Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

I received an email a few weeks ago from a friend. In it she wrote about conversations with some of her relatives in Bangladesh who were born after 1971. She was alarmed to hear how little her relatives knew about the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. A few of her relatives claimed that the Razakars [...]

[Hat tip to Robin Khundkar]
Recently I wrote about Sarmila Bose’s apologia for the Pakistan army that was published last September in Economic and Political Weekly. In this week’s issue of EPW, two critical comments were published that take to task Ms. Bose’s "research". The first comment is from Mr. Akhtaruzzaman Mandal, a freedom fighter whose first-person account of finding [...]

[Click any of the images above for a PDF of the complete 4 page issue of The Observer (Bangladesh Observer) from December 18, 1971]
The erstwhile Pakistan Observer newspaper, renamed The Observer, published its first issue in independent Bangladesh on December 18, 1971, two days after the Pakistan army surrendered to the joint forces of the [...]

[Click image for PDF of Pakistan Observer news article from November 8, 1971]
In October of this year, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, Secretary General of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh, declared that his party did not work against the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. He went on to say that "in fact anti-liberation forces never even [...]

[Cross posted at E-Bangladesh]
Last Sunday I attended a seminar on the Bangladesh Genocide at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. The seminar was organized by the Nathan Weiss Graduate College at Kean. The seminar inaugurated graduate course work on the Bangladesh Genocide as part of the Masters program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The seminar was [...]

[Cross posted at E-Bangladesh]
Aparajito: The word cannot be properly translated into English. Those who have seen Satyajit Ray’s 1956 film "Aparajito" may translate the word as "unvanquished". Undefeated. Unbowed. Uncowed. Unbeaten. It is much more than any of those words.
Today, four Bangladeshi prisoners of conscience - Moloy Bhowmik, Selim Reza Newton, Abdullah Al Mamun and Dulal Chandra [...]

Remember these names and faces:

 
Moloy Bhowmik

 
Selim Reza Newton

 
Abdullah Al Mamun

 
Dulal Chandra Biswas

These men are prisoners of conscience.
These men are Rajshahi University professors. This week the Bangladesh military government, in a sham trial, sentenced them to two years rigorous imprisonment for participating in a silent procession last August protesting police and army brutality against Dhaka University [...]

In their December issue, Daily Star newspaper’s monthly magazine Forum has published my article on Sarmila Bose’s recent paper. The article, entitled "The continuing rape of our history", is based on the post I wrote in October. The article benefitted significantly from the invaluable help of Tazreena Sajjad, a fellow member of the Dristipat Writers’ Collective.
The article is [...]

 
On March 25, 1971 the Pakistani military forcibly confined all foreign reporters to the Hotel Intercontinental (currently the Dhaka Sheraton) in Dhaka. That night after 11pm the military launched its genocide campaign against the Bengali civilian population of then East Pakistan. The reporters were able to see the tank and artillary attacks on civilians from their hotel windows. [...]