[Genocide/1971] Don Beachler: "Bangladesh: The Forgotten Genocide"

[Note from Genocide 1971 Webmaster:
The following paper was presented by the author at Biennial Conference of International Association of Genocide Scholars, June 2003. We appreciate the author’s kind permission to add this paper to this website.]

In the 1970s two Asian genocides resulted, by most estimates, in the deaths of at least 1.5 million people. In 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a campaign to repress the independence movement by Bengalis in the eastern half of the geographically separated nation. The campaign of murder, rape, and pillage that continued until the Indian Army defeated Pakistan in a brief war caused one to three million deaths. By some accounts, at least 200,000 Bengali women were raped. The International Commission of Jurists concluded that 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.”[1] The Pakistani repression ended when India defeated Pakistan in a two-week war in December 1971. East Pakistan gained independence as the new nation of Bangladesh shortly thereafter.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge seized power from the U.S. backed Lon Nol regime in April 1975. The new communist regime attempted an immediate transition to communism that included forced evacuation of urban residents to the countryside. Ethnic minorities were especially targeted for persecution. By the time the Khmer Rouge was driven from power by an invading Vietnamese army in January 1979, at least 1.5 million Cambodians had died as a result of Khmer Rouge policies.

Despite the similar death tolls, the two genocides have received very different levels of attention from scholars in the United States. Almost from the moment the Khmer Rouge took power, there has been debate about the existence of genocide in Cambodia, and subsequently about the nature of the genocide.

Writing in 1972 Kalyan Chauduri began the foreword of his book Genocide in Bangladesh by stating that, “With the present abundance, indeed surfeit of material on the tragedy of Bangladesh, a new book on the subject needs explanation.”[2] The extensive attention to the Bangladesh genocide that Chauduri noted, did not persist. While the events in what became the nation of Bangladesh received intensive media coverage in 1971, there has been little scholarly interest in the genocide since that time. Those who write about the secession crisis in South Asia in 1971 tend to ignore or pass briefly over the repressive measures imposed in East Pakistan. Little attention is paid to the Bengalis. In fact the genocide in Bangladesh attracts so little interest that a portion of this paper will demonstrate that there is substantial evidence from a variety of sources to indicate that a genocide occurred.

This paper will analyze the lack of interest in the genocide that occurred in East Pakistan in 1971. Scholarly interest in Cambodia will be contrasted with indifference to Bangladesh. Before the specific cases are examined, the issue of disparate treatment of, and selected interest in, genocides will be explored.

Some Genocides Are More Compelling Than Others: Selective Compassion and Interest

It is obvious that some killings of genocidal proportions generate a great deal more attention and interest than do others. A striking example of a neglected human catastrophe would be the depredations inflicted on the Congolese by Belgian King Leopold II as he exploited the resources of the central African land. While Leopold’s primary objective was not to eliminate the Congolese people, outright killings and the harsh conditions imposed on the indigenous people by the Belgians resulted in several million deaths. Despite the atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo, the first book length study in English on the decimation of the Congolese was published in 1998.[3]

Among genocides, the Holocaust is in a category by itself in intensity of interest. The Holocaust is the only genocide with a significant literature on why so many people are interested in it, and the ways in which this intense interest has developed over time. The Holocaust not only has a vast academic and popular literature devoted to the events of the 1930s and 1940s, but a growing literature on why so much attention is paid to it.

A striking example of the change in the status of the Holocaust in American academia is the career of the eminent Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1950s, Hilberg was told that writing a dissertation on the Holocaust was an academic death sentence.[4] Later Hilberg struggled for years to find a publisher for his book, The Destruction of the European Jews, a work that is now widely regarded as the authoritative history of the Holocaust. [5] By the 1990s, interest in the Holocaust was such that Hilberg could publish a memoir that essentially details his career as a Holocaust scholar.[6] University of Chicago Professor Peter Novick published a work that demonstrated how little interest there was in the Holocaust in the first few decades after World War II, and also attempts to explain the reasons for the very intense interest over the past 25 years.[7] Tom Segev has explored the changing significance of the Holocaust in Israeli society.[8] In a fiercely polemical work, Norman Finkelstein argues that the Holocaust has been used to justify Israel aggression, accord victim status to prosperous American Jews, and essentially extort money from Swiss banks.[9] Other recent work investigates the ways in which the Holocaust has been presented in media, museums, and historical sites.[10]

In recent years a debate has erupted over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. While ostensibly about the degree to which the Nazi effort to exterminate the European Jews was unlike any other genocide, the uniqueness debate has taken on angry tones as the argument delves into whether or not some Jewish groups have attempted to diminish attention from the suffering of groups such as the Sinti and Roma, African-Americans or Native Americans.[11] The uniqueness debate has at times reached extremely heated proportions, as some champions of other oppressed groups charge, that what they argue is an obsession with the Holocaust, leads to the exclusion of consideration for the concerns of others who were subjected to genocide.[12]

At times, genocide denial or indifference to a genocide may be a function of partisan or nationalist motivations. George Orwell asserted in his essay, “Notes on Nationalism” that the, “Nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald….Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people have escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles.” [13] In a study of genocide denial in Australia, Ben Kiernan notes the efforts of some in Australia to deny the genocide perpetrated against the Aborigines in the course of white settlement of that continent and of the genocide perpetrated by the government of Indonesia in East Timor from 1975 through 1999. Kiernan attributes these refusals in part to the reluctance of partisans of the right to support causes associated with the political left. The denial of these two genocides was also convenient for those who were supportive of the anti-communism of the Suharto regime in Indonesia and for those who wished to oppose the movement to recognize Aborigine land rights. Kiernan acknowledges that in other instances, such as Stalinist Russia or Khmer Rouge Cambodia, leftists have been reluctant to recognize the genocidal actions of communist regimes.[14]

While the Holocaust is the only genocide that has its own literature on why people are interested in it, the attention paid to other genocides varies greatly. This paper will analyze the relative disparity in attention paid to two genocides that occurred in the 1970s. As a percentage of the population killed, there is no doubt that a much greater portion of the Cambodian population was killed than in Bangladesh. If the high estimate of 3 million Bengalis killed is used, about four percent of the population of East Pakistan was killed. Estimates of deaths among the Cambodian population are generally in the 20 percent range. Despite the differences in percentages killed in the two nations, the actual numbers who perished as a result of murder and deprivation was at least as high in Bangladesh as in Cambodia. The next section of the paper will demonstrate that, despite scholarly neglect, there is considerable evidence that genocide did occur in Bangladesh in 1971.

East Pakistan in 1971: Was There A Genocide?

Given the state of the limited writing in the United States about the 1971 Bangladeshi genocide, it is necessary to look at the events there with greater care than in Cambodia, where in 2003, there is no serious claim of genocide denial.

Estimates of the number of those killed in Bangladesh in 1971 vary greatly. A low end estimate by American political scientists Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, who deny that a genocide took place in East Pakistan, is that about 300,000 were killed in the combat between factions with Bangladesh and in warfare between the Pakistani army and the rebel Mukti Bahini forces that battled for Bangladeshi independence.[15] A.M.A. Muhith, a Bangladeshi writer, estimates that about three million Bangladeshis were killed by the Pakistani Army between March 1971 and December 1971.[16] Rounaq Jahan also places the number of dead in the range of about three million.[17] In a book on democide, R.J. Rummel, estimates that about 1.5 million people were killed in Bangladesh in 1971.[18] In a survey that he acknowledges is incomplete, Kalyan Chauduri estimates that 1,247,000 Bengalis were killed in 1971.[19] Visiting Bangladesh in January of 1972, just over a month after India defeated Pakistan, journalist Sydney Schanberg reported that foreign diplomats and independent observers estimated a death toll of at least several hundred thousand and that many estimated that more than a million people were killed. Schanberg reports that these same observers indicated that if all deaths that could be attributed to the repression imposed by the Pakistani army, including the deaths among the roughly ten million refugees who fled to India and among those whose lives were disrupted inside East Pakistan, the total number of dead likely approached the three million total given by Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.[20] None of the authors provide detailed evidence for the number of deaths they project. In the United States at least there has been no significant effort to determine the number of deaths In East Pakistan from March to December of 1971.. There is, however, considerable evidence that a genocide took place in Bangladesh in 1971 despite the denials and lack of interest of American diplomats and scholars. This evidence indicates that the killings were spread across the whole of East Pakistan and that they continued during the nearly nine months that the Pakistani army waged war against both Bengali resistance fighters and the population of East Pakistan.

East Pakistan 1971: Background and the Evidence for Genocide

The tensions between East and West Pakistan that led to the crisis in 1971 cannot be recounted in detail here. Some relevant aspects of the tense relations between the geographically, ethnically, and linguistically distinct portions Pakistan from its founding in 1947 to its breakup in 1971 are relevant to the topic of this paper as they demonstrate the ethnic and nationalist concerns that often precede genocide. Unlike most modern states, East and West Pakistan were not contiguous, but separated by a thousand miles. East Pakistan as carved from the Bengali speaking region of India. The predominantly Bengali East Pakistanis believed they were not fairly represented in political and economic life. Though it was the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, Bengali was denied status as a national language until 1956. From the country’s founding, Bengalis had rioted against what they perceived to be the inferior status accorded to their language.[21]

Though East Pakistan contained a majority of the country’s population, most high ranking civil servants and military officers were from West Pakistan.[22] While a significant portion of the country’s foreign exchange was derived from jute grown in East Pakistan, it received just 35 percent of the money spent on development projects.[23] The Bengalis believed that they were an economic colony of West Pakistan.

Two events in late 1970 engendered the political crisis of 1971. In November 1970, East Pakistan was devastated by a cyclone and subsequent floods. The death toll from the natural disasters was difficult to determine, but have been estimated at 250,000 to 500,000. Bengalis believed that the central government in West Pakistan was slow to react and that its response to the catastrophe was inadequate.[24]

In December 1970, Pakistan held elections to a New Constituent Assembly that was to write a new national constitution. In these elections, the Bengali based Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a majority of the of the seats in the assembly. The ethnic divisions in Pakistani politics were starkly illustrated by the election results. The Awami League captured 167 of the 169 constituencies in East Pakistan. The League’s 167 seats gave it an absolute majority in the 313 seat new consistent assembly. The Awami league advocated a six point autonomy plan, first articulated in 1966, that would have granted the Bengalis a semi-independent status within Pakistan.[25] With its electoral victory, The Awami League was in position to enact its program and to name Sheikh Mujib Prime Minister. Neither of these outcomes was acceptable to the military elites who dominated Pakistan. On March 1, after Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, head of the Pakistan People’s Party that had won eighty constituencies in the elections, announced that his party would boycott the Assembly, Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Kahn postponed the meeting of the Assembly.

In East Bengal, the postponement of the assembly and thus, the denial of the fruits of electoral victory to the Bangladeshis, was met with mass outrage. Demonstrations were followed by widespread strikes that left East Pakistan paralyzed. At this point the Pakistani military leadership decided to quell the uprising in Bangladesh with brute force. The generals believed that the Bengalis could be quickly subdued by violence.[26]

The belief that the Bengalis would quickly be vanquished was rooted in a perception that the people of East Pakistan were culturally inferior to the West Pakistanis. Pakistani military ruler Ayub Kahn (1958-1969) explained a common view of the East Bengalis…[they] “probably belong to the very original Indian races….They have been in turn ruled by the caste Hindus, Moghuls, Pathans, or the British. In addition, they have been and still are under the considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence. As such, they have all the inhibitions of downtrodden races and they have not yet found it possible to adjust psychologically to the requirements of the new born freedom.”[27] Pakistani government and military officials perceived that Hindus had indoctrinated the Bengalis and were therefore responsible for the “aberrant” behavior exhibited by the Bengalis. Former Pakistan Prime Minister Chaudri Muhammad Ali went so far as to argue that the Awami League victory in the 1970 elections was in reality a triumph for Hindus.[28] In the midst of the Army repression in East Pakistan, Bhutto published a short book in which he claimed that, “ We have suffered almost irremediably by leaving the youth of East Pakistan to the care of Hindu teachers and professors. We have lost the present generation but we cannot afford to lose the generation of tomorrow. [29]

The desire to repress Hindu influence in East Bengal was not new. In the 1960s as part of the effort of the effort to cleanse Bengali culture of Hindu influence the works of Rabindra Nath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winning Bengali Hindu, were banned from state owned radio and television by the Pakistani government.[30]

The Pakistani elites, who wished to preserve a unified country under West Pakistani domination viewed the Bengalis as a culturally inferior people who were polluted by the practitioners of another religion. The impure majority sullied by a minority were viewed as a principal threat to national unity. As in other times and places, such considerations contributed to genocide.[31]

The notion of a malevolent Hindu influence in East Bengal was rooted in a practical political consideration as well. With Hindus removed from the population, East Bengal would lose its numerical domination in a Parliament in which seats were apportioned according to population.

A variety of sources would lead one to conclude that genocide took place in East Pakistan from March to December 1971. Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas was permitted to tour East Bengal in April 1971. His reports indicate that government policy was to eliminate the Hindus by death or flight. The comments made by Pakistani military officials in Bengal are eerily reminiscent of Nazi notions of purification and weeding out of bad elements from society. According to Mascarenhas, senior government and military officials in East Bengal stated that, “we are determined to cleanse East Pakistan once and for all of the threat of secession, even if it means killing off two million people and ruling the province as a colony for 30 years.”[32] Another officer claimed that it had reached the point where Bengali culture was in fact Hindu culture…“We have to sort them out to restore the land to the people, and the people to their faith.”[33] A major in the Pakistani army told Mascarenhas that, “This is a war between the pure and the impure… The people here may have Muslim names and call themselves Muslims. But they are Hindu at heart. We are now sorting them out…Those who are left will be real Muslims. We will even teach them Urdu.”[34]

Mascarenhas identifies the principle targets of the murder campaign in East Bengal. Singled out for murder and/or intimidation were Bengali militiamen in the East Bengal regiment and the East Pakistan Rifles; Hindus who, as have been noted, were viewed as the rulers of East Pakistan and the corrupters of the Bengali Muslims; all Awami League officers and volunteers; Students, especially college and university men and some women who were viewed as militants; and Bengali intellectuals and teachers who were regarded as militants.[35] The genocidal campaign aimed to deprive the Bangladeshis of the capacity for physical, political and intellectual resistance. It also especially targeted the allegedly corrupting Hindus, although one Pakistani officer claimed that only Hindu men were being killed.[36] As R.J. Rummel remarks, it was as if killing unarmed men were somehow virtuous. [37]

Further reports of a massacre at the University of Dhaka are available in James Michener’s interviews in Teheran with Americans who were evacuated from the East Pakistani capital. Several evacuees reported that they had seen Pakistani leaders with specific lists that had been drawn up with the names of Bengali professors who were slated for execution. They also reported seeing mass graves of students who had been killed. [38]

Mascarenhas reports that officers at the Pakistani Army’s Eastern Command headquarters in Dhaka made clear the government’s policy with regard to East Bengal. The Bengalis had shown themselves to be unreliable and should be ruled by West Pakistanis. The Bangladeshis were to be reeducated along Islamic lines. The two regions of Pakistan were to be joined by a strong religious bond. Finally, when the Hindus had been eliminated by death and flight, their property was to be distributed among the Muslim middle class.[39]

While at Comilla on East Pakistan’s eastern border with India, Mascarenhas heard officers discuss their searches for Hindus. Those Hindus apprehended were killed, while others abandoned their homes. Entire villages were burned for small acts of defiance.[40] Mascarenas’ reports of his ten day tour of East Pakistan indicate that the genocidal rhetoric expressed by many officers of the Pakistani army were not idle boasts.

Interviews conducted in early April with foreign evacuees from Chittagong, East Pakistan’s second largest city and principal port, provide further evidence that the army’s killings were not confined to the capital city. As in Dhaka, the army was said to have burned down the whole district’s flimsy homes of the poorest people who were considered to be the among the strongest supporters of independence. A Danish graduate student reported counting 400 bodies in the river. An American evacuee reported that he saw dead bodies as well as witnessing looting and arson by the Pakistani army. [41]

The Pakistani army worked to eradicate Hindu influence in East Pakistan. New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg reports that many Hindu shopkeepers were killed in Dhaka. The shops of those murdered were given to non-Bengali Muslims and others who collaborated with the occupation. Hindu temples were demolished. The campaign against Bengali culture was not confined to Hindus. Schanberg reported that automobile license plates with Bengali script were changed to English.[42] Pakistani soldiers informed Bengalis that Urdu was a more civilized tongue and they should abandon Bengali.[43]

Schanberg believed that by late June the killing was less indiscriminate. He reported that missionaries in remote regions of Bangladesh reported that massacres occurred on an almost daily basis. One missionary told Schanberg that over a thousand Hindus were killed in one day in the southern district of Barisal. According to another missionary, a meeting to effect a reconciliation was called in the northeastern Sylhet district. When a crowd gathered, troops arrived, selected 300 Hindus from the crowd, and shot them. [44]

Further evidence of the genocidal intent of the Pakistani army is provided in A.M.A. Muhith’s account of his conversations with West Pakistani officials in May and October 1971. According to Muhith, the West Pakistani argued that killing three hundred thousand or even three million Bangladeshis was justified if it would preserve the nation of Pakistan as it was constituted in 1947. Muhith also claims West Pakistani soldiers frequently compared Bangladeshi’s to monkeys or chickens.[45] General Niazi, the West Pakistani commander in East Bengal, is reported to have referred to Bangladesh as, “a low lying land, of low lying people.”[46]

Over the course of 1971, nearly 100,000 young Bengali men received military training within East Pakistan or in India and took up armed resistance against the Pakistani Army. In retaliation for guerilla activities, the Pakistani army destroyed entire areas where insurgent actions had occurred. Killing, burning, raping, and looting took place in the course of these army raids.[47]

Part of the campaign to terrorize the Bengali population involved mass rapes. Estimates of the number of women raped range from 200,000 to 400,000. Some of the victims were imprisoned in camps where they were subjected to several sexual assaults a day. Some women claimed to have been assaulted by as many as eighty men in a single day.[48] The women who had been sexually assaulted found themselves in especially dire straits in a society where female chastity was so highly prized. A post-independence campaign to find husbands for the women, who were dubbed national heroines, was largely unsuccessful.[49] The mass rape of Bengali women has received very little study and virtually all published accounts reference Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 work, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, which contains eight pages on the rapes. Bangladeshi scholar A.M.A. Muhith does note the mass rapes in his book on the 1971 crisis and claims that there were 200,000 verifiable victims of rape in East Pakistan in 1971. Muhith notes that this figure excludes those who died or refused to come forward out of fear and/or shame.[50]

While the Nixon administration showed little interest in the issue of genocide being committed in East Bengal, the atrocities were widely condemned by Democratic and Republican politicians and some newspapers. Access to accurate information was initially limited by the fact that the Pakistani government expelled foreign journalists from East Bengal early in the crisis.

On April 29, 1971 Ohio Republican Senator William Saxbe placed a letter from a constituent Dr. Jon E. Rohde in the Senate record. Dr. Rohde had served in East Bengal for three years as a physician with the USAID program. His letter contained the following accounts of what he witnessed before he was evacuated from Dhaka.…“My wife and I watched from our roof the night of March 25as tanks rolled out of the Cantonment illuminated by the flares and the red glow of the fires as the city was shelled by artillery and mortars were fired into crowded slums and bazaars...On the 29^th we stood at the Ramna Kali Bari, an ancient Hindu village, of about 250 people in the center of Dacca Ramna Race Course, and witnessed the stacks of machine gunned burning remains of men, women, and children butchered in the early morning hours of March 29...At the university area we walked through…two of the student dormitories at Dacca University shelled by the army tanks. All inmates were slaughtered.…A man who was forced to drag the bodies outside, counted one hundred three Hindu students buried there...We also saw evidence of a tank attack at Iqbal Hall where bodies were still unburied.”[51] Dr. Rohde’s assessment of the situation in East Bengal was that “…The law of the jungle prevails in East Pakistan where the mass killing of unarmed civilians, the systematic elimination of the of the intelligentsia, and the annihilation of the Hindu population is in progress.”[52]

Another American evacuated from Dhaka, Pat Sammel wrote a letter to the Denver Post that was placed in the House Record by Representative Mike McKevitt on May 11, 1971. Mrs. Sammel wrote that “We have been witness to what amounts to genocide.” The West Pakistani army used tanks, heavy artillery, and machine guns on armed civilians, killed 1,600 police while sleeping in their barracks…demolished the student dormitories at Dacca University, and excavated a mass grave for the thousands of students; they’ve systematically eliminated the intelligentsia of the country, wiped out entire villages-I could go on and on. It’s hard to believe it happened.”[53]

The willingness of members of both US political parties to place statements in the House and Senate records that were contrary to the view of events preferred by the Nixon administration at the time, indicates considerable dissent within the United States about administration policy in South Asia. Such divergence of opinion can, of course, not necessarily be read as motivated by humanitarian concern rather than geopolitical calculations. Still, there can be little doubt that information about atrocities was widely available and discussed in the United States.

Public knowledge of the events in East Bengal was not limited to the statements of members of Congress. The atrocities, the massive flow of refugees to India and the geopolitical maneuvering were all reported on extensively in the United States. A study of New York Times coverage of several instances of mass killings in the 1970s and 1980s indicates that the events in Bangladesh were reported extensively in the Times. For example the killings of the Khmer Rouge received 791 column inches in the paper in 1975, the year that the U.S. backed Lon Nol regime was displaced by the Khmer Rouge and the initial stages of the Cambodian genocide were launched. In 1971, events in Bangladesh received 690 column inches in the Times.[54]

For US diplomats writing about the nine month occupation of East Pakistan, there is very little concern about human rights violations and much heed paid to the geo-political considerations that motivated U.S. foreign policy in the region. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger, who was National Security advisor during Nixon’s first term (1969-1973), acknowledged that Pakistan’s reaction to the crisis in East Pakistan was “brutal and short sighted.”[55] At another point in his long chapter on events in the sub-continent, Kissinger states that Pakistan had unquestionably acted unwisely, brutally, and even immorally, though on a matter which under international law was clearly under its domestic jurisdiction.”[56] Despite the acknowledgement of Pakistani wrongdoing in the East, Kissinger never discusses the number of civilians killed, nor does he mention the mass rape of Bengali women in a very detailed chapter.

Even the brief expressions of disdain for Pakistani army repression in East Pakistan that Kissinger makes in his memoirs appear to be fabrications invented after the fact. In a study of the period, Christopher Van Hollen finds that Kissinger appeared to have no moral qualms about the vengeance his allies were wreaking on the Bengalis in March and April of 1971. In Van Hollen’s words, “At no time during that period is Kissinger on record as voicing outrage or humanitarian concern as the Pakistani armed forces obeyed Yahya’s crackdown orders with a vengeance.”[57] In Kissinger’s worldview, geopolitical strategy was primary and exclusive of any concern for human rights.

Even if Pakistani actions were immoral, they were, in Kissinger’s view, an internal Pakistani matter. Furthermore, Kissinger argues that the United States had few means to influence the actions of the Pakistani government. For the national security advisor and grand strategist, the real reason why the United States could not condemn the brutal repression occurring in East Pakistan was that there were strategic objectives that overrode humanitarian concerns. In Kissinger’s words, “To some of our critics, our silence over Pakistan--the reason for which we could not explain--became another symptom of the general moral insensitivity of their government. They could not accept that it might be torn between conflicting imperatives.”[58]

At the time of the genocide in East Bengal, Pakistan was serving as an intermediary between China and the Nixon administration. Kissinger was engaged in secret negotiations with the Chinese and Richard Nixon wished to open at least some form of diplomatic relations with China. China would play an important role in U.S. cold war policy as a partner of the United States against the Soviet Union. Kissinger argued that he could do nothing which would jeopardize the vital role that Pakistan was playing in nurturing the nascent relationship between the USA and China. Some of Kissinger’s strongest critics have argued that the National Security advisor himself admitted that Romania offered another conduit to China.[59] Whether or not Nicolae Ceausescu was a viable intermediary for Kissinger’s China diplomacy, it is clear that any inclination to place halting a genocide ahead of geopolitical concerns was quickly discarded.

The administration had early warning that American diplomatic officials regarded events in East Pakistan as genocidal. In early April, 1971 a group of American diplomats in Dhaka, lead by Consul General Archer Blood, sent a telegram to the State Department protesting the administration’s refusal to condemn the mass killings of the Bengalis. The telegram stated in part that…Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities…we have not chosen to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately, the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state...We, as professional public servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interest here can be defined and our policies redirected.”[60] Nixon and Kissinger reacted with fury to the Dhaka telegram and the President ordered Blood transferred from his post.[61] Indeed a reader of the 78 page chapter on the South Asian crisis of 1971 in Kissinger’s memoirs is led to the inescapable conclusion that the author was far more angered by Foreign Service officers dissent from the administration’s policy in the region, than he was by the genocide that he does not acknowledge.

American credibility was another consideration that trumped a concern for the human rights of Bangladeshis who were being slaughtered. The Nixon administration claimed to fear that the Chinese would be less interested in a relationship with the United States if the US were perceived as not standing by an ally. As the events in Bangladesh widened into a war between India and Pakistan, the US began to tilt toward Pakistan. Again the major concern was with the geo-political consequences of the situation. As reported by US diplomat Dennis Kux, Nixon confided to French president Pompidou that he was determined to preserve the balance of power in Asia. The American president believed a victory of India over Pakistan was the same as a victory of the Soviet Union over China.[62]

The absence of academic work in the US on the genocide in East Pakistan/Bangladesh is striking. The most thorough academic study of the secession crisis of 1971, written by University of California political scientists Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, states that there was in fact no genocide in Bangladesh in 1971.[63] The initial efforts by the Pakistani Army to repress the surging activities of Bengali nationalists were labeled Operation Search Light. Numerous accounts published at the time assert that Pakistani tanks fired on dormitories at the University of Dhaka.[64] According to Sisson and Rose, the Pakistani Army preferred that the detention of Awami League leaders and student activists be conducted in a peaceful manner. Sisson and Rose present interesting evidence for this contrarian assertion. They cite the book Witness to Surrender by Siddiq Salik, published in Karachi in 1978, as supporting their assertion, but they appear truly convinced by their interviews with the officers involved in the military actions that constituted Operation Searchlight. The officers’ corroboration of Salik’s book appears to close the case for Sisson and Rose.[65] Sisson and Rose, are either unaware of the mountain of evidence pointing to genocide in Bangladesh, or they choose to disregard it without ever informing the reader of their reasons for doing so.

In the main text of their work, Sisson and Rose do not address the issue of the total number of victims or the actions of the Pakistani Army against the Bengalis in 1971. In a footnote they provide a much lower estimate of victims, 300,000 to 500,000, than others who have attempted the imprecise task of calculating the victims of genocide. Their sources for this low estimate are two Indian officials who were responsible for monitoring affairs in Bangladesh in 1971. While the slimness of evidence accepted by Sisson and Rose is, of course, not proof of the accuracy of any counter claims, they clearly view the issue of civilian murder as on the periphery of the events in South Asia in 1971.[66] The marginality of human rights violations is further evidenced by the fact that while they discuss the geopolitical implications of the influx of millions of refugees from East Bengal into India, there is no consideration of the cause of the mass migration out of East Pakistan. Furthermore, Sisson and Rose do not discuss the rape of Bengali women in 1971.

The evidence indicates that the events in East Pakistan were indeed a genocide. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as, “…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such: (a)Killing members of the group ; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. …” [67]

The Pakistani army focused its efforts against the Hindu elements of the Bengali population. Hindus were disproportionately killed and they comprised a high percentage of the refugees. Bengali nationalists and supporters were also killed. The genocide in Bangladesh was aimed at Bengali nationalism with a special focus on the religiously distinct segment of the population that was believed to be the predominant source of that nationalism. The mass rapes and burning villages that occurred from March to December of 1971 indicate that sections b and c of article 2 were clearly violated.

Given the considerable evidence of genocide through murder and rape in East Pakistan in 1971, the lack of attention to the issue in the United States is striking. There have been no book length studies produced in the United States about this topic. The genocide is included in a few surveys and edited volumes on the topic, but omitted from others. Before attempting to explain the denial and neglect of the genocide in East Bengal, the contrasting case of Cambodia will be examined.

Cambodia

The Cambodian genocide occurred over a considerably longer period of time than did the Bangladeshi genocide. Thus there was a greater period for scholars and activists to debate the events in the country as they occurred. Both genocides received considerable press attention, although as indicated by New York Times coverage, journalistic interest in the events of Cambodia declined after 1975. Despite the expulsion of western journalists in late March 1971, there was considerably more access for journalists to cover events in East Pakistan than in the xenophobic dystopia of the Khmer Rouge.

Yale scholar Ben Kiernan has identified several victim groups of the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan estimates that no more than 2,000 of the 70,000 Buddhist monks in Cambodia were still alive in 1979. About 100,000 Vietnamese and over 200,000 Chinese perished under the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan estimates that about 100,000 of a quarter million Chams (Cambodian Muslims) were killed from 1975 through early 1979. The remainder of the victims were Khmers, with a somewhat higher death rate occurring among those dubbed “New Citizens,” who had lived in the cities under the control of the Lon Nol regime. About 25 percent of New Citizens perished, as opposed to a 15 percent death rate among “Base Citizens”, who had lived in areas controlled by the Khmer Rouge before 1975. Kiernan estimates that 1,671,000 people were killed in the Cambodian genocide or about 21 percent of the 1975 population.[68] The deaths were attributable to executions as well as starvation and disease that developed as a result of disruptions of life caused by the Khmer Rouge’s immediate transition to communism.

Scholarship on the Cambodian genocide has taken a considerably different turn from the denial and indifference accorded to Bangladesh. During the period of Khmer Rouge rule, April 1975 to January 1979, a fierce debate raged over the extent to which the accounts of genocide inside Cambodia were actually true. In the years after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal nature of the regime was not contested. The subsequent focus of the debate on the Cambodian genocide has been on the motivating factors behind the genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge. Both periods of scholarly debate are analyzed in this section of the paper.

When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975 by driving the American backed Lon Nol government from power, many long time opponents of the war had considerable sympathy for the new government. Long time critics of American policy in Southeast Asia were sanguine about the prospects for Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.[69] U.S. Senator George McGovern, a long time critic of American policy in the region, expressed admiration for the abilities of the incoming government. [70]

Even after the Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of Phnom Penh and the first reports of atrocities emerged, many on the U.S. Left discredited the reports and argued that the regime’s policies were consistent with the construction of a better society for the majority of its citizens. In the book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand, prominent critics of U.S. government actions during the Vietnam War, argued that the mandatory evacuation of the cities by the Khmer Rouge was a justified reaction to the food crisis. Porter and Hildebrand appeared untroubled by the forcible removal of people from hospitals.[71] Porter and Hildebrand claimed that the press accounts about Khmer Rouge atrocities were counterrevolutionary propaganda. As Porter and Hildebrand put it, “Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as a response to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting. In Cambodia - as in Vietnam and Laos - the systematic process of mythmaking must be seen as an attempt to justify the massive death machine which was turned against a defenseless population in a vain effort to crush their revolution.”[72] In testimony to a congressional committee in 1977, Porter cast doubt on atrocity reports and argued that refugees were, by definition, people who are dissatisfied with a government.[73]

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who were fierce critics of American foreign policy for many years, were still arguing in 1979 that the reports of Khmer Rouge genocide were largely unreliable.[74] In the view of Chomsky and Herman, the atrocity reports were rooted too heavily in refugee testimony. They approvingly quote a report from Michael Vickery that many refugees had fled Cambodia because they “disliked the rigorous working life” imposed by the Khmer Rouge.[75] Apparently, Chomsky and Herman regarded laziness rather than genocide as the impetus that drove Cambodians to flee their country for Thailand. Chomsky and Herman argued that atrocity reports from Cambodia served to obscure the prior U.S. role in the region, that they could be used as propaganda against all efforts to gain liberation from Western domination, and, that those who had been selective in their concern for human rights often disseminated them. It is, of course possible, that all of the assertions in the prior sentence are true and that a genocide occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

For the Right, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge offered an opportunity to lambast the Left for its opposition to policies designed to contain communism. For conservatives, the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge justified the long years of intervention to prevent communist victories in Southeast Asia. In his remarkable commencement speech at Harvard University in 1978, Russian dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked of those who had criticized the Vietnam War. “Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there…Or do they prefer not to hear?”[76] In the 1990s, those French scholars who compiled the Black Book of Communism believed that the Cambodian revolution is best understood as an innovative extension of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For Jean-Louis Margolin, author of the Cambodian chapter in the over 800 page indictment of all things Communist, the Cambodian genocide might be viewed as the ultimate culmination of Marxism-Leninism.[77]

After the Khmer Rouge was deposed by Vietnam there was little scholarly support for the policies of the Khmer Rouge. There has been vigorous debate about the sources of the mass killing that took place in Cambodia from 1975 through 1979. Michael Vickery argues that the killing resulted from peasant outrage especially directed against the former city dwellers and that it was this outrage that dictated events in Cambodia.[78] Vickery, who provides a low-end estimate of 750,000 deaths in Cambodia from 1975 through 1979, argues that the mass violence should not be associated with Marxism because it destroyed the urban proletariat.

Like Vickery, Yale historian Ben Kiernan does not locate the primary source of the Cambodian genocide in Marxist theory and practice. While not denying Marxist influence on the Khmer Rouge, Kiernan argues that racial notions overrode any ideas about class in the worldview of Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders. Kiernan points to the persecution of ethnic minorities and the Muslim Cham populations to support his thesis.[79] Steve Heder has argued that Kiernan misreads the evidence and that Marxism and Communism were indeed the sources of the Cambodian genocide.[80] Historian David Chandler, too, regards the Khmer Rouge policies as an outgrowth of Marxist-Leninist practices and theories. [81]

The study of the Cambodian genocide expanded with the decline of the Cold War. As was the case in Bangladesh, the genocide in Cambodia was enmeshed in the realpolitik of the Cold War. While the Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power and thus ended the genocide, the invasion was condemned by the Carter administration.[82] Vietnam was an ally of the Soviet Union and its success in occupying Cambodia was perceived as an expansion of Soviet influence. The Khmer Rouge was allied with China and the Carter administration was committed to improving U.S.-Sino relations as a counter to the Soviet Union. When the deposed Khmer Rouge regrouped along the Cambodian border, the United States encouraged the Chinese and Thai governments to provide aid to the remnants of the genocidal regime.[83] Carter National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezinski claimed that, because of his odious record, the U.S. could not support Pol Pot, but other nations could and should offer assistance to those who had committed genocide in Cambodia.[84]

The United States and others opposed unseating the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s representative in the United Nations until the Cold War was virtually over. In the early 1990s, the United States also ended its economic and diplomatic sanctions against Cambodia. Until then the nation was a proxy in a Sino-Soviet struggle for influence, and the genocide was of little concern to those who played in the great power game.[85]

The establishment of the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University has facilitated research on the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge. The CGP is devoted to documentation of the events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In 1994, the Congress passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act that committed the American government to pursuing justice for victims of the genocide. In December of 1994,the State Department awarded a grant of $499,000 to the Yale project. In the next two years the governments of Australia and the Netherlands, and the Luce foundation provided additional funding. In 1997, the State Department provided CGP with one million dollars and allocated an additional $150,000 in 1999.[86] With no geopolitical interests at stake, the US and other governments were now willing to fund research into a genocide that was, after all, committed by Communists against whom the United States had struggled for 45 years.

The web page of the genocide project at Yale provides a description of the very comprehensive project undertaken at Yale to investigate the Cambodian genocide. The CGP has set out to gather and preserve all existing information about the Pol Pot era in Cambodia. It is also willing to make this information available to a court that prosecutes surviving perpetrators of the genocide.[87]

There has been vigorous debate about the Cambodian genocide since the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. This debate has changed as the available evidence renders genocide denial implausible. A major American university maintains a project to study the Cambodian genocide and assist in bringing its perpetrators to justice. The Pol Pot regime and the atrocities it perpetrated remain on the radar screen of American academics.

While neither the Cambodian nor the Bangladeshi genocide receives the degree of scholarly attention generated by the Holocaust, which is in a class by itself with respect to both popular and academic interest, there is a substantial disparity in the scholarship on each genocide. This disparity exists despite the fact that there were probably at least as many Bengalis killed as Cambodians. Some estimates placed the number of Bengalis killed at in 1971 nearly twice the number of Cambodians who perished from 1975-1979.

No books on the genocide in Bangladesh have been published in the past thirty years in the United States. Indeed some recent books on the war of secession in 1971 deny that there was a genocide. Other memoirs and accounts of the era make only passing references to repression and atrocities. In addressing this topic there is a need to provide evidence that a genocide occurred.

Conversely, the Cambodian genocide has been the subject of debate and analysis since the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975. The two stages of this debate have been chronicled in the text of this paper.

A genocide will receive more attention when an intellectual or academic faction feels that it stands to gain politically or intellectually from promoting a certain perspective and from interpreting or researching the genocide. When the first reports of Cambodian genocide emerged, conservatives, who for decades had warned of the calamities that communism would bring to the region, felt vindicated by the claims of atrocities. The academic Left, which had so vigorously opposed the United States policies in Southeast Asia, argued vehemently that these stories were atrocity propaganda and that the Khmer Rouge policies were rational attempts to address the disastrous conditions the country inherited. Both the Left and the Right had a significant stake in interpreting the events that took place in Cambodia.

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge there were still ideological wars to be fought over the Cambodian genocide. For those who wished to continue to attack the Left, Cambodia represented the ultimate outcome of attempts to build a socialist utopia. Cambodia was proof of the evils of Marxism. Other scholars noted the religious and ethnic aspects of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

It is ironic that the end of the Cold War facilitated further research on the horrors perpetrated by a communist regime. With diplomatic imperatives altered, the U.S. government could restore the Khmer Rouge to the evil status it was accorded before it seized power and acquired a grudging acceptance, despite mass murder, because of its alliance with the Chinese and opposition to the Vietnamese who were allied with the Soviet Union. Federal funding for the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project was available only after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this instance, the changed state of geopolitics facilitated the study of a particular genocide.

As it occurred, the catastrophe that struck the Bengalis of East Pakistan, generated immense press attention. In addition to sustained coverage in the New York Times, the tragedy of East Bengal was featured in the coverage of Time and Newsweek. A concert for Bangladesh featured well known music stars such as Bob Dylan and George Harrison. Numerous Democratic politicians criticized the Nixon administration’s policy with respect to Bangladesh.

Despite the extensive media coverage of the events in Bangladesh in 1971, there has been relatively little scholarship on the genocide in the more than three decades that have elapsed since the break-up of Pakistan. Some edited volumes on genocide omit the Bangladesh genocide altogether. For example, in a comparative study of genocide that includes coverage of the Armenians, the Holocaust. Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, Alex Alvarez never mentions Bangladesh.[88] Bangladesh is never mentioned in the edited book, Studies in Comparative Genocide.[89] The 1971 genocide in East Pakistan is included in the previously cited work by R.J. Rummel and in the volume edited by Totten, Parsons, and Charny.

The study of genocide in Cambodia has also been facilitated by the fact that since 1979, the country has been governed by regimes that desire to expose the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Western scholars had access to the various archives soon after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power. The S-21 torture and extermination center was opened in 1980 as the Toul Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes.[90] Mai Lam, the Vietnamese colonel who had also organized the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City, had no interest in hiding the savage barbarism that occurred at S-21 where 14,000 people were murdered after being tortured. As an official of a communist regime, Mai Lam did wish to distance the DK regime from socialism. The museum made many comparisons between the policies of the Khmer Rouge and those of the Nazis.[91] In 1992, the Cornell University library microfilmed the entire S-21 archive. The establishment of Tuol Sleng and the Cornell microfilming were possible because the genocidal regime was conquered. In other instances, such as Pakistan, the genocidal regime was not replaced by a government that wished to enhance the opportunity to study a genocide perpetrated by its predecessor.

When genocidal regimes are conquered or displaced there is also a greater likelihood for international tribunals which draw further attention to the crimes that were committed. In Germany, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia the removal of the government that perpetrated genocide led to legal processes that not only held perpetrators accountable, but permitted increased scrutiny of the genocides that occurred.

Access to the records of perpetrators and survivors greatly facilitate investigation of the nature of a particular genocide. In the case of Bangladesh, the government of the nation created in the civil war of 1971 maintains a museum devoted to the atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army in what it terms a liberation war.[92] Pakistan, on the other hand, has little interest in promoting greater knowledge of a genocide inflicted by the nation’s military regime. Documents that might shed greater light on the intentions and motivations of the Pakistani government in 1971 are not available to researchers.

On a visit to Bangladesh in 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf did address the issue of the killings of 1971. Musharraf told the Bangladeshis that, “Your brothers and sisters in Pakistan share the pain of the events of 1971. The excesses of that period are regrettable.”[93] Musharraf’s statement can be read in a number of ways given that Pakistani government correctly points to the killing of several thousand non-Bengalis by Bengali nationalists in 1971 and the continued prevalence of the view that the entire secession crisis was engineered by India in an effort to dismember Pakistan. In any event, it is hardly a straightforward apology for the 1971 genocide.

Tariq Ali claims that much of the elite in Pakistan continues to deny the killings of 1971. In Ali’s words, “Pakistan has yet to acknowledge these crimes and apologize to the people of Bangladesh. `…Official histories in Pakistan continue to lie. They write of how India had decided to break up Pakistan. Not true. It was the Pakistan army backed by the bureaucracy and the majority People’s Party led Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who took the risk and lost. They did not succeed in implanting pure Muslim genes via the pure Muslim sperm of the Punjabi soldiery.”[94]

Pakistan is hardly alone in its reluctance to acknowledge a genocide. Many governments are unwilling to admit past acts of genocide. For example, to this day, the Turkish government fiercely resists the notion that genocide was committed against the Armenians during the course of World War I.[95]

The divergence in attention granted to the two genocides compared in this paper is not attributable solely to a disparity in scholarly resources and access. The neglect and even denial of the genocide in Bangladesh is attributable to several factors. Mainstream American policy makers, Henry Kissinger is of course a prime example, have little interest in focusing on a genocide that featured the United States tilting towards the perpetrators. American scholars who dealt with the events on the sub-continent in 1971 are far more interested in the various permutations of diplomatic strategy than the slaughter of a few million Bengalis.

The U.S. government has had a checkered relationship with Pakistan since 1971. The suspension of democracy, human rights issues, the status of Kashmir and nuclear proliferation have been sources of tension between the two countries. In the 1980s Pakistan was a key ally as the U.S. supported resistance groups who battled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.[96] In the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington by Al Qaeda, the Bush administration demanded that Pakistan ally itself against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. There is certainly no American strategic interest in investigating events committed by a Pakistani military regime in 1971. It is inconceivable that the U.S. Congress would appropriate money to investigate genocide in Bangladesh or to assist in bringing genocide perpetrators to justice.

The study of Cambodia has served the political and ideological needs of several factions in American politics since the Khmer Rouse took power in April of 1975. There is simply not much political mileage to be made of the genocide in East Pakistan. Some critics on the Left included the Bengalis on the list of atrocities associated with Henry Kissinger.[97] (The film version of The Trial of Henry Kissinger does not mention Bangladesh.) American involvement was more direct in other instances that led to mass death. Bangladesh is a relatively uninviting topic for the American Left. The subversion of the elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and the establishment of a military dictatorship there resulted in far fewer deaths than the slaughter in East Bengal. For the U.S. Left, however, Allende represents a far more sympathetic political figure than Mujibur Rahman, who had a far less coherent ideological program and ran a corrupt government before his assassination in 1975.[98]

American Jews have been key promoters of the study and remembrance of the Holocaust in the United States. A study of the increase in attention devoted to the Ukrainian famine in the United States and Canada concludes that the establishment of Ukrainian émigré communities in North America was in part responsible for the increased attention garnered by that tragedy.[99] There is not a significant Bengali ethnic presence in the United States to organize for greater recognition of the events in Bangladesh in 1971.

Jefferson claimed that the proposition that all men are created equal is self-evident. It is also self-evident that, in some important ways, all genocide victims are not remotely equal.

[1] International Commission of Jurists quoted in Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use In the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 78-79.

[2] Kalyan Chauduri, Genocide in Bangladesh. Bombay: Orient Longman Limited, 1972

[3] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

[4] Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journal of a Holocaust Historian. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2002.

[5] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.

[6] Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory. 2002.

[7] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

[8] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million Israelis and the Holocaust. New York, Owl Books, 2000.

[9] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso, 2000.

[10] Tim Cole Selling the Holocaust; From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought Packaged and Sold. New York: Routledge, 2000.

[11] See the essays in Alan S. Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Second Edition. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002.

[12] Gavril D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 13 (1): 28-61. 1989.

[13] George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism.” In George Orwell, As I Please, 1943-1945:The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. 370.

[14] Ben Kiernan, “Cover Up and Denial of Genocide: Australia, The USA, East Timor and Aborigines.” Critical Asian Studies. 34 (2): 163-192. 2002.

[15] Sisson and Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan: India and the Creation of Bangladesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990

[16] A.M.A. Muhith, Bangladesh: Emergence of A Nation. Revised Second Edition. Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1992.

[17] Rounaq Jahan, “Genocide in Bangladesh.” In Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, editors. Century of Genocide and Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.

[18] R. J. Rummel, Death By Government. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

[19] Kalyan Chauduri, Genocide in Bangladesh. 1972.

[20] Sydney H. Schanberg, “Bengalis’ Land A Vast Cemetery” The New York Times, January 24, 1972. 1.

[21] Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan: India and the Creation of Bangladesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

[22] Sisson and Rose, op, cit.,

[23] Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh. New Delhi, Vikas Publications, 1971.

[24] Robert Payne, Massacre: The Tragedy of Bangladesh and the Phenomenon of Mass Slaughter Throughout History. New York: MacMillan, 1973.

[25]Payne, op. cit.,

[26] Mascarenhas, op. cit.,

[27] Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined: Language, Belief and the Pakistan, Crisis of 1971.” Journal of Asian Studies. 44 (4): 711-733, 1985.

[28] Ibid.,

[29] This passage from Bhutto’s book is quoted in Aijaz Ahmad, “The Great Farce.” Pakistan Review. March 1972. 12.

[30] Jahan, “Genocide in Bangladesh,” op. cit.,

[31] Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

[32] Mascarenhas, p. 117

[33] Anthony Mascarenhas, Genocide, originally published in the Sunday Times of London, June 13, 1971. Reprinted in Bangladesh Documents.

[34] Mascarenas ibid.,

[35] Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh. New Delhi: Vikas Publications. 1971, 116-117.

[36] Ibid.,

[37] Rummel, Death BY Government, op. cit.,

[38] James A. Michener, “A Lament For Pakistan” The New York Times Magazine. January 9, 1972.

[39] Mascarenahs, Genocide, op. cit., 371.

[40] Mascarenahs, “Genocide,” 266.

[41] Sydney H. Schanberg, “Foreign Evacuees From East Pakistan Tell of Grim Fight,” The New York Times. April 7, 1971, 1.

[42] Sydney H. Schanberg, “Dacca Is Still Gripped By Fear3 Months After Onslaught.” The New York Times. June 26, 1971. 1.

[43] Sydney H. Schanberg, “West Pakistan Pursues Subjugation of Bengalis.” July 14, 1971. The New York Times. 1.

[44] Ibid.,

[45] Muhith, op. cit.,

[46] Sydney Schanberg, The New York Times. July 17, 1971.

[47] Ibid.,

[48] Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1975.

[49] Ibid.,

[50] Muhith, 1992,

[51] “Recent Events in East Pakistan.” Extract from the Record of the U.S. Senate, April 29, 1971. Reprinted in Bangladesh Documents. Madras, no date, 349-350.

[52] Ibid., 351.

[53] Ibid., p. 357

[54] Michael Stohl, “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends: States, Genocide, Mass Killing and the Role of Bystanders.” Journal of Peace Research. 24 (2): 1987. 151-166.

[55] Henry Kissinger, The White House Years. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1979. 855.

[56] Ibid., 914.

[57] Christopher Van Hollen, “The Tilt Policy Revisited: Nixon–Kissinger Geopolitics and South Asia.” Asian Survey. 20 (4): 339-361. 1980.

[58] Kissinger, op. cit. 854. 854.

[59] Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. New York: Verso, 2001.

[60] Lawrence Lifscultz, Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution. London: Zed Press, 1979. 158.

[61] Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001.

[62] Kux, p. 203.

[63] Sisson and Rose, op. cit.,

[64] Mascarenhas, op. cit. others

[65] Sisson and Rose, op. cit., p. 298. note 9.

[66] Ibid., see , p, 306, n. 24.

[67] Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell. 2002. p. 62.

[68] Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide,” in Totten, Parsons, and Charny, op. cit.,

[69] Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell:” America in the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[70] Ibid.,

[71] Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

[72] Ibid., 88.

[73] Hearing Before the Sub-Committee On International Organizations of the Committee ON international Relations House of Representatives. May 3, 1977. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977.

[74] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After The Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. Boston: South End Press, 1979.

[75] Ibid., 146.

[76] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

[77] Jean Louis Margolin, Cambodia, The Country of Disconcerting Crimes.” In Stephane Courteois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

[78] Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975-1982. Boston: South End Press.

[79] Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

[80] Steve Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labeling and Genocide in Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime.” South East Asia Research . 5 (2): 101-153. 1997.

[81] David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.

[82] Power., op. cit.,

[83] ibid.,

[84] ibid.,

[85] ibid.,

[86] See, the web page of the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project at http://www.yale.edu/cgp

[87] ibid.,

[88] Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

[89] Levon Chorbajian and George Shrinian, editors, Studies in Comparative Genocide. New York: St Martins Press, 1998.

[90] David Chandler, Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

[91] Ibid.,

[92] See the website of the Liberation War Museum at Http://www.liberationwarmuseum.org

[93] Musharraf’s comments are reported, in the Indian magazine Frontline and can be found http://www.flonnet.com/ fl1917/19170630.htm

[94] Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity. London: Verso, 2002.

[95] Henry R. Huttenbach, “The Psychology and Politics of Genocide Denial: A Comparison of Four Case Studies.” Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, Studies in Comparative Genocide. New York: St. Martins Press, 1998. Richard G. Hovannissian, “The Asrmenian Genocide,: Patterns of Denial.” In Richard G. Hovanissian, editor, The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1986.

[96] Kux, Disenchanted Allies, op. cit., Also Ahmed Rashid, Militant Islam, Oi, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Hven: Yale University Press, 2000.

[97] Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, op, cit.,

[98] For a critical view of Mujib’s government from an author who chronicled Pakistani Army atrocities in Bangladesh, see Anthony Mascarenhas, Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.

[99] Frank Sysyn, “The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-3: the Role of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Research and Public Discussion.” In Chorbajian and Shrinian, Studies in Comparative Genocide, op. cit.

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