Testimonies collected on the ground by the European Bangladesh Forum confirm scholarly studies, calling on the international community, and by extension the UN, to recognize an overlooked truth.
by Marco Respinti
Article 1 of 4.
On March 26, 1971, the Pakistani armed forces unleashed “Operation Searchlight” to repress in blood the national aspiration of the people of what at that time was East Pakistan. “Mukti Bahini,” the freedom fighters, responded. The conflict became the Liberation War that ended on December 16 with the birth of a new country, Bangladesh. Those months of war were also the months of a genocide, perpetrated by the Pakistani armed forces against the Bangladeshis.
“The facts of the Bangladesh genocide are known to the people of Bangladesh and scientists around the globe. The truth about what happened in Bangladesh however remains relatively unknown to the general public.” These words explain why an investigative delegation, led by Dutch politician and human rights activist Henricus “Harry” van Bommel, conducted a fact-finding mission in that country in May 20‒26, 2023, resulting in the report “Eyewitness: Witnesses and Survivors of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh Speak,” published by the European Bangladesh Forum (EBF). The previous quotation comes from its preface. Those who are interested in a PDF copy of the report may write to van Bommel.
First-hand accounts
“Eyewitness” has a peculiar merit. It collects direct accounts of the facts from people that went through it. The first-hand nature of those testimonies effectively dramatizes the tone of the report, transmitting the pulse and the sense of the tragedy to the reader, as if in real time. “Eyewitness” can thus satisfy scholars in search of primary sources as well as the general public, a relevant part of which still does not really know what happened. It is in fact time to lift the fogs that still cover “the forgotten genocide” in that country after so many decades. As the report says, the fact that “[s]o far not a single government worldwide has formally recognized the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh as genocide” is indeed appalling. Yet victims, survivors, and historical memory need justice.
A general consideration is ignited by the EBF report. It regards the embarrassment that seems sometimes to enter the scene when this kind of devastations happens. Genocide is a unique crime, punished internationally and nationally by specific laws and sanctions. While it is appropriate to denounce it, one also feels that this should be done with great caution. Not to be confused with prudence, which is always necessary, slowness must however be avoided. It is a temptation and misses the point—which is justice. “Eyewitness” is not slow. It performs its duty, furnishing yet more evidence to overcome shyness.
Aptly, the report starts with an important chapter defining the specific criminal nature of genocides, whose criteria are then applied throughout the rest of its pages to evaluate the case of Bangladesh in 1971. Suggesting indeed further reflections on the concept of genocide (I will develop them in the following articles in this series), the chapter opens the way to a collection of voices from Bangladeshis who narrowly escaped the massacre more than half a century ago, relatives of some of the victims, war crimes prosecutors, and researchers. It also serves as an introduction to the impressions that the mission team got from visiting the killing sites.
The martyrdom of the Rahman family
Some pictures from the ordeal of one of the interviewees document “Eyewitness”’s achievement. It is the story of Aminur Rahman, a Bangladeshi camera operator and documentarist born in 1960. At the time of the genocide, he was 11 and lived with his family in the city of Rajshahi, in mid-western Bangladesh. His father, Azizur Rahman, was as an intelligence officer of the police in the Central Intelligence Branch (CIB).
On April 14, 1971, about 15 days through the Liberation War, the Pakistani armed forces stormed Rajshahi and the Rahmans took shelter in the CIB office. “At about 8 am a group of Pakistani soldiers rushed into the office,” Aminur recounts in the EBF report. “They looted the family belongings, jewelleries, money, and other valuables and found the concealed arms and ammunition. The soldiers made the officers and staff members stand in line and took them outside to the field. Being a child and unaware of what was going on, I walked with the men outside, but a soldier hit me on the head and ordered me to stay inside. Five officers and staff members were taken to the field and the soldiers gunned them down with their sub-machine-guns. My father and the Assistant Director of the office were shot dead, three others were wounded but survived. The dead bodies were left on the ground for two days.”
Because of a curfew, the survivors could not go outside and properly bury them. “My father was hit by three bullets,” adds Aminur. “One in the head. His spectacles were splashed with blood. After two days, late at night, the Pakistani soldiers dug a shallow ditch and buried the bodies there in an attempt to hide their war crimes.”
The remnants of the Rahman family escaped then to a remote village, close to the Indian border, where they had relatives and “hoped to be safe.” But on May 24 the Pakistani soldiers invaded the village too. “Together with many villagers we looked for shelter on Indian soil. Those who remained in the village were massacred by the Pakistani army. The village was looted, houses were burnt. They killed my grandfather and hanged the dead body from the branch of a tree.”
Aminur has four brothers and one sister, Laila Parveen Banu, the eldest of the Rahman children. She was in constant fear of being raped, as rape was systematically used as a way for dehumanizing the whole Bangladeshi people targeted for genocide. Laila was studying medicine. In front of that carnage, she wanted to join the armed resistance. She indeed underwent military training but, due to her expertise, was employed at the “Gobra” women freedom fighter’s camp in Calcutta, India, “to provide medical treatment for victims of rape and torture and to train other common girls in nursing at the front. She has been acknowledged as a Valiant Freedom Fighter from the government of Bangladesh.”
Numbers are enormous
As “Eyewitness” explains clearly, it is not, per se, the number of caused deaths that makes a genocide, but the intention of the perpetrators to wipe entirely out a distinctive human group. Nonetheless, of course numbers also count and in case of genocides they are often staggering. In the year 1971, Bangladesh saw an enormous number of people die a violent death. Details are discussed and may even be adjusted by desirable further research into the magnitude and depth of that genocide. “There are other estimates for the total numbers of fatal casualties and women who were raped that are much higher,” the EPF report comments. “Eyewitness” is quite confident to affirm that, “[d]uring the nine-month Bangladesh Liberation War the Pakistan Armed Forces, supported by pro-Pakistani Islamist militias, killed up to 3 million people and raped between 200.000 and 400.000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Between 8 and 10 million people fled the country and up to 30 million civilians were internally displaced.”
Today, four organizations support the recognition of that massacre as a genocide. They are “four renowned scientific institutes: Genocide Watch, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and recently the International Association of Genocide Scholars. They call on the international community, and by extension the UN” to acknowledge the genocide as such. Answers have in fact been delayed long enough.