[vinnomot] 1971

The Nation, Pakistan; 15.12.07

 

December 16, 1971 demands justice COMMODORE PN (RETD) TARIQ MAJEED December 16, 1971 for Pakistanis, like September 11 for Americans, is a code word, a cue, for a great national disaster. Each came as stunning news to the people of the country concerned.  In America, a cry has arisen led by scholars and specialists that justice has not been done in the case of the terror attacks inflicted on the nation on September 11, 2001. Justice to an outrageous crime means an honest, full inquiry into the crime and how and why it was committed, clear-cut identification of the criminals, appropriate punishment to them, and adopting measures to protect the nation in future from such a happening. People from different fields in the US are getting together to pursue this demand.  There is no such demand, no cry from the public in Pakistan to do justice to the unspeakable horror and humiliation suffered by the nation on December 16, 1971 - the tragic date when our armed forces in Dacca surrendered in war and East Pakistan was cut from the parent country. There are other striking features in the comparison and contrast between the two occurrences. The Americans lost 2973 people and four passenger planes in the attacks. The Twin Towers and another tall building of the World Trade Center in New York and a section of the Pentagon edifice in Washington fell down. These were big losses but not enormous.  Pakistan's losses were enormous, even that is an understatement. Tens of thousands of people were killed. Millions of rupees worth of industrial and commercial properties and private belongings of citizens were lost. The huge losses of the military hardware of the country's army, navy, air force and paramilitary forces ran into hundreds of millions of rupees. The country was severed into two. The trauma and the psychological effects suffered by the Pakistani people were incalculable. The US government established a national commission to "prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks." The commission was distrusted even before it began its proceedings. Critics said it consisted of government's loyalists and its findings would echo the untrustworthy official story. The commission's report confirmed the worst doubts of the critics. The analysts found the report to be erroneous, misleading, untruthful and deficient in its treatment of the subject. It had to be so. The commission started its inquiry with the premise that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Instead of investigating the situation, it situated the investigation! In Pakistan, when the commission of inquiry headed by Justice Hamoodur Rehman was set up by the Bhutto regime on 26 December 1971, people thought it would investigate the whole debacle. No, the commission's task, though long-winded in words, was drastically curtailed - by design. "It was charged with the duty of inquiring 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 and a ceasefire was ordered along the borders of West Pakistan and India and along the ceasefire line in the State of Jammu and Kashmir." The commission focused its inquiry and the findings on the army, altogether ignoring the bigger culprits at home and abroad. Even then, its report, originally completed in July 1972, was glaringly deficient. The whole venture looked artificial. Here the 9/11 commission shows a remarkable similarity to the Hamoodur Rahman commission. There is now ample authentic evidence presented by American and other scientists and analysts that "The attacks of September 11 were masterminded from inside the American State apparatus." President George Bush, the central figure in the State apparatus which masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was the one who established the 9/11 commission of inquiry! It is possible the next US administration, most likely to be of Democrats, may order a new inquiry on 9/11. Besides, the distinguished intellectuals demanding a fresh inquiry may create an impartial committee of citizens to take on this task. We in Pakistan have to have a fresh full inquiry into our worst calamity. We have to raise a cry for justice. Justice to us, the victims, the people of both the Wings of United Pakistan; justice to the armed forces personnel who laid down their lives in the fighting, to the civilians who lost their lives, and those who lost their properties; justice to the Pakistani Biharis who were left stateless and destitute in the Eastern Wing; justice to history which shapes the thinking process and the emotional make up of the people, and whose record of events must be truthful and complete; justice to expose the culprits of the unforgivable crime and to haul up those who are alive and to hold those, who are dead, in perpetual disgrace. Immense harm has been done to our nation and the country by concealing the truth and distorting the facts of that national catastrophe. There is considerable material consisting of pieces of factual information and intelligent inferences put forth by genuine contributors, scholars, researchers, journalists, military men and others who had first hand experience of the horrid happenings of that time. But it remains in the form of stories that do not present the full picture. Besides, it is overwhelmed by the copious incorrect and misleading material and deliberate disinformation that has been reaching, and influencing, the public through books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television. Hamoodur Rahman commission report, apart from its utter inadequacy, has been rendered redundant, indeed worthless, by the very important disclosures, made public in late 1970s, regarding Pakistan's 1971 Crisis and the War with Hindu India. Most significant sources in this respect are RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger's The White House Years, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's On Watch: A Memoir, and two revealing books, Second Thoughts on Bangladesh, and Bangladesh Today: An Indictment and a Lament, the first edited by Matiur Rahman and the second authored by him. These two books expose how India fomented the rebellion in East Pakistan and then imposed the war on Pakistan.  Then there is Major K.C. Praval's Indian Army After Independence, which discloses that the decision to invade East Pakistan was taken on 28 April 1971 in a meeting of the Indian cabinet chaired by Indira Gandhi, and attended by chairman of the chiefs of staff committee, General Manekshaw (p.432). Kissinger confirms this, and reveals more: "By the middle of April 1971 we received reports that India was training Bengali refugees to become guerrilla fighters... By the end of April we learned that India was about to infiltrate the first 2000 of these guerrillas (the Mukti Bahini) into East Pakistan...In May-June 1971 we (had) stepped up aid to the refugees in India from $25 million to $250 million" (p.855).  It is clear from the books by Nixon and Kissinger that the United States was the senior partner with India in the scheme of rupturing Pakistan through subversion and war, and that it had allies and minions among the top policymakers and politicians in Pakistan whom it used as local tools in executing the scheme. Some of these tools performed the crucial tasks in inflicting surrender on Pakistan army that was a major objective of the scheme.  In achieving this objective, a fantastically deceptive and effective manoeuvre was executed through the famous, or infamous, Task Group (TG) 74 of the US Navy, In telling the story, then chief of naval operations, Admiral Zumwalt, discloses that TG 74's deployment throughout was controlled not by the navy but by Kissinger, sitting in the White House as President Nixon's national security advisor! The news of the TG's deployment, broadcast with deft disinformation on December 12, was meant to give a quick boost to the sagging morale of Pakistan's beleaguered generals conducting/fighting the war, who immediately thought that US military help was arriving after all! When, just a couple of days later, they suddenly found that this was a false signal, they suffered a total collapse of morale, rendering them incapable of resisting the enemies' demand of surrender and ceasefire!  These few items are just the tip of the iceberg or the mountain - of data, from which an honestly conducted fresh inquiry can construct the full chronicle of the 1971 debacle.  There is another compelling reason for a new inquiry. In that debacle a band of persons of prestigious status acting under a foreign design did terrible harm to the nation. As this alarming threat was not exposed and not countered, it was repeated 27 years later by a similar band of highly-placed persons that executed the scheme, devised and directed by US agencies, of sabotaging General Ziaul Haq's C-130 plane on 17 August 1988. In that merciless act 30 other persons died, including the American ambassador and 11 Pakistan army officers of colonel to general's rank. That appalling episode also needs to be investigated afresh.  Does such a band exist in the current critical situation in our country? Have the US strategic interests that run counter to Pakistan's vital national interests come to an end? Have the US secret agencies stopped operating in our country? A new comprehensive genuine inquiry would answer these questions.

 

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