By DAVID BERGMAN
DHAKA, Bangladesh — In 1971, Bengali nationalists and the
people of what was then called East Pakistan waged a war of independence
against the Pakistani Army. The conflict culminated in the birth of a new
nation, Bangladesh. The war, which lasted nine months, was a brutal one:
Depending on the source, some 300,000 to three million people were killed, and
millions were displaced.
There is no question that there were many atrocities,
including rape, deportation and massacres of civilians, carried out by the Pakistani
Army, aided at times by pro-Pakistani militias. Some of these included members
of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that remains a
powerful force in Bangladesh today. There is an academic consensus that this
campaign of violence, particularly against the Hindu population, was a
genocide.
In the decades since the war, there have been efforts to
bring the perpetrators to justice. The most recent attempt started in 2010,
when the current government established two International Crimes Tribunals that
together have convicted 26 people on charges of genocide and crimes against
humanity. International human rights organizations have criticized the
tribunals as falling far short of proper due process, but the trials appear
popular within Bangladesh.
So far, four men have been executed, including three leaders
from Jamaat-e-Islami and one leader of the main opposition party, the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Most of the others are on death row, awaiting the
outcome of appeals.
To the government of the Awami League, the party that
originally spearheaded the campaign for independence, the genocide of three
million Bengalis is a foundational element of the struggle for national
liberation. For many, particularly Awami League supporters, to allow any
equivocation about the numbers of victims in the 1971 war is to open the door
to the apologists for Pakistan and the enemies of Bangladeshi independence.
The three million figure is totemic, which is one reason
that, in February, the Bangladesh Law Commission opened consultation on a draft
law called the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act. The proposed legislation uses
the precedent of the Holocaust denial laws enacted in Europe after World War
II.
Some of the proposed offenses are so broad that they would
significantly hinder free speech and stifle legitimate historical research. The
proposal would outlaw the “inaccurate” representation of war history and
“malicious” statements in the press that “undermine any events” related to the
war. Efforts to “trivialize” information related to the killing of civilians
during the war would also be forbidden; this would almost certainly be used to
prosecute anyone who questioned the official death toll.
Even before this legislative plan, there was a clear drift
toward censorship here. In 2014, I was prosecuted for contempt of court in
relation to a blog post written three years earlier looking at the research
into war casualties. While the International Crimes Tribunal did not convict me
for that offense (though it did for other articles), the court ruled that the
number of three million dead “is now settled” and that “the issue of ‘death
figure in 1971’ involves highest sacrosanct emotion of the nation.”
More recently, a sedition case was filed by an Awami League activist
against Khaleda Zia, the leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, because of
aspeech she gave in December. “There is a debate about how many hundreds of
thousands were martyred in the liberation war,” she said. “Different books give
different accounts.”
For this, Ms. Khaleda was strongly criticized. Mofidul
Hoque, a trustee of the Liberation War Museum, said that her “comment shows
utter disrespect to the millions who laid down their lives and perished in the
black hole of genocide in 1971.” Although it is difficult to see how her
comment could amount to sedition, the government has given a go-ahead to the
legal action.
Where does the truth about the numbers lie? The three
million figure was popularized by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the
Awami League in 1971, the country’s first president and the father of the
current prime minister. Mujib, as he is popularly known, is a revered figure,
particularly within the Awami League. But his biographer, Sayyid A. Karim, who
was also Sheikh Rahman’s first foreign secretary, viewed the number as “a gross
exaggeration.”
In his book “Sheikh Mujib: Triumph and Tragedy,” Mr. Karim
reported that the prime minister’s office told him the figure was taken from
Pravda, the Soviet newspaper. According to the American writer Lawrence
Lifschultz, a survey by the Mujib government that was projecting a death toll
of 250,000 was “abruptly shut down.”
A 1976 study in the journal Population Studies estimated
that the number of deaths caused by the war was about 500,000, many as a result
of disease and malnutrition. A 2008 article in The British Medical Journal
concluded that the number of violent deaths during the war was about 269,000
(allowing a possible range of 125,000 to 505,000).
Many Bangladeshis sincerely believe in the three million
figure, which symbolizes the huge sacrifices of the war. M. A. Hasan, convener
of the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, said, “The figure of liberation war
martyrs is one such issue which no one should question.”
For others, however, questions are necessary on this and
other aspects of the 1971 war, including the widespread killings of members of
the Bihari ethnic group, who supported the Pakistanis during the conflict, by
Bengali nationalists. We should question this because nationalist narratives
about the past often serve contemporary political interests, and we should
beware of an orthodoxy being used to silence dissent.
Since the Awami League came to power again in 2009, it has
tried to use the emotions surrounding the 1971 war to justify a move toward
authoritarian one-party rule. In its version of history, only the Awami League
is the party of liberation, and therefore of government, and opposition parties
are branded as “pro-Pakistan,” and therefore dangerous and disloyal.
Freedom of speech in Bangladesh is already under threat both
as a result of religious extremists’ murdering secular bloggers, and the
government’s pressure on the independent news media (including a campaign of
harassment against one newspaper editor).
The proposed genocide law might work to the political
advantage of the Awami League in the short term. But in the long term,
curtailing free expression for sectarian political purposes is dangerous for
democracy.
- David Bergman is an investigative journalist based in
Bangladesh.
Source: http://nyti.ms/1RNaUl3
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