How did the contributor overhear the telecon between Hilari and Hasina? --- On Fri, 3/11/11, abid bahar <abid.bahar@gmail.com> wrote:
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Bangabandhu Killing Zia passively involved Lifschultz tells HC, submits written statement on Taher killing Ashutosh Sarkar
Clik here to read Lifschultz's statement This has become clear from the conversations with Col Farooq Rahman and Col Abdur Rashid, convicted killers of Bangabandhu, and from the book Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood written by Anthony Mascarenhas, he said. He said Ziaur Rahman was in the shadow of the whole episode of August 15, 1975 because he was very much one of the main players of the game. In reply to a question from the HC, Lifschultz said Ziaur Rahman could have stopped the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman because he (Zia) knew the plot. Zia was a complicated man and was the main beneficiary of the assassination, he said, adding, Zia was responsible for killing many freedom fighters including army official Khaled Mosharaf. The Pulitzer Prize winner who had covered the trial of Col Abu Taher in 1976 placed his statement before the HC bench of Justice AHM Shamsuddin Chowdhury Manik and Justice Sheikh Md Zakir Hossain. The bench is hearing a writ petition that challenged the martial law regulation under which the military tribunal was formed and Taher was sentenced to death. Earlier on January 20, the HC bench requested Lifschultz to appear before it to place a statement on the trial and execution of Taher. Lifschultz on January 31 sent a written statement to the HC bench through the Attorney General's Office saying that Gen Ziaur Rahman made the decision of Col Abu Taher's execution before formation of the military tribunal that gave the execution order. Gen Manzur, then high-ranked military officer, knew with absolute certainty that Zia had decided to have Taher hanged before the "so-called trial" began, Lifschultz said in the statement. "Subsequently, this fact was also confirmed to me by two high-ranking military officers, who were close to Zia at that time," he said in his January 31 statement, which was placed before the HC bench on February 3. Lifschultz yesterday appeared before the same HC bench around 2:30pm and placed a written and a verbal statement before it. He said the trial of Col Taher was not even a show-trial since it had no projection or demonstration. There existed a "Special Military Tribunal No 1" which convened at the Dhaka Central Jail. "I was there. I stood outside the prison. I watched men, like Colonel Yusuf Haider, the so-called Tribunal's chairman, walk through the prison gates," he said in the written statement. It was a premeditated assassination of which Ziaur Rahman was the assailant, Lawrence Lifschultz who arrived in Dhaka on March 12 told the court. Although Zia had convened a meeting of the generals returned from Pakistan as Moudud Ahmed stated in a book, the decision to kill Taher was taken exclusively by Zia, he said, adding that he (Zia) had convened that meeting only to pretend that those generals had involvement in killing Taher. "Moudud Ahmed claimed that Ziaur Rahman had convened a gathering of 46 "repatriated" officers to discuss the sentence that should be passed on Taher. It was well known that not a single officer who had participated in the Liberation War was willing to serve on Special Military Tribunal No 1. But General Zia's special convocation of repatriates appears to have ended with unanimous decision. They wanted Taher to hang," his written statement said. "Moudud claims his source for this story was General Zia himself. In this respect, Moudud's version of events tallies with what General Manzur claimed to me regarding General Zia having personally taken the decision on what the verdict would be. One man, Ziaur Rahman, decided, on his own, to take another's life. He then asked a group of about fifty officers to endorse his decision," he stated. The US journalist said he had tried to go inside the so-called court but was not allowed. "I had tried to meet Ziaur Rahman many times for taking an interview from him, but he did not allow me to do so," he said, adding that he was expelled from Bangladesh at that time. Replying to another question from the HC, Lifschultz said he could not term it as anything other than assassination, as Syed Badrul Ahsan, a journalist of The Daily Star, stated in 2006 that it was purely and simply a murder. "Syed Badrul Ahsan has called the Taher case 'murder pure and simple'. In an article published in July 2006, Ahsan writes: 'When he (Lifschultz) speaks of Colonel Taher and the macabre manner of his murder (it was murder pure and simple) in July 1976, he revives within our souls all the pains we have either carefully pushed under the rug all these years or have been allowed to feel through the long march of untruth in this country,' according to the statement. Zia decided to kill Taher as he wanted to appease the army officers repatriated from Pakistan and also consolidate the grief on power. Taher wanted to return democracy in the country, but Zia wanted to rule the country as a dictator, he said. Lifschultz said it was one of the saddest human rights violations in the whole of Asia. He said he had been trying to get the whole truth for so many years and he was happy that he was now in a position to disclose whatever information he had before the HC. The court will resume the hearing today. Attorney General Mahbubey Alam and Additional Attorney General also appeared before the court. |
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Sarmila Bose, an apologist for atrocities in 1971 and a denier of rape by Pakistani military, returns
ABM Nasir
March 11, 2011
Sarmila Bose, a denier of rape committed by Pakistani military in 1971 and an apologist for Pakistani atrocities in East Pakistan in 1971, returns with (perhaps with more distortion) her new book "Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War" scheduled to be discussed at a book event at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C., on March 15, 2011. Around 2005-06, she was widely rebutted for her distorted views on Liberation War in an article "Anatomy of Violence: Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971" published at the October 8, 2005 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly.[i] In the article, while Sarmila Bose rightly pointed out that "there has been little systematic study of the violent conflicts during the nine-month long civil war," she and other (see, e.g. Bose, 2005; and Mohaiemen, 2008[ii]) so called 'self-righteous' truth seekers like her appears to be filling the vacuum in rewriting, revising, and, even, twisting the history of Liberation War on their own volitions, based largely on selective references, report published by Pakistan government in 1971, and the eye-witness accounts of the Pakistani military officials. For example, both Bose and Mohaiemen termed the 1971 crisis in East Pakistan as the 'civil war' although the 1971 crisis is most commonly referred in Bangladesh as either Liberation War (or Mukti Juddho) or Independence War (Shadinotar Juddho). The use of the term 'civil war' to address the 1971 war in East Pakistan is an attempt to "deflect the attention from its genocidal connotation" as argued by Mookherjee (2006) in a rebuttal to Sarmila Bose's article. [iii] Indeed, instead of referring such analyses as being "a systematic analysis of the context and nature of violence in the conflict of 1971," as Sarmila Bose claimed, one must reject such articles as systematic attempt to discount the severity of the brutal assault of Pakistani military on Bengali people.
What are the main arguments in Sarmila Bose's Article?
In her article she claimed that
(a) "The civil war was not merely between the two wings of Pakistan, but also within the territory of East Pakistan, between Bengalis and non-Bengalis, and Bengalis themselves, who were bitterly divided between those who favored independence for Bangladesh and those who supported the unity and integrity of Pakistan,"
(b) the atrocity in East Pakistan was provoked by the resistance of the Bengali nationalists,
(c) violence committed by both sides with Bengalis attacking Biharis at the beginning of the war, provoking Pakistani military and Bihari reprisals during the war followed by Bengali retribution against Biharis toward the end of and after the War,
and
(d) no evidence of rape of Bengali women by Pakistani Military could be found. Her prevarication reflected in her: constant and deliberate attempt to depict Pakistani military officials as compassionate individuals, apparently, to deflect the severity of genocidal act committed by Pakistani military on the Bengali populace; heavy emphasis on Bengali atrocities on Biharis; deliberate and frequent use of the word 'male' to discount the violence against women; use of the phrase "collective punishment" to justify mass killings of Pakistani atrocities; frequent terming the 'freedom fighters' as 'Bengali nationalist rebels' to deflect attention from the broader historical cultural, social, political, and economic context of west Pakistani discrimination behind the Liberation War; and, the use of specific example based on selective references, reports published by west Pakistani regime, and interviews of former Pakistani military commanders to deny the broader perspective of the west Pakistani military atrocities.
The review of only one study, by Beachler (2007), containing an objective analysis of the Liberation War, would expose her distorted views and undoubtedly prompt one to throw the 16-page long contorted analysis of the Liberation War in historical recycle bin. [iv]
Why deniers deny?
Sarmila Bose's contorted views of the Liberation War remind this author of the denials by a group of academia of the major genocides in the world history including the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Why deniers deny? Charny (2001), a leading scholar on Genocide studies, stated in this article, that "… deniers are not necessarily rabid anti-some people, like anti-Semites and haters of Armenians, but may more simply be out for their personal gain, economic advantage, or even more simply career advantage -- research grants imply a combination both of financial resources as well as opportunities to engage in research in desired settings." [v]
In another article, Charny and Fromer (1990, 1998) presented five "conceptual characteristics of 'innocent denial." Among the five, one referred to as 'Innocence-and-Self-Righteousness' appears to fit the profile of Sarmila Bose. According to this feature of denial "The respondents claim that they only intend to ascertain the truth. Moreover, they do not believe that human beings could have been so evil as the descriptions of the genocide imply (as reflected in Sarmila Bose's defense for Pakistani military officials). Furthermore, even if many deaths took place a long time ago, it is important to put them aside now and forgive and forget (similarly, Sarmila Bose proposed, in the last sentence of her article, "efforts towards reconciliation, rather than the recrimination that has so far been its hallmark .").[vi]
Sarmila Bose derives her credibility from her being affiliated with multitudes of renowned organizations, being a Hindu of Indian origin, and being a Harvard graduate. However, her apparent objectivity, true intentions, and wisdom are exposed in her passion defense for Pakistani cause reflected in a coauthored article published in Christian Science Monitor on April 11, 2005.[vii] In the article, not only she defended the U.S. sale of F-16 to Pakistan, but she referred Pakistan as a stable Muslim democracy and praised former military ruler General Musharraf as a modernizer.
[i] Bose, Sarmila (2005). "Anatomy of Violence: Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971." EPW, October 8.
[ii] Mohaiemen, Naeem (2008). "Accelerated Media and the 1971 Civil War in Bangladesh," EPW, January 26.
[iii] Mookherjee, Nayanika (2006). "Skewing the history of rape in 1971 A prescription for reconciliation?" EPW, Vol. 41 No 36: 3901-3903.
[iv] Beachler, Donald (2007). "The politics of genocide scholarship: the case of Bangladesh," Patterns of Prejudice (2007). Beachler also indicated that "No book-length study of the genocide in Bangladesh has been published in the United States; essays about it have appeared in some collections on genocide not in others." Beachler also referred to only one article "Atrocities against humanity during the liberation war in Bangladesh" by Akmam, Wadratul (2002) appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research.
[v] Charny, Israel W. (2001). "The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots, and Even by Known Scholars," The IDEA Journal, July 17.
[vi] Charny, Israel W. and Fromer, Daphna (1998). "Denying the Armenian Genocide: Patterns of thinking as defence-mechanisms," Patterns of Prejudice, 39-49.
[vii] Milam, William B. and Sarmila Bose (2005). "The right stuff: F-16s to Pakistan is wise decision." Christian Science Monitor, April 11.