What was the real death toll in #Bangladeshs War of Liberation? saudigazette.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20141217227697#addcomments Dr. Ali Al-Ghamdi LAST week, I quoted from an article written by British journalist Lawrence Lifschultz in defense of the Bangladesh-based British investigative journalist David Bergman who was found guilty of contempt of court charges. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal fined Bergman for making derogatory remarks about the tribunal and for questioning the official death toll of three million people in the country’s 1971 War of Liberation. In my article, I agreed with Lifschultz and backed his viewpoints in defense of Bergman. But I disagreed with some of his arguments like his claim that those who had collaborated with the Pakistan Army during the War of Liberation had been given protection during the periods of military rulers General Zia-ul-Haq and General H.M. Ershad. Lifschultz said that his only concern was the tribunal’s trial of Bergman, who played a key role in making a documentary film titled “The War Crimes File” for Channel Four. Lifschultz explains that the contempt allegation against Bergman relates to a sentence in a 3 October 2011 tribunal order charging Delwar Hossain Sayedee. The order made a reference to the deaths of three million people during the War of Liberation. But he did not mention what really happened in connection with the trial of Sayedee. I think that it is part of the ethics of a journalist to speak out about some of the realities pertaining to Sayedee’s trial. When a witness, who was supposed to testify against Sayedee, decided to testify in favor of Sayedee, he was abducted from near the door of the court and ended up in a jail in Kolkata in India. The death penalty issued against Sayedee by the tribunal was later commuted to a life term even though all the evidence showed that he was innocent. Lifschultz then deals with the way chosen by Bergman to examine the issue of the death toll in the War of Liberation. He said: “Bergman wrote a detailed review of the historical debate on the issue of war casualties. Here he showed his capabilities as a ‘scholar journalist.’ However, AbulKalam Azad, the attorney who called for Bergman to be held in contempt, argued that no one should question the accuracy of the statistic of three million deaths during the War of Liberation. From the vantage point of Azad’s narrow-minded ‘nationalism’ anyone who questions this statistic must be ‘an enemy of the people,’ ‘an enemy of the state,’ or an enemy of the tribunal. Here we approach the really difficult issue. Is it the role of a tribunal to pass judgment on the ‘historical correctness’ of a particular position in a historical debate such as this one? Lifschultz then explains another surprising development that will create an embarrassing situation for the court and Azad too. This happened when Lifschultz was the resident correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Bangladesh in 1974. He wrote: “In the course of my reporting I met a very interesting man who had a very intriguing story to tell about the work he had recently been doing. He was employed by the Home Ministry and was part of a team of researchers conducting a study that was trying to assess the total number of casualties that had occurred during the nine months of 1971 as war raged across the country. “The Home Ministry study was trying to assess how many people had died directly from the armed violence of the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators. They were also trying to estimate how many people had died on the road or once they reached refugee camps across the border in India. Many of these deaths were among children and the elderly. The study was conducted by field workers systematically asking families in villages about those who had died from their village during the war and under what circumstances. They were slowly building up a picture across the country. At the time we met, the Home Ministry team had completed their survey in approximately a third of the districts.” Lifschultz continued: “My Home Ministry source told me that based on their projections the number of deaths from the war was estimated at 250,000 people. As I recall, this did not include the young, the ill and the elderly, who died either in the refugee camps or as they fled the Pakistan Army. A quarter of a million people dying from armed violence is by any measure a terrible and tragic number. However, according to my source, the study was abruptly shut down and discontinued. The reason was that the survey was moving toward a statistical conclusion that differed with the prevailing orthodoxy that three million people had died from armed violence and refugee migration. I never published this account because I was leaving Bangladesh within a week to take up a position as South Asia correspondent of the magazine based in New Delhi. I had always meant to return to the issue but the Emergency in India and other events conspired to make this one of the few stories I never revisited as I intended.” The arbitrary verdict issued by the tribunal against Bergman might have led to unearthing some truths that some people wanted to remain concealed. In the next article, I will shed light on some other aspects highlighted by Lifschultz in his article.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:00:19 +0000
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