Islamic Genocide of Bengal 1971

All India Muslim League was founded in Bengal,
Pakistan Resolution was forwarded and presented by
Late. Maulvi Fazle Haq but his name is not on the
Minar-e-Pakistan, Lahore. The vote of Bengalis was 62%
for Pakistan. In a memorable book by Late Qudratullah
Shahab "Shahabnama", he mentioned that during a
meeting of a cabinet in Karachi the then Federal
Capital of Pakistan when a Bengali Minister asked for
some senatory [WC/TOILET] for the Pakistan Secretariat
in Dhaka, a member from West Pakistan said, come on
Shahab Bengalis are used to use Banana Orchards as a
toilet. Another thorough gentleman Police Officer from
Punjab M.A.K Chaudary was being posted as IG Police in
East Pakistan he went to senior colleague of his and
asked what should he do the senior colleague answered
take Blue Eyed Pathans with you to East Pakistan so
the next generation of Bengalis are born with Blue
Eyes {from his book Martial Law Kay Siyasi Andaz by
M.A.K Chaudary}.

Case Study:Islamic Genocide in Bengal, 1971.
A summary

The Islamic mass killings in Bengal (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 murder which aimed at killing
millions of Bengalis, and likely succeeded in doing
so.

The background

East and West Pakistan were forged in the cauldron of
independence for the Indian sub-continent, ruled for
two hundred years by the Christian British. Despite the attempts
of Mahatma Gandhi and others to prevent division along
religious and ethnic lines, the departing British Christians and
various Indian politicians pressed for the creation of
two states, one Hindu-dominated (India), the other
Muslim-dominated (Pakistan). The partition of India in
1947 was one of the great tragedies of the century.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in religious and
sectarian violence and military clashes, as Hindus were forced to
flee
to India and Muslims to Pakistan -- though large
minorities remained in each country.
The arrangement proved highly unstable, leading to
three major wars between India and Pakistan, and very
nearly a fourth fullscale conflict in 1998-99.
(Kashmir, divided by a ceasefire line after the first
war in 1947, became one of the world's most
intractable trouble-spots.) Not the least of the
difficulties was the fact that the new state of
Pakistan consisted of two " Islamic wings," divided by hundreds
of miles of Indian territory and a gulf of ethnic
identification. Over the decades, particularly after
Pakistani pseudo-democracy was stifled by a military
dictatorship (1958), the relationship between East and
West became progressively more corrupt and
neo-colonial in character, and opposition to West
Pakistani domination grew among the Bengali
population.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

Catastrophic floods struck Bangladesh in August 1970,
and the regime was widely seen as having botched (or
ignored) its relief duties. The disaster gave further
impetus to the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman. The League demanded regional autonomy for East
Pakistan, and an end to military rule. In national
elections held in December, the League won an
overwhelming victory across Bengali territory.
On February 22, 1971 the Islamic 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 Islamic 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." (Robert Payne,
Massacre [1972], p. 50.) On March 25 the Islamic genocide was
launched. The university in Dacca was attacked and
students and teachers exterminated in their hundreds.Islamic death
squads
roamed the streets of Dacca, killing some 7,000 people
in a single night. It was only the beginning. "Within
a week, half the population of Dacca had fled, and at
least 30,000 people had been killed. Chittagong, too,
had lost half 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 Pakistani Islamic military invasion." (Payne, Massacre, p. 48.)
Ten million
refugees fled to India, overwhelming that country's
resources and spurring the eventual Indian military
intervention. (The population of Bangladesh/East
Pakistan at the outbreak of the genocide was about 75
million.)
On April 10, the surviving leadership of the Awami
League declared Bangladesh independent. The Mukhta
Bahini (liberation forces) were mobilized to confront
the West Pakistani army. They did so with increasing
skill and effectiveness, utilizing their knowledge of
the terrain and ability to blend with the civilian
population in classic guerrilla fashion. By the end of
the war, the tide had turned, and vast areas of
Bangladesh had been liberated by the popular
resistance.

The Islamic gendercide against Bengali men

The war against the Bengali population proceeded in
classic gendercidal fashion. According to Anthony
Mascarenhas, "There is no doubt whatsoever about the
targets of the genocide":
They were: (1) The Bengali militarymen of the East
Bengal Regiment, the East Pakistan Rifles, police and
para-military Ansars and Mujahids. (2) The Hindus --
"We are only killing the men; the women are to produce
Islamic Pak-Banla babies and children
to be raised as citizens loyal to Islam and Pakistan.
We are soldiers not fools to kill them ..."
I was to hear in Comilla [site of a major military
base] [Comments R.J. Rummel: "One would think that
murdering an unarmed man was a heroic act" (Death By
Government, p. 323)] (3) The Awami Leaguers -- all
office bearers and volunteers down to the lowest link
in the chain of command. (4) The students -- college
and university boys and some of the more militant
girls. (5) Bengali intellectuals such as professors, doctors,poets
and teachers whenever damned by the army as
"militant." (Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangla
Desh [Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1972(?)], pp.
116-17.)
Mascarenhas's summary makes clear the linkages between
gender and social class (the "intellectuals,"
"professors," "teachers," "doctors","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.
Bengali man and boys massacred
by the Islamic 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; no Begali male was to be left alive to to
reproduce more Begalis. Bengali Women, in accordance with the
Islamic principles, were Pakistani sex-slaves, and it was their duty
to reproduce Islamic Pakistani babies, of Pakistani soldiers, of
course. ." Especially "during the
first phase" of the genocide, he writes, "young
able-bodied males were the victims of indiscriminate
killings." ("Genocide in Bangladesh," in Totten et
al., Century of Genocide, p. 298.) 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."
(Death By Government, p. 329.) Rummel describes (p.
323) 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 Dacca 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. (Payne, Massacre [Macmillan, 1973], p.
55.)
Strikingly similar and equally hellish scenes are
described in the case-studies of Islamic genocide in Armenia
and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.

Atrocities against Bengali women

As was also the case in Armenia and Nanjing, Bengali
women were targeted for gender-selective atrocities
and abuses, notably gang sexual assault and
rape/murder, from the earliest days of the Pakistani
Islamic genocide. Indeed, despite (and in part because of) the
overwhelming targeting of males for mass murder, it is
for the systematic brutalization of women that the
"Rape of Bangladesh" is best known to western
observers.
In her ground-breaking book, Against Our Will: Men,
Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller likened the 1971
events in Bangladesh to the Japanese rapes in Nanjing
and German rapes in Russia during World War II. "...
200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets
of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped.
Eighty percent of the raped women were Moslems,
reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and
Christian women were not exempt (they were usually murdered soon
after the gang-rapes). ... Hit-and-run rape
of large numbers of Bengali women was brutally simple
in terms of logistics as the Pakistani Islamic regulars swept
through and occupied the tiny, populous land ..." (p.
81).
Typical was the description offered by reporter Aubrey
Menen of one such assault, which targeted a
recently-married woman:
Two [Pakistani Muslim soldiers] went into the room that had
been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed
behind with the family, one of them covering them with
his gun. They heard a barked order, and the
bridegroom's voice protesting. Then there was silence
until the bride screamed. Then there was silence
again, except for some muffled cries that soon
subsided. In a few minutes one of the soldiers came
out, his uniform in disarray. He grinned to his
companions. Another soldier took his place in the
extra room. And so on, until all the six had raped the
belle of the village. Then all six left, hurriedly.
The father found his daughter lying on the string cot
unconscious and bleeding. Her husband was crouched on
the floor, kneeling over his vomit. (Quoted in
Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 82.)
"Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to
beauty," Brownmiller writes. "Girls of eight and
grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually
assaulted ... Pakistani Muslim soldiers had not only violated
Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of
hundreds and held them by force in their military
barracks for nightly use." Some women may have been
raped as many as eighty times in a night (Brownmiller,
p. 83). How many died from this atrocious Islamic treatment,
and how many more women were murdered as part of the
generalized campaign of destruction and slaughter, can
only be guessed at (see below).
Despite government efforts at amelioration, the
torment and persecution of the survivors continued
long after Bangladesh had won its independence:
Rape, abduction and forcible prostitution during the
nine-month war proved to be only the first round of
humiliation for the Bengali women. Prime Minister
Mujibur Rahman's declaration that victims of rape were
national heroines was the opening shot of an
ill-starred campaign to reintegrate them into society
-- by smoothing the way for a return to their husbands
or by finding bridegrooms for the unmarried [or
widowed] ones from among his Mukti Bahini freedom
fighters. Imaginative in concept for a country in
which female chastity and purdah isolation are
cardinal principles, the "marry them off" campaign
never got off the ground. Few prospective bridegrooms
stepped forward, and those who did made it plain that
they expected the government, as father figure, to
present them with handsome dowries. (Brownmiller,
Against Our Will, p. 84.)
How many died?
The number of dead in Bangladesh in 1971 was almost
certainly well into seven figures. It was one of the
worst genocides of the World War II era, outstripping
Rwanda (800,000 killed) and probably surpassing even
the Islamiic Indonesia (1 million to 1.5 million killed in
1965-66). As R.J. Rummel writes,
The human death toll over only 267 days was
incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen
districts some incomplete statistics published in
Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the
Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca,
150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in
Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen
districts the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an
incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows
the final toll. Some estimates of the democide
[Rummel's "death by government"] are much lower -- one
is of 300,000 dead -- but most range from 1 million to
3 million. ... The Pakistani army and allied Islamic volunteers.
the Jamaat i Islami's Al-Shamas, Al-Badar paramilitary groups killed
about one out of every
sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every
twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East
Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan
is annualized over the years the Yahya' Islamic martial law
regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971),
then this one regime was more lethal than that of the
Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan
under the military (even through World War II).
(Rummel, Death By Government, p. 331.)
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 Bengalis killed (400,000 and 3
million, respectively); if we accept that half as many
women were killed as were raped; and if we double that
number for 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 Islamic 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 religiously organized massacres conducted by sophisticated
Islamic staff officers, who knew exactly what they were doing.
Muslim soldiers, sent out to kill Bengali peasants,
went about their work as mechanically and efficiently
as Islamic Arab armies of the early Islam,
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." (Payne, Massacre, p. 29.)
There is no doubt that the Islamic mass killing in Bangladesh
was among the most carefully and centrally planned of
modern genocides. A cabal of five Pakistani Islamic generals,
under the careful planning of the evil Islamic ISI (the Inter
Services Intelligence)
orchestrated the events: President Yahya Khan, General
Tikka Khan, chief of staff General Pirzada, security
chief General Umar Khan, and intelligence chief
General Akbar Khan. The U.S. government, long
supportive of the Islamic military rule in Pakistan, supplied some
\\$3.8 million in military equipment to the
dictatorship after the onset of the genocide, "and
after a government spokesman told Congress that all
shipments to Yahya Khan's regime had ceased." (Payne,
Massacre, p. 102.)
The Islamic genocide and gendercidal atrocities were also
perpetrated by lower-ranking officers and ordinary
soldiers. These "willing executioners" were fuelled by
an abiding anti-Bengali racism, especially against the
Hindu minority. "Bengalis were often compared with
monkeys and chickens. Said Pakistan General Niazi, 'It
was a low lying land of low lying people.' The Hindus
among the Bengalis were as Jews to the Nazis: scum and
vermin that [should] best be exterminated. As to the
Moslem Bengalis, they were to live only on the
sufferance of the soldiers: any infraction, any
suspicion cast on them, any need for reprisal, could
mean their death. And the soldiers were free to kill
at will. The journalist Dan Coggin quoted one Punjabi
captain as telling him, 'We can kill anyone for
anything. We are accountable to no one.' This is the
arrogance of Power." (Rummel, Death By Government, p.
335).
During the War, shiploads of Bengali girls were shipped to
Pakistan; they were kept in Attock Fort, and were their to
please the sexual fanacies of the very Islamic Pakistani army.

The aftermath

On December 3, India under Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi, seeking to return the millions of Bengali
refugees and seize an opportunity to weaken its
perennial military rival, finally launched a fullscale
intervention to crush West Pakistani forces and secure
Bangladeshi independence. The Pakistani Islamic army,
demoralized by long months of guerrilla warfare,
quickly collapsed. On December 16, after a final
genocidal outburst, the Pakistani Islamic regime agreed to an
unconditional surrender. Awami leader Sheikh Mujib was
released from detention and returned to a hero's
welcome in Dacca on January 10, 1972, establishing
Bangladesh's first independent parliament.
In a brutal bloodletting following the expulsion of
the Pakistani army, perhaps 150,000 people were
murdered by the vengeful victors. (Rummel, Death By
Government, p. 334.) The trend is far too common in
such post-genocidal circumstances (see the
case-studies of Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,
and the Soviet POWs). Such largescale reprisal
killings also tend to have a gendercidal character,
which may have been the case in Bangladesh: Jahan
writes that during the reprisal stage, "another group
of Bengali men in the rural areas -- those who were
coerced or bribed to collaborate with the Pakistanis
-- fell victims to the attacks of Bengali freedom
fighters." ("Genocide in Bangladesh," p. 298; emphasis
added.)
None of the generals involved in the genocide has ever
been brought to trial, and all remain at large in
Pakistan and other countries. Gen.Tikka Khan was
appointed as Governor of Punjab by the very Islamic-socialist
Pakistan People's Party.Gen. Yahya Khan was buried with dignity.
Several movements have
arisen to try to bring them before an international
tribunal (see Bangladesh links for further
information).
Political and military upheaval did not end with
Bangladeshi independence. Rummel notes that "the
massive bloodletting by all parties in Bangladesh
affected its politics for the following decades. The
country has experienced military coup after military
coup, some of them bloody, not underestimating the
role of the evil Pakistani Islamic ISI.." (Death By Government, p.
334.)
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