Deaths and Atrocities in the Liberation War of Bangladesh: An Investigation on Genocidal Incident

Author(s): Dr. Md. Abdus Samad, Dr. Nasir Ahmad

Publication Date: December 16, 2024

Abstract

Bangladesh achieved its independence after nine months of atrocious war against Pakistan. The Pakistani military, along with Bangladeshi collaborators, brutally killed and attacked East Pakistani civilians to repress the revolution for a sovereign state, which ultimately cost more than three million individuals’ lives, lakhs of women’s respect and millions of people’s displacement from their homeland. The sufferings of the ordinary people were multidimensional, which included deaths and devastation, mass killing, rape, arson, attacks, torture, forced conversion, the decimation of human settlements, torching of houses, opening fire on fleeing civilians, etc. There were mass murders, deportation, and genocidal rape during the war. The soldiers of the Pakistan Army and their local cohorts kept Bengali women as sex slaves inside the Pakistan Army’s camps. Around 10 million Bengali refugees fled to neighbouring India, and an estimated 30 million were internally displaced. Against this backdrop, the paper tries to investigate the massacre during the liberation of Bangladesh to establish the killings as a textbook example of genocide of the 20th century.