(JustPatriots.com)- The worst genocide of the post-World War II era ended 51 years ago, almost to the day, notes the 19FortyFive website. The U.S. State Department watched the killing of Bengalis in real-time, but it did nothing because the then-secretary sat on his hands.
President of the United States Joe Biden acknowledges the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, and Holodomor, but he and his predecessors say nothing about what happened in Bangladesh.
When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad started using guns against his people less than ten years ago, a large portion of the Western world was horrified. The United Nations calculates that more than 300,000 civilians have died during that conflict and more than ten times that many have been displaced.
Syria and Afghanistan are overshadowed by the Yemeni conflict in Washington’s political discourse. The last two wars are largely forgotten today, at least in America. Progressives demand that the United States downgrade or sever ties with Saudi Arabia due to the Kingdom’s participation in Yemen’s civil war, and they argue that failure to do so makes the United States responsible for a conflict that has likely claimed 400,000 civilian lives since its outbreak in 2014.
The second half of the 20th century was even worse. Rwanda’s 1994 genocide killed 800,000 Tutsis in three months. Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian civil war killed 350,000 people, 25% civilians. Europe was appalled by the wartime rape. Cambodia’s post-Vietnam War conflict was fierce. Yale Prof. Ben Kiernan showed an ethnic component to the Khmer Rouge’s four-year massacre in Cambodia, which killed 1.5 million to 3 million people.
Each of these horrifying wars was an effort to either carry out genocide or to ethnically purge populations and fundamentally alter the demographics of a nation. But only the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda comes close to the number of murders that took place over time in what is now Bangladesh. For eight months in 1971, Pakistani forces massacred, purposefully uprooted, and systematically raped ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan, killing an average of 375,000 people each month. Three million people ultimately perished.
The slaughter in Pakistan was preceded by racism, like so many other genocides.
Recognizing the genocide in Bangladesh could not only improve ties with a significant but frequently underappreciated South Asian nation, but it would also force Islamabad and the State Department to engage in much-needed introspection.
