Why doesn't anyone talk about 1971
I wanted to write this one really carefully because... Well it means more to me than most of the stuff I put up here and I don't want to mess it up.
My family is Bengali and it is never just a distant history to us, it is the date that Bangladesh was born and it was born in a war that basically no one my age in the US has heard of. I mentioned it casually to friends here at school this year and basically got the blankest looks. Someone actually asked me if I meant the India Pakistan war which is close, but not really what I meant-and actually just that disconnect made me feel really lonely.
The super quick version of the story (as much as a war and genocide can have a super quick version): 1971, what is now Bangladesh was East Pakistan, and it was controlled by West Pakistan from over a thousand miles away with all kinds of political and economic discrimination against Bengalis. Then a Bengali party was elected overwhelmingly in a national vote and the West Pakistani government refused to accept it, initiating a crack down known as Operation Searchlight. The military began a nine-month operation where they killed Bengali students, intellectuals, Hindus, Bengali women broadly...
Basically it was and is treated as an outright attempt at ethnic cleansing or more broadly Genocide depending on your phrasing of the statistics and political motivations to write/not write it.
My grandfather went through this war and I am writing that part of my grandfather’s story in another entry soon (it feels like it deserves its own post and I’m not completely comfortable with how to tell it yet).
What has been hard to convey has been talking honestly about the numbers of deaths. The number my government teaches us has been the figure of three million-others estimate the deaths much lower based on more scientific modeling, but are around in the hundreds of thousands with an emphasis on ethnic/nationalist differences between accounts, so... That’s a pretty wide range.
Obviously neither of those two figures should tell us that three million vs hundreds of thousands matters too much when all estimates agree it was hundreds of thousands who died...
But even then every single number given has been higher or lower than what it was, and that makes it difficult to put the atrocity where it needs to be in terms of global human rights issues while also dealing with conflicting narratives. Regardless the general consensus seems to agree that the killings constitute a genocide because of specific targeting (especially targeting specific groups like students, religious groups, women, and educated individuals).
But here is what is most frustrating, for me. It’s not that we don’t disagree with other countries about it, we do, that happens with lots of atrocities around the world. It is that we don't even mention it really, at school, we don't mention the 1971 massacre of Bengalis anywhere and they were so important to the history of Asia and the world. When we learn about the Holocaust and the genocide of Rwanda they are given sufficient lesson time while Bangladesh’s civil war barely receives a sentence and despite there being documented evidence like UN reports, journalist accounts, even evidence of American involvement in the massacre (through withheld information and knowledge of genocide); and I want this to be documented for any of you who don't know and I wanted it written down someplace other than just in my family and in my head.
