Interesting review of a book in the 1971 war suggesting some of the atrocities were exaggerated.
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
by Sarmila Bose
Columbia University Press 2011
http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta2/tft/article.php?issue=20110902&page=20
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There are plenty of places one can visit on the web that will bring shame to a Pakistani, such as the Human Rights Watch website's section on Pakistan and the front page of the New York Times, where our ISI is called out as a terrorist collaborator every other day. Most of the time, I cannot help but be humbled by these accusations, and I often argue with my Pakistani friends who see a conspiracy against Pakistan by the world media.
Among these ignominious pages on Pakistan is a Wikipedia page on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which stated that the Pakistan army committed "genocide" from March to December 1971, killing three million Bengalis and raping 200,000 women. There is an entire section devoted to "atrocities." The story on Wikipedia is not completely one-sided, however. There is mention in more than one place that facts are disputed about the atrocities. For example, the Hamood ur Rahman Commission Report is mentioned, which claims only 26,000 people were killed. There is also mention of the fact that the killings were not all perpetrated by the Pakistani Army, but that the Bengalis also killed non-Bengalis such as the Beharis. But these minor dissenting voices are completely drowned out by the dominant narrative of atrocities that Wikipedia represents.
Sarmila Bose, in her new book Dead Reckoning, Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War has decided to take on this narrative and public perception of the events of 1971. A Harvard graduate and research fellow at Oxford, her interest in the story emanates from being in Calcutta when millions of refugees were coming in from across the border and her father, a doctor, set-up a field hospital near the border. Her main investigative technique is interviewing the witnesses of the alleged atrocities, civilian and military, from Pakistan as well as from Bangladesh.
Her thesis is this: It is the victors who write history. And in this case, the victorious Bangladeshis created a victimhood narrative regarding the birth of their country that far outstripped the reality and what can today be proven by evidence. Bose systematically reviews the evidence behind the major 'atrocities' that have long been attributed to the Pakistani army, and in each case the evidence indicates the story has been highly exaggerated - and sometimes even fabricated. She also sets the record straight by highlighting what have been mostly forgotten atrocities of the Bangladeshis themselves and the exaggerated role that is attributed to the Bengali freedom fighters in the liberation of their country.
The Wikipedia pages states that the Pakistan army committed "genocide", killing three million Bengalis and raping 200,000 women. But the Hamood ur Rahman Commission Report claims only 26,000 people were killed
Although Bose goes into the details of several alleged atrocities, I would like to touch upon go the most well-known of these: the alleged killing of intellectuals in Dhaka by the Pakistani Army. Bose questions: who may have actually killed them, based on the timing of the attacks? She asks why the Pakistan Army would decide to kill them in the middle of the war (most of these killings took place around 15 December 1971), when Pakistan could ill afford to divert its attention as it was losing the war with India. Why not kill them earlier? The fact that the killings were perpetrated by masked Bengalis (the dominant narrative suggests that these are the Al-Badr who were Bengali but sided with Pakistan) and that they continued well after the Pakistan Army had been defeated and Mujib was in control, suggests that these may have been revenge killings conducted by Bengali nationalists against intellectuals that had not supported secession from Pakistan. Bose points out that not everyone in East Pakistan was in favor of succession; even Mujib himself was looking for greater autonomy, not secession, till March of that year.
At Dhaka University, the author reminds us that the students had been putting on parades and training to fight the army long before the army operations began in March. Proud pictures of these students training are in the war museum in Dhaka. Additionally, from the interviews conducted it is clear that most of the students not interested in fighting had already left for their respective homes, after sensing the trouble. Large numbers of trained freedom fighters had come into the hostel instead. Therefore, most of the people that the army encountered at the university were not students, and those that were students, had been armed and trained to fight. In other words, these were not helpless students as the international media at the time or the current narrative would have us believe. The extent of the killings at the university is also exaggerated according to Bose. The Wikipedia page puts the number killed at "600 to 700" and provides no supporting evidence or citation. Bose questions such numbers and provides counter evidence. The university's own memorial for all those that died that entire year puts the number at 149. This corroborates her point that a lot of those at the university at the time were not really students, as more than 149 likely died that day. Then she provides transcripts of the wireless conversation between the army personnel on the ground at the university and those stationed at Dhaka GHQ. This reveals a soldier at the university claiming that 300 rebels had been killed. Bose thinks this may be an overestimate as the soldier may be bragging about his "accomplishment." The eyewitnesses that Bose interviews, from the professor who shot the only video footage of some of the killings to the sweeper and other staff that were used by the army to pile up the bodies in the field, leads her to conclude that the figure is probably lower than 300. The lowest estimate of 44 dead comes from Brigadier Taj, the commanding officer at the scene, interviewed by Bose for her book.
But I found the most damning question, one that goes to the heart of Bose's thesis, to be: Why has the mass grave outside Jugganath Hall, where there is a memorial, never been exhumed?
Why has the mass grave outside Jugganath Hall never been exhumed?
"The failure to carry out a scientific exhumation at such a specific site, in the capital city, of such a well-publicized incident has damaged Bangladesh's claims of massacre and mass burials at the University. It is possible that a dig would reveal fewer bodies than the numbers claimed by the Bangladeshis. It is also possible that the identification might reveal that some of the dead were not students of the university. That would dent parts of the nationalist mythology, but be truer to history."
Towards the end of her book, Bose challenges the single most important piece of historical "fact" of the entire Bangladesh Liberation War. It is the number splashed across Wikipedia: "three million killed." But with it begins and ends the discussion of what happened in Bangladesh in 1971. The number simultaneously decides the extent of the victimhood of the Bangladeshis- and hence the justification for the creation of Bangladesh- and the weight of shame on millions of Pakistani shoulders.
She traces the figure's origins in the media- newspapers attribute it to Mujib on his return to Dhaka from prison- and discusses the main academic sources that use the figure as well. But none of them provided any factual basis for the claim. "The claim of three million dead or variations thereof was repeated by the South Asian and Western academia and media for decades without verification." The Bangladeshis, she goes on to say, claim 'killing fields' and 'mass graves' everywhere, "but none was forensically exhumed and examined in a transparent manner, not even the one in Dhaka University," she says, concurring with William Drummond, who wrote a report called "The Missing Millions" in June 1972 for The Guardian newspaper. Drummond, along with suggesting that an investigation was needed to verify the claims of mass graves and killing fields, also made the prescient statement: "The figure of three million dead, which the Sheikh has repeated several times since he returned to Bangladesh in early January, has been carried uncritically in sections of the world press. Through repetition such a claim gains a validity of its own and gradually evolves from assertions to fact needing no attribution." The academic work of Simon and Rose (1990) on the creation of Bangladesh and perhaps the only work of its kind "generated by impartial and highly respected scholars" also dismisses the three million figure and lampoons the gullibility and lack of verification of the foreign press, Bose notes. She concludes that the three million figure is nothing more than a "gigantic rumor."
While doing the research for this article, I encountered what I believe is another assertion with no supporting evidence that has become fact due to repetition. I present it here as an example of how history is still indeed being written by the victors. When the uprising began, General Yahya Khan is quoted (and highlighted) on the Wikipedia page of the Bangladesh Liberation War as saying: "Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands." I suspected this quote not to be true because it does not fit Yahya's character as I have understood it through the events that took place. Look at all Yahya did prior to the uprising. First, he decided to hand over power to the civilians by holding the country's first free and fair elections. Then he chased after Mujib (whom he publically called the next Prime Minister of Pakistan) and Bhutto for months to try to get them to form the government. Then, once the uprising started, he told his men to show restraint and remain in their barracks over the month of March before Operation Searchlight began, even as Mujib's direct rule resulted in anarchy and the army's food and ammunition supplies were disrupted. Does this sound like a premeditative murderer of vast proportions of his own people?
Strangely enough, the three million figure also conveniently coincides with exactly how many Bangladeshis are alleged to have been killed later. Hitting a target of three million would imply a level of competence that I doubt the military possessed. This is the same army that lost the war in 1971 in the record-breaking time of two weeks.
Suspicious for all these reasons, I tracked down the citation for Yahya's quote. It leads to a book by Robert Payne called Massacre (1972). In the introduction, Payne essentially acknowledges that his entire account is biased. He says, "This account is based largely on interviews with many of the people who helped bring the new nation to birth. I visited India and Bangladesh in March and April of 1972..." He did not visit Pakistan nor claims to have interviewed any one from there in the course of the two months of interviews that are the backbone of his book. Reading the book removes any doubt as to Payne's bias. It reads more as a comic book prone to hyperbole (Payne is a novelist and not a historian) than a history book.
According to Payne, Yahya is purported to have said the quote at a military conference in February of '71. Obviously it was not something Yahya would have said publically, so it must have come from someone who had reported this to Payne who had attended the conference. This must have been someone within the Bangladeshi Army as Payne admits to not having interviewed in Pakistan. But other than knowing that the quote possibly came from a biased source, we cannot say much else. The entire book is without a single footnote or reference other than a sparse one-page bibliography. Without evidence to uphold his assertion one must dismiss Payne's quote.
Payne's common-sense-defying quote about Yahya has been used in over 3000 entries on the web. Fiction has fed on itself and become fact, much like the three million figure.
Bose's book will hopefully go some way towards exposing fictions masquerading as facts. Until then, Pakistanis, for once, may actually be justified in thinking their name is being dragged through the mud needlessly. But contrary to the usual suspicions, in this case the slander is not the fault of the Western media, but of another state, which was once a part of Pakistan.
Taimur Ali Ahmed is a writer and photographer based in the US. http://www.taimurahmed.com
