I hope also that he knew the difference between three million and three lacs but your argument does not suffice at all because Sheikh Mujib did not hear about Yahya's boast (the statement you mentioned) by then (immediately after release). Because that book was not publish until later. I am sure Bhutto or Yahya did not tell that to his ear before he boarded for the London bound plane. I think we still have time to take a survey and make it a historical fact about our deaths. "A nation who does not know to count their dead is a dead nation." You know this.
If a survey corrects the number, Mujib will not loose his face. Mujib was a human being and might have said something emotinally which we might not have to keep alive for his sake.
Please talk rational not emotional.
Shahadat Suhrawardy
Washington DC
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
From: farida_majid@hotmail.com
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 13:43:34 -0500
Subject: RE: [ALOCHONA] Mujib's confusion on Bangladeshi deaths
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. Genocides are not defined so much by the enormity of the number, though that is an important determinant, but by the ferocity of the intentionality. Below is a snippet excerpt from something I wrote on Genocide of 1971 two years ago.
. . . . . . . .
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).
The intended number to be killed mentioned in the statement of Yahya in a radio interview in February, 1971 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, i.e., subjugation of a whole race of people by brute, inhuman force.
------------
But that was Pakistani military's neo-colonial aim. I like to 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.
Farida Majid
To:
From: bdmailer@gmail.com
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:22:40 +0600
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Mujib's confusion on Bangladeshi deaths
Serajur Rahman
Retired deputy head, BBC Bengali Service
On 8 January 1972 I was the first Bangladeshi to meet independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after his release from Pakistan. He was brought from Heathrow to Claridge's by the Indian high commissioner Apa Bhai Panth, and I arrived there almost immediately.
Mujib was puzzled to be addressed as "your excellency" by Mr Panth. He was surprised, almost shocked, when I explained to him that Bangladesh had been liberated and he was elected president in his absence. Apparently he arrived in London under the impression that East Pakistanis had been granted the full regional autonomy for which he had been campaigning. During the day I and others gave him the full picture of the war. I explained that no accurate figure of the casualties was available but our estimate, based on information from various sources, was that up to "three lakh" (300,000) died in the conflict.
To my surprise and horror he told David Frost later that "three millions of my people" were killed by the Pakistanis. Whether he mistranslated "lakh" as "million" or his confused state of mind was responsible I don't know, but many Bangladeshis still believe a figure of three million is unrealistic and incredible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/mujib-confusion-on-bangladeshi-deaths
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