Unheard Voices

The following case compiled by concerned Bangladeshis is swirling on the net. This seems to be the first organized compilation of facts against this guy.

Delwar Hossain Sayeedi Factfile

While Sarmila Bose’s research
has generated many responses, is it enough or should we take a more formal approach. While some has said there is overreaction on this, some like the following poster, does not think it is enough. The following is from an email:

For last couple of days I have been going through the
articles written in response to Sarmila Bose’s
controversial paper that came in the Bangladeshi
media. Most of the articles gave me an impression that
the authors did not have chance to read the original
paper. Their reaction was more generic than specific
(except the one written by Masuda Bhatti in Daily
Janakantha). I also read the rebuttals posted on
Drishtipat site. Most of them sounded too modest to me
though they correctly noted that Bose started her
research with some predetermined conclusions. To my
surprise none of the notable intellectuals or
political personalities (except Rashed Khan Menon)
spoke against this paper. Though this is not the first
time the history of our liberation war is attacked but
I believe no one earlier tried to question the
massiveness of the genocide and other violence in the
name of research. Another point that bother me is,
this is an ongoing project and current conclusions are
just preliminary findings (Bose mentioned it at the
beginning of the paper). Haven knows what she has in
her mind for final conclusions.
I was wondering if Drishtipat can organize an online
campaign to protest against it. Is it not possible to
launch a web page like stop violence portal site? It
will contain Sarmila Boses’s original paper and the
articles written in protest. People can be requested
to send their comment to this site. This site can be
advertised through other Bangladeshi sites and
Bangladeshi News papers. At the end of the campaign
these comments can be sent to Sarmila Bose as well as
to the institution she is working with.
This campaign can be organized to show the popular
reaction. Since Bose is doing the research at the
academic level, it will be more effective if some one
(or group of researchers) can challenge her form the
same level. Flaws in her investigation, absurd
arguments, and very unconvincing interpretation need
to be pointed out by people who are well known for
their authority on this topic. Bangladesh government
can take the initiative, but that is not going to
happen. What makes me more concerned about this paper
is the peril that pertains to this type of propaganda.
If we failed to react duly, some utterly distorted
hypothesis about our liberation struggle might get
accepted at the international level.

Thoughts?

Amid all the bad news, such stories of compassion makes us hopeful again. More and more, the Bangladeshi diaspora is moving away from their comfort zone and getting motivated to
spend time and money on charitable tasks. Very heartening indeed.

Officials of the National Security Intelligence beat up photojournalists as they reach its offices at Segun Bagicha in Dhaka on Thursday. Apparently a photojournalist had been detained by the security agency. — NEW AGE PHOTO

Or else why ‘National Security Intelligence (NSI) personnel yesterday swooped on them in front of the NSI office at Segun Bagicha in the capital’? As far as I remember, that can be the last prerogative for ‘our friends in the intelligence’ to act upon. Or, am I not talking sense? The ‘land of press freedom’ is rocking these days…

New Age reports,

NSI personnel assault lensmen
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Photojournalists took to the streets and blocked busy Topkhana Road in the capital protesting against the confinement of two of their colleagues and subsequent assault on others by the National Security Intelligence personnel on Thursday.

The two photojournalists who were handed over to the Ramna police were released in the afternoon.

Witnesses said a photojournalist of Bangla daily Janakantha, Enamul Kabir, was caught by the NSI men while he was taking a snap of the outside wall of the NSI building at about 12:00 noon.

Enamul informed his office of the incident and another photojournalist of the daily Sheikh Mamun went to the NSI office to know about it, but the NSI men also took him to hostage and beat him up.

As the news spread, a number of photojournalists from different dailies also went to the office, but the NSI men assaulted them with sticks and iron rods leaving several of them injured.

The injured — Mir Ahmed Miru, photojournalist of Janakantha and also general secretary of the Bangladesh Photojournalists’ Association, Anisur Rahman of Daily Star, Raja of Bhorer Kagoj, AKM Musa of Sangram, Milon of Financial Express, and Enamul Kabir of Janakantha — were admitted to different hospitals.

The photojournalists with a number of newsmen blocked Topkhana Road near the National Press Club snapping traffic for more than three hours. They also held a rally there.

Speakers demanded punishment for those involved in the attack on the journalists. Journalists’ leaders including Reazuddin Ahmed, Shawkat Mahmud, Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury, Ruhul Amin Gazi, Manjurul Ahsan Bulbul, Altaf Mahmud, Elahi Newaj Khan, and Shafiqur Rahman addressed the rally.

The road blockade was withdrawn when the police brought the two photojournalists to the spot from their police station and released them at about 4:30pm.

The journalists’ leaders in a statement demanded stern action against the NSI men involved in assaulting the photojournalists. They also demanded that the government should take necessary steps to stop recurrences of such incident. The signatories to the statement include Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury, Gias Kamal Chowdhury, Reazuddin Ahmed, Manjurul Ahsan Bulbul, Ruhul Amin Gazi, Shawkat Mahmud and Altaf Mahmud.

And for anyone who thinks New Age is an ‘operation run by Indian special interest money’, Daily Star reports, (anyone with a similar complain against Star, please scroll up and stick to the Age wire)

NSI men swoop on lensmen
Staff Correspondent

Nine photojournalists of different national dailies were injured, three of them critically, when National Security Intelligence (NSI) personnel yesterday swooped on them in front of the NSI office at Segun Bagicha in the capital.

The trouble began as a photojounalist was doing his professional duties.

[Note: The photo attached with this post is from New Age. And any request for a ‘more detail’ visual account of the event will be humbly turned down.]

“It takes real courage to be a journalist in Bangladesh” — Ann Cooper, CPJ

And yes, I would really like to see how many readers type in ‘shame’ as a comment after they read this piece of ‘disgust’.

Sarmila Bose’s controversial paper Anatomy of Violence: An Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971

Update: Pakistani Media, of course, jumps to embrace this finding based on flawed method. Its a matter of time before this will be touted every where by all the wrong people. That’s why it is imperative to point out all the flaws in this analysis. Also see this in Dawn

Late Update The whole controversy has been collated in one page over here
Late Late Update The link to her original article here was published in EPWa few months later..one of the previous versions which caused the major firestorm in Bangladesh was taken down of this site after the writer sent legal threat to the hosting company of this website without corresponding with us.
Last update Thanks to Salma’s compilation and research, all the responses to Sarmila Bose’s research are compiled in one page.

Here it is

Update from 2006.. a fantastic academic rebuttal from Nayanika

The fire storm on Sarmila Bose’s recent findings continues…. rebuttal from Zafar Sobhan. Thanks to AC for forwarding me this response:

Unconvincing. One of the peculiarities of academia is the somewhat perverse
incentive scholars have for problematizing existing understandings and
presenting novel and contrarian reinterpretations of history, however
tortured.

It is clear that the author went into her study with her conclusion already
decided, and then has cherry-picked her facts to fit. The fact that her
conclusion is a contrarian one and that contrarian viewpoints tend to gain
more notice and acclaim than ones that reiterate established scholarship,
is, I am sure, merely coincidental. There’s a lot of that going around
these days. (See, e.g., In Defence of Internment, by Michelle Malkin or
anything by David Irving).

The moral equivalence she draws between the two sides is certainly novel
(though no one disputes that there were atrocities on both sides). The mere
fact that violence and atrocity were perpetrated by both sides does not
render them equivalent and the author’s absurd argument that the only thing
keeping the pro-liberation side from committing equal atrocity was lack of
fire-power and opportunity, if accepted, can surely be extrapolated to any
conflict at any place and any time in history to show that there is always
moral equivelence on both sides of all conflicts.

The author’s conclusions are rendered problematic even within her own
writing and taking her research at face value (which would be extremely
generous). For instance, she continually conflates atrocities committed by
pro-Pakistani Bengalis or “loyalists” with those committed by pro-liberation
Bengalis to prove her point about Bengali brutality, when the more
meaningful interpretation would suggest the opposite. In addition, facts
such as that some students at DU were armed with .303 rifles and resisted
(indeed true) hardly supports the point that the author is attempting to
make.

I am not a historian and will leave a fuller rebuttal to others, but one
final point I would like to make is that the author’s point “No rape of
women by Pakistan army found in any of the cases of conflict” if true would
make the conflict unique in the history of war and is so outlandish that the
author is even forced to sheepishly qualify her findings. Perhaps she
should contemplate that the fact that her findings in this one instance are
so bizarre that they might call her entire research methodology into
question and problematize her findings in other areas as well.

More on this revisionist historian Sarmila Bose, as she says, Pakistan army should have been recognized for their heroism in 1971. I am debating how to accept these new arguments. On one hand, as Afsan bhai says historian’s job is to be unemotional, unbiased and objective, on the other hand, even if she has documents, this kind of stuff is hard to accept. Its like doing an analysys of Hitler’s army’s performance and calling them gallantry. In reality Pakistan broke every single convention of war and committed genocide on innocent civilians. If this is called gallantry by objective historians, I am sorry to say that I don’t care much for that history.

No matter how traumatic the outcome of 1971 for Pakistan, the Eastern command did not create the conflict, nor were they responsible for the failure of the political and diplomatic process. Sent to do the dirty work of the political manoeuvrers, the fighting men seem to have performed remarkably well against overwhelming odds. It is shocking therefore to discover that they were not received with honour by their nation on their return. Their commander, Niazi, appears to have been singled out, along with one aide, to be punished arbitrarily with dismissal and denial of pension, without being given the basic right to defend himself through a court-martial, which he asked for.

The commission set up allegedly to examine what had happened in 1971 was too flawed in its terms of reference and report to have any international credibility. However, even its recommendations of holding public trials and court-martials were ignored. There is much for Pakistan to come to terms with what happened in 1971. But the answers don’t lie in unthinking vilification of the fighting men who performed so well in the war against such heavy odds in defence of the national policy. Rather, in failing to honour them, the nation dishonours itself.

Full Article

Believe it or not that was the finding of a recent study as per Daily Times of Pakistan. Read the whole story to believe it.

Outraged Bangladeshies were naturally disgusted at this finding and few of us are in the process of establishing contact with this scholar Sarmila Bose. Abedin Chowdhury seems to have managed to get a reply from her and here is the text of her reply.

The Daily Times, Pakistan, report was brought to my notice. The heading given to the report is incorrect and not the finding of my study. The issue of rape in any case amounted to about 100 words out of a nearly 6,500 word paper on the subject of patterns of violence in 1971.

I certainly prefer people to read what I have actually written. Normally I would expect the paper to be revised after peer review and then published.

In the meantime you and your friends may wish to know that my paper, while summarizing the patterns from case-studies, noted that no case of rape was found in these specific violent incidents involving the Pakistan army - i.e., there was evidence of killing, but not rape. The paper clearly states that this result cannot be extrapolated to all incidents in that year.

As I pointed out in the discussion that followed, there is evidence elsewhere that rape certainly occurred in 1971, committed both by the army and by Bengalis. But it seems - from this study and other works - that it may not have occurred in all the instances it is alleged to have occurred.

Excerpts from the NYTimes article published in 1972:

Menen got his information from the victim’s father. Pakistani
soldiers had come to the little village by truck on day in October.
Politely and thoroughly they searched the houses - “for pamphlets,”
they said. Little talk was exchanged since the soldiers spoke a
language no one in the little village could understand. The bride of
one month gave a soldier a drink of coconut juice, “in peace”.

At ten o’clock that night the truckload of soldiers returned, waking
the family by kicking down the door of their corrugated iron house.
There were six soldiers in all, and the father said that none of
them was drunk. I will let Menen tell it:

Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple.
The others stayed behind with the family, one of them covering them
with his gun. They heard a barked order, and the bridegroom’s voice
protesting. Then there was silence until the bride screamed. Then
there was silence again, except for some muffled cries that soon
subsided.

In a few minutes one of the soldiers’ came out, his uniform in
disarray. He grinned to his companions. Another soldier took his
place in the extra room. And so on, until all the six had raped the
belle of the village. Then all six left, hurriedly. The father found
his daughter lying o the string cot unconscious and bleeding. Her
husband was crouched on the floor, kneeling over his vomit.

After interviewing the father, Menen tracked down the young woman
herself in a shelter for rape victims in Dacca. She was, he
reported, “truly beautiful” , but he found her mouth “strange.” It
was hard and tense. The woman doubted that she would ever return to
her tiny village. Her husband of one month had refused to see her
and her father, she said, was “ashamed.” The villagers, too, “did
not want me.” The conversation, Menen wrote, proceeded with
embarrassing pauses, but it was not without high tension.

A very accurate observation by Abedin Chowdhury on the current opposition with no forward looking agenda. If I am twenty something who was born after 71, is there any reason for me to vote for AL based on the current programme they are promoting? Every body I talked to recently, more than bad governence of the current government, they mourn the lack of credible opposition in Bangladesh. There is a void. No one is promoting the right agenda or talking about the issues that people need to hear about. Its not that good leaders are not present in these parties but lack of democracy inside the parties prevent anyone to come up the ladder unless he/she is kissing the leaders’ you know what or has big suitcases filled up with black money to spend. So what’s the alternative?