1971: Pakistan’s guilt will not go away

By Syed Badrul Ahsan

Every time a nationalist government in Bangladesh, adhering to the principles of the Great Liberation War of 1971, has been removed through internal as well as external conspiracy, elements opposed to our freedom struggle have unabashedly reared their heads and called into question our tryst with history.

Observe the glee with which anti-national elements, encouraged by the parties whose goon squads assisted the Pakistan occupation army in 1971 in the killing of Bengalis have of late been encouraged by comments by short-sighted writers in Pakistan calling for a ‘reunification’ of the old country. Imagine their poor understanding of history. Imagine too their deliberate setting side of the factors that led to the Mukti Bahini and Bangladesh’s people in compelling the Pakistan occupation army to bite the dust in December 1971.

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But, of course, such quislings have always been there at various stages in global history. Such collaborators of fascists, of vicious regimes and occupation forces have in the end been defeated and punished through the inexorable movement of the wheels of justice. But until that beckoning of reckoning comes, these dark elements cause much damage to the country they reside in, even as they shamelessly miss the alien country they brazenly defended against their own people in the past.

Our preoccupation with Pakistan has to do with the continued failure of its successive governments since 1971 to issue an official apology to Bangladesh over the genocide perpetrated by the Pakistan occupation army fifty-four years ago. It was most recently Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister Ishaq Dar, visiting Bangladesh, who fell back on the old spurious argument that Pakistan’s leaders from Z.A. Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf had apologised for what their soldiers did in 1971. And what did those ‘brave’ soldiers do? They killed three million Bengalis, raped anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women, forced 10,000,000 Bengalis into seeking shelter in India and put Bengali villages and towns to the torch. General A.A.K. Niazi spoke of creating a new race of people through the rape of Bengali women by the men under his command. ‘Hum un ki nasl badal denge’, he boasted.

Now, to this matter of an apology by Pakistan. All that Pakistan’s ruling class, including its army-dominated so-called elected civilian government, needs to do is to walk back to a seminal work, ‘We Owe An Apology To Bangladesh’, in which reputed Pakistanis, those properly upset about the doings of their soldiers in 1971, have painted a concrete, unambiguous picture of how Bangladesh suffered under the Yahya-Tikka regime during the war. It is a work Shehbaz Sharif and his ministers as also Field Marshal Asim Munir need to read to remind themselves of the terror their compatriots caused in Bangladesh and the reason why Pakistan cannot by any stretch of the meaning be considered a ‘brotherly’ country by Bengalis.

Did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto apologise on behalf of his country when he visited Bangladesh in June 1974? He merely said ‘tauba’, as if that was enough to wash away the sins committed by his country, indeed by himself, in 1971.

Did Pervez Musharraf offer any apology? He expressed regret for the tragic happenings of 1971. That was not an expression of apology.

Germany and Japan have not only apologised to the nations their soldiers put to the sword in the Second World War but have also gone around with folded hands with a continuity of apologies. Pakistan needs to learn from them. When a state, having been an oppressor, offers an apology to the state it earlier subjected to oppression, it is an exercise to be undertaken formally. Not only the people and government of the state brutalised by an occupation army are to be informed of the apology, but also the citizens of the oppressor country as well as the larger global community which must be officially apprised of the apology measure.

Pakistan has not done that. Neither have its rulers, all the way from 1971 till now, revised school textbooks for their children to inform them of the true, credible reasons behind the loss of ‘East Pakistan’ and the emergence of the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971. Pakistan will not be at peace with itself unless it comes to terms with its past, unless its leaders demonstrate the moral courage to acknowledge the atrocities the Pakistan army committed in Bangladesh more than a half century ago.

And, yes, Pakistan’s army-run government must not imagine that Bangladesh’s people, despite the darkness they have been passing through since the constitutional government led by the Awami League was brought low by local and foreign-engineered conspiracy last year, have forgotten and forgiven Pakistan for the genocide in 1971. Ishaq Dar has come and gone. What will not go away for Pakistan is the guilt which has remained associated with its history since its collapse in Bangladesh. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journlaist, biographer, author