Then came the topic of creation of Bangladesh. Naturally, they sided with the Pakistani Islamic army, although they expressed sorrow for the lives lost. When they heard that 3 million people were massacred and that the action of the Pakistani Islamic army could not be dismissed simply as an act of restoration of peace and order, they simply laughed. The reason was that they did not believe what had happened to our people in the occupied Bangladesh. When we asked them how many Bengalis were killed, they quoted a figure of three thousand. They also insisted that those killed were mostly Hindus, so we should not bother too much about the massacre. That was to say that the killing of Hindus was all right. We pointed out that the figure of 3 million was not invented by the government of Bangladesh but the figure was from reliable foreign sources such as the Agence France Presse, Reuters, and Time magazine. We also told them that a Pakistani journalist by the name of Anthony Mascarenhas has written a book titled The Rape of Bangladesh,' where he had quoted a similar figure. The Pakistanis simply dismissed those facts and said that the foreign journalists were bribed by India to write these figures. When we asked them how did they get the figure of three thousand, they said that that figure was released by the military authorities. And what about the two hundred thousand rape cases? They were adamant that not a single woman was raped. Such is the power of Pakistani Islamic oligarchy and Pakistani Islamic military to condition peoples' minds...

All the atrocities commited by the Pakistani army clearly shows that it was nothing but a religious war. When I read the Koran and compare the actions of the Pakistani army I find an absolute link between the killings and the provisions in the Koran. To the Pakistani military, the Bengalis were not true followers of Islam, but hypocrites. So they wanted to get rid of these nonbelievers (the Bengalis) as per the provision in the Koran and hadith. The whole world knows the truth. The truth is that the genocide in Bangladesh was conducted by the Islmic army of Pakistan to save Islam and to completely annihilate the unbelievers.

I covered the war and witnessed first the population's joyous welcome of the Indian soldiers as liberators .. Later I toured the country by road to see the Pakistani legacy first hand. In town after town there was an execution area where people had been killed by bayonet, bullet and bludgeon. In some towns, executions were held on a daily basis. This was a month after the war's end (i.e. January 1972), ... human bones were still scattered along many roadsides. Blood stained clothing and tufts of human hair clung to the brush at these killing grounds. Children too young to understand were playing grotesque games with skulls. Other reminders were the yellow "H"s the Pakistanis had painted on the homes of Hindus, particular targets of the Muslim army.

It is disgraceful that the Hindus in my country were hunted by the Muslims after the destruction of the Babri Masjid. All of us who love Bangladesh should feel ashamed that such a terrible thing ‘could happen in our beautiful country. The riots that took place in 1992 in Bangladesh are the responsibility of us all, and we are all to blame.

After the liberation, it was found that the killing and destruction done by the Pakistani Islamic military was one of the worst in the Old Dhaka area. They killed virtually every person in the Hindu-dominated Shankari Patti in the Old Dhaka area. The fire and smoke were so terrible that at night the whole sky was red.

Sir, during the dark days or nights of the Great Killing, I watched events from the ‘point of view of a member of the Opposition. The news that came to me trickling down from various sources was unfavourable to the Ministers in power. I was very deeply impressed with the fact that during the whole of these disturbances the machinery of Government had completely broken down in this city. Sit, I pondered deeply over the situation, and if I have risen to say a few words on these motions I wish to tell my comrades in the Assembly what | feel very strongly and which T think ought to be raised before the people of Bengal, if Bengal is to be saved at all from utter extermination. There have been Hindu-Muslim quarrels in the past all over India. In many of these quarrels, when cases had been started, I had the privilege of defending the Muslim accused almost all over the country. But, Sir, 1 have never in the whole course of my life seen anything like the purcly fiendish fury with which both Hindus and Muslims have murdered not merely men or women but even small children. 1 do not know to satisfy what impulse—human or devilish—which seems to have possessed the Bengalees for those fateful days and nights that my countrymen indulged.

You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next Spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there. I repeated my thoughts to my wife, but she said it was not difficult to understand about battlefields: The blood of the men killed on the field, and the bodies buried there, fertilize the ground and stimulate the growth of vegetation. That was all quite natural she said. But I could not agree with this, too-simple, explanation: To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.

To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.

I started to question the necessity of religion in our lives and the inhuman and illogical practices in many religions, including Islam. You might wonder what triggered my distaste for religion. It all started in my school days when I witnessed the slaughter of a dear Hindu friend of mine (along with his entire family) in Chandpur, Bangladesh. I can never erase that memory from my mind. That was a devastating experience. But more shocking was that many Muslims were actually happy about that slaughter and even went further, supporting the idea that we (Muslims) should kill more Hindus because the Muslims in India are being slaughtered, too. It was also declared by some Muslim clerics that killing of non- Muslims is an act of jihad and therefore anyone participating in jihad will be rewarded with heaven. At that tender age I knew very little of Islam and nothing about other religions. However, the little conscience inside me told me that what was being done and what was being practiced were not right. However, I had little power to change the course of events. I personally visited the house of my slain friend and found that all the members of his family, including his parents, brothers, and sisters, were killed by axes and swords. I saw pools of blood in their kitchen and bathroom, where they hid to save their lives. The incident happened in the dead of night and no one came to help them. When I went back to my school, I was extremely ashamed in front of my Hindu friends. I was speechless and could say nothing. I feared that my Hindu friends might one day attack me. To my great surprise I found that my Hindu friends did not really bother very much and treated me as usual.

[S]he (Taslima Nasrin) cites as many as 145 instances of persecution of Hindus in present- day Bangladesh, taking care to mention the precise location where the act was perpetrated, in terms of Zilla, Upazilla and Gram (respectively district, sub-district and village). These are mostly instances of small-scale, localised persecution, quite apart from the type of countrywide atrocities that took place in October 1990 and again in December 1992.

Summarizing the evidence relating to the slaughter of the Buddhist Monks perpetrated by the Musalman General in the course of his invasion of Bihar in 1197 AD, Mr. Vincent Smith says, "....Great quantities of plunder were obtained, and the slaughter of the 'shaven headed Brahmans', that is to say the Buddhist monks, was so thoroughly completed, that when the victor sought for someone capable of explaining the contents of the books in the libraries of the monasteries, not a living man could be found who was able to read them. 'It was discovered,' we are told, 'that the whole of that fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindi tongue they call a college Bihar.' " Such was the slaughter of the Buddhist priesthood perpetrated by the Islamic invaders. The axe was struck at the very root. For by killing the Buddhist priesthood, Islam killed Buddhism. This was the greatest disaster that befell the religion of the Buddha in India.

Looting. Rape. Kidnappings. Murder. Where no one had cared about Pakistan when I arrived at Harvard, now everyone did. And the condemnation of my country was universal. At first, I refused to believe the accounts in the Western press of atrocities being committed by our army in what the East Bengal rebels were now calling Bangladesh. According to the government-controlled Pakistani papers my parents sent me every week, the brief rebellion had been quelled. What were these charges then that Dacca had been burned to the ground and firing squads sent into the university to execute students, teachers, poets, novelists, doctors and lawyers? I shook my head in disbelief. Refugees were reportedly fleeing by the thousands, so many of them strafed and killed by Pakistani planes that their bodies were being used to erect road blocks.

We need not even look very far: of the one to three victims of the Bangladesh war in 1971, most were Hindus, totally dwarfing those who were killed in religious riots in remainder-India since 1947. In 1947 too, the Hindu refugees from West Panjab killed by their Muslim neighbours far outnumbered the East Panjabi Muslims who didn’t make it to the Promised Land they themselves had created.

I have myself seen the depredations of the Afghans round Dehli and Mattra. God defend us from them! It makes the very hair of the body stand on end to think of them. Two hundred thousand men were destroyed in these massacres, and the hordes of the enemy were without number. Such atrocities, forsooth, were perpetrated in compliance with their religion and law! What cared they for the religion, the law, the honour and reputation of the innocent sufferers? It was enough for such bigots that splendour accrued by their deeds to the faith of Muhammad and 'Ali!