Bangladesh
Operation Searchlight The 1971 Genocide of Bengalis- An obliterated truth
Bangladesh has been campaigning for getting recognition of March 25 as the International Genocide Day by all the countries in the world. The conflict in erstwhile East Pakistan, during 1970-71, was one of the bloodiest and most contested in the post-WWII era.In the 9-month-long war of liberation against Pakistan about three million innocent people were killed and more than 200,000 women were violated.
On the night of March 25, 1971 the Pakistani military conducted its so-called Operation Searchlight, aimed at wiping out an entire generation of Bengalis. Intellectuals, activists, artists, journalists, politicians or common people going about their daily lives, nobody was spared by the Pakistan Army. Such was the degree of impunity with which Operation Searchlight was carried out that an officer participating in the operations infamously boasted, “We can kill anyone for anything. We are responsible to none.”
The genocide was targeted at civilians in predominantly Hindu neighbourhoods in and around the capital Dhaka and on army barracks who were loyal to Bangabandhu and other Bengali political leaders.
During the nine month war, three million Bengali civilians were killed, more than 200,000 women were violated, 10 million people took refuge in India and 30-40 million people were internally displaced. A small minority of ideologically motivated local Bengali collaborators and auxiliary forces of Pakistan participated and abetted in committing these atrocities.
Although the victims of the genocide included innocent civilians from all over the country, the pattern of killings during the “Operation Searchlight” and the entire war time show clear intention to destroy certain selected sections of the society, such as, students, teachers/intellectuals, Hindus and Bengali political leaders.
Besides, the racial hatred against the Bengalis in the mindset of the Pakistani political and military leaders are evident in various accounts and historical documents, contributing to the brutalities against the people of Bengali origin. The genocidal intent of Pakistan military can be proved surely by two instances – the killings during the 25 March Operation Searchlight and the killing of intellectuals on 14 December 1971 when the last phase of that genocide was conducted.
On 14 December 1971 during Operation Scorched Earth the targeted abduction and killing of about 1,000 unarmed academics and professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers in and around Dhaka was executed.
The British magazine, The Spectator, in its issue of June 19, 1971, described these killings as ‘Another Final Solution.’ The May 22, 1971 editorial of the US publication Saturday Review, was titled ‘Genocide in East Pakistan.’
‘Testimony of Sixty,’ published by the eminent international personalities, including Mother Teresa and US Senator Edward Kennedy, had accounts of atrocities.
While the Sheikh Hasina government, in 2017, declared March 25 as the National Genocide Day, the United Nations has not yet recognised it as a genocide. Today civil society has also raised its voice and different civil society organisations are raising the issue in different international forums to push forth the demand of 1971 genocide recognition.
At a international Seminar on ‘Remember and Recognize: The Case of Bangladesh Genocide of 1971’ held at the Human Rights Museum, Winnipeg in Canada Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen said that "the Genocide of Bangladesh committed in 1971 by the Pakistani military is one of the most heinous crimes in human history ... we do not know of another instance of such barbarism of such intensity and mayhem."
Pakistan has always denied both the intent and the scale of killings. There is a concerted effort by Pakistan to undermine the nationalism of Bangladeshi people as a cause for separation of erstwhile East Pakistan and justifies the killings of non-Bengalis before the 1971 war as part of military action.
Pakistan has resorted to selective forgetting of what happened in 1971. The defeat left a lasting imprint on Pakistan’s psyche. The loss of East Pakistan created a “never again” mentality in the country. Perceived as a humiliating defeat, the war is brushed over in textbooks and there is little acknowledgement of the military oppression and the resulting atrocities in East Pakistan.
Successive Pakistani establishments have been unwilling to back Bangladesh’s efforts at delivering justice to the victims of Pakistan’s crimes. In 2015 Pakistan criticised the execution of two convicted war criminals – Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojahid.
The United States and China tried to suppress the reports of genocide and bloodbath in the then East Pakistan during Bangladesh's nine-month-long war of liberation. According to Donald W. Beachler, professor of political science at Ithaca College, "The government of Pakistan explicitly denied that there was genocide. By their refusal to characterise the mass killings as genocide or to condemn and restrain the Pakistani government, the US and Chinese governments implied that they did not consider it so."
China's professed aim to end exploitation all over the world while extending assistance to West Pakistani exploiters expectedly provoked both academics and activists. The fact is that China’s centralised, party state has suppressed freedom of expression, which has adversely affected the growth of independent research thinking, a trend that has resulted in rather narrow and conformist social science research. Hence the denial of genocide and aknowledgement of attricities commited by its Pakistani partner.
The counter narrative given by Pakistan is that the number of those killed, raped, persecuted are exaggerated. But the fact remains that it may never be possible to determine the exact number of the loss and the scale of the Bangladesh Genocide, as scores of mass graves remain unaccounted for across the countries, and it had never been possible to discover and identify the bodies of many of the abducted. Many survivors of rape were also not able to officially come forward because of social stigma. So an approximation based on reports by witness and victim accounts, narrated to the representatives of the international media, humanitarian agencies, jurist associations and human rights organisations – has never been proved.
Sustained Pakistani narrative has ensured that the struggle of East Pakistanis to form their own country has been reduced to a civic-political demand and not an ethnic-based claim to distinct nationalism. The reality is that the genocidal violence unleashed in former East Pakistan amounted to the systematic wiping out of the ethnic distinctiveness of its people through ideological, economic, political and military means.
The basic problem in denying that the massacre of East Pakistanis was not genocide is that it does not consider the ideological and political background of the conflict; instead, it focuses on the secessionist movement alone. For the majority of the population of Bangladesh, the healing from the wounds of war would never be complete, without the recognition of the crime against humanity.
Quite apart from the fact that the alien/foreign perpetrators have not been brought to justice but rather the denial is amplified, the recognition of the act of Genocide, by them and by the international community, will strengthen peace and stability within BangladeshFor this reason, the analysis of the killing of Bengalis in noncombat situations as political killings of secessionists or suspected to be secessionists deprives them of the application of the UN definition on genocide.
The recognition of the massacre in former East Pakistan during its Liberation Struggle as genocide is not only ethically demanded, but this recognition also demands a qualitative widening of the existing legal understanding of genocide.
