[Genocide/1971] Suhail Islam and Syed Hussain: The Wretched of the Nations: The West's Role in Human Rights Violations In the Bangladesh War of Independence

[Note from Genocide 1971 Webmaster: The following chapter is from the book Genocide, War Crimes & The West, edited by Adam Jones and published by Zed Books, 2004. We appreciate the authors', editor's and publisher's kind permission to add this chapter to this website.] This timely and well researched book, edited by an eminent genocide scholar, Dr. Adam Jones, has received high accolade from various scholars. Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, writes: "This exceptionally well selected, brilliantly edited collection of writings provides the most comprehensive treatment of Western responsibility for mass atrocity yet published. The cumulative impact of the volume is a devastating indictment of state terrorism as practised by the West, both historically, and now after September 11 in the name of 'anti-terrorism.'" A enlightening reading. Highly recommended. To learn more about the book, please visit Zed Books.

The Wretched of the Nations: The West's Role in Human Rights Violations in the Bangladesh War of Independence Suhail Islam and Syed Hassan Dr. Suhail M. Islam: He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Nazareth College of Rochester in New York. He has special interest in Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, and Human Rights Issues. Dr. Syed K. Hassan: He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Purdue University in Indiana.
Human rights and their genesis in Eurocentrism Prior to the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789, the term 'the people' was merely an expression occasionally uttered by absolute monarchs. But following those great upheavals, 'the people' established their claims with such force that Western civilization thereafter acknowledged that sovereignty indeed belonged to the people. In the wake of these two seminal events, the battles in the West were fought on cultural, political, and moral grounds. That is to say, the core of Western civilization and culture was based on the promotion of human rights and the concept of individual liberty. So it was that Abraham Lincoln, on the eve of the American Civil War, declared: 'They who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it.' Staking out the same moral high ground, President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century defined the nation he was leading as 'not a mere -body of traders...[but] a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -[it] is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.' And yet, in an ironic twist on Lincoln's and Wilson's fine words, the role of the West -including the United States -in international human rights violations was nothing short of abhorrent. Accordingly, 'human rights' was redefined as the new criterion by which the West, especially the US, declared itself to be civilized and other civilizations to be barbaric. The framework is reminiscent of that used by imperialists in colonial societies. More recently, during the Cold War rivalries between the superpowers, ‘democracy’ and 'freedom' were both used and abused to advance neocolonial agendas. Throughout Western history, the opponent and main target of propaganda has remained the same: the subaltern populace of the Third World, pitted against the ruling of what Edward W. Said calls the states of 'national security' (Said, 1990: 6). The briefest survey of human rights as a movement confirms this appraisal of its true meaning and role. The use of human rights as a pretext for Western political action dates back to the French occupation of Syria and Lebanon in August 1860, which was defined as necessary to protect Christian Maronite minorities. This strategy has only increased since the Second World War, with the current vogue for 'humanitarian interventions' only the latest variant. Likewise, the formulation of human rights theory has also been politically motivated in large part, and led by advocates with their own narrow political agendas. The idea of a universal definition of human rights dates to the proposal of an International Bill of Rights of Man in 1945 by Hersch Lauterpecht, a leading Zionist. It was this proposal that led to the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, adopted on 1O December 1948. This was drafted by a committee of fifteen experts from various countries; the debate was politically driven, and influenced by the ideological schism between socialism and capitalism. While the countries involved might appear to have formed a reasonable cross-section of the world community -they included Iran, the Soviet Union and India -a closer look at the terms of engagement and reference reveals this to be a fallacy. None of the representatives was nationally or culturally representative; in fact, it was a specific requirement of their engagement that they did not represent national or cultural interests, but rather were 'experts' in the narrow field of 'rights' discourse employed by the UN committee. Thus, all representatives adhered to a narrow concept of ethical theory hailing from such allegedly emancipatory texts as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and the US Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, the declaration was called 'universal' to provide it with an aura of authority and legitimacy. This declaration was then forced upon other countries, which, in a Western-dominated world, had little choice but to sign. In fact, not only is the UDHR not 'universal' in its origins, but the UN -largely controlled by the US -had, from the outset, no intention of implementing it. There were three subcommittees involved in drafting the UDHR, the third of which was charged with proposing mechanisms for its implementation. The findings of this subcommittee were rejected, and no other mechanism was subsequently approved. The lessons of history, then, seem quite clear. Human rights, and the 'Universal' Declaration, have become tools of the West -used to further Western influence and interests, while the West itself feels free to ignore their provisions. In the US invasion of Haiti or western support for the military takeover in Algeria, to cite just two recent examples, the West cited a need to 'preserve democracy.' In the last few years, the West has effectively supported aggressors like Slobodan Milosevic and Vladimir Putin in their respective campaigns against Muslims, while paying lip-service to their critics. We have seen the West supporting abuses of human rights in the Israeli-occupied territories, while at the same time bombing civilians in Iraq on the pretence of protecting Kuwait. The hypocrisy is truly impressive. In this light, it is hardly surprising that the West in general, and the Anglo-American alliance in particular, have protected dictatorships and participated in rights violations whenever it is deemed in their interest to do so. The subject of this chapter, the disintegration of Pakistan as a result of the atrocities committed by its armed forces, is only one of many examples of Western double standards deepening the tragedy of the masses. One aim of this study is to bring to wider attention Justice Hamoodur Rahman's report, drafted after the disintegration of Pakistan, and to integrate its findings with the more recent perspective advanced by Christopher Hitchens on the Western role in that disintegration and the concomitant genocidal massacres of Bangladeshis. We will pay particular attention to the role of the US State Department, under President Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (see also the chapters by Steven Jacobs and Mario Aguilar in this volume). Elite conflict, Bengali Muslim nationalism, and the creation of Bangladesh The early 197Os witnessed a major transformation in the Muslim world's political systems. The Islamic republic of Pakistan, the largest Muslim country in terms of population, disintegrated, and two successor states emerged: Pakistan in the west, and Bangladesh in the east. Why did this occur? The construction of this odd divide between East and West Pakistan is one of the legacies of imperialism. The British government partitioned British India into the dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947. British policy was based on the scheme embodied by the India Act of 1935, which developed a 'two-nation theory' and proposed that areas with a numerical majority of Hindus should constitute an independent India, while those with a majority of Muslims would constitute an independent Pakistan. Interestingly, the resolution for the partition of India and Pakistan was moved by the great Bengali leader, A.K. Fazlul Haq, on 23 March 1940, at Lahore in present-day Pakistan. The partition duly took place, albeit at the cost of well over a million Muslim and Hindu lives. East Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh, was separated from the remainder of the state by 1,000 miles of hostile Indian Territory. In addition to this uniquely challenging geographical separation, 'united' Pakistan lacked either cultural or linguistic unity. The case for regional autonomy in economic and cultural affairs was therefore fairly strong (Wilcox, 1963). The conduct and attitude of the ostensibly all-Pakistan government towards East Pakistan made that case stronger still. Attempts by the central regime to deny Bengali (East Pakistani) demands, and to impose unitary rule, spawned a powerful Bengali autonomy movement (Westergaard, 1985). Despite winning a majority in the Pakistani national assembly in the elections of 7 December 1970, the Bengali representatives under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were prevented from taking office, even though their vote exceeded that of all other parties combined. (Mujibur's Awami League captured all but two of East Pakistan's 162 seats, while the Pakistan People's Party captured 81 of 138 seats in West Pakistan.) Indeed, the assembly never met. The story of the secession of East Pakistan actually begins in 1947, when Pakistan came into existence as an independent dominion with a parliamentary and federal political system. The elites who dominated the Muslim League transferred their allegiance to Pakistan and became the ruling elite there, excluding all other movements and organizations. This elite's attempts to deny national status to Bengali language and culture, and to impose the Urdu language on Bengalis in the east, infuriated educated members of that group and further strengthened their ethnic identity (Ahmed, 1981). Support for regional autonomy mounted. As Rounaq Jahan writes in a new preface to her definitive analysis of Pakistan's disintegration: When I wrote this book twenty-five years ago [before the independence of Bangladesh], there was general consensus among the Bengalis that the policies and practices of successive regimes in Pakistan -suppression of fundamental rights, representative institutions and cultural freedom; economic disparity; misuse of religion in politics and monopoly of state power in the hands of a narrow civil-military bureaucratic elite were inevitably leading to the disintegration of the country. There was a general acknowledgment that the Bengalis were struggling not simply against Pakistani oppression and exploitation; [but] the nationalist movement was to establish a different vision of society and polity -a secular democratic state. (Jahan, 1994: preface)¹ The tragedy of 1971 Scores of books have been written addressing the darkest year in Greater Pakistan's history: the tragedy of 1971, which ultimately resulted in the dismemberment of the nation and the death of hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as three million, Bengalis. Among the accounts that deserve particular attention is that of Lieutenant-General A.A.K. Niazi, who spearheaded military operations in Pakistan's eastern wing. In his book The Betrayal of East Pakistan (Niazi, 1998), this senior military figure exposed how superpower rivalries contributed to unnecessary bloodshed in the rapidly unfolding drama on the Indian subcontinent. This superpower role will be considered in greater detail later. However, it is indispensable to touch at this point on the actions of the West -in particular, those of the US, West Pakistan's power-broker -in encouraging atrocious violations of human rights and, eventually, the fu1l-blown genocide that eventually gave rise to Bangladesh as an independent nation. In Niazi's book, and his earlier declarations, we find reference to an 'enemy within.' The general had stated in November 1971 that: In spite of spite of my shortages, difficulties, and handicaps, the step-motherly treatment by my high command, the knowledge that I was being used as a sacrificial lamb and that my troops were deemed an expendable commodity, and despite heavy pressure from a far superior enemy, I remained fighting till the end, and kept moving on the battlefield. ...These were some of the handicaps which were not encountered by our counterparts in West Pakistan, nor indeed by any other army during the war. (cited in Niazi, 1998: 115) To be more specific, Niazi claimed that: The so-called action on the political level was a farce. We had a number of friends in the UNO, but no one from our side showed any interest in raising the matter in the Security Council when India attacked East Pakistan [on] 21st November. If the aggrieved party itself was not interested, why should anyone have come to the rescue? (Niazi, 1998: 178) This raises a critical question. If Pakistan itself was uninterested in raising the matter in the Security Council, how can the role of the West be considered influential or decisive? In the first place, Pakistan's leader, General Yahya, was fundamentally illegitimate. He could hardly be a spokesperson for Pakistan and a representative of its national interests -especially when Mujibur had received a majority in a free and fair national election. By supporting Yahya, therefore, the West -especially the US under President Nixon -not only chose to ignore the election results of 1970, but supported the military despot in his campaign to delay and indefinitely suspend a peaceful transfer of power to the democratically elected authority see Kissinger, 1979). Obviously, the US, and other Western countries who similarly turned a blind eye to Yahya's malfeasance, reasonably expected that the legal victor of the elections would resist such a political injustice. And when that resistance broke out, the governments of both the United States and Great Britain officially and fully supported General Yahya's regime. Also, both governments chose to conceal the widespread massacres in East Pakistan, which from their start represented a genocidal assault on the mass of the Bengali population. At this critical juncture, it is ironic that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto -whose party, the Pakistan People's Party, had won the majority of seats in West Pakistan, and who was thus due to take his place in the political opposition -was appointed to represent Pakistan in the United Nations. The most prominent representative of the regime internationally was thus the figure who had lost national elections. Such an arrangement suited Bhutto's personal ambitions perfectly. It hardly mattered that, in this position, Bhutto was exposed to the manipulation of Western powers, rapidly becoming their pawn in the grand chess game of Cold War politics. The historical record suggests, then, that Pakistan's dismemberment was the product of intersecting conspiracies. The forces of Mujibur, Bhutto, and the dozens of political parties in both East and West Pakistan each had its own cause to take up arms. Sociopolitical blunders were made on all sides. Nonetheless, the authors of genocide cannot be excused of their crimes simply because others stumbled along the way. And chief among the external authors was the United States. Pakistan was led to believe that the United States would ultimately rescue its national integrity, regardless of the scale of the crimes it committed against predominantly Bengali citizens. In central respects, General Yahya Khan was led by the nose by President Nixon and his master diplomat, Henry Kissinger. Ordinary Pakistanis, and especially the Bengalis of East Pakistan, were invisible in the equation. As some of the most poverty-stricken and dispossessed people on earth, they could be annihilated in their hundreds of thousands - according to R.J. Rummel, the death toll in Bangladesh in 1970-71 very likely exceeded a million, and may have been as high as 3 million.² One is reminded of David Spurr's analysis in The Rhetoric of Empire: Under Western eyes, the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented. The body, rather than the speech, law, or history, is the essential defining characteristic of the primitive peoples. They live, according to this view, in their bodies and in natural space, but not in a body politic worthy of the name, nor in meaningful historical time. (Spurr, 1993:22) Hitchens, Kissinger, and the case for a war-crimes trial Christopher Hitchens's book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Hitchens, 2001c) was first published in 2001 as a two-part series in Harper's magazine (Hitchens, 2001a, 2001b). Much of the work concentrates on Kissinger's role in the Vietnam War, in which the US deliberately targeted civilians or bombing and ground attacks 'as a matter of policy' (see also Brian Willson's chapter in this volume). Kissinger, Hitchens alleges, was the driving force in the expansion of the war to Laos and Cambodia, where US bombing killed an estimated 1,350,000 people, the vast majority civilians. Kissinger literally restructured the chain of command to allow him to take personal charge of bombing raids. He expressed happiness in his briefings to Nixon on the bombing, and seemed to be 'really having fun with it,' according to the President (quoted in Hitchens, 200IC: 37). These actions provide some guide to the mindset of the man who turned, in 1970-71, to the unfolding events in Pakistan. With Kissinger at be helm, the US provided the Pakistani army with the arms, training, and military aid that enabled it to butcher up to 3 million people and spark the exodus of 10 million refugees to neighboring India. US diplomats in East Pakistan implored Kissinger to stop the killings and rein in its client. Instead, 'at the very height of the mass murder,' Kissinger sent a message to the Pakistani dictator, General Yahya Khan, thanking him for his 'delicacy and tact' (quoted in Hitchens, 200IC: 47). His general attitude to the military leader was approving and sympathetic (see Kissinger, 1979: 871). What strategic considerations underlie the attitude of Kissinger and Nixon towards the Pakistani imbroglio? Clearly, Kissinger in particular disliked the non-aligned policy followed by India, which contrasted with Pakistan's eager military subservience to Washington. The emergence of an independent Bangladesh threatened a new addition to non-aligned ranks. There seems, as well, to have been a personality clash between Kissinger and Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India (Kissinger, 1979: 880). Kissinger's grand policy, however, failed dismally when India invaded East Pakistan in December 1971 and defeated the Pakistani army in a week, seizing 90,000 prisoners of war. When Bangladesh achieved its independence, Kissinger's resentment was plain. He compared Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's first president, to Chile's Salvador A1lende -and appears to have prepared a similar fate for him. Among the significant new information unveiled by Hitchens is the US involvement in a military coup against Mujib in August 1975, leading to the murder of the nationalist leader and forty of his family members (Hitchens, 200IC: 51). Another dimension to the story is Kissinger's head-over-heels enthusiasm for 'opening up' the People's Republic of China. At the time of the Pakistan crisis, Romania was already working to ease US access to Beijing. For reasons that remain unexplained, Kissinger instead chose Islamabad as the springboard for his secret trip to China. G. W Choudhury, a member of the Pakistani cabinet from 1967 to 1971, writes that 'Nixon gave Yahya the special assignment to act as "courier" between Washington and Peking -an assignment which the latter carried out with the utmost secrecy and conscientiousness' (Choudhury, 1969: 68). As a reward to the general, Kissinger agreed to overlook Pakistan's political turmoil, and to designate it an 'internal affair.' The result was a crucial blind eye turned to the unfolding military atrocities in Pakistan's eastern wing. Our own research shows that American diplomats in the Indian sub- continent, notably in Dhaka and Delhi, sent sufficient warning of this turmoil, and details of the atrocities committed by the Pakistani central command after the 1970 elections. Hitchens supports this conclusion: On April 6, 1971, a cable of protest was written from the United States Consulate in what was then East Pakistan (the Bengali 'wing' of the Muslim state of Pakistan) ...The cable's senior signatory, the Consul General in Dacca [Dhaka], was named Archer Blood, though it might have become known as the Blood Telegram in any case. Sent directly to Washington, its purpose was, quite simply, to denounce the complicity of the United States government in genocide. Its main section read: 'Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy [in Pakistan]. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pakistan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya Khan a message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a democratically elected majority party incidentally pro-West, and calling for an end to repressive measures and bloodshed. ...But we have chosen not 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. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.' (Hitchens, 200IC: 45, emphasis added) The Blood Telegram was signed by twenty members of the United States diplomatic team in East Pakistan and, when it reached the State Department, also a further nine senior officers of the South Asia division. Hitchens contends that it was 'the most public and the most strongly worded demarche from State Department servants to the State Department that has ever been recorded' (Hitchens, 200IC: 45). But Blood's was not the only protest from a senior us diplomat in the region. Ambassador Kenneth Keating, the ranking US diplomat in New Delhi, added his protest to those of the dissentors. Kissinger and Nixon reacted promptly and decisively to the unprecedented outburst of protest. As Hitchens writes, ‘Archer Blood was immediately recalled from his post and Ambassador Keating was described by the President to Kissinger, with some contempt, as having been "taken over by the Indians".' It was at this point, too, that Kissinger notoriously praised General Yahya Khan for his 'delicacy and tact' (Hitchens, 200IC: 47). The Blood Telegram and associated examples of diplomatic dissidence are a reminder that Hitchens's case against Kissinger and Nixon cannot be generalized into an accusation against the us diplomatic corps. US diplomats on the ground in fact did heroic work in reporting the atrocities. But their efforts were bound to be fruitless, given the amoral emphasis on power politics that Kissinger had raised to a fine, if murderous, art, and that Nixon enthusiastically endorsed. Kissinger responds Henry Kissinger, whose status as an elder statesman is so apparently undiminished in the halls of US power that he can safely be appointed to a prestigious position as head of an independent inquiry into the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, has never responded directly to Hitchens's polemic or the other accusations of war crimes made against him. (He has, however, limited his international travels to avoid being seized and charged a la his protégé, Augusto Pinochet.) Perhaps, though, one can infer his views from an article published in Foreign Affairs a few months after Hitchens's book appeared (Kissinger, 200Ib). Its title, 'The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction,' is quite suggestive. It implies a kind of a priori skepticism towards a trend in international law that has gained significant ground in recent years, and has swept up Kissinger, however mildly, in its train. Kissinger contends that universal jurisdiction, designed to ensure that even the highest government official is liable to arrest and prosecution anywhere in the world for heinous crimes against humanity, is being pushed to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of courts for the tyranny of governments. Referring to the landmark case against his old ally, Pinochet, Kissinger argues that any universal system must contain procedures not only to punish the wicked, but to control the righteous. Legal principles must not be used as weapons to settle political scores (Hussain, 2001-02). At this point, certain questions arise. Does Kissinger believe that the Spanish magistrate who requested Pinochet's extradition (Baltasar Garzon) , and the British authorities (particularly the House of Lords) who upheld it, should have been 'constrained' from doing so? Was the Pinochet case a matter of ‘settling political scores'? Kissinger sidesteps such issues, focusing instead on the invalidity of universal jurisdiction as such, and the corresponding lack of fit between the new International Criminal Court and US national interests (Hussain, 2001-02). He writes in his recent book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (Kissinger, 2001a) that the statesman's ultimate dilemma is to strike a balance between values and interests, and occasionally between peace and justice. It seems not to occur to him that the wider world might prefer the value of peace with justice; that these elements are not contradictory, but mutually reinforcing. Such a perspective would, no doubt, be dismissed by Kissinger as 'idealistic.' Ironically, Kissinger's book cautions that 'a deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great,' and that' America's ultimate challenge is to transform its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance in a world that, for all its seeming resistance, desperately needs enlightened leadership' (Kissinger, 200la: 281). Kissinger's own actions, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, could hardly be said to have revolved around 'willing' popular acceptance of US power and values, generating a broad 'moral consensus' among those unfortunates on the receiving end. Fortunately, there seems little doubt that the arm of international law is growing longer, and the world smaller for national leaders and others accused of atrocities, from Augusto Pinochet to Kissinger himself. No longer are 'covert' US interventions immune from international scrutiny. In Chile itself, legal actions have been filed against Kissinger, together with extradition requests, both for his active involvement in the over- throw of the democratically elected Allende government, and support for the atrocious Pinochet regime that followed (Hussain, 2001-02). If the analysis advanced at the outset of this chapter is correct, however, the regime of 'universal jurisdiction' cannot be viewed as the disinterested result of morally motivated global actors. The United States has, in effect, granted to itself the power of universal jurisdiction, while displaying a well-founded fear of its exercise by others. Its seizure of Manuel Noriega from Panama and his 1992 conviction for drug trafficking; its worldwide hunt for terrorists and campaigns against 'rogue' states; its pressuring of Yugoslavia to turn over Slobodan Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague -all demonstrate that the US can exploit and adapt humanitarian and human-rights standards for its own purposes, deforming them out of all recognition in the process. This is combined with an outright refusal to intervene where intervention, if valid anywhere, is most justified. Bangladesh during the genocide of 1971 provides a historical example. Chechnya today, for similar reasons of realpolitik, provides another. Postscript: Musharraf's visit, Pakistan's 'apology' If Kissinger and other US leaders have never acknowledged their leading role in the atrocities inflicted on the Bengali population of East Pakistan, Pakistan's current leader, President Pervez Musharraf, has been slightly more forthcoming. On an August 2002 visit to Bangladesh, he expressed regret for the 'excesses' committed during the war of independence. But he called for 'burying] the past in the spirit of magnanimity.' 'Your brothers and sisters in Pakistan share the pains of the events of 1971,' Musharraf wrote in the official visitors' book after laying a wreath at the National Martyrs Memorial outside Dhaka, dedicated to those killed in the war. 'The excesses committed during the unfortunate period are regrettable. ... [But] let not the light of the future be dimmed. Let us move forward together.' Hailing Pakistan's 'Bangladeshi brothers and sisters,' he added that 'courage to compromise is greater than to confront.' With 'our joint resolve, the friendship between Pakistan and Bangladesh will flourish' (Habib, 2002). Several Bangladeshi dailies ran editorials praising Musharraf for his statements, and characterizing his words as a 'good gesture' or a 'good beginning.' But did they really represent an acknowledgment or apology of substance? Other dailies termed Musharraf's apology 'cosmetic,' 'a cunning effort to sidetrack the historic crime against humanity.' The old Pakistani mindset, for these commentators, still dominated. Normalization of relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan is crucial to a new beginning for the two countries. Healing the wounds of genocide, and truly burying history's most unpleasant legacies, is always extremely difficult. To the extent that it is achieved, though, it can provide important closure. Therefore, although public opinion in Bangladesh supports trials for West Pakistani war criminals (who were given safe passage from Bangladesh to Pakistan via India, under the terms of the Tripartite Agreement that concluded the war), the political mood leans towards reconciliation. Part of this vision of reconciliation, however, involves a genuine Pakistani acknowledgment of the scale of the human tragedy caused by its forces. President Musharraf's predecessors sought to shift the blame for barbaric acts onto the military or even a few generals. In this sense, Musharraf's expression of regret represents a real step forward (Karnaluddin, 2002). But an unconditional public apology is needed to begin truly to heal the wounds. It is worth ending with the words of a joint statement issued by leaders of fifty-one civil rights organizations in Pakistan, a few days after Musharraf left Bangladesh, calling for such a public apology to the people of Bangladesh. 'We feel sad and burdened by what we know was a violation of the people's human rights: the signatories wrote. 'The apology should have come a long time ago, and citizen groups did make attempts to do so. ... We deeply feel that a message from us is necessary to acknowledge the historic wrongs, to express sincere apology and build a bond based on honest sentiments' (Kamaluddin, 2002). Notes We agree with Jahan's comments about 'economic disparity,' 'misuse of religion in politics,' and 'the monopoly of state power in the hands of a narrow. ..elite.' However, her assumption that the Bengali nationalist movement planned to create a different vision of society and polity, with the aim of establishing a 'secular democratic state,' in our view misrepresents the sociopolitical slant of the bulk of the ordinary population. Examined honestly, over 80 per cent of the Bangladeshi population is Muslim, and the Islamic heritage has been deeply rooted in the region for at least three centuries (Smith, 1957). Undeniably, atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, but these were flaws of individual rulers, not representative of the ideology of Islam. The Bangladeshi population is both highly tolerant and highly religious. The idea of secularism -that is, attempting to remove religion from people's lives and politics -likely did not animate the nationalist movement in the way that Jahan suggests. Rummel writes: 'The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible. Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed 100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts the total is 1,247,000 killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final toll. Some estimates of the democide [NB Rummel's 'death by government'] are much lower- one is of 300,000 dead -but most range from 1 million to 3 million. ...The Pakistani army and allied paramilitary groups killed about one out of every sixty-one people in Pakistan overall; one out of every twenty-five Bengalis, Hindus, and others in East Pakistan. If the rate of killing for all of Pakistan is annualized over the years the Yahya martial law regime was in power (March 1969 to December 1971), then this one regime was more lethal than that of the Soviet Union, China under the communists, or Japan under the military (even through World War II)' (Rummel, 1994: 331). References Ahmed, R. (1981). The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906:A quest for identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bolander, D. (1987). The new Webster quotation dictionary. New York: Lexicon Publications. (Lincoln's quote is a speech to Henry L. 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