On orders from Pakistan President Yahya Khan, the military in East Pakistan proceeded to quell the rebellion systematically and ruthlessly. Commented Tony Clifton in Newsweek in June, 1971, "East Pakistan is still nominally a part of Pakistan." Clifton predicted then that with the brutality inflicted by the West in the last three months it will only be a matter of time before Pakistan becomes two countries. "And those two countries will be irreparably split — at least until the last of today’s maimed children grow old and die with their memories of what happened when Yahya Khan decided to preserve their country."

In its 1981 report, the UN Human Rights Commission affirmed that the genocide in Bangladesh was one of the worst in history. Declares Bangladesh’s human rights activist Jahanara Imam, "Even if a lower range of 1.5 million deaths was taken, killings took place at a rate of 6,000 to 12,000 per day, through the 267 days of carnage."

A letter in The Guardian described the scene. "We saw the amputation of a mother’s arm and a child’s foot ... gangrene developed from their bullet wounds. Many saw their daughters raped, and the heads of their children smashed in. Some watched their husbands, sons and grandsons tied up at the wrists and shot in more selective male elimination ... No sedative will calm a girl now in Bougavu hospital — she is in a permanent delirium, crying ‘they will kill us all’. Next to her is a girl still trembling from day-long raping and a vaginal bayonet wound."

A stream of victims and eyewitnesses narrated how truckloads of Pakistani soldiers and their hireling, razakars, swooped down on villages in the night, rounding up women by force. Some were raped on the spot and others carted off to military camps. Weeping survivors of villages, razed because they were suspected of siding with the Mukti Bahini, told of how wives were raped before the eyes of their bound husbands, who were then put to death.

On the eve of their surrender, Pakistani troops spirited away at least 250 intellectuals from Dhaka, including top doctors, professors, journalists, both men and women, and eliminated them before dumping their bodies in pits. Not a single village escaped their depredations. A playground near Alipur village was turned into a graveyard, while almost 300 bodies were dumped in trenches near Dinajpur. More than 3,000 girls were reported missing from Dhaka city alone. Indian troops with the help of the International Red Cross rescued 51 girls from secret places in Narayangang and Dhaka cantonments.

After the war and Pakistan’s ignominious defeat resulting in the birth of Bangladesh, the then president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto set up a war inquiry commission to inquire into the circumstances in which the Commander, Eastern Command, surrendered, and the members of the armed forces of Pakistan under his command laid down their arms. Headed by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Hamoodur Rahman, a Bengali, the commission examined nearly 300 witnesses, most of them Pakistani officers.

Because of its scathing indictment of the military establishment, the report remained in a can with a tight lid. Bhutto, it is alleged, ordered all copies to be destroyed. But selective leaks trickled out within Pakistan and Bangladesh, and an Indian magazine scooped out the whole report and published it on its website.

Lt Gen AAK Niazi, commander of the forces in East Pakistan, alleges that Bhutto tried to buy him off with a diplomatic assignment if he publicly declared that the defeat in East Pakistan was a military defeat and not a political one. Niazi refused and further alleged that Bhutto tried to replace some 18 pages of the Hamoodur Rehman Report which adversely highlighted Bhutto’s own role in particular.

Now the Musharraf dispensation is under pressure to make the report public even as Bangladesh insists on an apology from Pakistan for those hellish events of 1971. The truth is that the Pakistan army violated all military and civilised norms and committed war crimes for which it got away. For that inglorious chapter in its history it wants to avenge its defeat that resulted in the country’s bifurcation, and get even with India!