Seasons of organized murder
Syed Badrul Ahsan appreciates a new work on 1971
.M.A. Hasan understands the course of history in Bangladesh because he has been intimately involved with it. He lost his brother in the War of Liberation. And he recognizes the pernicious role played in this country by the defeated forces of 1971. It then becomes easier to comprehend the zeal and dedication he has put into the War Crimes Fact Finding Commission, the objective being the presentation of a definitive history of the genocide pursued by Pakistan in 1971.
It will be easily to put away Beyond Denial as merely one more among the books that have been written on the Bangladesh struggle over the past four decades and more. And yet there is the proper caveat: ignoring Hasan's work would be tantamount to denying the course of history. That is because unlike so many other researchers or writers in the study of Bangladesh's history, Hasan brings into his pursuit of war crimes and their perpetrators clear, unambiguous analytical details of the killings that occurred in 1971. Of the handful of Liberation War scholars who have emerged in these past many years with their accounts of history, Hasan is one. Indeed, one of the more powerful points behind the need to prosecute Bangladesh's war criminals has been made by Hasan. He has chosen not to forgotten.
There are societies that do not forget the past. The ceaseless pursuit of Nazi war criminals around the world has always been a useful message for the world --- that criminality can only go up to a point and no more. Successive governments in Japan have regularly faced flak from such nations as China and the Koreas over the issue of Japanese prime ministers visiting Yasukuni, where a number of the influential figures of wartime Japan convicted as war criminals lie buried. The essential truth about collective criminality, as witnessed in Khmer Rouge Cambodia and 1994 Rwanda, is that it is not easy looking away from past misdemeanours. And what Pakistan's soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators did in 1971 was in flagrant breach of political norms. Coming down on a restive nation, that too its own, in full force is a premeditated assault that inevitably leads to casualties. And that is precisely what happened in East Pakistan in 1971.
And it is a recapitulation of that history that Hasan, with Tom Deegan, has on offer for readers. Those who were around during the nine long months of the war --- and obviously Hasan was among them --- will recognize in this narrative the old familiar images and smells of a terrible war that left three million Bengalis dead. On the face of it, Hasan does not throw up any new or enlightening findings on the war. It is history as we have known it, as we have seen it take shape in our land and deep inside our sensibilities. A study of history becomes a pointless affair if it has no place for individual or collective sensibilities. In Beyond Denial, Hasan reminds readers, especially at a time when Bangladesh's people have finally an opportunity of dispensing justice in the matter of the war crimes committed in 1971, that any narrative of the history of the war must necessarily come with huge doses of pain.
That said, any remembrance of old pain must not do anything that threatens to reduce the process of justice to a condition where the entirety of the war crimes trial might lose meaning. Sarmila Bose, in her recent book on 1971, quite turned away from the truth in Dead Reckoning, ending up embarrassingly as a denier of history. Beyond Denial sets out in meticulous detail the sequence of circumstances that pushed Bengalis into war against Pakistan, with special emphasis. A powerful case for justice over the war crimes issue is made in the section (in the book), 'The Slaughter of Muslims and Non-Muslims':
'Amir Ahmed Chowdhury, Principal at Mymensingh Mukul Niketan (high school) became a victim of the Pakistani torture campaign. A few soldiers and para-militaries grabbed him at his home and dragged him away. Two soldiers tied his hands and legs together and put him in a deep pit. They then stoned him with broken bricks and pelted him periodically like this all day. After this torture he was presented to Brigadier Kadir Khan for interrogation. He was kept hanging upside down from the branch of a tree with his hands tied tightly together. Periodic kicking and beating went on throughout the following day. After many hours of torture he was stripped naked and left by the side of the Brahmaputra River for the whole night. . .'
That is only the beginning of Chowdhury's nightmare, as it is of a whole nation. And it is not a sudden happening or a desperate response by the Pakistan military to the growing crisis in the province. The reality lay in Operation Searchlight, a military programme that began to be drawn up within weeks of the general election which placed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League within reach of power in Pakistan. The decision to kill Bengalis came long before conditions turned explosive in early March. To suggest that the crackdown of 25 March was a reaction to Bengali violence would be a lie. And Hasan proceeds to an enumeration of the historical details that sum up the Pakistani regime's well thought-out assault on the Bengalis. The various chapters in the work speak volumes about the nature of the atrocities. Hasan throws up examples of the genocide as also the shame of what he describes as 'the greatest violation of women in history'.
The writer means to serve up evidence of the war crimes committed in 1971 and this he does with finesse, dealing with facts in disparate sections rather than lumping everything together and so losing sight of the overall objective of the exercise. History and the courts, the writer appears to suggest, need hard evidence of crime before the process of justice can be set rolling. And evidence was there in plenty, as homes and villages were put to the torch by the army and its cohorts. Hasan recreates the mindset of the Pakistan army. It respects no one and it is ashamed of nothing, which is why it is not shy about murdering academics and students of Dhaka University in March 1971. Hindus were a special target. In the chapter, An Account of Events at Dhaka University, the writer notes:
'The ISI and military intelligence, under General Rao Farman Ali, identified students from the different halls, along with the Hindu students of Jagannath Hall, as the pioneers and instigators of these movements which they despised because it challenged their rule and their perceptions of the state . . .'
That a genocide occurred in Bangladesh, that the Pakistan army and its local murder squads organized the killings and the tens of thousands of rape in the occupied country, is backed up by evidence that Hasan has marshalled over time. The research which has gone into the work has been meticulous, to a point where the case for Bangladesh, every time the atrocities of the 1971 war become a matter of public discussion, can be presented on the foundations of the strong and secure evidence underpinning this work.
In collecting and collating information on the genocide, M.A. Hasan does not forget to re-acquaint his readers with the chronology of events that were to redraw the map of the subcontinent in 1947 and then, even further, in 1971. History does not forget. And men do not forgive.
The evidence of genocide, the very enormity of it, is out there.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, The Daily Star
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