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Analysis
Pakistan's Army:
Living in a State of Strategic Denial
by
C. Uday Bhaskar
A two-day
international conference on genocide that concluded in Dhaka July 31
exhorted the UN to recognize the mass killings and rape that the
Pakistan Army had unleashed in the torturous and tumultuous events that
preceded the birth of Bangladesh in December 1971.
Legal experts from Germany, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Britain and Canada
joined their Bangladeshi counterparts in issuing a declaration that
noted: "The conference calls upon the media and the civil society at
home and abroad to focus on the (1971) genocide in Bangladesh, and
launch a campaign so that this is recognized in the UN as Genocide."
Furthermore, the conference urged the Bangladesh government to begin the
process of trying the perpetrators as war criminals and to seek
international support in this regard.
But the sad truth is that as in the past 37 years, this earnest plea is
unlikely to elicit any meaningful response from the powers that be at
the global table.
The US, with Richard Nixon in the White House and his ace assistant
Henry Kissinger actually calling the shots in 1971, was culpable by
turning a blind eye to the genocide and mass rape that enveloped then
East Pakistan. To their credit, the US mission in Dhaka tried to report
the carnage to the DC Beltway and the US media, including some
mainstream papers reported the events as accurately as possible. But in
vain. And in keeping with the dictum that major powers shape the
historical narrative in a selective manner by engaging in astute
exclusion, this enormity has since been successfully relegated to the
distant back-burner of the global record.
Four decades later, except for the victims and their traumatized
families, recall of the genocide in Bangladesh outside of that country
is hazy. The Pakistan Army, which was the principal institution engaged
in attacking and butchering its own citizens - albeit of Bengali
ethnicity, has since sought to play down the scale of the bloodshed and
rape.
The official Pakistani version refers to 26,000 killed over a year but
this is at considerable variance with other estimates which range from
300,000 to a staggering three million killed and between 200,000 to
400,000 women raped.
Two other estimates are illustrative of the disparity that exists about
these gory figures. "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder
Since 1900" by R.J. Rummel places the deaths at 1.5 million and other
literature on the subject avers that East Pakistan of 1971 ranks as
having the highest concentration or density of genocide by way of the
numbers killed, the time involved and the geographical area in question.
Yet another book, "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape" by Susan
Brownmiller estimates that the total number of women raped by Pakistan
Army personnel along with their local support base - the 'razakars' -
varies from 200,000 to 400,000. The majority of them were Muslim girls
and women ranging from age eight to 70 plus.
These are appalling statistics by any yardstick and in a normative
context, even one death or rape of a civilian non-combatant by any
uniformed person is cause for the gravest concern. Paradoxically, where
death becomes macro, cerebral distortions occur easily. In keeping with
the Einstein formulation that in a stellar domain mass can deform space,
it may be averred that where a whole state machinery is committed to
mass killing, normal morality and ethics are warped and elite
responsibility evaded. Most objective genocide studies point to this
pattern.
However, the purpose of this comment is not to cast aspersions on the
veracity of one study or the other - more qualified voices will have to
address that - but to relate the events of 1971 with the current turmoil
in Pakistan.
Currently, the Pakistan Army - which in the Zia years became the
defender of the Islamic faith - is caught in deep strategic denial about
its murky and blood-splattered past. The empirical reality is that this
institution since the first war for Kashmir in October 1947 to Kargil of
May 1999 has been tasked in covert operations that have used terror
stoked by religious radicalism and sectarian xenophobia against the
'adversary' - whether the much reviled Hindu Indian or the fellow
Pakistani, be it the Bengali Pakistani of 1971 or the Baluchi of current
times.
Like Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Grey", the institutional face of
the Pakistan Army is best exemplified by the chutzpah of General Pervez
Musharraf is a visage of supreme confidence - now further bolstered by
the nuclear firewall. But the ugly reality is of a once proud army - its
track record in World War II as part of the erstwhile British Indian
Army is lustrous - that has lost its moral compass. The result has been
the ignominy of killing fellow citizens on an unprecedented scale and
where arch enemy India has been engaged - not being able to acknowledge
the deaths of its regular troops in battle or even claim their bodies. A
la Lady Macbeth, this is a stain that cannot be wiped away.
The inflexible mindset of the Pakistan Army has to be radically altered
and there is no historical precedent that this will occur by consensus
and deep introspection. The military acquires its legitimacy to use
proportionate force for a larger national objective from adherence to
the rule of law and a distilled code of professional conduct. But when
the deviant becomes the norm, the correlation between principle and
power is subverted.
The Pakistan Army is caught in an inflexible mode of strategic denial
about its past, which is why it appears both unable and unwilling to
deal with its present internal security challenges. This is the 'truth'
that President Asif Ali Zardari has been trying to reveal - but with
limited success. The reverberations of the Dhaka genocide conference
must be picked up by Pakistan's accomplished intellectuals - both in the
media and academia - and a false narrative corrected. The army must
finally confront its mea culpa moment through the bloody cross of East
Pakistan.
(C. Uday Bhaskar is a well-known strategic analyst. He can be reached at
cudayb@gmail.com)
August 5, 2009
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