HELAL MOHIUDDIN: THE Bangladesh genocide of 1971 remained largely unrecognised internationally. The acts of mass killing by the Pakistani military undoubtedly bear every sign of genocide. The intensity and magnitude of the massacre committed between March 26 and December 16, 1971, match every definitional criterion of the UN Declarations and other definitions. The Genocide Watch indicators, especially Gregory Stanton’s eight signs of genocide, are vividly present in the patterns and forms of Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh in 1971. This utterance is repetitive. It is, at this juncture, worth reflecting afresh on why the Bangladesh massacre did not yet receive recognition in the global human rights circle as a case of genocide. To set the context, I am sharing a glimpse of my personal experience overseas.
In 2015, I was serving in a provincial government position in Manitoba, Canada. My responsibility as a multiculturalism outreach coordinator provided me the opportunity to look into the advocacy and activism foci of diverse immigrant communities in Canada. Soon I learned a lesson that most immigrant communities pursue their human rights causes as a priority in the Canadian context. Such advocacy and activism provide them with familiarity and prominence in Canadian society. Most welfare economies of Europe, namely Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland, and the Netherlands, consider the diaspora communities a bridge between them and the countries of origin of the diaspora members. The welfare economies generously patronise diasporic advocacy initiatives on human rights, the rule of law, humanism, voluntarism, community stewardship, and other positive changes in their countries of origin.
I observed that the mass of Canadians displayed immense enthusiasm to learn about cross-border human rights restoration projects by the diaspora. They are generally welcoming and compassionate about extending help and joining hands with the diaspora change advocates for human rights promotion causes. Unfortunately, the Bangladeshi diaspora community tended to remain seclusive. Their activities largely remained confined to the petty party-political lines of the ruling and opposition parties in Bangladesh. I observed scanty, disjointed, and sporadic attempts to establish diasporic visibility in Canadian society to align with the country’s social welfare values toward marshalling human rights causes universally.
At a point, I noticed that the Punjabis, the Tamils, the Ukrainians, the Eritreans, the Ethiopians, the Iraqi Yazidis, the Armenians, the Congolese, the Rwandans, and the Sudanese people became successful in opening up many platforms to voice their opinions on the perpetrations of human rights violations in their origins. The campaigns of the human rights activists toward attaining state proclamations on many genocidal events received recognition. I learned that the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide remained largely unknown and unacknowledged in Canada. During 2013–2015, I participated in several programmes of diverse human rights activists’ circles. I noticed that they often mentioned many genocides in discussion forums without mentioning Bangladesh even once. In those forums, I reminded the participants that the genocide in Bangladesh was a far more horrific example of crimes against humanity. Audiences often admitted their ignorance. Some looked at me in surprise, awe and disbelief.
When the Canadian Museum for Human Rights started formal operation in 2014, it listed most genocides of the last century except the Bangladesh genocide for archiving and display. I contacted the museum researchers to enlist the Bangladesh genocide with due significance. In 2017, Dr Kawser Ahmed, a fellow Canadian citizen, and I formed the Conflict and Resilience Research Institute, Canada to pursue Rohingya refugee studies, genocide research and advocacy mission. The Conflict and Resilience Research Institute, Canada campaign to include the Bangladesh genocide went on. Recently, the newly formed Bangabandhu Centre for Bangladesh Studies in Winnipeg, the Bangladesh High Commission in Canada, and the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh came forward to convince the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to partner in showcasing the Bangladesh genocide. I also learned about a few sporadic colloquia attempts to discuss the Bangladesh genocide in the US and Europe. Upon collecting excerpts from Bangladesh genocide symposiums and popular discourses, I revealed a few glitches that caused the global pacification of the Bangladesh genocide. The following cursory discussion sheds some light on the reasons behind the global-scale pacification of the Bangladesh genocide.
Reductionist advocacy approach
GENOCIDE, as defined in Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, is ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ The Bangladesh delegations from academia and the liberation museum circles seemed to have focused too much on the definition. Their contributions in forums were reduced to a single argument — the Bangladesh massacre meets most definitional clauses. The position evolved around ‘intent to destroy’ and ‘deliberate infliction’ in general.
The approach was too simplistic and reductionist. It is now established wisdom in genocide studies that ‘intent’ is one of the most subjective words that hardly retains an objectively verifiable basis. Photographs, journalistic accounts, and wartime memoirs are often not considered credible pieces of evidence by objectivity-hungry war and genocide historians in proving ‘intent’ or ‘deliberate act’. Such accounts are frequently suspected of containing potentially tainted information — biased, fictionalised, fantasised, and individualised perspectives marred by inaccurate readings and transcriptions. The Bangladesh delegation also tended to use Gregory H Stanton’s indicators of genocide, ie, digging up the mass graves, burning the bodies, covering up the evidence and intimidating witnesses, denial of perpetration, and blaming the victims. However, now is the time for new and creative approaches to campaigning and advocacy. Using other scholars’ indicators may be helpful, but it is not sufficient to gain ‘genocide’ recognition from global actors and activists. A newer paradigmatic shift is needed in this regard.
Futile debate over genocide victim figure
DOES the number of people killed really matter to prove genocide? The straightforward answer is ‘no’. The genocide of the aboriginal Tasmanians (which is commonly known as the Black War) constituted only 400–1,000 deaths. It was recognised as genocide. Despite the lack of a specific number, the annihilation of the Uighurs in China and the Yazidis in Iraq were recognised as two genocide victim communities. Although the number of deaths did not reach an average of 7,000, the Maori massacre, the Selkman extermination, and the Haitian killings of the 19th century received ‘genocide’ recognition. In short, most ‘genocide’ recognitions did not depend on the number of killings. The massacres against Bosnians, Parsis, and Rohingyas killed between 10,000 and 44,000 people. The average number of people killed in more than 90 per cent of all globally recognised genocides is around 150,000. We appear to have forgotten that the gravity of cruelty in perpetration is more important to global communities than death numbers. We rather displayed a never-stoppable tendency to engage a nationalistic energy in clearing up the global confusion about the accurate number of genocide victims in our independence war.
Advocacy campaigns that prioritise establishing the number of deaths over all else are unnecessary activism at this point. The debate is likely to continue for many decades until the genocide researchers attain a genuine and credible accounting with solid proof. Sentiments and emotions have no place in objective historiography. According to Pakistani classified documents and war histories, only 26,000 people died during the liberation war. The Bangladeshi intelligentsia seems to lack the required intellectual muscles to disprove Pakistan’s denial of our 3-million-toll claim. Following independence, international newspapers and write-ups reported varying numbers of mass slaughters, ranging from 300,000 to three million people. However, the most commonly mentioned numbers are two to three million deaths. We still tend to refer to the unsolicited writings of Robert Payne. In 1972, Payne published The Tragedy of Bangladesh and the Phenomenon of Mass Slaughter throughout History. Most local historians in Bangladesh use a reference from page 50 of this publication, indicating that then Pakistan president Yahia Khan designed a cool-brained genocide plan to nip in the bud of Bangladesh people’s freedom struggle. The intent was evident in one of the statements he made in a meeting with the high officials of the Pakistan military in 1971. His statement was, ‘Kill 3 million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.’
The Pravda, an infamous soviet newspaper, published a feature in December 1971 mentioning the annihilation of more than 3 million people. Bangladesh newspapers — the Daily Observer, the Morning News, the Dainik Bangla, the Daily Ittefaq, Daily Purbadesh and other newspapers published in different January 1972 impressions — picked up the Pravda figure. Political scientist Rounaq Jahan also mentioned three million as genocidal victims in her piece ‘The Genocide in Bangladesh’. The chapter was published in Samuel Totten, William S Parsons and Israel W Charny’s (1995) edited anthology’ titled Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. Rudolph Joseph Rummel, a genocide researcher, is credited for his ‘estimating democide: methods and procedures’ tool, which helped grasp the genocide figure. His ‘statistics of Pakistan democide, estimates, calculation, and sources’ presents the figure of Bangladesh genocidal victims to be about 1.5 million.
Serious academicians may still doubt the accuracy of the figures, and there is no harm in that. The aggressive tendency to establish a 3-million-murder narrative religiously is rather harmful to historical accuracy-seeking practices. Verification is an integral part of history-writing tasks. Because of our limited access to the White House Papers, classified CIA documents, and Indian Wartime intelligence reports — Bangladesh’s advocacy and campaigns to attain global recognition of the massacre may not appeal to genocide scholars globally.
Missed question of pertinence
THE fundamental question is: why do we need the much-talked-about ‘genocide’ recognition? We often hear a reductionist response from the experts that the genocide recognition will provide Bangladesh the ability to ask for compensation from Pakistan. Another answer appears to be retributive. It implies that Bangladesh will seek punishment for the perpetrators under the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice jurisdiction. These positions have little appeal to international peace advocates and the human rights community. Instead, the response could be, ‘Why not?’ We need the recognition to remain faithful to history, respectful of global humanity, and committed to social justice in finding pathways to prevent future genocides in any part of the world. Such a position would affirm the universality of Bangladesh’s intent for peace in the world.
Ultra-populism, ultra-nationalism and feminisation of war victims
BOTH ultra-populism and ultra-nationalism stand against any striving for global peace. Azra Rashid, in her book titled Gender, Nationalism and Genocide in Bangladesh, took the Liberation War Museum’s archival contents for analysis. She revealed that the display of the contents is uncomfortably male-biased in depicting war heroes. On the other hand, contents displaying women victims demonstrate the sheer feminization of women’s victimhood. Besides women victims’ representation in a pitifully sympathy-seeking manner (other than attributing them as war heroes contributing through self-sacrificial measures), the contents display embeddedness bias and local petty-political inclination, ultra-populist and ultra-nationalist powerhouse intents, as well as the loose and artificial connections between the Shahbagh movements of 2013 and genocide discourses. It is worth fearing that such representations may raise more questions than answers in the minds of serious and unbiased genocide researchers.
Co-existence of dependable and undependable resources
IT IS only recently that a global narrative on Bangladesh has begun to emerge. Willem Van Schendel’s 2009 book, A History of Bangladesh, looks at history and liberation war with some emphasis on the objective inquiry of the genocide. Sarmila Bose’s much debated 2011 work, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, raised a heated debate about the number of genocidal victims. Raghavan’s 2013 study titled 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh brings some reflections on the genocide. However, his approach falters in focusing more on the glorification of the contribution of India in safeguarding Bangladesh from further turmoil. Besides these scanty efforts, there are disorganised discussions of the genocide among Bangladeshi bloggers and free-thinkers. These reflections constitute amateurish attempts. The politically motivated narratives of warring political ideologues on genocide scholarship represent narrow tunnel visions on genocide scholarship.
Absence of a global narrative in academic circle
POST-WAR Bangladesh Studies construed a limited image of three representative genres of Bangladesh’s genocide history. The first is the literary genre — personal history and accounts of wartime experience as represented in various literary works, journals, media columns, and plays. Most of these emotional and sentimental accounts represent personal viewpoints. They rarely provide objectively verifiable information worthy of archival merit. Many of them have significant art value with patriotic emblems. Journalistic texts or observer commentaries (ie, Mascarenhas 1986, Parekh 1972, reflect outsider views). The second is the aesthetic genre, which represents the wartime killing of Bangladeshi people with considerable nationalist or pseudo-socialist emotional twists. The genre comprises cinemas, dramas, and other forms of visual art. The third is the neo-populist academic genre, led by a small group of armchair political scientists and vernacular historians.
This genre presents a comparative study of government and politics, post-war experiences in nation-building, civil and military bureaucracy, and national integration (for instance, Jahan 1972, Maniruzzaman 1980, etc). These texts tend to make scanty references to genocide and human rights violations in Bangladesh. Such pedagogical efforts received considerable nationalistic backing for collecting and preserving comprehensive resources — facts and figures, souvenirs and signature elements of the liberation war. In 1982, the genre published a 15-volume series of documents. A reproduction of the same took place in 2004. The Liberation War Museum began functioning in 1996.
These initiatives provided a pulse to grassroots-level veneration and sensitiveness of the Bangladesh citizens toward the liberation war and the freedom fighters. A notable outcome of the initiatives is the establishment of the War Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh to try local collaborators for perpetrating war crimes (crimes against humanity) during the liberation war in 1971. However, the developments did not surpass the boundary of the nationally-bound narrative of patriotism and heroism of a non-military militia of the people waging guerrilla warfare against the Pakistan army and its modern and sophisticated war machinery. This popular narrative overshadowed the genocide question. It is evident in a yet-to-be-formed international fact-finding and truth and reconciliation commission on the Bangladesh genocide. Fifty years after independence, it is high time for Bangladesh’s intelligentsia to take a deeper look at the fault lines of genocide scholarship.
An innovative approach to genocide advocacy
INTERESTINGLY, there is a number of psychological studies on intuitive and innovative models of genocide remembrance. The lessons of the studies are that genocide remembrance measures must succeed to draw global attention and make world citizens think and sympathise. The intuitive, innovative, and newer displays each year need to be the most eye-catching and attention-drawing. Dry statistics fail to draw human tears, emotions, feelings and sympathy and empathy. There are examples of such attention-generating displays. In 1994, to draw the attention of the US Congress, human rights activists displayed 38,000 pairs of shoes in remembrance of 38,000 handgun deaths. In Tennessee, middle school students collected six million paper clips to create an educational display on a memorial. The intent was to visualise the gravity of the Holocaust. We surely need a paradigm shift for the Bangladesh genocide advocacy. The advocacy needs to be more visual than the occasional oral presentation here and there in a futile attempt to touch the global conscience.
Helal Mohiuddin is professor of political science and sociology, North South University.
জুমবাংলা নিউজ সবার আগে পেতে Follow করুন জুমবাংলা গুগল নিউজ, জুমবাংলা টুইটার , জুমবাংলা ফেসবুক, জুমবাংলা টেলিগ্রাম এবং সাবস্ক্রাইব করুন জুমবাংলা ইউটিউব চ্যানেলে।
