One can always criticise procedures. Israel's relentlessly and justifiably ferreted out and punished German war criminals decades after World War II. It is an affront to fair play to overlook these and condemn the Dhaka trials
Forty-two years ago this day — perhaps even as this column is being read — hordes of supporters of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliates like the razakars, al-Badr and al-Shams, were searching out members of Bangladesh’s intellectual and professional elites and savagely torturing them to death. Dr MA Hasan, a medical practitioner and freedom fighter, who has given a chilling account of genocide and mass rape in Bangladesh by the Pakistani Army and its collaborators, wrote in Beyond Denial: The Evidence of a Genocide, “Between December 10th and 14th[1971], al-Badr paramilitary units, Razakars and Pakistani soldiers, under the direction of Generals Rao Farman Ali and Jahanzeb Arbab, abducted hundreds of doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers, teachers, civil servants, artists, Sufi religious scholars and other such leading Bengali professionals and intellectuals, men and women, and in some cases their children as well, who lived in Dhaka and its suburbs, took them to various killing sites around the city and murdered them.”
These diabolical murders, Dr Hasan says — as many had done earlier — were committed deliberately as the last vindictive crime “to try to cripple the country for a generation. The intention was to deprive an independent, free, Bangladesh of the services of these highly skilled and talented people.” Almost all of them were savagely tortured before being killed in what was clearly the climactic chapter in the chronicle of unspeakable atrocities that the Pakistanis and their henchmen had unleashed on Bangladesh, starting with the military crackdown on the night of March 25-26, 1971.
Three million people were killed. Women were special targets. Dr Hasan wrote that about 80 per cent of the genocide victims were males between the ages of 15 to 80. The remaining 20 per cent were women. “Of them, the majority of murdered women were raped before being killed.” He cites Professor RJ Rummel’s book, Death by Government, as stating that “the number of women sexually abused during the conflict was about 4,00,000”, and adds that the surveys by the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee between 1999 and 2008 “put the number at approximately half a million and deaths due to rape and associated causes are not accounted for in this number.”
According to Dr Hasan, Pakistani soldiers raped Muslim women in Bangladesh in “the perverse belief that rape-babies would be born into their brand of the Islamic faith and that they would be loyal to Pakistan. They said this to some of their victims. Time after time, Bengali women and girls hiding in fields and forests were captured and raped. To destroy the pride of the nation they raped the mothers, daughters, the sisters and wives of Bengali Muslims and Hindus systematically.
“The Pakistani Army also sought to destroy the honour and pride of Bengali men so that they could prove them to be a cowardly race. Forcing them to stand and watch their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers being raped seems to have been a confirmation for them of cowardice. In almost every village, town and city of Bangladesh, Pakistani soldiers used rape as an instrument of humiliation.”
Had this writer not seen the bodies of Bangladeshi women tortured, raped and murdered, he could never have imagined that the human mind could conjure up such horrible ways of inflicting pain and humiliation. Gary J Bass rightly states in The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in Bangladesh, “The slaughter of what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans.”
Americans then knew what was happening, thanks to media coverage and, except President Richard M Nixon, then National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and those around them, were outraged. Among those who did so was Archer Blood, United States’ consul-general in Dhaka, who sent telegram after telegram to Washington, DC, detailing the Pakistani Army’s celebration of savagery. He was deeply upset that his pleas fell on deaf years, as were most of his colleagues. Finally, on April 6, 1971, twenty of the latter sent to Washington DC a dissent cable, a device introduced during the Vietnamese War, allowing diplomats to speak freely.
A searing indictment of the Nixon Administration, the telegram stated, among much else, “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to protect the West Pak dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against them.”
As Bass, who reproduced the text of the telegram in his book, points out, Blood not only “bore responsibility for authorising the transmission of the cable but agreed with the dissent with zeal”, writing at the end. “I also subscribe to these views but I do not think it appropriate for me to sign their statement as long as I am principal officer at this post.”
Blood paid a price for his courage; he did not rise as high as he should have in his career. The Nixon Administration persisted with its shameful course and even tried to intimidate India during the latter’s 1971 war with Pakistan by sending a naval battle group into the Bay of Bengal. The move failed. Pakistan was routed in the war and Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign state on December 16, 1971. Unfortunately, Pakistani war criminals were repatriated to their country following the Shimla agreement to enable the return of Bangladeshis trapped in West Pakistan. Bangladeshi war criminals from the ranks of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliates emerged from the woodwork after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination and were rehabilitated by the military dictators ruling the country for 15 years thereafter. It is only now that they are being tried and sentenced.
As Bass wrote, the slaughter in Bangladesh is today “far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans”. This perhaps explains why a section of Americans and others in the West are so critical of the trials which are being faulted on procedures and as being vindictive. One can always criticise procedures. Israel’s relentlessly and entirely justifiably ferreted out and punished German war criminals decades after World War II. It is an affront to fair play to overlook these and condemn the Dhaka trials.