Happy Bangladesh Independence Day:

‘Amar Shonar Bangla (My Golden Bengal)’ is a 1906 song written and composed by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the first ten lines of which were adopted in 1972 as the Bangladesh national anthem. The word shonar literally means ‘made of gold’, but in the song shonar Bangla may be interpreted to either express the preciousness of Bengal or a reference to the colour of paddy fields before harvest. The song was written in 1906 during the period of Bangabhanga (Bôngobhôngo - 1905 Partition of Bengal)… Another poem of Tagore’s (’Jana Gana Mana’) was adopted as the national anthem of India. [Link]

Never forget:

At a meeting of the military top brass, Yahya declared: “Kill 3 million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.” Accordingly, on the night of March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army launched “Operation Searchlight” to “crush” Bengali resistance in which Bengali members of military services were disarmed and killed, students and the intelligentsia systematically liquidated and able-bodied Bengali males just picked up and gunned down. Death squads roamed the streets of Dacca, killing some 7,000 people in a single night. [Link]

‘I give a final estimate of Pakistan’s democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000…’ Professors, journalists, doctors, artists, engineers, writers were rounded up by Pakistan Army and the Razakar militia in Dhaka, blindfolded, taken to torture cells in Mirpur, Mohammadpur, Nakhalpara, Rajarbagh and other locations in different sections of the city to be executed en masse in the killing fields, most notably at Rayerbazar and Mirpur. Allegedly, the Pakistani Army and its paramilitary arm, the Al-Badr and Al-Shams forces created a list of doctors, teachers, poets, and scholars…

The West Pakistani rulers identified the Bengali culture with Hindu and Indian culture, and thought that the eradication of Hindus would remove such influences… The period also saw a wave of sectarian violence carried out by Bengali nationalists against non-Bengali minorities, especially Biharis… [Link]

East Pakistanis noticed that whenever one of them… were elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, they were swiftly deposed by the largely West Pakistani establishment… The war led to a sea of refugees (estimated at the time to be about 10 million) flooding into the eastern provinces of India. [Link]

Today, Bangladesh is again under military rule:

The interim government took power on January 12, 2007 promising to clean up Bangladesh’s notoriously corrupt politics before reinstating democracy later this year… Democracy had been restored in Bangladesh in 1990 after years of military dictatorship. [Link]

Nixon tried to intervene in the Bangladesh War on the side of the murderous Pakistani general Yahya Khan. Today, Dubya backs still another Pakistani dictator. As William Faulkner once said, ‘The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.’

(photos via Yahoo News)

Related posts: All quiet on the eastern front, The rape of Dhaka, The Kick, Nixon and the Bangladesh massacre