By Imran Chowdhury

The bloody birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was one of the human catastrophes that the world have witnessed after the tumultuous World War II. The Liberation War of Bangladesh following the brutal crackdown started by the Pakistan Army on the fateful night of 24/25th March 1971 they named that massacre Operation Search Light. Indeed it was a searchlight to locate, find and kill people indiscriminately. The saga of the obliteration and annihilation began from that dawn, and it continued till the shameful surrender of the brutal, heinous, treacherous, neo Nazi the infamous Pakistan Army. The rise of Bengali nationalism climbed to the zenith from those ashes of that phoenix.

However, the rise of a new sun of independence was very costly, dangerous, sacrificially expensive. Above it entailed receiving an enormous quantum of humiliation in the hands of the vicious military killing machines of the Pakistan Army.

The encampment of erstwhile East Pakistan ( today’s Bangladesh) saw the worts Genocide after the Holocaust coupled with an exodus en masse.’ The unprecedented fleeing of the people from their homes to find some solace, safety, and security was, in essence, the most significant displacement of humans since the fall of the Nazi regime.

The perpetuation of the Genocide of 1971 in the then East Pakistan today’s Bangladesh has somehow gone ignored. For unknown geopolitical, international issues and ideological reasons, the Genocide failed to achieve pan world recognition and subsequent legal trial. Ironic as though it sounds but the indelible marks and the unrepairable pain and the loss of lives that the Genocide caused remains deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of millions of Bengalis.

The memories of the women who were sexually compromised and raped by those perpetrators. Millions of people had been killed in this cruelty. And the shreds of evidence and witnesses are slowly and gradually getting obscured due to this extended passage.

To document, research, gather, and archive and record the statements of those eyewitnesses, the freedom fighters, the peasants, the students, the teachers, the members of the martyr families and the next of kins or the Keith and kin, which Have prompted the emergence of the Genocide Research Institute; an organisation generated by those who were witnesses, victims, descendants of the slain and quintessentially ardent supporters of an independent Bangladesh in its entirety as a secular and multiculturally inclusive society. The quest of the Genocide Research Institute is to unearth all those instruments and apparatus of The Genocide to prepare for a Trial for those who caused the Bengali people such inhumanity, barbaric extermination and humiliation. It is a burden of responsibility; that we owe to our nation and the race.

During the Nazi orchestrated Genocide in Europe, the Jews, the Gipsies, and the commissars faced the wrath of the Nazi final solution and the Holocaust. After the fall of the Nazi regime, the allied forces established the Nuremberg Trial to bring those perpetrators of Nazi Germany to face the legal wrath for their crimes against humanity and war crimes. This epitome of the trial, in essence, paved the way for the world to adopt, promulgate, enact and enshrine the game-changing legislatures, statutes and laws like The Genocide Convention of 1948, Nuremberg Principals of 1950, The Convention on the Abolition of Statutes of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 1968, The Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War of 1949 and other protocols in 1977.

In line with those remarkable achievements of the Nuremberg trial, which brought some respite to the sufferers seeing their captors, torturers, killers, annihilators brought to the altar of law; Genocide Research Institute will emulate those footsteps of the Nuremberg by bringing those who masterminded Bangladesh Genocide by awakening the world’s consensus by supporting the cause, and its final closure.

The onus, in essence, lies with us. It is a moral responsibility for all the Bengalis worldwide to rally under these kinds of umbrellas to bring those heinous, brutal, inhumane Pakistan Army and Pakistan as a statehood to stand trial for the Genocide they have committed in Bangladesh.

To find more about Genocide Research Institute,

visit the website

www.gri.org.uk