The mass killings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 vie with the annihilation of the Soviet POWs, the holocaust against the Jews, and the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated act of genocide in the twentieth century. In an attempt to crush forces seeking independence for East Pakistan, the West Pakistani military regime unleashed a systematic campaign of mass killing which aimed at killing millions of innocent Bangladeshis, and likely succeeded in doing so.
In national elections held in December 1970, the Awami League won an overwhelming victory across Bangladesh territory. On February 22, 1971 the generals in West Pakistan took a decision to crush the Awami League and its supporters. It was recognized from the first that a campaign of genocide would be necessary to eradicate the threat: "Kill three million of them," said President Yahya Khan at the February conference, "and the rest will eat out of our hands."
On March 25 the genocide was launched. The university in Dacca (Dhaka) was attacked and students exterminated in hundreds. Death squads roamed the streets of Dhaka, killing some 7,000 people at only night. It was only the beginning. "Within a week, half the population of Dhaka had fled, and at least 30,000 people had been killed. Chittagong, too, had lost half of its population.
All over East Pakistan people were taking flight, and it was estimated that in April some thirty million people were wandering helplessly across East Pakistan to escape the grasp of the military." Ten million refugees fled to India, overwhelming that country's resources and spurring the eventual Indian military intervention.
The genocide against Bangladeshi men The war against the Bangladeshi nation proceeded in classic gendercidal fashion. According to Anthony Mascarenhas: clear the linkages between gender and social class (the "intellectuals," "professors," "teachers," "office bearers," and - obviously - "militarymen" can all be expected to be overwhelmingly if not exclusively male, although in many cases their families died or fell victim to other atrocities alongside them). In this respect, the Bangladesh events can be classed as a combined gendercide and elitocide, with both strategies overwhelmingly targeting males for the most annihilatory excesses.
The Government's policy for East Bengal was spelled out to me in the Eastern Command headquarters at Dhaka. It has three elements: i) The Bangladeshi have proved themselves unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis; ii) The Bangladeshi will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The - Islamization of the masses - this is the official jargon - is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan;
ii) When the Hindus have been eliminated by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the under privileged Muslim middle-class. This will provide the base for erecting administrative and political structures in the future."
Bangladeshi men and boys massacred by the West Pakistani regime Younger men and adolescent boys, of whatever social class, were equally targets. According to Rounaq Jahan, "All through the liberation war, able-bodied young men were suspected of being actual or potential freedom fighters. Thousands were arrested, tortured, and killed. Eventually cities and towns became bereft of young males who either took refuge in India or joined the liberation war." Especially "during the first phase" of the genocide, he writes, "young able-bodied males were the victims of indiscriminate killings."
R.J. Rummel likewise writes that "the Pakistan army [sought] out those especially likely to join the resistance - young boys. Sweeps were conducted of young men who were never seen again. Bodies of youths would be found in fields, floating down rivers, or near army camps. As can be imagined, this terrorized all young men and their families within reach of the army. Most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five began to flee from one village to another and toward India. Many of those reluctant to leave their homes were forced to flee by mothers and sisters concerned for their safety."
Rummel describes a chilling gendercidal ritual, reminiscent of Nazi procedure towards Jewish males: "In what became province-wide acts of genocide, Hindus were sought out and killed on the spot. As a matter of course, soldiers would check males for the obligated circumcision among Moslems. If circumcised, they might live; if not, sure death."
Robert Payne describes scenes of systematic mass slaughter around Dhaka that, while not explicitly "gendered" in his account, bear every hallmark of classic gender-selective roundups and gendercidal slaughters of non-combatant men:
In the dead region surrounding Dacca, the military authorities conducted experiments in mass extermination in places unlikely to be seen by journalists. At Hariharpara, a once thriving village on the banks of the Buriganga River near Dacca, they found the three elements necessary for killing people in large numbers: a prison in which to hold the victims, a place for executing the prisoners, and a method for disposing of the bodies.
The prison was a large riverside warehouse, or godown, belonging to the Pakistan National Oil Company, the place of execution was the river edge, or the shallows near the shore, and the bodies were disposed of by the simple means of permitting them to float downstream. The killing took place night after night. Usually the prisoners were roped together and made to wade out into the river. They were in batches of six or eight, and in the light of a powerful electric arc lamp, they were easy targets, black against the silvery water.
The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in the hot night air, and then silence. The prisoners fell on their sides and their bodies lapped against the shore. Then a new bunch of prisoners was brought out, and the process was repeated. In the morning the village boatmen hauled the bodies into midstream and the ropes binding the bodies were cut so that each body drifted separately downstream.
Strikingly similar and equally hellish scenes are described in the case-studies of genocide in Armenia and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.
People regard that the best option is to regard "3 million" as not an absolute but an arbitrary number. The proportion of men versus women murdered is impossible to ascertain, but a speculation might be attempted. If we take the highest estimates for both women raped and Bangladeshis killed (400,000 and 3 million, respectively, we should accept that half as many women were killed as well as raped.
And if we double that number of murdered children of both sexes (total: 600,000), we are still left with a death-toll that is 80 percent adult male (2.4 million out of 3 million). Any such disproportion, which is almost certainly on the low side, would qualify Bangladesh as one of the worst gendercides against men in the last half-millennium.
Who was responsible?
"For month after month in all the regions of East Pakistan the massacres went on," writes Robert Payne. "They were not the small casual killings of young officers who wanted to demonstrate their efficiency, but organized massacres conducted by sophisticated staff officers, who knew exactly what they were doing. Muslim soldiers, sent out to kill Muslim peasants, went about their work mechanically and efficiently, until killing defenseless people became a habit like smoking cigarettes or drinking wine. … Not since Hitler invaded Russia had there been so vast a massacre."
There is no doubt that the mass killing in Bangladesh was among the most carefully and centrally planned of modern genocides. For the brutal kindles killing of the innocent people at mid night, the night is considered as black night in the history of Bangladesh. However, Bangladesh has moved forward and stepped into a new phase though the independence but the flame of the dark night still haunts each and every Bangladeshi patriots heart, and none will ever escape it.
The writer is a columnist
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