16 December is remembered in India as Vijay Diwas, when in 1971 Pak Army surrendered to Indian Army, thus leading to Bangla liberation.
NEW DELHI: More than 50 years have passed since the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and not much is talked about the atrocities carried out by the Pakistani army in the erstwhile East Pakistan. Thousands of people were killed, women raped and children orphaned by the Pakistani army that created a mayhem in now what is Bangladesh.
The mayhem of the Pakistani army that began on March 25 as “Operation Searchlight” lasted for nine months where houses were searched, young freedom fighters were gunned down, women picked up from their houses and raped and killed. According to estimates, 300,000 women in Bangladesh were killed by the Pakistani army and more than one lakh people killed in the war.
There are well-documented stories of tragedies in the history of Bangladesh carried out by the Pakistani army. Some of these tragic stories are never forgotten by families who had either lost their family members or have suffered due to the massive war crimes carried out by the Pakistan army then. Many Bengalis even call 25 March as the “Genocide Day”.
One such well documented story is about a little girl Amina, who lived in the rural villages of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and was hunted down by the Pakistani army officials. The 16-year-old Amina survived the brutality carried out on her by the officials of the Pakistani army. But not many were as fortunate as her to have survived to tell the horrific tales.
Another well documented horrific tale of Pakistani army’s atrocity came from a small village in Bangladesh called Sohagpur where even today many call it as the village of widows as on one fateful night of July 1971, a group of Pakistani armymen along with their local collaborators raided the village and killed 167 men and raped over 100 women. Even today, some 50 plus women who have been eyewitness to this gory crime stand in court in Bangladesh to testify.
According to the submissions by these women, within half an hour the mob led by then Pakistani army and a local named Kamaruzzaman killed 164 men and made these women widows. They said that it was done to ensure that their screams will silence the other freedom fighters who were fighting for the liberation of Bangladesh.
A detailed report published by a well-known Pakistani journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas, in June 1971, highlighted how he saw Pakistani army search door-to-door in the Bangladeshi neighbourhoods of rural villages and checking for Hindu household and shooting the villagers dead after they found that they were not circumcised.
According to several other documented stories from the atrocities of Bangladesh in 1971 by the Pakistani army, naked bodies of girls were hanged from the Dhaka University’s Rakya Hall as a public display of what the Pakistani army was capable of doing if the people of then East Pakistan did not fall in line.
Others who have seen that dark ages also narrate that bodies of women hung upside down and bodies of men floating on ponds and rivers were a common sight. They also say that young girls were captured by the Pakistani army and used as “comfort girls” and after using them, they were killed and thrown in the fields and ponds.
In October this year, two US lawmakers, Ro Khanna and Steve Chabot introduced an eight-page resolution urging the US House of Representative to call upon the Pakistan government to apologise to the people of Bangladesh and term the atrocities by Pakistani army in 1971 against the common people and the Hindus as a “genocide”.
“The Bangladesh Genocide of 1971 must not be forgotten. With help from my Hindu constituents in Ohio’s First District, I and RO Khanna introduced legislation to recognize that the mass atrocities committed against Bengalis and Hindus, in particular, were indeed a genocide. We must not let the years erase the memory of the millions who were massacred. Recognizing the genocide strengthens the historical record, educates our fellow Americans, and lets would-be perpetrators know such crimes will not be tolerated or forgotten,” Steve Chabot tweeted in October.
Following the reports of atrocities by the Pakistani army, after the war was over in December, the then Pakistani government under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had constituted a commission called the Hamoodur Rahman Commission to investigate causes of the defeat of Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and the atrocities that were committed in the region by the Pakistani army at the time.
The report prepared by the Commission highlighted the atrocities carried out by the Pakistani army in that region during that period.
The Commission had also acknowledged that the Pakistani army officers posted there should be inflicted with the strictest of punishment for “wanton cruelty” on the people of Bangladesh.
The Hamoodur Commission report also highlighted the “excesses” committed by the Pakistani army in erstwhile East Pakistan and in its report the Commission has categorised the excesses into the following categories: (a) Excessive use of force and firepower in Dacca during the night of the 25th and 26th of March 1971 when the military operation was launched; (b) Senseless and wanton arson and killings in the countryside during the course of the “sweeping operations” following the military action; (c) Killing of intellectuals and professionals like doctors, engineers, etc., and burying them in mass graves not only during early phases of the military action but also during the critical days of the war in December 1971; (d) Killing of Bengali Officers and men of the units of the East Bengal Regiment, East Pakistan Rifles and the East Pakistan Police Force in the process of disarming them, or on pretence of quelling their rebellion; (e) Killing of East Pakistani civilian officers, businessmen and industrialists, or their mysterious disappearance from their homes by or at the instance of Army Officers performing Martial Law duties; (f) Raping of a large number of East Pakistani women by the officers and men of the Pakistan Army as a deliberate act of revenge, retaliation and torture; (g) Deliberate killing of members of the Hindu minority.