Abdul Bari had run out of luck

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My research for a recent article on the campaign to try the perpetrators of atrocities committed during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, took me to the second-hand book section of New Market – dozens of tiny stalls, each with a random collection of discarded and damp books and magazines, piled up to their metal sheet roofs, and blue-plastic awnings.

At the first stall I came to, I told the man what I was looking for, and he sent a couple of boys round the market to try to find them. From among the mountains of discarded chemistry text-books, Jackie Collins novels, and back issues of Cosmopolitan, they returned with two heavy compilations of documents, speeches and articles from the time of the conflict. I thought that the best way to find out what had happened would be to read contemporary accounts like these, because no war crime trials have taken place, either here or in Pakistan, and the history text books have since been altered or influenced by different political parties.

Massacre

One of the books, “International Press on Bangladesh Liberation War”, compiled by Dr M.D. Husain in 1989, includes a startling account in Newsweek, from August 1971, of the massacre of the Bengalis by the Pakistan army and their local allies, which was the dominant story of that year. It is so horrific I find it hard to imagine it can be true.

It seemed a routine enough request. Assembling the young men of the village of Haluaghat in East Pakistan, a Pakistani Army major informed them that his wounded soldiers urgently needed blood. Would they be donors? The young men lay down on their makeshift cots, needles were inserted in their veins and then slowly the blood was drained from their bodies until they died.

India Vs China

The other book I picked up was published by the Indian government in 1972. It is simply called “Bangla Desh Documents 2,” and reprints many of speeches and interviews given by the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, as she toured the World trying to persuade other governments that they should stop Pakistan’s brutal campaign of repression. Mrs Gandhi sounded increasingly exasperated as she appealed for help with the enourmous refugee crisis caused by the conflict (more than ten million East Pakistanis fled into India), and tried to counter the prevailing opinion in Western countries that Pakistan, India and the separatists were somehow equally to blame for the violence.

The failure of the West to censure Pakistan, was one of their most appalling compromises of the Cold War. The US was allied to Pakistan which in turn was friends with China, which had recently cut its ties with the USSR. Nixon was using Pakistan as a conduit to Beijing, so did not want to endanger that relationship. India meanwhile was friends with the Soviets. This all led to some fiery debates at the UN Security Council. This is from Jacob Malik, the USSR’s ambassador:

The Soviet Union does not kiss the boots of bloody dictatorship…Slander against the friendship between India and the Soviet Union: we are proud of that friendship; we cherish it as the apple of our eye. This was Lenin’s dream…The Chinese traitors to Socialism are pretending that it is the intention of the Soviet Union to conquer the Indian Sub-Continent and launch further aggression against China. Who will believe that? That is the fairy story for little children or great fools.

Before reading these speeches and articles I had no idea how worried people were that the war on the Subcontinent could force both China and the Soviet Union to intervene. It is amazing to think that three decades later India, China and Russia are all now friends with rapidly growing capitalist economies. 

The Sunday Times

But the thing I really wanted to find was not in either book. For that I has to search the web, and came across it at a fascinating new online archive, dedicated to ensuring that the history of the war is neither forgotten nor rewritten. 

It is an account of the massacres by a Pakistani journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas (who was originally from Goa), which was published in the Sunday Times. He later went on to write Legacy of Blood, the seminal study of the first years of Bangladesh’s independence, when coup followed coup.

Mascarenhas and a handful of other Pakistani reporters were invited to tour the conflict zone with the Pakistan army, and report on atrocities committed by the Bangladeshi freedom fighters. The other reporters duly filed their propaganda pieces, but not Mascarenhas. This is how the Sunday Times described what happened next, in a straightforward, modest way, which is hard to imagine any newspaper (or broadcaster for that matter) doing these days:

On Tuesday, May 18, he arrived, unexpectedly, in The Sunday Times office in London. There was, he told us, a story he wanted to write: the true story of what had happened in East Bengal.

He made it plain that he understood that if he wrote his story there could be no going back to Karachi for him. He said he had made up his mind to leave Pakistan: to give up his house, most of his possessions and his job as one of the most respected journalists in the country. There was only one condition: we must not publish his story until he had gone back to Pakistan and brought out his wife and five children.

He was able to get them out of the country easily enough, but the authorities refused to let him leave. Tantalisingly, The Sunday Times reports that Mascarenhas  ”found a way of leaving anyway,” but does not explain any further.

Genocide

Back in London, on June 13 1971, The Sunday Times then ran his powerful story, simply headlined GENOCIDE.  This is how it starts:

Abdul Bari had run out of luck.

Like thousands of other people in East Bengal he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani army patrol.

He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.

Read the rest here.

 

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Tags: 1971, Anthony Mascarenhas, Bangladesh, genocide, history, media, Pakistan