OSINFO - Open Sources Information

From: With A Grain of Salt!

Posted: 12 Jan 2008 03:29 AM CST

I am always curious about one historical anomaly. Why is the Bangladeshi Genocide never considered in the same light as that of Rwanda, Darfur, Southern Sudan, Congo, Cambodia or other genocides? Why does it not even get a fraction of the attention paid to the Palestinian Question, the Kosovo Question, the Lebanese Question or a host of other minority based problems? I can only point to four reasons why this never hit the headlines. First is that the genocide was carried out by an American Ally. Second, the country never was part of the American Interest. Third, it was carried out by Muslims on other fellow Muslims. Fourth, both Bangladesh and Pakistan did not really show much interest in pushing for this to be resolved. Between these four issues, nobody cared or even still cares about the Bangladeshi genocide.

But then, I am biased and I have to admit that right off the bat. I am a Hindu, and my roots are from Bangladesh (my father was a refugee from erstwhile East Pakistan many moons ago). So while Hindus were targeted solely for being Hindus, Muslims were targeted for being intellectuals or just wanting their rights, so I am connected to Bangladesh by virtue of language, cuisine, family, history, culture, geography, religion and a whole lot more. I know fully well that Hindus have been significantly and seriously ethnically cleansed from Bangladesh (and from Pakistan and from Kashmir) but they do not matter in the greater scheme of things of the international and the national grand Poo-Bahs. Nobody cares much for them. One of my childhood memories is about the 1971 Bangladeshi refugees fighting over left over food thrown into garbage bins but let us not go there for now. So this is a topic which is dear to my heart and I might be a bit more emotional than normal and I really don’t want to do an Alex Haley of Roots fame here.

Having said that, the history of the 1971 war and genocide is pretty well known and I do not want to reiterate it here. I quote from the report by the International Commission of Jurists here: “a campaign of genocide involved. . . the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including women and children and the poorest and weakest members of the community; the attempt to exterminate or drive out of the country a large part of the Hindu population; the arrest, torture and killing of Awami League activists and students, professionals, business men and other potential leaders among the Bengalis; the raping of women; the destruction of villages and towns.”

According to an excellent and thought provoking recent paper by Donald Beacher ('The politics of genocide scholarship : the case of Bangladesh', Patterns of Prejudice, 2007, 41:5, 467 – 492)many scholars bluntly even denied that any genocide took place. He says that compared to the Cambodian Genocide where a similar number of people were killed, "no ideological or partisan faction in the United States has stood to gain much from the study of the Bangladesh genocide." Think about it, Pakistan, that rogue country responsible for this genocide is an ally of USA!
It is still ruled by the same Pakistani Army, which is very much supporting the so-called “War on Terror”. Pakistan is still the primary base of most of the terrorists, they were either trained, educated, born in or have links to Pakistan. This “land of the pure” (an ironical name for Pakistan) was responsible. It has lost effective control over large swathes over its public and real life space to the fundamentalists. It has carried out massacres (some say it's also genocide, but that’s a bit debatable) in Baluchistan and Karachi. And this is a USA ally! So why on earth would American politicians, media or academics be interested in investigating it any further (specially compared to the Cambodian Genocide)?

• READ FULL POST HERE…