, if we only have the intention and the while to learn about it. Yet, in our endless debates and discussions, in our perception of the world and its turbulent affairs, we take this side or that. We are the pathetic captives of our silly and empty egos and the little cages of our own ideologies, beliefs or prejudices, to the exclusion of a universal commiseration with the helpless victims who have fallen.

Still, there is this nagging desire, with a pessimistic heart certain of it falling to deaf ears, to make an incremental attempt to open the firmly shut eye of the disbeliever, the disrespecter, the defiler. So, for a moment, I will give way once again to the weakness of recounting a little of the curse that had befallen us, to reproduce this or that vignette of the gruesome pogrom.

The doubters and the disblievers may doubt me, a Bengali only a small child in 1971, but would they doubt an official representative of the United States Government of 1971, which opposed tooth and nail our fight for deliverance?

You all know about the report of the 10-man World Bank Mission headed by Mr. Peter Cargill during its fact-finding tour of the then East Pakistan that was submiited to the Board of Governors of the Bank on July 12, 1971. The Pakistan government, which had earlier banished all foriegn journalists from the country after confiscating their notes and films, had allowed the team to tour East Bangal in hopes that it would bolster the government's claim that the "situation in the Eastern province was normal". The team however, upon completion of its tour, could not help but speak the truth. The importance of the report lay in the fact that this was, in the words of a contemporary impartial and authoritative publication, "the first completely objective finding submitted by a team of experts who made extensive on-the-spot inquires in 12 administrative distrcits of East Bengal."

Scenes reminiscent of the devastated German cities during World War II, the morning after the nuclear explosion in Japan and the infamous My Lai massacres in Viet-Nam were recalled in the 11,000-word comprehensive field-study report, which stated that "fear and lack of confidence were all-pervading in East Bengal, particularly among the lower grades of civil servants and wrokers" and that "there are no signs that the situation will improve significantly or rapidly."

One field report stated that "scores of totally destroyed villages were visible from the air as the team was approaching Jessore. The damage to housing in Jessore district was so severe that the [Pakistani] authorities themselves estimated that 450,000 people out of a total population of 2,500,000 might have been 'affected'. Half a million had fled to India. In Jessore town itself, some 20,000 people had been killed."

In Greater Khulna, the population had been reduced from 4,000,000 to 1,500,000 and the destruction of buildings "was reminiscent of Arnheim, in the Netherlands, in 1944."

"The City of Mangla had been virtually obliterated by naval shelling and the population was down from 22,000 to 1,000."

"Fifty percent of the Phultala Thana's population had fled... It was at the Thana level that the shock waves of the army action had hit the hardest...In Kushtia, the army action was so thorough that 90 per cent of the houses, shops, banks, and other buildings were totally destroyed. The city looked like a World War II German town having undergone strategic bombing attacks. It was like the morning after a nuclear attack"

"Kushtia is the My Lai of the West Pakistan army...Thousands of farmers have fled. Everything was abnormal there and it was a shattering experience."

According to the formal report, there were areas in ALL cities visited by the World Bank team that had been razed and in ALL districts visited, there were villages which had "simply ceased to exist."

Recall that this was the situation within the first three months of the comprehensive pogrom; that there were 22 administrative districts in the then East Pakistan at that time, of which 12 were visited by the team, ALL of which were subjected to this merciless, completely one-sided military onslaught; that the sparsely and anachronistically armed, briefly and unprofessionally trained, poorly and unreliably supplied irregular force of the Mukti-Bahini was barely organized by then and India still had not seriously considered providing political support to the idea of an independent Bangladesh and military support to the Bangladesh forces by that time; and that the only logical target of the army onsalught was the poor, innocent, unarmed civilans of the countryside--the "lower grades of civil servants and wrokers" of the report who still had not fled to India unlike their metropolitan counterparts.

One of the most well-armed and vicious defence forces of the cold war era--of America's keeper in the then strategically important South Asia--with its infantry, air force and navy in full fury against unarmed civilians of a plain country without practically any natural barrier. The outcome--which has only begun to be chronicled in a systemtic manner by genocide scholars--can be easily deduced. You can compare, notwithstanding Fatemolla's misgivings, this with the situation in most other genocides in recent history. In very few other places, if at all, has an unopposed REGULAR army gotten such a free reign, has shot and raped and pilaged so indiscriminately, has been so swift and so comprehensive in murdering civilians.

There are reasons why leading genocide scholars rank the Bangladesh genocide among the top ten or so "mega-murders" of the twentieth century; as the swiftest of genocides; as "THE SINGLE WORST instance of rape inflicted on a civilian population," surpassing even the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese forces , which is often considered worse than the rape of the Jewish women by the Nazi thugs during the second world war. In terms of the sheer number raped, the Rape of Bangladesh accounts for four to five times the number of victims in the great Rape of Nanking.

May be comparison is unwarranted; and Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron are ongoing, heart-rendering spectacles while Dacca, Khulna, Rajshahi, Chittagong, Jessore, Comilla, Pabna, Kushtia, Bogra, Dinajpur, Rongpur, Noakhali, Potuakhali, Sylhet, Barisal, Pabna, Mymensingh, Tangail and so on of 1971 have receded into the vagueness of an unwilling memory prejudiced by silly religious bigotry and petty political quarrels.

Yet, there were one thousand Jenins in Bangladesh every month in 1971. There were one hundred Arnheims, one score Normandy, one hundred My Lais, one hundred Sabra and Shatila, one score Srebrenica every month in Bangladesh of 1971.

One million--the statistically-extrapolated conservative estimate of dead in the Bangladesh genocide--exceeds the combined number of civilian casulaties of some of the worst-affected European countries in the entire of the second world war (Great Britain lost a total 61,000 civilians, France lost 108,000, Belgium 101,000, and the Netherlands 242,000). To put it in a more historical perspective, the Pakistani mass murderers killed more people in just 9 months than the Romans in Carthage (150,000 slaughtered), the Christian armies during the Spanish Inquisition and the infamous Timur Lenk who murdered 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398. The number of dead is at least five times the combined death toll of the two atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the end of 1945 (estimated at 140,000 and 70,000, respectively).

Read Part-2 of the article