| Actually, Charge 7, the genocide against Bengalis by the (west) Pakistani army is very well documented. Estimations of 3 - 8 million people -- all civilians, and about half of them minority Hindus -- were murdered.
Not only is there simply no dispute on the veracity of those figures and the scale of the genocide, but a whole generation of memoirs and military records by retired Pakistani officers confirms these numbers. Some of them making the claim, citing Pakistani army records, quote as much as 10 million people murdered.
Quite frankly, the world's failure to apparently take notice of this is one of, in my view, the most colossal blunders in 20th century history. In the 1960s, the political value of a murdered Bengali was apparently less than that of a murdered European. Sad, but true.
The genocide, and the resulting literally tens of millions of Bengalis fleeing over the border into northeast India, was the major cause of the 1971 India Pak war. The fact that Pakistan made the stupendously stupid mistake of trying to take out the IAF a la Israeli-Arab war, and failed miserbly, was just the spark that set off the tinderbox. |