1971 Dhaka University massacre

In March 1971, the Pakistan Army Eastern Wing Commander Tikka Khan launched Operation Searchlight on the orders of dictator Yahya Khan to crush the Bengali nationalist movement. As part of the operation, Pakistani forces attacked Dhaka University.

Quotes

• And the students at the university
  Asleep at night quite peacefully
  The soldiers came and shot them in their beds
  And terror took the dorm awakening shrieks of dread
  And silent frozen forms and pillows drenched in red
  Bangladesh, Bangladesh
  Bangladesh, Bangladesh
  When the sun sinks in the west
  Die a million people of the Bangladesh
  • Joan Baez, in the Song for Bangladesh (1971)

• Midnight, March 25, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib's lair. Students and lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Merchurichrome stained the lawns . . .
  • Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. quoted from Tariq Ali - The Clash of Fundamentalisms_ Crusades, Jihads and Modernity-Verso (2002)

• That first night, army units also attacked the University of Dacca. Four American-built M-2 tanks shelled student dormitories at close range, killing many men and women students.13 Those students who survived until the morning were forced to dig mass graves for the dead and then themselves were lined up and shot.
  • R.J. Rummel, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, by R.J. Rummel New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994

• The U.S. consulate gave detailed accounts of the killings at Dacca University, ordinarily a leafy, handsome enclave. At the wrecked campus, professors had been hauled from their homes to be gunned down. The provost of the Hindu dormitory, a respected scholar of English, was dragged out of his residence and shot in the neck. Blood listed six other faculty members “reliably reported killed by troops,” with several more possibly dead. One American who had visited the campus said that students had been “mowed down” in their rooms or as they fled, with a residence hall in flames and youths being machine-gunned. “At least two mass graves on campus,” Blood cabled. “Stench terrible.” There were 148 corpses in one of these mass graves, according to the workmen forced to dig them. An official in the Dacca consulate estimated that at least five hundred students had been killed in the first two days of the crackdown, almost none of them fighting back. Blood reckoned that the rumored toll of a thousand dead at the university was “exaggerated, although nothing these days is inconceivable.” After the massacre, he reported that an American eyewitness had seen an empty army truck arriving to get rid of a “tightly packed pile of approximately twenty five corpses,” the last of many such batches of human remains.
  • Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times was stuck at the Intercontinental Hotel, beside himself with frustration. On that night, he was jolted by explosions. The army corralled the foreign press. “They kept pushing us into the hotel,” he remembers. They ended up watching from the tenth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. They could see flames from Dacca University, which was a mile and a half away, where, Schanberg says, the army seemed to be shooting artillery. The trapped reporters watched a Pakistani soldier on a jeep that had a mounted machine gun—equipment probably provided by the United States. He recalls, “They started shooting at students coming from the university, up the road about a mile. They were singing patriotic songs in Bengali. And then the army opened up. We couldn’t tell when they hit the ground if they were ducking or killed.”
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• In Old Dacca, an area the size of two-dozen city blocks had been razed by gunfire. Pakistani soldiers had reportedly destroyed a Bengali police barracks, pounding it with heavy weapons and killing many, and had stormed Dacca University, whose leafy, shaded campus is ordinarily a relatively quiet sanctuary from the city’s tumult. Many students and professors had backed the Awami League. Iqbal Hall had evidently been blasted by mortar fire. The inside of the hall, which had been rumored to be a weapons stockpile for the Bengali nationalists, was scorched; a corpse lay nearby. (An American witness later reported that a few students in Iqbal Hall had been armed, which enraged the troops, although a Pakistan army brigadier testified that his fellow soldiers faced no resistance and acted out of “revenge and anger.”) Some of the worst killing of civilians, according to students, took place at Jagannath Hall, the Hindu dormitory.
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• At the end of the meeting, Kissinger looped back to the reports of a massacre at Dacca University. “Did they kill Professor Razak?” he asked. “He was one of my students.” A CIA official replied, “I think so. They killed a lot of people at the university.” Here was a moment when the abstractions of high policy and impersonal numbers—thirty thousand troops, seventy-five million people—might have melted away, replaced with the individual human face of a pupil from more innocent days. Henry Kissinger, seemingly referring to past Muslim rulers of India, replied, “They didn’t dominate 400 million Indians all those years by being gentle.”
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.