Petard. Own. By. Hoisted. My.

TCH

personally, overall my feeling is that it is a shame that what always happens in discussing the impact of war and the fall-out, and what we can try to learn, becomes a battlefield itself again, with everyone trying to quantify things (as if somehow, to a victim, it makes a difference whether everyone else was raped or you were the only one) and shy away from basically accepting that shit has happened, we’ve all contributed towards it somehow or other, we’ve all had our losses, and can we agree to learn something from it for the future constructively!

clearly not, and the way this “debate” thing is going just goes to show how we can’t even have proper dialogue. but i suppose that’s hardly suprising – given the relations between our two countries, we cant even visit easily without going through visa nightmares.

Such a waste of time and keeping up of enmities.

The limit is just one of those standard techniques pulled (suggested by security to thick student socs out on the rim) when words escalate, people conform to stereotypes, outsiders start getting interested and going in with their agendas, flexing their tired vocabulary and potentially making things messy.

I’m a glory-denier and find the whole episode akin to a double barrel shotgun through the back of the head, with several people’s fingers on the trigger. It’s only really the freshies who are into it so ritually, instrumentally and nationalistically.

Such events and future conferences are a logical avenue for them to do their thing. It’s a good idea to pull something off a little exploratory with a bit of taste in the future.

Some say that the LSE have closed it down for “fear of violence”. Although, given that the talk is pushing Pakistani Army version of events which is supported by the Islamists, I wonder whether this is an overreaction on the part of the LSE.

I grew up in Pakistan and only really found out about the genocide after reading Hitchens and to a lesser extent Midnight’s Children.

As you say though, the most depressing part is the fact that British Pakistani’s continue to believe the myth of genocide denial.

Most probably Japan is slowely reverting.. Picking up Japanese secrity umbrella might be getting too expensive for the Americans, but still I think the Japanese did more soul searching on their own history and atrocities than most ….

Sudeep, I wonder what Ms. Bose has to say about that.

Rape is the way of a coward, and military history is replete with cowards.

Also, even if somehow one can gloss over the rapes in Bangladesh, what about the human rights abuses that led to one of the largest refugee population ever ? [10 million Bangladeshi refugees in India].

You’re absoloutely right, reflection of one’s atrocities isn’t something any nation does well, it takes a lot, perhaps even the need to elevate the human spirit from that all familiar fundamentalism that is called nationalism. Japan I think does a pretty good job compared to most, given that they have forsaken the right to bear arms and commit violence on the world. I don’t think this is just because of the post-WW2 settlement, but comes from the Japanese people’s own abhorrence of its history as you say, and the even more horrific violence committed against its own people by an external power, and now a search for peace dominates its identity as a nation.

People will always try to deny this (witness the right wingers in Japan who try to ignore or downplay the atrocities carried out in China and Korea by the Imperial Army), and so it is important that they are always challenged and repudiated for their denial. In the face of such reactionary wickedness and denial, the righteous will always speak truth to such moral emptiness and blackest cynicism.

The Pakistani establishment has never made any kind of real gesture of self-examination. The stories go that in the salons of Lahore and Karachi the genocide and rapes were talked about with pride, and that the pure soldiers of Pakistan would improve the gene pool of the ‘black Bengali monkeys’ by raping the women there. Worst of all, in Pakistani eyes, they deserved their fate because the Bengalis had proved themselves to be only slightly more evolved than apes by reverting to type by wanting independance and being ‘Hindus’; simply because they fought for Bengali language and culture against the Pakistani hegemony an dthe Islamist ideology that sought to strangle them.

What is most astonishing is how this denial is carried on by British Pakistanis, who also seek to deny, downplay, and revise the truth. And I think that is because the germ of the Jamaat-e-Islaami mentality is still strong within them, and anyone who dares to betray Pakistani sensibility on any issue (and Pakistanis in Britain have appointed themselves guardian of the Ummah), still ignites the darkest resentment and outrage and violence in them.

After all, Pakistan, a nation supposedly set up to protect the Muslims of the subcontinent, is singlehandedly responsible for the biggest mass slaughter of Muslims (and Hindus) in post independance history.

And that blows the myths of the Ummah and Pakistani supremacy clear out of the water. And that causes such deep pain for those in so much denial. And that is why this posting by Sid is so important, and why the denial by British Pakistanis must be forever exposed, and why the reactionary politics of the Jamaat-e-Islaami and ‘Ummah’ hypocrites must forever be resisted.

On whether or not to stop her from speaking … Interestingly, a lot of Pakistani people I speak to were not even aware that the genocide took place, it’s kinda like a silence that those in the know (i.e elites in military knew but stopped talking about..). Not too dissimilar from pre-apartheid struggles in the South Africa when for ages loads of well meaning white South Africans didn’t realise that atrocities were being cimmitted under their noses and by their leaderships. So from this point of view anything that highlights the genocide is good for me, even from a problematic a standpoint as Bose, and as someone said earlier, let Bose defend her views.

More here: http://opendemocracy.net/blog/zohra_moosa/when_the_state_rapes

The rape of Bengali women and girls by the Pakistani army during 1971 is quite well documented. It is estimated that anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 women were raped. This is not an estimate put forward by Susan Brownmiller. Brownmiller in her book was only citing the estimates given by the Red Cross, Planned Parenthood, the Bangladesh government, rape counselors and doctors who converged on Bangladesh after the war, Mother Teresa, etc. It is estimated that anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 women and girls became pregnant because of the campaign of genocidal rape. Many international teams converged on Bangladesh to perform abortions, some of the war babies were adopted by foreigners, and unfortunately many women committed infanticide or suicide also. Others raped women and girls had also been killed by the Pakistan army.

Over 10 million refugees fled Bangladesh during 1971 to escape the Pakistan army, while an additional 30 million fled their homes within Bangladesh. That number amounts to over half the population of Bangladesh at the time. These refugees provided numorous eyewitness accounts of the rape and killings. Western news reporters reported on the many women who were found, naked with their heads shaved, in Pakistani barracks and cantonments after the war. The women were kept naked and with their head shaved to prevent escape and to prevent suicide. In fact, over 500 such women were found in the Dhaka cantonment at Pakistani General Niazi’s own headquarters. You can read news reports of the discovery by western reporters of captive rape victims in magazines such as Time and in most western newspapers from the time. Niazi, after the war, acknowledged that the Pakistan army had raped, but he blamed General Tikka Khan (his predecessor in Bangladesh) for the brutality. He maintained that after he took over, rape only occurred because his troops were disobeying his orders.

The American Consul General in Dhaka during 1971, Archer Blood, also reported on the raping and killing of Bengali women and girls during the early stages of the war. He sent vivid telegrams to the State Department expressing his shock at the killings and the rapes. You can find these declassified telegrams online at the National Security Archives at George Washington University.

After the war, the Bangladeshi government had begun a survey of the killings and the rape. By March 1972, an incomplete tally from the 18 districts of Bangladesh showed over 89,000 women raped, about 1.25 million people killed, over 80,000 skulls and skeletons discovered, and over 2000 slaughterhouses and mass graves found.

Notwithstanding Ms. Bose’s revisionism, there is overwhelming evidence (in eyewitness accounts, in newspaper reports, in the work of rape counselors and abortion clinics, in accounts from charitable organizations such as Mother Teresa’s centers, Red Cross, Planned Parenthood, etc.) of genocidal rape by the Pakistan military during 1971.