bangladesh-liberation-war

"The struggle this time is the struggle for our emancipation. The struggle this time is the struggle for independence. Joy Bangla!"

"I, Major Zia, on behalf of our Great Leader, the Supreme Commander of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, do hereby proclaim the independence of Bangla Desh and (sic) that the government headed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has already been formed. It is further proclaimed that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the sole leader of the elected representatives of 75 million people of Bangla Desh and the government headed by him is the only legitimate government of the people of the independent sovereign state of Bangla Desh, which is legally and constitutionally formed and is worthy of being recognised by all the governments of the world. I, therefore, appeal on behalf of our Great Leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to the governments of all the democratic countries of the world, especially the Big Powers and the neighbouring countries, to recognise the legal government of Bangla Desh and take effective steps to stop immediately the awful genocide that has been carried on by the army of occupation from Pakistan. To dub us, the elected representatives of the majority of the people, as secessionists, is a cruel joke and should befool none. The guiding principle of the new state will be, first, neutrality; second, peace; third, friendship to all and enmity to none. May Allah help us. Joy Bangla!"

"More ominously, for Bangladeshis whose relatives were murdered, is the exclusion in the new BNP sponsored textbooks of the role played by the Jamaat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist organizations that supported razakars, Islamic terrorist squads implicated in the murders of intellectuals in Dhaka on December 14, 1971. The controversial sentences that blamed the Jamaat-i-Islami in the Awami League era text books were immediately expunged when the Jamaat-i-Islami came to power in a coalition government with the BNP."

"The new editions have re-embraced the view of Bangladeshi nationalism that was promoted by the military regimes. However, the BNP's efforts to vindicate the perpetrators of genocide have gone considerably further than even the former textbooks of Zia and Ershad's periods where the word "razakar" still appeared in reference to the murderers of the intellectuals on December 14, 1970. In 1996 era textbooks, the Awami League added "al-badars" and "al-shams" to the list of collaborators, specifically naming the "Jamaat-i-Islami" as culpable in the murder of the intellectuals. The new 2001 genre textbook leaves all of these names out of the narrative and simply blames the deaths of the intellectuals on themselves and on the Pakistani Army. After October 2001, eliminating references to razakars and certainly the Jamaat-i-Islami was an imperative since former razakars and members of the Jamaat are now part of the ruling coalition. ... An important impact of the omissions and extractions is that the genocidal excesses of the infamous collaborators, the razakars are ignored and thereby excused. This deflection of guilt by the Jamaat-i-Islami was one of the first orders of business for the BNP/Islamists political dispensation that came to power in October 2001."