The atrocities in the 1971 civil war

[Rasel]

MOD EDIT: Much of the world only knows the one-sided history of the events of 1971, that the Pakistan Army carried out a genocide and killed '3 million people', and exaggeration admitted by Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian scholars at a conference held by the State Department over declassified documents from the 1971 war: http://www.dawn.com/2005/07/07/nat3.htm

Here are some accounts of the atrocities committed by the Bengali population of East Pakistan upon non-Bengalis BEFORE Operation Searchlight began on the 25th of March:

Rummel's Death by Government.

Here is an excerpt:

"Throughout East Pakistan, non-Bengali communities were assaulted, their members mutilated, tortured and butchered. Let the words of Anthony Mascarenhas, whose vigorous condemnation of the Pakistan democide in East Pakistan established his credentials, speak to this:

'Thousands of families of unfortunate Muslims, many of them refugees from Bihar who chose Pakistan at the time of the partition riots in 1947, were mercilessly wiped out. Women were raped, or had their breasts torn out with specially fashioned knives. Children did not escape the horror: the lucky ones were killed with their parents; but many thousands of others must go through what life remains for them with eyes gouged out and limbs amputated. More than 20,000 bodies of non-Bengalis have been found in the main towns, such as Chittagong, Khulna and Jessore. The real toll, I was told everywhere in East Bengal, may have been as high as 100,000, for thousands of non-Bengalis have vanished without a trace. The Government of Pakistan has let the world know about that first horror. What it has suppressed is the second and worse horror which followed when its own army took over the killing. West Pakistan officials privately calculate that altogether both sides have killed 250,000 people.'"

And a first hand account of events by an American engineer working in East Pakistan:

A description of the indiscriminate killing during this period has been given by an American engineer who was working on a construction project at Kaptai, near Chittagong. We have quoted from it at length as it gives a vivid picture of the terror which reigned and of the blind hatred which motivated the killings on both sides:

Shortly after March 1, we received word from some British friends in Chittagong that Bengali mobs had begun looting and burning the homes and businesses of the West Pakistani residents and were beating, and in some cases killing, West Pakistanis as well as Hindus.

On the night of March 9, my expatriate staff and I decided to depart Kaptai. As we passed through Chittagong we noted three of four fires. A service station attendant told my driver these were homes and businesses of 'Biharis'.

We returned to Kaptai on March 23. There was a small Army garrison stationed at Kaptai. They were a part of the East African Rifles which was a regiment of Bengalis with mostly Punjabi officers and N.C.O.'s. The garrison was quartered in an old school building about 400 yards from our residences.

On the morning of March 26 around 9 a.m. we heard shooting coming from the school. I went to investigate and found a large crowd gathered there. Some of the crowd was shooting toward one of the upstairs school rooms. I was told that the previous night all Punjabis in the Army garrison (about 26 or 27) had been arrested and locked in the school-room. Now someone in the crowd was claiming that shots had come from the room. After removing a sheet of roofing several men with guns gathered around the opening and began firing into the room. After a few minutes they came down and began dispersing the crowd. I later learned that the commanding officer, who was under house arrest within sight of the school, was slowly beaten and bayoneted to death as his staff was being shot. The officer's wife, in a state of terror, asked the mob to kill her too. She was beaten to death. Their small son was spared and taken in by a Bengali family.

I met immediately with the local Awami League leader and the Power Station Manager, a Bengali named Shamsuddin. The Awami League leader said the people had been told to remain peaceful and that he had peace patrols roaming the area, but that he could not control the large mobs. Shamsuddin told me that the mobs had killed many Biharis the night before and thrown their bodies over the spillway of the dam. He said he just managed to talk the mob out of taking his three West Pakistani engineers but felt they were still in great danger .

All India radio began an almost continuous propaganda barrage of East Pakistan. This inflammatory propaganda roused the mobs in Kaptai to new frenzies. After all known Biharis, including at least two of our employees, had been killed, a search was begun for 'imposters'. On about the third day of the trouble we saw two Bengali soldiers marching away a servant who worked in the housing area. A few seconds later we heard a shot and ran out into the road. The servant had fallen partway down a ravine. A crowd quickly gathered and, when it became apparent the servant was still alive, dragged him up onto the road. One of the soldiers motioned the crowd away, knelt and very deliberately fired another bullet into the body. After a short while the death-Iimp body was dragged and rolled into the back of a pickup and hauled away. It had been found out that although the servant had been living in Kaptai over 20 years, he was born in India. By this time the mobs were killing anyone not a 'son-of-the-soil'.

Friends and acquaintances in Chittagong said that on the night of March 25 Bengali mobs descended on the homes of all known Biharis and especially those military personnel living outside their cantonment. The mobs slaughtered entire families and I heard many horrible descriptions of this massacre. The mutinous East Pakistan Rifles along with irregulars

laid siege to the Chittagong military cantonment. After seven or eight days the siege was broken by a relief detachment which had force-marched from the cantonment at Camilla. I am told that when the entrapped garrison broke out it was with a terrible vengeance. The slightest resistance was cause for annihilation of everyone in a particular area. For instance, the Army made a habit of destroying, by tank cannon, everything within a wide radius of hostile roadblocks. I saw the remains of a completely razed three to four square block area of Chittagong near the entrance to the port area. I was told that after encountering resistance here the Army encircled and set fire to the entire area and shot all who fled. Hundreds of men, women and children were said to have perished here.

When the East Pakistan Rifles and Bengali irregulars began retreating from the fighting around Chittagong, many of them passed through Kaptai en route to Rangamati and the Indian border areas. These renegades began looting their fellow Bengalis as they came through Kaptai. They also began to murder the surviving wives and children of previously killed Biharis. They demanded and took food, clothing and other supplies from the local residents. By April 10, everyone in Kaptai, including myself had become terrified of these deserters. Mr. Shamsuddin suggested, and I agreed, that he and several members of his staff, along with families, move into the houses around my residence.

After great pressure from implied threats, Shamsuddin had finally banded his three West Pakistani engineers over to a mob after he was told they would not be harmed, only held in jail at Rangamati. Shamsuddin agreed to hand over the engineers provided two Bengali members of his staff be allowed to accompany the engineers on their trip to the jail. This was agreed and they were taken away. Everyone felt certain these men would be killed but they were spared. When I last heard of them they were safe with their families in Dacca. Shamsuddin, although a Bengali, attempted on several occasions, at great risk to himself and his family, to stop the killings by the mobs but with little success. Also he saw to it that the existing generating units remained in operation throughout the trouble.

An Army unit arrived in Kaptai on the morning of April 14. Except for those in our area Kaptai and surroundings were completely deserted. The unit consisted of a tank, two jeeps, a half-track and about 250 infantry. As they approached the tank fired blanks from its cannon and the soldiers fired intermittent bursts from their weapons. The object seemed to be to cower the inhabitants with the noise. The army immediately began burning the shanties ('bustees') in which most of the people had lived. The bazaar and a few permanent type dwellings were also burned.

While his troops were searching the area, the commanding officer and his staff took tea in our residence. They congratulated and warmly praised Shamsuddin and his staff for their attempts to maintain order and for keeping the generating units in operation. The C.O. said that the Army's objective was to restore normality as quickly as possible. One of the officers told of a terrible scene they had come upon in a town about 10 miles from Kaptai called Chandagborna. About 40 to 50 women and children -survivors of previously killed Biharis - had been taken into a loft building where they had been hacked, stabbed and beaten to death. He said this grizzIy scene had driven the troops to an almost incontrollable rage and he said it was fortunate that Kaptai was deserted except for us.

[Mr. Shamsuddin was later taken from the house by two Pakistan soldiers.] We ran after them. They were taken behind the fire station which was about 250 yards away. Just as we arrived at the station we heard two shots. Shamsuddin and another man lay dead on the grass, each with a bullet through his chest.

The officer-in-charge appeared and questioned the soldier who had done the killing. We later found this man was a Major. After questioning by the O.I.C. the Major's weapon was taken and the Major was ordered immediately to Chittagong. The O.I.C. told us the whole thing was a tragic mistake. Later I was told what had happened. While directing the search of the area the Major and his driver came upon a woman with a small child who told that her husband and son had been killed by the Bengalis. She charged that Shamsuddin was the leader of the mobs and instigator of the atrocities. The women was taken to the fire station and the Major and his aide set off to find Shamsuddin. When Shamsuddin was brought before the woman she immediately identified him and the Major instantly carried out the executions. The man who died with Shamsuddin had also been accused by the woman, who was crazed by fear and grief.'

===================== End Mod Edit

It was the Indian Army people who raped a lot of the Bangladeshi Women's. But many of course blamed the Muslim Pakistani Army.

1. Indian Army Men used to change the Pak Army Uniforms and put it on there bodies to make Bengalis fool in there eyes they knew who they where. But in the Bengali eyes they where Pakistani Muslims.

2. Many Bengalis came in that trick of the Indian Policy.

3. Bangladeshis never had a significant proof of that Yahya Khan ever said to kill ''threee million bengalis'' the only truth is that there are some fake links on internet sites which are mostly based against Pakistani Army! And there some books where they say three million Bengalis where Genocied and a lot of raped to. But the Americans are confused wether it's 1 or 3 million who got raped by Indian Army.

[Rasel]

5. Many Bengalis did blamed that it was the Pakistani Muslims who genocided and raped a lot of the bengalis. But could they ever prove about that it was the Pakistani Muslims who actually did so???

I would love to show the sites but many say that the PakBD Liberation War was ''Covert Operation'' and it was done by the Indian RAW. And there is a site called [url The URL won't show upHistory can sometimes lie and deny about the secret facts. Everything is just going against one Nation and one group of people in the 1971 History of Bangladesh.

As i mentioned the BanglaPak Liberation War was a Covert Operation.

[Rasel]

In 2009 many Bangladeshi people will blame the Pakistani Army because of the false and misunderstood history. But past is past 1971 can't be related with 2009 Pakistanis have said sorry to Bangladeshis when it wasn't even Pakistani Army Muslim fault the same way can Pakistanis do ask the Bengali brothers can you people prove us where Pakistani Muslim Army people raped the women's of Bangladesh or did genocide i admit there was some of accident of Pakistani Army but not a lot. Bangladesh big mistake was to work together with India Army espcially when they came to Bangladesh to fight the Pakistani Army. And Bangladeshis took the Indian site before the Indian Armies even where in BD then there where never seen such a brutal genocides which where done on 1971. Why did everything changed when the Indian Army came in ? Big Question

YouTube

YouTube

[Rasel]

This may not be a genuine video rather made by Indian intelligence agency as a doctored one. When Gen. Tikka Khan took military action from March 25, 1971, the so called members of Mukti Bahini(a terrorist army made by India) were not locals rather Indian nationals who were chanting Pakistan Zindabad in night's darkness & doing all such things like death, destruction & rape & in the morning they were mingling with local Mukti Bahini men. The earstwhile East Pakistan was gripped with internal & external conspiracy as Indian army in other forces ased people entered the land & made underground base camps & so violated international law. Pakistani army couldn't have remained sitting silently & military action was inevitable. East pakistan was NOT a disputed territory like Kashmir. Gen Tikka Khan men did military action quickly & in that quickness many innocents too got entrapped. 3 million external elements were killed & as most of them were from Indian forces, India did a lot of propaganda. Indian themselves know that any information of Indian government sources has no credibility. From 1989 till 2005 , India intelligence & media too much shouted about Pakistan's so called Operatio Topac but now Indian newspapers openly say that it was a false thing, a propaganda strategy of Indian establishment against Pakistan. Don't swayed away by just one small thing. Indian soldiers in East Pakistan in the guise of Mukti Bahini raped much more number of women there. You have very poor info abt Bangladesh. Genocide of locals was done by India, as told to me personally by many Indian Mukti Bahini men

[Rasel]

If any of you know about if it's the Indian Army please discuss this is interesting. I had to cut my words like that because it wasn't working

Salaam

Much Love Rasel

[Jako]

Hahah....indians taking on pakistan army uniform and killing??......mukti bahini indian organization?? Dont disrespect the freedom fighters mate,without any ground knowledge,this is unacceptable...... All pakistanis are not the same,infact many are genuine gentlemen.....but what the pak army did is a unforgiving offence......nationality unnoticed,those men cant be treated as humans.......they were animals......btw,ei sob galgolpo onyo kauke gie sonaben......true bangladeshis know the original facts,irrespective of the present indo-bangla relations.....

[fateh71]

Infact Yahya Khan was an Indian wearing a bio suite of a pakistani general. Had they cut him open they would have found a tiny vegetarian scared indian inside, seriously.

Now my claim has no evidence just like your claims, so i think we can discuss it seriously.

[Zob]

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Look


The massacre may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists, reports Sarmila Bose

BITTER TRUTH: Civilians massacred in Jessore in 1971 ? but by whom?

RECOGNITION DENIED: Father and son killed in Dhaka in 1971
The bodies lie strewn on the ground. All are adult men, in civilian clothes. A uniformed man with a rifle slung on his back is seen on the right. A smattering of onlookers stand around, a few appear to be working, perhaps to remove the bodies.

The caption of the photo is just as grim as its content: ‘April 2, 1971: Genocide by the Pakistan Occupation Force at Jessore.’ It is in a book printed by Bangladeshis trying to commemorate the victims of their liberation war.

It is a familiar scene. There are many grisly photographs of dead bodies from 1971, published in books, newspapers and websites.

Reading another book on the 1971 war, there was that photograph again ? taken from a slightly different angle, but the bodies and the scene of the massacre were the same. But wait a minute! The caption here reads: ‘The bodies of businessmen murdered by rebels in Jessore city.’

The alternative caption is in The East Pakistan Tragedy, by L.F. Rushbrook Williams, written in 1971 before the independence of Bangladesh. Rushbrook Williams is strongly in favour of the Pakistan government and highly critical of the Awami League. However, he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had served in academia and government in India, and with the BBC and The Times. There was no reason to think he would willfully mislabel a photo of a massacre.

And so, in a bitter war where so many bodies had remained unclaimed, here is a set of murdered men whose bodies are claimed by both sides of the conflict! Who were these men? And who killed them?

It turns out that the massacre in Jessore may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists.

It is but one incident, but illustrative of the emerging reality that the conflict in 1971 in East Pakistan was a lot messier than most have been led to believe. Pakistan’s military regime did try to crush the Bengali rebellion by force, and many Bengalis did die for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence. Yet, not every allegation hurled against the Pakistan army was true, while many crimes committed in the name of Bengali nationalism remain concealed.

Once one took a second look, some of the Jessore bodies are dressed in salwar kameez ? an indication that they were either West Pakistanis or ‘Biharis’, the non-Bengali East Pakistanis who had migrated from northern India.

As accounts from the involved parties ? Pakistan, Bangladesh and India ? tend to be highly partisan, it was best to search for foreign eye witnesses, if any. My search took me to newspaper archives from 35 years ago. The New York Times carried the photo on April 3, 1971, captioned: ‘East Pakistani civilians, said to have been slain by government soldiers, lie in Jessore square before burial.’ The Washington Post carried it too, right under its masthead: ‘The bodies of civilians who East Pakistani sources said were massacred by the Pakistani army lie in the streets of Jessore.’ “East Pakistani sources said”, and without further investigation, these august newspapers printed the photo.

In fact, if the Americans had read The Times of London of April 2 and Sunday Times of April 4 or talked to their British colleagues, they would have had a better idea of what was happening in Jessore. In a front-page lead article on April 2 entitled ‘Mass Slaughter of Punjabis in East Bengal,’ The Times war correspondent Nicholas Tomalin wrote an eye-witness account of how he and a team from the BBC programme Panorama saw Bengali troops and civilians march 11 Punjabi civilians to the market place in Jessore where they were then massacred. “Before we were forced to leave by threatening supporters of Shaikh Mujib,” wrote Tomalin, “we saw another 40 Punjabi “spies” being taken towards the killing ground?”

Tomalin followed up on April 4 in Sunday Times with a detailed description of the “mid-day murder” of Punjabis by Bengalis, along with two photos ? one of the Punjabi civilians with their hands bound at the Jessore headquarters of the East Pakistan Rifles (a Bengal formation which had mutinied and was fighting on the side of the rebels), and another of their dead bodies lying in the square. He wrote how the Bengali perpetrators tried to deceive them and threatened them, forcing them to leave. As other accounts also testify, the Bengali “irregulars” were the only ones in central Jessore that day, as the Pakistan government forces had retired to their cantonment.

Though the military action had started in Dhaka on March 25 night, most of East Pakistan was still out of the government’s control. Like many other places, “local followers of Sheikh Mujib were in control” in Jessore at that time. Many foreign media reported the killings and counter-killings unleashed by the bloody civil war, in which the army tried to crush the Bengali rebels and Bengali nationalists murdered non-Bengali civilians.

Tomalin records the local Bengalis’ claim that the government soldiers had been shooting earlier and he was shown other bodies of people allegedly killed by army firing. But the massacre of the Punjabi civilians by Bengalis was an event he witnessed himself. Tomalin was killed while covering the Yom Kippur war of 1973, but his eye-witness accounts solve the mystery of the bodies of Jessore.

There were, of course, genuine Bengali civilian victims of the Pakistan army during 1971. Chandhan Sur and his infant son were killed on March 26 along with a dozen other men in Shankharipara, a Hindu area in Dhaka. The surviving members of the Sur family and other residents of Shankharipara recounted to me the dreadful events of that day. Amar, the elder son of the dead man, gave me a photo of his father and brother’s bodies, which he said he had come upon at a Calcutta studio while a refugee in India. The photo shows a man’s body lying on his back, clad in a lungi, with the infant near his feet.

Amar Sur’s anguish about the death of his father and brother (he lost a sister in another shooting incident) at the hands of the Pakistan army is matched by his bitterness about their plight in independent Bangladesh. They may be the children of a ‘shaheed,’ but their home was declared ‘vested property’ by the Bangladesh government, he said, in spite of documents showing that it belonged to his father. Even the Awami League ? support for whom had cost this Hindu locality so many lives in 1971 ? did nothing to redress this when they formed the government.

In the book 1971: documents on crimes against humanity committed by Pakistan army and their agents in Bangladesh during 1971, published by the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, I came across the same photo of the Sur father and son’s dead bodies. It is printed twice, one a close-up of the child only, with the caption: ‘Innocent women were raped and then killed along with their children by the barbarous Pakistan Army’. Foreigners might just have mistaken the ‘lungi’ worn by Sur for a ‘saree’, but surely Bangladeshis can tell a man in a ‘lungi’ when they see one! And why present the same ‘body’ twice?

The contradictory claims on the photos of the dead of 1971 reveal in part the difficulty of recording a messy war, but also illustrate vividly what happens when political motives corrupt the cause of justice and humanity. The political need to spin a neat story of Pakistani attackers and Bengali victims made the Bengali perpetrators of the massacre of Punjabi civilians in Jessore conceal their crime and blame the army. The New York Times and The Washington Post “bought” that story too. The media’s reputation is salvaged in this case by the even-handed eye-witness reports of Tomalin in The Times and Sunday Times.

As for the hapless Chandhan Sur and his infant son, the political temptation to smear the enemy to the maximum by accusing him of raping and killing women led to Bangladeshi nationalists denying their own martyrs their rightful recognition. In both cases, the true victims ?Punjabis and Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims ? were cast aside, their suffering hijacked, by political motivations of others that victimised them a second time around.

[Mirage2000]

Originally Posted by Zob

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Look


The massacre may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists, reports Sarmila Bose

BITTER TRUTH: Civilians massacred in Jessore in 1971 ? but by whom?

RECOGNITION DENIED: Father and son killed in Dhaka in 1971
The bodies lie strewn on the ground. All are adult men, in civilian clothes. A uniformed man with a rifle slung on his back is seen on the right. A smattering of onlookers stand around, a few appear to be working, perhaps to remove the bodies.

The caption of the photo is just as grim as its content: ‘April 2, 1971: Genocide by the Pakistan Occupation Force at Jessore.’ It is in a book printed by Bangladeshis trying to commemorate the victims of their liberation war.

It is a familiar scene. There are many grisly photographs of dead bodies from 1971, published in books, newspapers and websites.

Reading another book on the 1971 war, there was that photograph again ? taken from a slightly different angle, but the bodies and the scene of the massacre were the same. But wait a minute! The caption here reads: ‘The bodies of businessmen murdered by rebels in Jessore city.’

The alternative caption is in The East Pakistan Tragedy, by L.F. Rushbrook Williams, written in 1971 before the independence of Bangladesh. Rushbrook Williams is strongly in favour of the Pakistan government and highly critical of the Awami League. However, he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had served in academia and government in India, and with the BBC and The Times. There was no reason to think he would willfully mislabel a photo of a massacre.

And so, in a bitter war where so many bodies had remained unclaimed, here is a set of murdered men whose bodies are claimed by both sides of the conflict! Who were these men? And who killed them?

It turns out that the massacre in Jessore may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists.

It is but one incident, but illustrative of the emerging reality that the conflict in 1971 in East Pakistan was a lot messier than most have been led to believe. Pakistan’s military regime did try to crush the Bengali rebellion by force, and many Bengalis did die for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence. Yet, not every allegation hurled against the Pakistan army was true, while many crimes committed in the name of Bengali nationalism remain concealed.

Once one took a second look, some of the Jessore bodies are dressed in salwar kameez ? an indication that they were either West Pakistanis or ‘Biharis’, the non-Bengali East Pakistanis who had migrated from northern India.

As accounts from the involved parties ? Pakistan, Bangladesh and India ? tend to be highly partisan, it was best to search for foreign eye witnesses, if any. My search took me to newspaper archives from 35 years ago. The New York Times carried the photo on April 3, 1971, captioned: ‘East Pakistani civilians, said to have been slain by government soldiers, lie in Jessore square before burial.’ The Washington Post carried it too, right under its masthead: ‘The bodies of civilians who East Pakistani sources said were massacred by the Pakistani army lie in the streets of Jessore.’ “East Pakistani sources said”, and without further investigation, these august newspapers printed the photo.

In fact, if the Americans had read The Times of London of April 2 and Sunday Times of April 4 or talked to their British colleagues, they would have had a better idea of what was happening in Jessore. In a front-page lead article on April 2 entitled ‘Mass Slaughter of Punjabis in East Bengal,’ The Times war correspondent Nicholas Tomalin wrote an eye-witness account of how he and a team from the BBC programme Panorama saw Bengali troops and civilians march 11 Punjabi civilians to the market place in Jessore where they were then massacred. “Before we were forced to leave by threatening supporters of Shaikh Mujib,” wrote Tomalin, “we saw another 40 Punjabi “spies” being taken towards the killing ground?”

Tomalin followed up on April 4 in Sunday Times with a detailed description of the “mid-day murder” of Punjabis by Bengalis, along with two photos ? one of the Punjabi civilians with their hands bound at the Jessore headquarters of the East Pakistan Rifles (a Bengal formation which had mutinied and was fighting on the side of the rebels), and another of their dead bodies lying in the square. He wrote how the Bengali perpetrators tried to deceive them and threatened them, forcing them to leave. As other accounts also testify, the Bengali “irregulars” were the only ones in central Jessore that day, as the Pakistan government forces had retired to their cantonment.

Though the military action had started in Dhaka on March 25 night, most of East Pakistan was still out of the government’s control. Like many other places, “local followers of Sheikh Mujib were in control” in Jessore at that time. Many foreign media reported the killings and counter-killings unleashed by the bloody civil war, in which the army tried to crush the Bengali rebels and Bengali nationalists murdered non-Bengali civilians.

Tomalin records the local Bengalis’ claim that the government soldiers had been shooting earlier and he was shown other bodies of people allegedly killed by army firing. But the massacre of the Punjabi civilians by Bengalis was an event he witnessed himself. Tomalin was killed while covering the Yom Kippur war of 1973, but his eye-witness accounts solve the mystery of the bodies of Jessore.

There were, of course, genuine Bengali civilian victims of the Pakistan army during 1971. Chandhan Sur and his infant son were killed on March 26 along with a dozen other men in Shankharipara, a Hindu area in Dhaka. The surviving members of the Sur family and other residents of Shankharipara recounted to me the dreadful events of that day. Amar, the elder son of the dead man, gave me a photo of his father and brother’s bodies, which he said he had come upon at a Calcutta studio while a refugee in India. The photo shows a man’s body lying on his back, clad in a lungi, with the infant near his feet.

Amar Sur’s anguish about the death of his father and brother (he lost a sister in another shooting incident) at the hands of the Pakistan army is matched by his bitterness about their plight in independent Bangladesh. They may be the children of a ‘shaheed,’ but their home was declared ‘vested property’ by the Bangladesh government, he said, in spite of documents showing that it belonged to his father. Even the Awami League ? support for whom had cost this Hindu locality so many lives in 1971 ? did nothing to redress this when they formed the government.

In the book 1971: documents on crimes against humanity committed by Pakistan army and their agents in Bangladesh during 1971, published by the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, I came across the same photo of the Sur father and son’s dead bodies. It is printed twice, one a close-up of the child only, with the caption: ‘Innocent women were raped and then killed along with their children by the barbarous Pakistan Army’. Foreigners might just have mistaken the ‘lungi’ worn by Sur for a ‘saree’, but surely Bangladeshis can tell a man in a ‘lungi’ when they see one! And why present the same ‘body’ twice?

The contradictory claims on the photos of the dead of 1971 reveal in part the difficulty of recording a messy war, but also illustrate vividly what happens when political motives corrupt the cause of justice and humanity. The political need to spin a neat story of Pakistani attackers and Bengali victims made the Bengali perpetrators of the massacre of Punjabi civilians in Jessore conceal their crime and blame the army. The New York Times and The Washington Post “bought” that story too. The media’s reputation is salvaged in this case by the even-handed eye-witness reports of Tomalin in The Times and Sunday Times.

As for the hapless Chandhan Sur and his infant son, the political temptation to smear the enemy to the maximum by accusing him of raping and killing women led to Bangladeshi nationalists denying their own martyrs their rightful recognition. In both cases, the true victims ?Punjabis and Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims ? were cast aside, their suffering hijacked, by political motivations of others that victimised them a second time around.

I am very much suprised by seeing something like this from an Indian paper,however they do forget the sufferings of biharis in that insurgency.Will BD Govt which is chanting hard for PK to appologize. Will apologize for these brutalities? even when the media of their masters India is coming out with reports like these.

[MBI Munshi]

I was just beginning to worry that the Bangladesh section on PDF was becoming pro-Indian and then we have this wonderful thread. I have also started another thread titled 'The spirit of 1971' which is worth reading by all Bangladeshis and I think Pakistanis and Indians will also find it informative. It is entirely true that many of the atrocities committed in 1971 were perpetrated by the Indians and the Mujib Bahini and some Mukti Bahini and subsequently blamed on the Pakistan army. I have always advocated a new approach and understanding to the war.

[iajdani]

One thing I need to highlight here. Few of my observation.
1) A person needs to first disclose his identity to speak for a certain group.
2) A person should not pretend to be somebody else and speak as he represent that community.

Why I am saying that?
I found few members who are from Urdu/Bihari background and pretend to be Bengali and speak for Bengali and gives misleading inforamation. This is really unethical.
Yes there are stories from W. Pakistani and Biharies side as well and we love to hear them. But they have to clear their identity first and let us understand the clear picture. Also there are Bengalis who sided with W. Pakistani in 1971 for some ideological reason as well as from their greeds. Those people also need to clear their identity and let us hear their part of the history.

[dhaka]

NBC News reports on 2/20/1972 on genocidal rapes of Bangladeshi women and girls during the Bangladesh Liberation War by pakistan army troops.

YouTube - Bangladesh Genocide: Rape Victims

YouTube - Bangladesh Genocide: Rape Victims

inplace of feeling sorry for the wrongdoing of their army in 1971 , pakistani people now has gone shameless to post misleading theards like this.....
nothing more to say ...

[MBI Munshi]

Originally Posted by iajdani

One thing I need to highlight here. Few of my observation.
1) A person needs to first disclose his identity to speak for a certain group.
2) A person should not pretend to be somebody else and speak as he represent that community.

Why I am saying that?
I found few members who are from Urdu/Bihari background and pretend to be Bengali and speak for Bengali and gives misleading inforamation. This is really unethical.
Yes there are stories from W. Pakistani and Biharies side as well and we love to hear them. But they have to clear their identity first and let us understand the clear picture. Also there are Bengalis who sided with W. Pakistani in 1971 for some ideological reason as well as from their greeds. Those people also need to clear their identity and let us hear their part of the history.

I think you will find that the Indians started this game. I have been on this forum longer than you have and the Indians have behaved the most atrociously. Remember that we are members of this forum due to the graciousness and courtesy of the Pakistani owners and moderators. I wish that the Bangladeshi and Indian members would stop abusing the privilege that is being accorded to us. I have been on Indian forums and they have never shown as much toleration.

[Hasnain2009]

Stop yaar!!
Pakistan and BD are still brothers!
We only need good leaders from both sides to resolve issues!

[umairp]

Before 1971 there were no Bangladeshi's. They were Pakistani's and you think that Pakistani's will do such thing with Pakistani's? Why?
Well, it was pure involvment from Indian side using maximum possibilities to ensure the divide. This can be one of them.