Bangladesh observing Intellectual Martyrs day

[idune]

Bangladeshi novelist, writer and filmmaker zahir raihan was abuducted and and killed by india. He was picked up by indian army officials from his home. When his wife complained to Sheikh Mujib, Mujib said if you make noise you will face same fate as Zahir.

This is how indians killed Bangladeshi Intellectuals and then blaming others. Typical indian practice just like we saw recently.

 

[livingdead]

Bangladeshi novelist, writer and filmmaker zahir raihan was abuducted and and killed by india. He was picked up by indian army officials from his home. When his wife complained to Sheikh Mujib, Mujib said if you make noise you will face same fate as Zahir.

This is how indians killed Bangladeshi Intellectuals and then blaming others. Typical indian practice just like we saw recently.

wrong link... please post again.... the link takes us to film making wiki entry.

 

[Bratva]

Somethings doesn't add up in this thread.

Pakistan Army went berserk in March last week when AL and mukti bahini started a mass riot and killings of pro-pak bengalis, biharis coupled with the mutiny of East Pakistan rifles. Documented accounts of such killings, rapes by mukti bahini and AL is provided in Blood and Tears by qutubuddin aziz book.


It was a full on insurgency with the backing of India. There was no time for following "due process". Most of the insurgents caught were killed on sight. THat's what happens during a period of Rebellion. That what happened in 1857.

Even today, If any state of bangladesh would try to break away from them, Let's see how Bangla Army would react.

And Last but not the least. Why shiekh mujeeb was killed by his own people if he was such a popular leader?

 

[IamBengali]

There is a rumour that a Pakistani army raped Khaleda Zia in cantonment. She was extremely beautiful back then. She is called birongona with respect by some people. I am surprised she is still allied with Jamaat.

 

[livingdead]

There is a rumour that a Pakistani army raped Khaleda Zia in cantonment. She was extremely beautiful back then. She is called birongona with respect by some people. I am surprised she is still allied with Jamaat.

that cant be true, she is wife of an army man, right?

 

[M. Sarmad]

@Capt.Popeye

What do you say about "Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War" by Sarmila Bose ?
Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971
bose is not Pakistani or American , she is Indian ..[Bose was born into a leading Indian political family. She had her schooling in Modern High School, Kolkata. She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and master's and PhD from Harvard University in political economy. regime. She has recently completed the Legal Practice Course at City University.]

And here is a review on her book from The Guardian UK


Dead Reckoning by Sarmila Bose - review
A long-overdue study of Bangladesh's war of independence

• 
• • Martin Woollacott

The eyes would widen and the head move from side to side in the striking Bengali gesture of affirmation. "How many were killed?" we would ask refugees who had fled from areas where the Pakistani army and its auxiliaries were attempting to suppress the Bangladesh independence movement. "Lakhs and lakhs!" came the answer. Journalists who covered the Bangladesh war in 1971 remember the phrase with a mixture of amusement and frustration. Lakh is the Indian word for 100,000, and it sometimes seemed as if the majority of Bengalis knew no other number, or, if they did, it was "crore" – ten million – at least when describing the atrocities and depredations of their West Pakistani oppressors. Reporters had no doubt that there were such atrocities. Some of them witnessed bloody incidents or their aftermath, but for the most part correspondents had to rely on the accounts of others. Between the protestations of the Pakistani military, for whom all Bengali deaths were those of "miscreants" or criminals, and the manifest exaggerations of inflamed and sometimes bereaved East Bengalis, it was difficult to steer a measured course

The numbers mattered, and matter still, because they make the difference between seeing the war as a tragedy and seeing it as a terrible crime, indeed as a genocide. That in turn is important because it profoundly affects the way in which the peoples of South Asia understand both their separate and their common histories. Much that is both wrong and dangerous in the subcontinent today, from Pakistan's paranoia to India's extreme self-righteousness and Bangladesh's sense that it is neglected and ignored, can be traced to the 1971 conflict, even if the roots go back further still. Sarmila Bose's attempt to set the numerical record straight in her aptly named book is a contribution to a debate that ought to have taken place a long time ago but instead has hardly started. It is a grim kind of accountancy, because even when she concludes, as she often does, that fewer, sometimes far fewer, died than claimed, still we are dealing with murder, rape, unnatural deaths and the destruction of individuals and their families in a land that had joyously embraced the idea of Pakistan less than a generation before.

Her method is to take the worst of the alleged atrocities, and then to attempt to reconstruct and quantify them by interviewing the participants on both or, rather, all sides. She wove back and forth between Pakistan and Bangladesh, seeing mainly retired Pakistani officers in the west, and survivors of killings and their relatives in the east, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities. Bose (pictured) seems to have been the first to do this. It is a method not without its problems. My own feeling, remembering how charming Pakistani officers, like their Indian equivalents, can be, is that she may have been a bit too ready to accept the honourable, just-trying-to-do-our-duty image that those officers naturally prefer to convey, and that she may also be too convinced that the received wisdom needs to be entirely overturned. Yet when she underlines how stretched the Pakistani forces were, how unready they were for the role of suppression that was thrust on them, and how perplexed they were in the face of a Bengali hostility that seemed to them so disproportionate, what she writes rings very true.

Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One lakh, in other words, at most. One cannot say that she absolutely proves this, but her evidence points in that direction, and, in any case vastly away from the figure of 3 million still proclaimed in Bangladesh and India. The wider revision of the conflict's history she implies exonerates the Pakistani government of any plot to rule the east by force, suggests that the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle but could not control it, and insists that the conflict was a civil war within East Pakistan. The killings by Bengalis of non-Bengali minorities, of Bengalis who stuck with the idea of a united Pakistan, and even of some Hindu Bengalis – all of whose deaths were attributed at the time to the Pakistani army – needs to be reckoned in any fair balance. The notion that the Bangladesh movement was non-violent, even Gandhian, was always fantastical. Bose has written a book that should provoke both fresh research and fresh thinking about a fateful turning point in the history of the subcontinent.

paragraph from wikipedia article on pakistani army :-


In 1997 R. J. Rummel published a book, available on the web, called "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900", In Chapter 8 called "Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources" he looks at the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Rummel wrote:

In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) [the President of Pakistan, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, and his top generals] also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This plan may be perceived as genocide.[18]
According to Maj. (Retd.) Agha Humayun Amin, Pakistan Army high command commanders had not seriously considered an Indian invasion of East Pakistan until December 1971 because it was presumed that the Indian military would not risk Chinese or US intervention. Maj Mazhar states that the PA's senior command failed to realise that the Chinese would be unable to intervene during the winter months of November to December 1971 period due to snowbound Himalayan passes and the US had not made any real effort to persuade India against attacking East Pakistan


R J RUMMEL now is neither an indian nor a bengali

And how conveniently you overlooked what same R J RUMMEL says about the Massacre of Non Bengalis committed by Mukti Bahni !!!

R J Rummel estimated that 150,000 non-Bengals were massacred by Awami League aligned militias, with a low estimate of 50,000 and a high estimate of 500,000.

 

[IamBengali]

that cant be true, she is wife of an army man, right?

She was in cantonment with many army personnel. Major Zia refused to accept her after independence. So she went to Sheikh Mujib's house for shelter. Sheikh Mujib then called Zia to accept this war heroine and he then accepted her. Its just sayings of people. I don't know if its true.

 

[livingdead]

She was in cantonment with many army personnel. Major Zia refused to accept her after independence. So she went to Sheikh Mujib's house for shelter. Sheikh Mujib then called Zia to accept this war heroine and he then accepted her. Its just sayings of people. I don't know if its true.

what is the source of the story... army wives club?

 

[Capt.Popeye]

@Capt.Popeye

What do you say about "Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War" by Sarmila Bose ?
Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971
bose is not Pakistani or American , she is Indian ..[Bose was born into a leading Indian political family. She had her schooling in Modern High School, Kolkata. She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and master's and PhD from Harvard University in political economy. regime. She has recently completed the Legal Practice Course at City University.]

And here is a review on her book from The Guardian UK


Dead Reckoning by Sarmila Bose - review
A long-overdue study of Bangladesh's war of independence

• 
• • Martin Woollacott

The eyes would widen and the head move from side to side in the striking Bengali gesture of affirmation. "How many were killed?" we would ask refugees who had fled from areas where the Pakistani army and its auxiliaries were attempting to suppress the Bangladesh independence movement. "Lakhs and lakhs!" came the answer. Journalists who covered the Bangladesh war in 1971 remember the phrase with a mixture of amusement and frustration. Lakh is the Indian word for 100,000, and it sometimes seemed as if the majority of Bengalis knew no other number, or, if they did, it was "crore" – ten million – at least when describing the atrocities and depredations of their West Pakistani oppressors. Reporters had no doubt that there were such atrocities. Some of them witnessed bloody incidents or their aftermath, but for the most part correspondents had to rely on the accounts of others. Between the protestations of the Pakistani military, for whom all Bengali deaths were those of "miscreants" or criminals, and the manifest exaggerations of inflamed and sometimes bereaved East Bengalis, it was difficult to steer a measured course

The numbers mattered, and matter still, because they make the difference between seeing the war as a tragedy and seeing it as a terrible crime, indeed as a genocide. That in turn is important because it profoundly affects the way in which the peoples of South Asia understand both their separate and their common histories. Much that is both wrong and dangerous in the subcontinent today, from Pakistan's paranoia to India's extreme self-righteousness and Bangladesh's sense that it is neglected and ignored, can be traced to the 1971 conflict, even if the roots go back further still. Sarmila Bose's attempt to set the numerical record straight in her aptly named book is a contribution to a debate that ought to have taken place a long time ago but instead has hardly started. It is a grim kind of accountancy, because even when she concludes, as she often does, that fewer, sometimes far fewer, died than claimed, still we are dealing with murder, rape, unnatural deaths and the destruction of individuals and their families in a land that had joyously embraced the idea of Pakistan less than a generation before.

Her method is to take the worst of the alleged atrocities, and then to attempt to reconstruct and quantify them by interviewing the participants on both or, rather, all sides. She wove back and forth between Pakistan and Bangladesh, seeing mainly retired Pakistani officers in the west, and survivors of killings and their relatives in the east, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities. Bose (pictured) seems to have been the first to do this. It is a method not without its problems. My own feeling, remembering how charming Pakistani officers, like their Indian equivalents, can be, is that she may have been a bit too ready to accept the honourable, just-trying-to-do-our-duty image that those officers naturally prefer to convey, and that she may also be too convinced that the received wisdom needs to be entirely overturned. Yet when she underlines how stretched the Pakistani forces were, how unready they were for the role of suppression that was thrust on them, and how perplexed they were in the face of a Bengali hostility that seemed to them so disproportionate, what she writes rings very true.

Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One lakh, in other words, at most. One cannot say that she absolutely proves this, but her evidence points in that direction, and, in any case vastly away from the figure of 3 million still proclaimed in Bangladesh and India. The wider revision of the conflict's history she implies exonerates the Pakistani government of any plot to rule the east by force, suggests that the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle but could not control it, and insists that the conflict was a civil war within East Pakistan. The killings by Bengalis of non-Bengali minorities, of Bengalis who stuck with the idea of a united Pakistan, and even of some Hindu Bengalis – all of whose deaths were attributed at the time to the Pakistani army – needs to be reckoned in any fair balance. The notion that the Bangladesh movement was non-violent, even Gandhian, was always fantastical. Bose has written a book that should provoke both fresh research and fresh thinking about a fateful turning point in the history of the subcontinent.





And how conveniently you overlooked what same R J RUMMEL says about the Massacre of Non Bengalis committed by Mukti Bahni !!!

R J Rummel estimated that 150,000 non-Bengals were massacred by Awami League aligned militias, with a low estimate of 50,000 and a high estimate of 500,000.

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL is that the effing best that you come up with!!!!!!!!!!
A Review of a effing book????????????
I gave you Pakistani accounts to read.

There are NONE SO BLIND AS THAT WILL NOT WANT TO SEE, LOLLLLLLLL
Go on living in Delusionistan..............
Little wonder that the Country got chopped up the way it did.

 

[IamBengali]

what is the source of the story... army wives club?

The leaders of AL (Tofayel and others) who were in presence during Khaleda's visit to Mujib's house.

 

[ExtraOdinary]

Sickening account.

 

[M. Sarmad]

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL is that the effing best that you come up with!!!!!!!!!!
A Review of a effing book????????????
I gave you Pakistani accounts to read.
There are NONE SO BLIND AS THAT WILL NOT WANT TO SEE, LOLLLLLLLL
Go on living in Delusionistan..............
Little wonder that the Country got chopped up the way it did.

I can see the frustration of a Indian loser here ....
you better read the book by the Indian Author first before posting stupid comments here !!

Ok ...
Here is the challenge ....
The Indians and AL claims 3 million kills by Pakistan Army ...

CAN YOU BRING ANY OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE ???

and if you cant (which surely u cant) , then reconsider plz that who lives in Delusionistan !!

 

[Capt.Popeye]

Either deny my statement or point out the lie? I am not here to take a history lesson and specially not that from a brainwashed child like you. If its ok for your establishment to commit a massacre in the name of Counter Insurgency then it was ok in 1971 for our country too.

Of course; it was BLOODY RIGHT for you to do so. But what was the outcome of it?
You lost the Bigger and Productive half of your country i.e. you became Adha-Adhura.
Then your Army had to surrender in the biggest surrender of modern times.

Now you decide how right it was and how much it was worth in the light of all that? As for taking lessons, you did not get the lessons earlier, neither will they be any help to you now.

Btw, considering all that happened; there is no similarity between Khalistan and Bangladesh. Not even in the final outcomes................

 

[dray]

@Itachi A non-India/BD source for you.

Bangladesh war: The article that changed history
By Mark Dummett BBC News

Continue reading the main story
In today's Magazine

• The return of the female condom?
• 'It took 24 years to find out my son had died'
• Bitcoin: Price v hype
• North Korea's way with extreme insults

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK's Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan's suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter's family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake - the fatal mistake - of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.

So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.

Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK's Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army's brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million.

The strategy failed, and Bangladeshis are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the birth of their country. Meanwhile, the first trial of those accused of committing war crimes has recently begun in Dhaka.

Continue reading the main story
Anthony Mascarenhas

• July 1928: Born in Goa
• 1930s: Educated in Karachi
• June 1971: Exposes war crimes in East Pakistan that alter international opinion
• 1972: Wins international journalism awards
• 1979: Reports that Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons

There is little doubt that Mascarenhas' reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her "on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India's armed intervention," he recalled.

Not that this was ever Mascarenhas' intention. He was, Evans wrote in his memoirs, "just a very good reporter doing an honest job".

He was also very brave. Pakistan, at the time, was run by the military, and he knew that he would have to get himself and his family out of the country before the story could be published - not an easy task in those days.

"His mother always told him to stand up and speak the truth and be counted," Mascarenhas's widow, Yvonne, recalled (he died in 1986). "He used to tell me, put a mountain before me and I'll climb it. He was never daunted."

A map of Pakistan before the 1971 war
When the war in what was then East Pakistan broke out in March 1971, Mascarenhas was a respected journalist in Karachi, the main city in the country's dominant western wing, on good terms with the country's ruling elite. He was a member of the city's small community of Goan Christians, and he and Yvonne had five children.

Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

It was terrifying - I had to leave everything behind”

Yvonne Mascarenhas
The conflict was sparked by elections, which were won by an East Pakistani party, the Awami League, which wanted greater autonomy for the region.

While the political parties and the military argued over the formation of a new government, many Bengalis became convinced that West Pakistan was deliberately blocking their ambitions.

The situation started to become violent. The Awami League launched a campaign of civil disobedience, its supporters attacked many non-Bengali civilians, and the army flew in thousands of reinforcements.

On the evening of 25 March it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Awami League, and other perceived opponents, including members of the intelligentsia and the Hindu community, who at that time made up about 20% of the province's 75 million people.

In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors.

Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.

Initially, the plan seemed to work, and the army decided it would be a good idea to invite some Pakistani reporters to the region to show them how they had successfully dealt with the "freedom fighters".

Continue reading the main story
Bangladesh independence war, 1971

• Civil war erupts in Pakistan, pitting the West Pakistan army against East Pakistanis demanding autonomy and later independence
• Fighting forces an estimated 10 million East Pakistani civilians to flee to India
• In December, India invades East Pakistan in support of the East Pakistani people
• Pakistani army surrenders at Dhaka and its army of more than 90,000 become Indian prisoners of war
• East Pakistan becomes the independent country of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971
• Exact number of people killed is unclear - Bangladesh says it is three million but independent researchers say it is up to 500,000 fatalities

• Watershed moment
• Key defendants
• Article that changed history

Foreign journalists had already been expelled, and Pakistan was also keen to publicise atrocities committed by the other side. Awami League supporters had massacred tens of thousands of civilians whose loyalty they suspected, a war crime that is still denied by many today in Bangladesh.

Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province. When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to.

But one of them refused.

Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers him coming back distraught: "I'd never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional," she says, speaking from her home in west London.

"He told me that if he couldn't write the story of what he'd seen he'd never be able to write another word again."

Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried.

Pretending he was visiting his sick sister, Mascarenhas then travelled to London, where he headed straight to the Sunday Times and the editor's office.

Indians and Bengali guerrillas fought in support of East Pakistan
Evans remembers him in that meeting as having "the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy".

"He'd been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale," Evans wrote.

Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a "final solution".

Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.

They had agreed that the signal for them to start preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that "Ann's operation was successful".

Yvonne remembers receiving the message at three the next morning. "I heard the telegram man bang at my window and I woke up my sons and I was: 'Oh my gosh, we have to go to London.' It was terrifying. I had to leave everything behind.

"We could only take one suitcase each. We were crying so much it was like a funeral," she says.

To avoid suspicion, Mascarenhas had to return to Pakistan before his family could leave. But as Pakistanis were only allowed one foreign flight a year, he then had to sneak out of the country by himself, crossing by land into Afghanistan.

The day after the family was reunited in their new home in London, the Sunday Times published his article, under the headline "Genocide".

'Betrayal'
It is such a powerful piece of reporting because Mascarenhas was clearly so well trusted by the Pakistani officers he spent time with.

I have witnessed the brutality of 'kill and burn missions' as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages.

I have seen whole villages devastated by 'punitive action'.

And in the officer's mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day's kill.

'How many did you get?' The answers are seared in my memory.

Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

This was one of the most significant articles written on the war”

Mofidul Huq Liberation War Museum
His article was - from Pakistan's point of view - a huge betrayal and he was accused of being an enemy agent. It still denies its forces were behind such atrocities as those described by Mascarenhas, and blames Indian propaganda.

However, he still maintained excellent contacts there, and in 1979 became the first journalist to reveal that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons.

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country's Liberation War Museum.

"This was one of the most significant articles written on the war. It came out when our country was cut off, and helped inform the world of what was going on here," says Mofidul Huq, a trustee of the museum.

His family, meanwhile, settled into life in a new and colder country.

"People were so serious in London and nobody ever talked to us," Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers. "We were used to happy, smiley faces, it was all a bit of a change for us after Karachi. But we never regretted it."

BBC News - Bangladesh war: The article that changed history​

 

[M. Sarmad]

@Itachi A non-India/BD source for you.

Bangladesh war: The article that changed history
By Mark Dummett BBC News

Continue reading the main story
In today's Magazine

• The return of the female condom?
• 'It took 24 years to find out my son had died'
• Bitcoin: Price v hype
• North Korea's way with extreme insults

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK's Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan's suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter's family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake - the fatal mistake - of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.

So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.

Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK's Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army's brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million.

The strategy failed, and Bangladeshis are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the birth of their country. Meanwhile, the first trial of those accused of committing war crimes has recently begun in Dhaka.

Continue reading the main story
Anthony Mascarenhas

• July 1928: Born in Goa
• 1930s: Educated in Karachi
• June 1971: Exposes war crimes in East Pakistan that alter international opinion
• 1972: Wins international journalism awards
• 1979: Reports that Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons

There is little doubt that Mascarenhas' reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her "on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India's armed intervention," he recalled.

Not that this was ever Mascarenhas' intention. He was, Evans wrote in his memoirs, "just a very good reporter doing an honest job".

He was also very brave. Pakistan, at the time, was run by the military, and he knew that he would have to get himself and his family out of the country before the story could be published - not an easy task in those days.

"His mother always told him to stand up and speak the truth and be counted," Mascarenhas's widow, Yvonne, recalled (he died in 1986). "He used to tell me, put a mountain before me and I'll climb it. He was never daunted."

A map of Pakistan before the 1971 war
When the war in what was then East Pakistan broke out in March 1971, Mascarenhas was a respected journalist in Karachi, the main city in the country's dominant western wing, on good terms with the country's ruling elite. He was a member of the city's small community of Goan Christians, and he and Yvonne had five children.

Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

It was terrifying - I had to leave everything behind”

Yvonne Mascarenhas
The conflict was sparked by elections, which were won by an East Pakistani party, the Awami League, which wanted greater autonomy for the region.

While the political parties and the military argued over the formation of a new government, many Bengalis became convinced that West Pakistan was deliberately blocking their ambitions.

The situation started to become violent. The Awami League launched a campaign of civil disobedience, its supporters attacked many non-Bengali civilians, and the army flew in thousands of reinforcements.

On the evening of 25 March it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Awami League, and other perceived opponents, including members of the intelligentsia and the Hindu community, who at that time made up about 20% of the province's 75 million people.

In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors.

Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.

Initially, the plan seemed to work, and the army decided it would be a good idea to invite some Pakistani reporters to the region to show them how they had successfully dealt with the "freedom fighters".

Continue reading the main story
Bangladesh independence war, 1971

• Civil war erupts in Pakistan, pitting the West Pakistan army against East Pakistanis demanding autonomy and later independence
• Fighting forces an estimated 10 million East Pakistani civilians to flee to India
• In December, India invades East Pakistan in support of the East Pakistani people
• Pakistani army surrenders at Dhaka and its army of more than 90,000 become Indian prisoners of war
• East Pakistan becomes the independent country of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971
• Exact number of people killed is unclear - Bangladesh says it is three million but independent researchers say it is up to 500,000 fatalities

• Watershed moment
• Key defendants
• Article that changed history

Foreign journalists had already been expelled, and Pakistan was also keen to publicise atrocities committed by the other side. Awami League supporters had massacred tens of thousands of civilians whose loyalty they suspected, a war crime that is still denied by many today in Bangladesh.

Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province. When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to.

But one of them refused.

Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers him coming back distraught: "I'd never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional," she says, speaking from her home in west London.

"He told me that if he couldn't write the story of what he'd seen he'd never be able to write another word again."

Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried.

Pretending he was visiting his sick sister, Mascarenhas then travelled to London, where he headed straight to the Sunday Times and the editor's office.

Indians and Bengali guerrillas fought in support of East Pakistan
Evans remembers him in that meeting as having "the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy".

"He'd been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale," Evans wrote.

Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a "final solution".

Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.

They had agreed that the signal for them to start preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that "Ann's operation was successful".

Yvonne remembers receiving the message at three the next morning. "I heard the telegram man bang at my window and I woke up my sons and I was: 'Oh my gosh, we have to go to London.' It was terrifying. I had to leave everything behind.

"We could only take one suitcase each. We were crying so much it was like a funeral," she says.

To avoid suspicion, Mascarenhas had to return to Pakistan before his family could leave. But as Pakistanis were only allowed one foreign flight a year, he then had to sneak out of the country by himself, crossing by land into Afghanistan.

The day after the family was reunited in their new home in London, the Sunday Times published his article, under the headline "Genocide".

'Betrayal'
It is such a powerful piece of reporting because Mascarenhas was clearly so well trusted by the Pakistani officers he spent time with.

I have witnessed the brutality of 'kill and burn missions' as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages.

I have seen whole villages devastated by 'punitive action'.

And in the officer's mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day's kill.

'How many did you get?' The answers are seared in my memory.

Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

This was one of the most significant articles written on the war”

Mofidul Huq Liberation War Museum
His article was - from Pakistan's point of view - a huge betrayal and he was accused of being an enemy agent. It still denies its forces were behind such atrocities as those described by Mascarenhas, and blames Indian propaganda.

However, he still maintained excellent contacts there, and in 1979 became the first journalist to reveal that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons.

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country's Liberation War Museum.

"This was one of the most significant articles written on the war. It came out when our country was cut off, and helped inform the world of what was going on here," says Mofidul Huq, a trustee of the museum.

His family, meanwhile, settled into life in a new and colder country.

"People were so serious in London and nobody ever talked to us," Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers. "We were used to happy, smiley faces, it was all a bit of a change for us after Karachi. But we never regretted it."

BBC News - Bangladesh war: The article that changed history​

^^Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died.

that is the truth my friend

The figures of 3 million killed by PA , as claimed by AL and Indians is a ABSURD LIE

Indian sponsored Mukti Bahni killed 0.15-0.5 million non bengalis , then why blame PA alone ??