Dear Alochok Farida
A million deaths here or there is irrelevant only in a cosmic sense.
Down in the gutter of our politics, how many died in 1971 is the single most important question that should be answered by Bangladesh.
We pay the price for thinking that the real number does not matter - because, as a result, now NOTHING matters.
The sanctity we afford the number 3 million has sanctified our bold stupidity.
The institutionalisation of the number 3 million has institutionalised our crass mediocrity.
That number props up our egos, our insecurities and our delusions.
That number cheapens the value of life and lightens the loss of life.
We cannot even begin to describe how negatively that number has shaped our politics and our conscience.
There are dirty reasons why we don't talk about it. And none of the reasons are in the context of the cosmos.
These reasons are the very same reasons for our condition. I can't write about them because I don't think the English language can accommodate the scale of political depravity in Bangladesh..
So now it seems Mujib said 3 million not because he could not translate 3 lakhs. He said 3 million because Yahya said 3 million. Good grief!!Ezajur Rahman
Kuwait
--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, Farida Majid <farida_majid@...> wrote:
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> I try to avoid getting into the '3 million killed' argument. It is a pointless argument, as if a million subtracted here or added there makes a whole lot of difference. Below is a snippet excerpt from something I wrote on Genocide of 1971 two years ago.
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> He quotes R. J. Rummel again: "It was Yahya Khan, then President of Pakistan", who said regarding his ill-conceived miliitary crackdown on East Pakistan in March, 1971: "Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands" (p315).
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> The intended number to be killed mentioned in the statement of Yahya is not nearly as important as the explicit aim for mass killing that is expressed in the bombast there. And the aim of this mass killing was to make "them" eat out of "our" hands.
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> But that was Pakistani military's neo-colonial aim. I distinguish between that aim and the one that was in the blackened hearts of the Bengali Razakars as they conducted the mass murders of fellow-countrymen in 1971. Those Razakars (and their newer versions) with the same murederous desires in their hearts are still among us. We keep knocking over them even in this forum.
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> Farida Majid
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