Abdullah Al Imran is a Bangladeshi author and investigative journalist, currently working in Canada.
Growing up in Bangladesh, I was raised hearing stories about the massacres, rapes and other horrors inflicted upon my country when Pakistan attempted to crush our fight for independence in 1971.
My uncle told me about the dangers of working as a doctor during the brutal war, treating the wounded and the dying. Veterans in our small village recounted stories of the killings that scared me as a child. In school, it became an important part of our literature and history classes.
But when I became a journalist and travelled the world, I was shocked to learn how little people in other countries – including Canada – knew about what many consider the worst genocide since the Holocaust.
I was gratified to learn that the much-respected Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is now planning to include content about the atrocities committed in Bangladesh in its Breaking the Silence gallery space.
A human rights tragedy that goes unrecognized only deepens the wounds. It tells the victims that they did not matter then, and they do not matter today.
In 1971, the Bengali majority in what was then East Pakistan sought to break away from West Pakistan in a nine-month struggle my country now calls the Bangladesh Liberation War. It was a quest for freedom that came from the deprivation of democratic and economic rights for Bengalis within the framework of the old Pakistan.
According to many human rights organizations and historians, the Pakistan armed forces – aided by pro-Pakistani Islamist militias – raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women, and killed as many as three million people over a 10-month period.
Dr. Jeremy Maron, the curator of Holocaust and genocide content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, recently visited Bangladesh at the invitation of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka. There, he viewed some of the sites of the genocide, met with local experts and talked with descendants of the victims of those brutal massacres.
“As a museum whose mission calls us to amplify voices with lived experiences of human rights violations, we share the desire to broaden awareness of the atrocities of 1971,” Dr. Maron told me.
Like all Bangladeshis, I feel vastly emotional at this development, which came about after many years of work by the Bangladesh High Commission in Canada, the Bangabandhu Centre for Bangladesh Studies in Canada and the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka.
In many ways, the scars of the atrocities of 1971 are still with us – quite literally.
Monwara Clark was one of several Bangladeshi “war babies” brought to Canada as a result of the genocide – infants who were stigmatized and unwanted because they were the result of rape. Since birth, she has always had scars on her body.
I met her in 2014 when she made a trip to Dhaka to search for her roots. Pregnant at the time, Ms. Clark’s mother was raped and killed by Pakistani troops in 1971. She believes the bayonets they used to stab her mother left their marks on the child she was carrying in the womb.
More than 50 years after my country was born in blood and repression, it is time for Canada to acknowledge what happened in Bangladesh as the crime against humanity that it was. The Canadian government has formally recognized five instances of genocide abroad: the Armenian genocide, which began during the First World War; the forced famine of Soviet Ukraine, known as the Holodomor, which lasted from 1932 to 1933; the massacre of Jews during the Holocaust; the Rwandan genocide of 1994; and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war.
More recently, Canada has become the second country in the world to recognize the persecution of China’s Uyghur minority as a genocide.
“We do not compare the gravity of different cases of genocide and mass atrocities,” Dr. Maron explained to me. “Instead, we show how the struggle to end human rights violations depends on a collective willingness to take a stand against them, wherever and whenever they occur.”
By incorporating the genocide in Bangladesh into the museum’s content, Dr. Maron is hopeful that visitors will understand how important it is to speak out about violations of human rights, “and resist the pressure to stay silent.”
Indeed, Canada could be a leader in breaking that silence.