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Enter General Tikka Khan

“The Butcher of Bangladesh On 6 March 1971 General Tikka Khan took over as the Military
Governor of East Pakistan. He arrived in Dhaka with a detailed brief in his pocket given by the
GHQ in Rawalpindi that he should waste no time in getting reinforcements from West Pakistan
and deploy the troops with no loss of time. Within just a few days after his arrival, two full
Pakistan Army divisions were airlifted to East Pakistan. Lieutenant General AAK Niazi was
appointed General Officer Commanding, Eastern Command, Pakistan Army and was posted in
Dhaka. The military was provided with an order of battle under the command of Lieutenant
General AAK Niazi while full compliments of heavily armed paramilitary forces were sent out
to the districts. It soon became obvious that preparations for a military crackdown were now
under way.

25 March 1971 Operation Searchlight. The military crackdown begins,

In an ominous show of force, the Army and the paramilitary forces were deployed in full
strength on the roads of Dhaka on 25 March 1971. From very early in the moming there was a
foreboding among the citizenry, who saw from what was happening on the streets that
something horrible was about to take place. Unafraid of the heavy army presence on the Dday 25
March 1971 when Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code was imposed on the city banning
the assembly of more than five people together, the students of Dhaka University, challenging
the authority of the Army, started a pro-democracy protest rally within the compound of the
University.

The troops moved in with their heavy weaponry, all guns blazing. Automatic weapons like
thomson submachine carbine guns were used which could fire seven hundred fifty rounds in a
minute. The noisy crowd of thousands of unarmed sloganeering young men and women who had
gathered in the university precincts were mowed down mercilessly. One of those who survived
the blood bath later described it as Dhaka’s equivalent of Jalianwalla Bagh Massacre in India of
the empire days. Those who died included students of Dhaka University and other colleges in
the city, professors, the university’s admin staff, party political activists of various hues,
rickshaw pullers and taxi drivers, onlookers and passers by and a whole lot of other ordinary
people. According to independent estimates between six and seven thousand people lay dead on
the ground. The massacre of 25 March ‘71 in Dhaka produced the critical mass of the
Bangladesh Revolution.

Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury, the Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University, was on a visit to
London on a lecture tour. When he heard the news of the massacre of his students he was so
overwhelmed with grief and anger that he called a press conference in London and declared, “It
is genocide. Today, I renounce the citizenship of Pakistan and declare my allegiance to the
liberation of Bangladesh. He did not even think for a minute about his family and their
livelihood. He just resigned from his Vice Chancellorship of the Dhaka University. He showed a
rare degree of moral conviction and commitment.
Shaikh Mujibur Rahman was in Dhaka on 25 March 1971. He was an eyewitness to the
gruesome mass murder, the scale of which was never seen before. According to authoritative
reports, Mujib was so moved when he saw the hundreds of dead bodies of mostly young people
lying on the road soaked in blood that he became emotional and broke down into tears.
He quickly called an emergency meeting of Awami League’s senior leadership. A day later on
26 March 1971 he called a press conference and declared the “Independence of Bangladesh”.

It was an act of great courage on the part of Mujib because he made his independence
declaration while standing on the soil of East Pakistan. He knew that the military authorities
would see his declaration of independence as an act of treason. He was, however, prepared for
the consequences. In fact he had warned his people in his speeches of 4, 6, and 7 March that
soon the time would come when he would be taken into military custody and whisked away
from his people to West Pakistan. He said that he was unlikely to return home alive. There was a
possibility that he could be hanged on charges of treason and exhorted the people that even
without him the liberation struggle must go on relentlessly till freedom was achieved. His
declaration was a clarion call for the start of an armed struggle against the Punjabi-dominated
Pakistan Army. His call to arms transformed the street protests into a fullfledged revolution.

Nobody was surprised when news broke out a day later on 27 March 1971 that Shaikh Mujibur
Rahman was arrested from his residence at 32 Dhanmondi Residential Area in Dhaka and put on
a military flight and taken to Karachi where he was placed under house arrest. Shortly thereafter
he was moved to Mianwali and incarcerated in a prison cell as a political prisoner in solitary
confinement. The description of the prison cell as given by Mujib himself after his release was
the stuff of goose pimples. He was locked up in a small room and was not allowed to read
newspapers, books, or magazines, there was no TV in his room, nobody to talk to. There was a
hangman’s noose menacingly hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell. To add to the sense of
morbidity, a grave was dug just outside his prison cell warning him that his time was up.

After Mujib was taken under military custody and flown to West Pakistan on 26 March 1971,
the elected members of the National Assembly representing the Awami League all 167 of
themmet at a secretly held conclave on 10 April 1971 at Baidyanathtala, Meherpur.

The newly designed Bangladesh national flag was unfurled and a proclamation was adopted
dating it 10 April 1971 a) confirming the declaration of independence of Bangladesh made by
Shaikh Mujibur Rahman on 26 March 1971 in Dhaka, b) declaring and constituting Bangladesh
to be a Sovereign People’s Democratic Republic and c) resolving that till such time that a
constitution was framed Shaikh Mujibur Rahman would remain the President of the Republic
and Syed Nazrul Islam the Vice President of the Republic.

This historic proclamation was incorporated as a separate chapter in the constitution of

Bangladesh of 1973. It was, however, expunged by the Bangladesh National Party (BNP-led)
Government of Begum Khaleda Zia (2001-2006), arguing that the declaration was merely a
news item and could not form part of the Constitution. A Special Committee for drafting a
constitutional amendment was appointed in February 2011 by the Awami League-led
government of Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina, whose job would be to decide on how to
incorporate the chapter with the required amendment at an appropriate slot in the constitution.
The Army top brass who were handling the Bangladesh crisis-General Yahya Khan, the Military
Dictator’: General Tikka Khan, the Military Governor of East Pakistan; and General AAK Niazi,
the GOC Eastern Command Dhaka-were from the very beginning feeling unequal to the task
facing them. Mujibur Rahman’s strategy and tactics adopted for conducting the Liberation
Struggle which he had launched with India’s backing and support were proving too much for the
generals.

Trained to fight wars, the generals were unable to figure out the finer points of the Bangladesh
leader’s mass political campaign for freedom. Arresting Mujib and hanging him could prove too
explosive considering his mass popularity. The minority leader Zulfiqar Al Bhutto, an
establishment figure and a politician, could be taken on board and perhaps also serve a useful
purpose to understand the nuances of Mujib’s political frolics, but the generals were not quite
sure that he would be a trustworthy partner. They were aware that Bhutto had one problem: he
was focussed far too much on his own political agenda than would be helpful to the generals.
Tied down with so many constraints, the Army decided to go in for desperate remedies to meet a
desperate situation. The country had to be saved from disintegration. It would be a two-tier
policy response to the crisis. The political response would be to launch a massive military
crackdown on the unarmed civilian population. This should go concurrently with a no-holds-
barred operation letting loose the army troops to drag Bengali women into the bunkers and
trenches dug for war and subjecting them to rape. It was to be on such a scale that the liberation
struggle would be killed once and for all.

Exercising the military option by going to war with India would help cut off the supply lines of
material support. Mujib’s campaign would therefore be weakened.

It was noteworthy that Mujib, while addressing a million strong mass rally at Paltan Maidan in
Dhaka 7 March 1971, had demanded of the military government to stop the “Genocide” in the
countryside. It was for the first time that the international community heard that Pakistan Army
had launched itself into a campaign of mass murder and mayhem in East Pakistan. It was on
such a mass scale that the leader of the liberation struggle could not find a word other than to
describe it as genocide.

According to other reports filtering out of the heavily censored environment in the provinces, the
military had dug trenches all over the countryside in preparation for a full blown war with India.
Reports had already started coming out that the troops of Pakistan Army deployed in the rural
heartland had taken Bengali women as prisoners of war (before even the war began) and literally
dragged them into the trenches and bunkers, forcibly and subjected them to mass rape. Needless
to reiterate, the intention of committing such a heinous and despicable crime on the womenfolk
on such a mass scale obviously was to demoralise and de-motivate the freedom fighters and
dampen their vigour and enthusiasm as a fighting force.

The tally of civilian casualties of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle according to the figures
compiled by the Government of Bangladesh was three million dead. However, according to
other sources the figure was more like one and a half million dead. And nearly a quarter of a
million women were raped in the trenches and bunkers dug for war by Pakistan Army troops.
The perpetrators of the crimes were said to be troops of ethnic Punjabi origin. Later in a count
collected from hospitals, rural primary health care centres, and homes of the victims all across
Bangladesh, it was revealed that about two hundred thousand illegitimate children were born to
these women victims of rape committed by the Pakistani troops. It was this head count of
illegitimate children that confirmed the enormity of the crime.

There were also reports that during the period when a wave of religious extremism was
sweeping Bangladesh in the nineties of the last century and the first decade of the new
millennium, some of the terrorist outfits based in the Punjab Province of Pakistan like Harkat ul
Jihad e Islami (HUJI) which has a strong base in Bangladesh, Lashkar e Tayyaba (LeT). Jaish e
Mohammad, as indeed al Qaeda and others had recruited from this pool of illegitimate
progenies, both boys and girls, for terrorist activities against India and elsewhere.

It is a matter of great regret that none of the Western Governments who are always the first to
come out with condemnations when even minor politically hyped instances of human rights
violations occur in the third world countries-take for example the constant bashing the Indian
security forces get in the State of Jammu and Kashmir on this issue chose to take no notice of the
crimes of genocide and mass rape committed by the troops of Pakistan Army.

The one exception however was the stand taken by the UN Agency on Universal Human Rights
in 1981. It honestly acknowledged the enormity of the crime of Genocide committed by the
Pakistan Army in Bangladesh. It stated in a narrative, “Among the genocides in human history
the highest number of people killed in such a short span of time (nine months) was in
Bangladesh in 1971. An average of 6,000 to 12,000 people were killed every single day. This
was the highest daily average in history.” A lower estimate shows that one and a half million
were killed, majority of whom were Hindus. A Commission of Enquiry appointed by the
Pakistan Government, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, recorded testimonies of Pakistan
Army field commanders who quoted General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, General Officer
Commanding, Eastern Command of Pakistan Army in 1971, as asking the question “How many
Hindus have you killed today?” as a matter of routine.

As a matter of comparison of the play of realpolitik, witness the February 2011 outbreak of the
pro-democracy protest movement in Libya demanding the ouster of Colonel Muammar el-
Qaddafi when five to ten thousand people were killed in the confrontations between the
protagonists of the revolution and the government forces. The UN Security Council passed an
unanimous resolution seizing the assets of Libyan President Qaddafi and his family, authorised
imposition of a nofly zone over Libya, slammed an arms embargo on Libya and declared that
Qaddafi and his henchmen would have to face prosecution in the International Criminal Court at
the Hague. In contrast the military top brass in Pakistan as indeed ZA Bhutto, who were
collectively responsible for killing over a million and a half men and women and raping a
quarter of a million women were provided protection instead.

It is heart-breaking to see that the international community has never thought of taking up the
cases during the last forty years since 1971 for bringing the perpetrators of this extreme kind of
violence against humanity to justice. It is therefore left to Prime Minister Hasina Wajed to take
up the cases of crimes against humanity and bring them to justice.
Adolf Hitler took six years (1939-1945) to kill six million Jews in the gas chambers. The Jewish
people have neither forgiven nor forgotten the event. They have done everything possible to
keep alive the memory of those who died and worked hard to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War had committed the most heinous
crime by using Chinese and Korean women in their thousands as prostitutes, in other words
raping them. These women were given the name “comfort girls”. Both China and South Korea
forced Japan after so many years to apologise and pay compensation to the families of these
“comfort girls”.

There is a strong case for compensating the families of the dead and the victims of rape in
Bangladesh. I have seen media reports recently that some women’s organisations in Bangladesh
as indeed India have come together and are trying to raise these issues in international forums
like the UN and the International Criminal Court. I hope they succeed in their efforts and get
Pakistan Army to stand trial for War Crimes. There are clear provisions in international law to
initiate criminal proceedings against the perpetrators of the crime and bring them to justice even
at this late stage. There is no denying that there is an imperative need to raise the awareness of
the international community, under Article 1 of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, about the
denial of justice to the victims of the Bangladesh
Genocide of 1971. For evidence, the reference in the UN Declaration of Universal Human
Rights of 1981 will be sufficient to prove the case. There is also the absolute need to seek
redress under Article 2 of the UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide 1948, holding the parties in power accountable for their gross violations of human
rights and also offering protection to deter future abuse. It is better late than never.

It has remained in the history of mankind the most grievous travesty of justice that the Holocaust
of South Asia in 1971 has gone unmourned and the perpetrators of the horrendous crime have
gone unpunished at the altar of real politik and the cold war compulsions of the Superpowers.
Their pretensions as the upholders of universal human rights were exposed to be no more than
hollow slogan mongering. Forget the superpowers; future generations of humankind would
surely remember and honour the dead and the victims of rape with utmost dignity. Many in
Bangladesh believe that if there were no war crimes tribunals set up to bring
erpetrators of the crimes to justice, it was because Bangladesh is a poor nation and has no oil in
the ground, which is why the West turned its face the other way.