DHAKA, Bangladesh — On the fourth floor of a nondescript pale-blue government building in Old Dhaka, clerks are stapling together copies of depositions from witnesses to the crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of secession from Pakistan — a conflict that may have killed up to three million people, according to the Bangladeshi government. Above them on the wall is a map showing the 11 sectors of what was then called East Pakistan.
In the office next door sits Abdul Hannan Khan, the chief …

Over the last 20 years, international criminal justice has developed rapidly, and most people see this as a change for the better. Thanks to the labors, however imperfect, of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and of ad-hoc tribunals from Sierra Leone to Cambodia, it has been established that politicians and warlords who commit terrible crimes against the vulnerable can no longer count on impunity.
But a trial now starting in Bangladesh risks making a mockery of that principle. Indeed, it serves as a …

DHAKA, Bangladesh — In the last days of the bloody war that created this nation out of the eastern half of Pakistan in 1971, a gang of men abducted Dr. Alim Chowdhury, an eye surgeon and independence activist, from his home. Three days later, his battered body was found in a mass grave, his eyes gouged from his head.
His killers, members of a pro-Pakistan militia, were never punished. Moulana Abdul Mannan, the man who confessed to orchestrating the killing, according to a government investigation, went on to become a cabinet …

NEW DELHI — The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to becomeBangladesh.
The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.
Accepting even the lowest set of figures …

The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.

Accepting even the lowest set of figures for Bangladesh forces a horrifying comparison — the 1992-95 Bosnian war saw one-tenth the number of rapes as did the Bangladesh war. The rapes of Bosnian women forced the world to recognize rape as “an instrument of terror,” as a crime against humanity. But so far no one has been held to account for the sexual violence against Bangladeshi women in 1971.

As the 40th anniversary of the 1971 war approaches, the Bangladeshi government has set up an International Crimes Tribunal to investigate the atrocities of that era. But human rights advocates and lawyers fear that the mass rapes and killings of women will not be adequately addressed. They hope to ensure they are.

Spain’s best-known investigative magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, is now being prosecuted in a politically driven case that should have been thrown out of court.
Judge Garzón is charged with ignoring a 1977 amnesty law when he decided to investigate the disappearances of more than 100,000 people during Spain’s 1930s civil war and the decade of Francoist repression that followed. The charges were brought by two far-right groups who fear an open investigation of the Franco-era record. Unfortunately, one of Mr. Garzón’s fellow magistrates sustained …

…[Judge Garzón is charged with ignoring a 1977 amnesty law when he decided to investigate the disappearances of more than 100,000 people during Spain’s 1930s civil war and the decade of Francoist repression that followed.]…

An article by Peggy Durdin in the New York Times, It was published on May 2, 1971.
http://www.docstrangelove.com/uploads/1971/foreign/19710502_nyt_the_political_tidal_wave_that_struck_east_pakistan.pdf

AGARTALA, India. April 13 – Although large numbers of East Pakistani secessionist leaders have been reported killed, and with wholesale bloodshed continuing, several members of the movement’s high command are alive and have formed a cabinet.
They include Tajuddin Ahmed, second in command to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose Awami League took the steps for independence that brought West Pakistan’s military crackdown.
In an East Pakistani border area visited by this correspondent, at least six secessionist leaders met to name Mr. Ahmed Prime Minister and Defense Minister of the state they call Bangla …

19710409_nyt_families_flee_town.pdf
SATKHIRA, Pakistan, April 8 (Reuters)-Scores of terror-stricken families tonight fled this town in the Khulna district of East Pakistan amid reports that a Pakistani Army column was moving on the area.
A Government column of hundreds of men with artillery was reported to have left Jessore yesterday and to be moving toward Khulna.
Local leaders and men of the East Pakistan Rifles, now fighting with the liberation forces of the Awami League, the dominant East Pakistani political party, say they expect the army to come to Satkhira about 15 miles from the …

Washington’s persistent silence on recent events in Pakistan becomes increasingly incomprehensible in the light of mounting eye-witness evidence that the Pakistani Army has engaged in indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and the selective elimination of leadership groups in the separatist state of East Bengal.
A State Department spokesman conceded yesterday that  “we would be concerned if American weapons were used in circumstances such as these.” But he Insisted the United States has no firsthand knowledge that such is the case. This is sophistry. Only last month the Secretary of State, in his …

A game? To foreign newsman in Dacca, it looked like a surprise attack with tanks, artillery and heavy machine[...]