“The war in East Pakistan ended just before Christmas 1971.  By that time, Graham and I were married and tenants at a drafty Baldwin Street rooming house in Toronto, the unofficial ghetto for draft dodgers and other war objectors.  After nine cruel months, independent Bangladesh was born.”

- Robin Rowe in This Innocent Corner, p. 228

Forty years ago today, the Pakistani forces surrendered to the Indians.  They signed an historic agreement that ended both their brief 13-day conflict and the nine-month long civil war.  The process of recognition of Bangladesh as an independent state had begun.  India was the first – on the 6th December 1971 – and once the war was over, other nations followed suit like dominoes.  Canada finally recognized Bangladesh on the 14th February 1972.

Writer and activist Jahanara Imam, by Ragib at bn.wikipedia

But they were indeed nine cruel months.  Bangladeshi author and political activist Jahanara Imam who wrote the war diary Of Blood and Fire entered this into her journal on the day after the surrender:  “The entire city [Dhaka] is laughing and crying at the same time.  People are happy because at last they are free but the price that had to be paid in blood was immense.”

Standing on the rooftop of her home in Dhaka at the side of her only remaining son Jami as they raised the flag of independent Bangladesh, she thought to herself the words that are the title of this blog entry:  “Everybody wept but there were no tears in my eyes.”  On a personal level, she had lost so much in the conflict.  Who could not understand the breadth of her emotions?

Ever since my personal interest was drawn to Bangladesh, I have watched as the country has struggled in the aftermath of the conflict.  Forty years later, so much remains to be resolved.  Steps are being taken right now to heal some of the deep wounds through a war tribunal which is examining cases of people accused of war crimes and genocide.  However, it’s slow, perhaps necessarily, even though with each passing year, the memories become more indistinct as the people involved in the conflict pass away.  There are efforts made to keep the memories alive in the younger generation, including some rather disquieting and unorthodox methods.

I began this blog in order to delve more deeply into some aspects of my novel This Innocent Corner in the hope that it would widen the experience of readers whose curiosity had been sparked by the book.  It’s been a year since the book came out, a year that has followed the parallel track of the 40th anniversary of the conflict.  And so with the end of this 40th anniversary year, it is time also to draw this blog to a close in order that I move on to my next writing project.

It’s been a wonderful opportunity to follow this evolving history and to connect with both the people who are making it, and with the people reading about it in my novel and elsewhere.  For a modest novel entered into the infinite world of cyberspace, and only 21 entries, I’m pleased to say that 400 of you are visiting this blog every month which makes it, in my books, a great success.  I will continue to follow the news out of Bangladesh, and keep an eye on the blog to make sure the links continue to work.  Please get in touch with me through the blog if you have any questions or comments.  For writers, this is the one unparalleled advantage of the Internet – direct contact with readers.

What’s next for me?  I am writing about another stranger in a new land though her adaptation is quite different from Robin Rowe’s.  She’s a teenage refugee from Russia whose family lands in rural southern Ontario in Canada in the 1950s.  She’ll deal with her own growing self-awareness in a world beset with the Cold War, urbanization and migration.  There’s a thread of biography to the story, as it is the skeleton of the story of my mother’s family’s arrival in Canada.  But it is a work of fiction.  I hope you get to read it one day.

To get a sense of the geopolitical rhetoric of the day, check out some of the more recently declassified documents from the US State Department.  In 2005, it released records which concern relations between the USA and South Asia in this time period.  In one of them, US President Richard Nixon calls Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “an old witch” and the people of India “slippery and treacherous…the most aggressive goddamn people around.”  There are 335 documents related to the South Asia Crisis, 1971, available at the website of the State Department’s Office of the Historian.  You can also find among these the infamous cable message from US Consul General Archer Blood in which he and 28 other Americans strongly protest the atrocities being committed in the war in East Pakistan and the lack of US action.  Once President Nixon found out about the telegram, Blood was immediately transferred from Dhaka.

Taking into account international interest in the conflict, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appealed to the international community for assistance.  On 31 October 1971, she spoke to the India League in London.

“I feel that I am sitting on the top of a volcano and I honestly do not know when it is going to erupt. So the question is not of how restrained we are today, but of what will happen across the border. We think this is the responsibility of the international community to see that a way out is found. Obviously, the best way, the most humane way, is to have a political settlement and that political settlement can only be with the elected leader of the people of Bangla Desh, and with the elected and accepted representatives of that country.”

But there was no political settlement.  On the evening of December 3rd, Pakistan launched a preemptive air attack centred on military installations in western India.  (Among the places targeted was Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.  Anticipating the attacks, the monument, whose white marble is a beacon from an aerial perspective, had been camouflaged with twigs, leaves and burlap.  As a result, it was not damaged in the air strike.)  By midnight, Prime Minister Gandhi addressed the people of India on public radio and the Indian Air Force retaliated.

For thirteen days, on the ground, in the air and at sea, the two countries battled.  On the eastern front, in what was to become Bangladesh, the Indian forces joined with the Mukti Bahini, to capture the capital city, Dhaka.  Once that happened, surrender followed.  The Commander of the East Pakistani Forces in East Pakistan, Lt. Gen. A.A.K. Niazi, signed the Instrument of Surrender, along with the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Command of the Indian Army, Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora.

Lt. Gen. Niazi (right) and Lt. Gen. Aurora (left) sign the document ending in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War.

Officially, the wars were over – both the Indo-Pakistani War and Bangladesh’s Liberation War – and Bangladesh achieved independence.  However, forty years later, the region continues to deal with the legacy of those conflicts.  Compare this account of the news that the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni had asked very recently for a formal apology from the Pakistan government for the atrocities committed during the war to this account under the subheading “genocide.”

Everyone thought it was a horrific accident.  And then, only fifteen minutes later, the second airplane hit the South Tower.  I badly wanted to believe that it, too, was accidental because the alternative was unthinkable.  But by the time the Pentagon was hit a half hour later, and Flight 93 crashed into the field in Pennsylvania, it was obvious this was no accident.

My baby woke in the middle of the coverage.  In a fog, we put him in his high chair with a tray of fruit while we listened, numb, for some reporter or expert  – anyone, anywhere who could offer an explanation that made sense.  But there was no sense to be found that morning.  There was room only for the horror and for the premonition that many things in my world were about to change very quickly, very drastically.

A year after this, I began to write This Innocent Corner.  It is not a story about what happened on September 11, 2001.  However, the attack on the World Trade Centre, the tragic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed, the paranoia that settled so comfortably over many societies, the sickening acts of brutality carried out at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba were features of the nightmarish landscape that emerged as I wrote.  From 2002 to 2006, my days were shaped like this:  early mornings, coffee in hand, I read newspaper reports of what was happening in the world as a result of the events of September 11, 2001; after breakfast, when I went to work, I read newspaper archives from the 1971 Liberation War.  At times, the thirty years between the two events blurred and I would find myself not knowing what I was reading.  I was sad and depressed by the brutality of people and apparent inability of politicians and other decision-makers to stop the violence.  I was overwhelmed with all I did not understand about the world.

This Innocent Corner is set in the months preceding September 11, 2001.  The final scene takes place in July 2001, mere weeks away from the attack, and no character even suspects it is coming.  Setting the story at that time was a choice I made very early in the writing process.  Through the story of one woman, I wanted to explore involvement, especially the kind of involvement which appears to be well-intended but which results in unforeseen long-term consequences. Robin’s very public opinions on women’s rights and peace are easily transformed into action when she becomes involved in Luna’s marriage arrangements.  Robin thinks only to save Luna; the possible repercussions of her act do not even factor into her decision to lie, assign blame where it does not belong, and then walk away.  She keeps her eye on the goal, and the means by which she must get there are, to her, justified because of the nobility of her end.  Sadly, it’s a familiar script in world affairs; not the only script, but one that keeps raising its head, even though most governments and policy-makers profess to know better.

The 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre is unleashing another wave of speculation as we try, much as I did on the day of the attacks and subsequently through the writing of This Innocent Corner, to make some sense of the events and understand what caused the tragedy.  It’s a daunting task for a fiction writer, when nearly every word of the reported story renders anything I can possibly imagine trivial by comparison.  Essayist Adam Sternbergh, in the October 2011 issue of The Walrus, writes that we are all still struggling to find meaning in the events of September 11th.  “We are now literally hard-wired as a planet – congregating globally, electronically, and perpetually – to ask that question again and again and again.  The trouble is, we now assume that every event will eventually yield an answer….Yet ten years later, it still doesn’t make any sense – or at least no more sense than it should.”

The events which unfold in This Innocent Corner both precede and allude to the events of September 11, 2001.  The eagle-eyed reader will spot the allusions.  But if you’re not so eagle-eyed, here they are:

The World Trade Centre:

Amma laughed nervously.  ‘These prospective brides!  So bashful!  But a little modesty goes a long way in a young girl, don’t you think?’ she said to Mrs. Alam, while I bristled into my tea.  ‘Luna was just saying how much she would like to visit the new World Trade Centre.’
‘Oh.’ Rafiqul smiled.  ‘But it’s just opened – and not really very interesting inside – far more impressive from the outside.  Nevertheless, there are many more beautiful places in the city.’
‘Excuse me,’ Luna said.  She rose and left the room, leaving behind stunned silence.” (p. 106-7)

New York City:

“‘Luna?’  Amma prompted when it became obvious and uncomfortable.  ‘Tell this pleasant young man what you were saying about New York City.’” (p.  106)

Attack/Burn/Fall:

“I was back with Amma in less than twenty minutes, though unable to focus on how pora as a verb meant either to study, to read, to wear, to be uncultivated, to be vacant, to be unpaid, to ooze, to burn, to attack, or to fall.”  (p.  50)

Skyscraper:

“Under [the bank’s] tasteful clock tower, Salt Spring’s version of a skyscraper, an equally decorous loans officer conjures up impossible figures.” (p. 194)

Box cutters:

Interestingly, the box cutters, which were believed to be have been the weapon used to overpower the flight crew on one of the aircraft, turned out to be a myth.  There were no remains of any box cutters, and no one is sure exactly how they became woven into the narrative.  Some conspiracy theorists use the box cutters as evidence that the attacks were masterminded by the US administration.

“I slice open the jute twine and brittle tape with paint-stained box cutters, then turn down the flaps.  I don’t remember the last time I opened [the box].  Now, I need to see what is inside.” (p. 243)

The Pet Goat:

Similarly, there was debate about the exact title of this book.  For weeks, it was referred to as My Pet Goat, and still references are made to the erroneous title.

“That night, Sunday, everyone except me goes to bed early.  I can’t sleep.  The quiet that blankets the house disallows rest.  I get up and go to the living room.  I pace between the television and front door. Then I eat corn flakes.  I watch the second hand creep around the clock, three, four, five revolutions.  Underneath a book – The Pet Goat – awfully juvenile, even for Jason – I find one of Hayley’s discarded magazines.”    (p. 221)

Mohammed Atta:

As the many innocent Mohammed Attas whose names appear on no-fly lists already know, there are many people in the world who share this name.  There is a fictional Mohammed Atta in This Innocent Corner.

“The journalist, Mohammed Atta – was he Bengali?  West Pakistani? – said the much-maligned Biharis were not the only collaborators.” (p. 228)

This anniversary has also unleashed a flood of lists of best books about September 11th (including, from Salon.com, a list of the worst books).  But there are commentators who believe we are still too close to the events at hand to be able to fictionalize them very well.  Tolstoy did not write War and Peace, his masterpiece about the invasion of Russia by Napoleon until 60 years after the event.  Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, says it may be the wrong approach to even try to define “best” on this subject.  “Events should have as many definitions as the number of people who experience them,” he says to BBC News, leaving the gates open for many more books to be written on September 11th.

“I love New York.  Do you know New York?” a boy wearing cutoffs asked me on the beach.  He was carving a woman’s body in the sand.

“I’m from Michigan,” I said flatly and rolled over on my stomach.  I thought about Shaheed and what he would say if he was here right now.

“I’m going to the George Harrison concert at Madison Square Garden next month,” the cutoff boy offered.  “Clapton’ll be there, Dylan, Ringo – I heard from a very reliable source Paul and John will show up too.  The Beatles are reuniting for one last concert.  But it’s all on the q.t., eh?”

I looked him over, wondering at his cluelessness.  “You’re talking about the benefit for the Bangladeshi refugees, right?”

“Huh?”  He slid his hand down the sand woman’s hip.

I picked up my towel and left.

- from This Innocent Corner

George Harrison, 1974

Forty years ago today, George Harrison took to the stage at Madison Square Garden – with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston and others – in a ground-breaking concert to raise funds to help the people of Bangladesh.  The country was then known as East Pakistan and while recovering from a devastating cyclone, its people found themselves embroiled in a civil war that created conditions so horrific that hundreds of thousands of them fled to refugee camps in India.  It was an almost unbearable cascade of tragedies in one of the world’s most densely populated and poorest countries.

Harrison admitted he knew little about what was going on in that part of the world until Indian musician Ravi Shankar told him about it, and then asked for help.   “I organized the thing with a little help from my friends,” Harrison quipped at the time.

There were two concerts.  They raised a very respectable $250,000, and much more from record and film sales.

If you’ve never seen the concert film, I highly recommend it.  You will see lots of long hair, beards and moustaches, and skinny pants – note Harrison’s very white natty suit – and nearly everyone has a lit cigarette either in hand, or tucked into his guitar, or somewhere else within easy reach.  Those were the days before the by-laws of smoke-free places were even dreamt of.  The musicians all appeared on stage together, sharing the spotlight, and clearly, for the entire hour-and-a-half, loving it.  Dylan, Clapton and Ravi Shankar, who still appear in public and perform, look radiantly youthful.

Shankar’s performance, with Ali Akbar Khan, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty is one of the best parts of the film.  They perform a beautiful 20-minute traditional raga titled Bangla Dhun which precedes the rock and roll.   Harrison asks the audience to “settle down” because “Indian music is a little more serious than our music” and Shankar then tells them that they should try to “have patience” because the music needs “concentrated listening” and he asks them to “refrain from smoking.”  Then, the magic begins.  The next post on this blog, titled “Ravi Shankar at The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971″, contains an excerpt of their performance.

To mark the 40^th anniversary, the film of the concert can be streamed online for a limited time, while the concert album is being digitally released for the first time on iTunes.  Sales of the album will benefit the George Harrison Fund for Unicef.  Given the situation in the Horn of Africa, Unicef will direct those funds during the month of August, which they have dubbed the Month of Giving, to famine relief in east Africa.  Dozens of musicians, taking their cue from the generosity of spirit embodied by Harrison forty years ago, are taking part in the effort by raising awareness and contributing funds.

The Concert for Bangladesh was a model for many aid concerts to follow over the years, and inspired musicians such as Bob Geldof, Willie Nelson, and the more recent concert and album for Hope for Haiti.  After Harrison’s death, Bono, who grew up listening to the music of Harrison and the Beatles, said on CNN, “When you’re a teenager, you’re not watching the news, and so it takes sometimes somebody that you look up to or whatever to just — to turn you on to a particular problem and what we might be able to do about that problem.  The concert for Bangladesh was way ahead of its time.”

Here’s part of Bangla Dhun, performed with Ali Akbar Khan, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty.

“We careened down the streets toward Ramna Park on a rickshaw.  Buoyed perhaps by the morning demonstration, something of Shaheed’s old self emerged.  He laughed and told the rickshawallah jokes many of which I understood until he reached the punch line.  The two of them laughed again and again while I sat grasping at puns that seemed to fly about and then evaporate before I had the chance to take them in my hands long enough to make sense of them.”

- from This Innocent Corner

The rickshaw is a bit player in This Innocent Corner, but it would be impossible to write it out of the text.  It’s not just the ubiquity of the vehicle on the streets.  It also gets narrator Robin Rowe where she needs to go on more than one occasion, and takes members of the Chowdhury family here and there, moving the plot along with the passenger.  It’s a significant piece of Robin’s introduction to the street life she so longed to experience on her first day in Dhaka.

I was reminded recently of the beauty of these vehicles while at a shopping plaza in Victoria, BC.  Ten Thousand Villages keeps a Bangladeshi rickshaw outside its front door.  You can see it pictured here on the store’s website.  I was tempted to climb on board and go for a spin but, sadly, it’s chained up.

Every surface of the rickshaw is painted and decorated. Photo by Steve Evans http://www.flickr.com/photos/babasteve/

Nowhere in Asia are the rickshaws as colourfully painted and decorated as they are in Bangladesh.  That’s according to Abdus Sattar, an oriental art professor at Dhaka University, who says decorating rickshaws is a unique art form in the country.   “Decorating rickshaws was a way for drivers to compete for business — they wanted to make their vehicle as beautiful as possible to attract as many clients as they could,” he says in a recent AFP article.  Having visited and lived in many countries in which the rickshaw is still used today, I agree with Professor Sattar that the Bangladeshi version is like no other.

Many of the rickshaws of 1970, when Robin was in Dhaka, were as colourful as they are today.  The back panels would depict scenes of rural utopia, trains and buses, film stars and movies, myth and nature – especially animals.  In the Directory on Rickshaw and Baby-Taxi Painters published by the Alliance Francaise de Dhaka (1999), several of the pre-war rickshaw paintings depict fierce tigers attacking livestock.  During and following the war year, many of these paintings depicted scenes from the conflict replete with brave freedom fighters and gruesome scenes of shooting and bombing.  Rickshaw painting flourished during the era, according to cultural and social anthropologist Joanna Kirkpatrick, who references a painting she saw of a man planting the flag of Bangladesh on the moon!  There are several wonderful rickshaw paintings shown in this same article.

When asked to categorize the art, Kirkpatrick refuses.  “From my outsider point of view, I consider it ‘peoples’ art’. It is not necessary to force it into a unitary category as it combines folkloric, movie, political and commercial imagery and techniques. It serves the expression of heart’s desires of the man in the street for women, power, wealth, as well as for religious devotion. Ricksha art also serves prestige and economic functions for the people who make, use and enjoy it.”

“The garden was overgrown and damp.  As we set foot in it, I could almost feel my hair curling from the humidity.  Brick pathways snaked around specimens of trees, hand-painted tin signboards hammered crookedly at their roots, identifying their local and Latin names.  Sundari, sal, kathal, magnolia, bel — I could now read the Bangla script.”

from This Innocent Corner

The National Botanical Garden in Dhaka is exquisite.  Located in the Mirpur neighbourhood, it is one of the most peaceful places in the city.  Many residents know this and flock there on Friday afternoons to find a quiet corner in which to picnic, or just to stroll along the pathways and experience the sights and scents of the plant life of Dhaka.  Many young lovers can be found there — sitting close and still and silent.  However, with 84 hectares of well-designed space, there is much privacy for the lovers, and still room left over for the families and tourists.  I spent many an afternoon there, enchanted by the atmosphere.  It’s a treasure in the city both for people seeking quiet green spaces and for all levels of botanists.

The sundari (Heritiera fomes) is one tree you will see in the garden.  It commonly grows in mangroves, though it is a fresh-water loving tree.  It’s a tall tree with a beautiful canopy.  Apparently, the wood makes good boats.  However, there is concern about the species in Bangladesh, partly due to overexploitation, but also to the increasing salinity in the mangrove.

The sundari tree in the Sundarbans, Bengal. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

The sal tree (Shorea robusta) is another tall and beautiful tree found in the garden.  It has broad leaves which, in many places in South Asia, are shed in the dry season of late winter-early spring.  Following the dramatic spring rains, the trees burst into leaf very quickly.  Goats and cattle can often be found munching on the fallen leaves.  The leaves are so broad and flexible, even when dry, they are stitched together in some places to make bowls and plates.

The kathal (Artocarpus heterophyllus or A. heterophylla), also known as jackfruit, is a prolific tree.  It bears fruit in large lobes which often grow directly off the trunk.  When ripe and harvested, the bumpy, brittle skin can be peeled to reveal juicy pockets of flesh growing around seeds.  When we lived in Dhaka, we had several of these trees growing around our small apartment building.  Everyone was impatient for the day when the fruit was pronounced ready and we would crack one open and dig in.  Many people find the taste very strong, though I like it.  It also makes a delicious curry.

Ripe kathal or jackfruit on a tree in Thailand. Photo by User: Ahoerstemeier, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

What can I say about the magnolia (Magnolia)?  There are 210 species in the family, growing all over the world.  This is the season it blooms in the mild part of Canada where I live.  In fact, I have an extraordinary pink magnolia in bloom right now.

The magnolia tree in my garden in full bloom, Victoria, BC, April 2011.

The Asian varieties tend to be more robust, like their ancestors.  Magnolias evolved before the appearance of bees (there are fossilized specimens dating back 20 million years).  Beetles were the pollinators and so, as a result, the flower petals were quite tough and waxy.  This quality remains to this day.

The bel tree  (Aegle marmelos) is a slightly smaller tree that grows all over South and Southeast Asia.  It bears a delicious fruit with a very tough shell that encases a woody fruit.  It is sometimes called the wood apple, and can be eaten in several different ways.  I think the most delicious is when it is strained and served as a cool drink called sharbat.  And yes, according to my Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian Words, this word is directly related to sorbetto, sorbet and sherbert.

Bel tree in Narendrapur, West Bengal, India. By J.M. Garg. Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

There is one more plant mentioned in this section of the novel which I would like to show you.

“Luna showed me the tiny lajja-patta plants whose delicate fringe of leaves folds up when touched.

‘How does it work?’ I asked.

She shrugged.  I brushed another to see it happen again.  Then, I remained still, waiting until the pale, closed up plant unfurled itself once more.  It took much longer to open than it had to close.”

- from This Innocent Corner

The lajja-patta (literally, shy leaf) is also known as the sensitive plant because its leaves fold up when disturbed by touch, wind and even warmth.  This is called seismonastic movement.  It does this through a very complicated chemical process in which the water which pressurizes individual plant cells is released quickly and temporarily.  Of course this evolved as a defense mechanism for the plant.  What hungry animal wouldn’t be scared off by a moving plant?  How many insects will be able to hold on when the leaf they are gripping shrivels up?

It grows all over the world, though is native only to South and Central America.  In South Asia, it is seen as an invasive species.  If you click on the image below, you can see the folding take place.

With a slight touch, the leaves of the lajja-patta close up. By Hrushikesh. Licenced under Creative Commons CC0 1.0.

Of course, there are clumps of towering bamboo in the garden as well, and a cultivated section in which roses, marigolds, salvia, dahlias and other enormous flowers can be found in season.  Best time to visit:  winter.  But at any time of year the garden has its own unique charms.

“This election is not about power.  That is what Hasan says,” Mrs. Chowdhury said.

“‘Hasan is correct,” Beth said.  “There are some who think this election is a referendum.  On autonomy.”

“For East Pakistan?” I asked.

Beth nodded.  “The whole partition thing — you know about that, right? — the whole thing was a mistake.  How can Pakistan hold itself together with the big lump of India sitting in the middle like an elephant in your drawing room?”

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Chowdhury jumped in.  “It is not a mistake.  The idea is a good one.  The problem is the leadership.  My husband says they do not listen to the people.  Especially our people.”

– from This Innocent Corner

The barrage of election talk coming at us in Canada as we face our 41st general election on May 2 has me thinking about the December 7, 1970 election in Pakistan.  This election is one of the key historical events taking place during main character Robin Rowe’s stay in Dhaka.  She first hears about it while having tea at the home of Beth Ahmed.  (The quotation above is from that scene.)

It was the first election in Pakistan, and had been delayed numerous times, once most notably because of the Bhola Cyclone.  It pitted the country’s west wing against the country’s east, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (the father of assassinated former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto) running in the west for the Pakistan People’s Party and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (the father of the current prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina) running in the east for the Awami League.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 1950.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

(Note for language buffs:  “awami” means “national.”)

These political dynasties continue to flourish in South Asia, and are key to understanding contemporary politics in the region.

The scale of the endeavour was, at that time, nearly unthinkable:  56 million voters, 30 thousand polling stations, and 330 thousand polling officials, with 23 parties and more than 300 independents running for 313 seats.  The government of the day estimated voter turnout to be about 63%.

Beth and Mrs. Chowdhury explain to Robin the key issues of the election:  autonomy and leadership.  This little bit of information allows her to leap headfirst into arguments with Hasan about the kind of autonomy East Pakistan should be seeking, and how it might best achieve that goal.

Notwithstanding Robin’s or Hasan’s opinions on the matter, when the votes were counted, a very clear and troubling picture emerged.  The geographical division of the country was perfectly mirrored in the election results:  Sheikh Mujib took 160 of the 162 seats in East Pakistan, while Bhutto took 81 of the 138 seats available in West Pakistan.  (Note for math buffs: the other 13 seats were reserved for women.)  However, when the administration in the west refused to act on the election results, tensions escalated, and a cascade of events culminated with the Liberation War which broke out on March 25, 1971 following a violent military attack on civilians in Dhaka.

I’m waiting to see how Canada’s 308 seats are divvied up this year.  I expect even deeper divides between urban and rural, west and east, and Quebec and the rest of Canada.  There are several elephants scattered around this country’s rather large drawing room.

Dr. Amartya Sen at a lecture in Cologne, 2007. CC-BY-SA

This month, Dr. Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, has been writing and talking a great deal about economic growth and what it really means.  He is writing in the context of India versus China.  He says it is “silly” for India to be obsessed with overtaking China in the rate of growth of the Gross National Product (GNP).  The problem with this obsession, writes Dr. Sen, is that it clouds what is really going on in the things that matter:  life expectancy, education and basic health care.

About half-way through his op-ed piece “Growth and other concerns” published in The Hindu on February 14th, he illustrates his point by comparing India with its neighbour Bangladesh, which most people would think is much worse off than India.

You would be right about that if you just looked at per capita GNP,  Dr. Sen says.  India’s is slightly more than double Bangladesh’s.  But, he asks, “How well is India’s income advantage reflected in [its] lead in those things that really matter?  I fear not very well – indeed not well at all.”

Here are a few of the statistics he offers:

Per capita GNP:  India:  Rupees 3,250  Bangladesh: Rupees 1,550
Life expectancy:  India:  64.4  Bangladesh: 66.9
Under-5 mortality:  India: 66  Bangladesh: 52
Mean years of schooling:  India: 4.4 Bangladesh 4.8

Neither I nor Dr. Sen mean to say everything in Bangladesh is rosy and the international community no longer needs to be concerned.  Bangladesh still ranked “low” on the United Nations’ Human Development Index in 2010.  It was ranked at 129 of 169 countries.  (India ranked 119.) As I write this, the government of Bangladesh is investigating the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus has been asked to step down while the investigation is ongoing.  The international community has reacted with outrage, many believing the investigation itself is politically motivated.  The Grameen Bank is a pioneer of micro-lending, and its model has been copied worldwide.

However, Bangladesh’s successes in health and education are noteworthy, and have taken place in the presence of a relatively low per capita GNP.  Dr. Sen attributes these successes to three factors:  a very active NGO (non-governmental organization) sector; new public policies; and, the role that liberated Bangladeshi women now play in the country.

“The Bengali spring ended at 11:30 on Thursday night when convoys of army trucks moved into Dacca with fire and sword.  I saw the sword this morning, raised in the hand of an army private as his truck drove behind a jeep fluttering an enormous Pakistani flag — a standard that has been rare in Bengal these past four weeks.  The fire billowed from various sites around the town, most noticeably from a massive conflagration in the direction of the new university campus where rocket launchers opened up at 1:20 am and from which smoke is still rising nine hours later.”

So begins the report of journalist Martin Adeney of The Guardian who was confined to his hotel on the night of March 25, 1971 along with most of the rest of the foreign journalists when a dramatic army attack on the city of Dhaka began.  His reports, available in The Guardian archive, are charged with emotion.  Though unable to leave his hotel room, he recounts in chilling detail everything he did see and hear, from machine gun and bazooka fire, to army personnel setting fire to a market, scrap yard and a newspaper office that Adeney could see from his hotel window.  Less than 24 hours later, he and the 30 other foreign journalists were put on a plane for Karachi.  Every note he had taken in the last six weeks, every book he carried, even his address book, was taken from him by the martial law authority.

The attack was dubbed “Operation Searchlight.” It was planned by the Pakistan government to curb the growing nationalist movement in its eastern wing.  It was supposed to be over in one month.  But no one anticipated the level of resistance that the army met with in East Pakistan.  The operation gave birth to civil war.  It ended nine months later – with up to 3 million people dead – only two weeks after the Indian army intervened in the conflict.

It’s not easy to describe what happened in that nine-month period.  The army attacked in an organized fashion, beginning indeed with the university and the institutions and neighbourhoods in the cities which threatened the existence of a united Pakistan.  But it did not stop there.  Villages were attacked and burnt to the ground.  Especially targeted were university students, intellectuals, Hindu and Buddhist communities and anyone else suspected of Bengali nationalism.  An estimated 10 million people left the country, seeking refuge across the border in India.   In addition, some Bangladeshi sources say 200,000 women were sexually assaulted during the war – and clearly, many would have become pregnant and given birth.  But because of shame attached to the crime, few women go public with their stories.

It was a chaotic, bloody time in the country, and a time of great fear for many people.  So many shocking atrocities are documented in newspaper reports, photographs, film and video, eye-witness accounts – even in the Pakistani government’s report on the conflict, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission. I’ve opted not to post any of these images here, as the copyright status of many of the best-documented photos will not allow it.  Besides, the images are more than upsetting.  They are numbing.  However, all you need do is type “1971 Liberation War” into any search engine.  You can browse through what shows up until you’ve seen enough.

As noted by the International Center for Transitional Justice among many many others, the perpetrators of those atrocities were never brought to justice.  Although efforts were made and subsequently undone (and then remade once again) as the parties in power in the country changed over the last 40 years, the war remains unfinished for many people as long as the perpetrators remain unprosecuted.

But how do you begin to investigate things that happened forty years ago?  On the other hand, how can you ignore them?

The government of Bangladesh took steps, beginning in early 2009, to establish an International Crimes Tribunal which will prosecute people who committed crimes as defined by a 1973 law, the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act.  Rules of procedure have been established, and next week, the tribunal will begin hearing charges against the first accused, Salauddin Qadr Chowdhury.  He says he was out of the country during the war.

But according to the International Center for Transitional Justice, “certain factors raise concerns that the process could fall short of international standards or suffer from serious challenges.”  In its excellent briefing document “Fighting Past Impunity in Bangladesh: A National Tribunal for the Crimes of 1971″, it says the independence of the process, both real and perceived, is in question.  It also states that the international community is going to have a hard time supporting the process as long as the death penalty remains in place in Bangladesh.

However, the ICTJ also calls these developments in restitution “rare.”  “The International Crimes Tribunal is faced with a historic opportunity to bring truth and justice to victims, who have been fighting for these ideals for the past four decades.”

In my next post, I will be continuing this discussion with emphasis on the “collaborators” (those people who aided the Pakistani army in carrying out its operations in East Pakistan), some of whom allegedly remain in positions of power in Bangladesh.