The Cancer Of 1971 Unfortunately, the war is not yet over.

SOURCE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/30012017-the-cancer-of-1971-still-consumes-bangladesh-oped/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

The Cancer Of 1971 Still               Consumes Bangladesh

                                By

                      Bhaskar Roy 

Unfortunately, the war is not yet over.

Location of Bangladesh. Source: CIA World Factbook.

                                               BY SAAG 

JANUARY 30, 2017

I would be morally remiss if in my article on Bangladesh (my first article on the country this year-2017) I did not revisit the torture and trauma the Bengali people suffered in their struggle for freedom from Pakistan. The Liberation War was fought on the plank of ethno-cultural independence and secularism. 

Unfortunately, that war is not yet over.

In 1947, when India was divided by the British on the demands of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan was formed (West Pakistan in the West and East Pakistan in the east) on the basis of religious (Muslim) majority areas.

The Bengalis of East Pakistan soon discovered that their language, culture and diversity were under threat from the dominant western wing. And thus started the long arduous and “bloody” struggle for a Bengali identity that ultimately led to independence. The resistance to the imposition of Urdu started in the 1950s, by both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis who shared the deep bonds of language, ethnicity and culture.

In their long struggle for independence of Bangladesh, the following dates are of critical importance:

February 21, 1952 – Language Movement Day

March 25, 1971 – Operation Searchlight Martyred Intellectuals Day

December 14, 1971 –December 16, 1971 – Surrender by Pakistani Forces

August 15, 1975 – Assassination of Bangabandhu, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

November, 1975 to December, 1975 – Coups Counter Coups and trials by ‘Kangaroo courts’ of liberation fighters later brutally assassinated by Zia-ur-Rehman

1952 was the watershed moment for Bengali aspiration. The call was to oppose the imposition of Urdu, an alien language which brought with it the subtle infiltration of an alien culture. On February 21 of that year several protestors in a peaceful anti-Urdu demonstration were killed in police firing. Bangladesh observes this day as Language Movement Day. February 21 has been recognised by UNESCO (1999) as International Mother Language Day in a tribute to the Bengali language movement and the linguistic rights of people all over the world. (The government of Bangladesh must be credited for this).

In 1970, the Awami League won the Pakistani general elections. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, its leader of the Awami League should have become the prime minister of Pakistan. But that did not happen; instead he was arrested and imprisoned and the elections rescinded.

Responding to widespread protests in Bengal, the Pakistani army of Gen. Yahya Khan launched ‘Operation Searchlight’ on March 25, 1971 – it was a planned military operation to wipe out the Bengali nationalist movement. The Pakistani army perpetrated a reign of terror, ably assisted by their local henchmen, mostly members of the right-wing fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. The massacre continued till the Pak army surrendered to joint Bangladesh-India command on December 16, 1971. Over 90 thousand Pakistani military personnel, including officers and other ranks surrendered to the Indian army, which had to give them protection, otherwise they would have been torn to bits by the Bengali people. The surrendered Pakistani personal were brought to India and later repatriated to Pakistan.

‘Operation Searchlight’ had a much larger agenda. The West Pakistani generals realized the impossibility of retaining East Pakistan, and therefore adopted a scorched earth policy. Their aim was to leave the newly independent country maimed and destroyed. More than 3 million people were massacred and over 3 thousand women raped. The economy was destroyed. On December 14, Bengali intellectuals both Hindu and Muslim were rounded up and brutally murdered by the Jamaatis who had formed killer organisations called Al Badr and Al Shams, under the generic nomenclature of Razakars. Intellectuals are the backbone of a nation and eliminating them would set the nation back by a generation or two. Hindus were a specific target, the aim being to kill as many as possible and drive the rest to India. Millions of refugees, both Hindu and Muslim, poured into India. Many did not return.

The story did not end with liberation. On August 15, 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated with his entire family, including his 10 year old son, Sheikh Russell.

Only two of his daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana survived, because they were living in West Germany then.

The group of army officers who killed Bangabandhu and his family and others close to him, were not alone. Turncoat Awami League leaders, the Pakistanis and the Americans were part of the conspiracy. It was a personal act of revenge for Henry Kissinger, (U.S. National Security Advisor under President Nixon) who was rabidly pro-Pakistani, pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy in countries that the Americans wanted to control.

The era of betrayal had begun. It divided the nation and remains a festering wound to this day.

Major Zia-ur-Rehman, highly decorated “freedom fighter” was, perhaps, the biggest betrayer of liberation. Soon after Sheikh Mujib’s assassination four national leaders of Bangladesh were also killed. The date August 15, 1975 has another significance. It is India’s Independence Day and India had supported Sk Mujib and the liberation fighters. What better way would there be for the anti-liberation forces to “thumb their nose” at India?

Several Bangladeshi friends have remarked to this writer that they had expected Indian tanks to roll down the Jessore Road to Dhaka, to help Bangladesh to consolidate its independence. And they were dismayed when that did not happen.

Information available now suggests that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had overstretched herself in 1971; global dynamics had shifted and India would have been labelled an aggressor in the UN Security Council.

Returning to Zia-ur-Rehman. He seized power in a coup in November 1975. He quickly moved to annul the collaborators (Special Tribunal) order of January 1972, released all convicted and under trials for their role in collaborating with the Pakistani army. Zia reinstituted the banned Jamaat-e-Islami party for a support base and floated his own party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had many anti-liberation elements.

Zia strengthened the political assassination culture, executing hundreds through closed door trials. Judicial assassination of Col. Abu Taher, a highly decorated freedom fighter (who had helped free Zia after his arrest post Sheikh Mujib assassination) was a sickeningly brutal act. Abu Taher, a Bangladeshi patriot with a vision for a modern and progressive country was completely opposed to Zia’s blueprint of making Bangladesh a protectorate of Pakistan.

And the young army officers who killed Sk. Mujib and his family were not free radicals out to save Bangladesh, but part of a large conspiracy to sabotage liberation and secularism. Many of them were sent on diplomatic assignments by Zia, to keep them out of harm’s way.

Ultimately Zia was killed in an attempted coup. 

Historians have a sacred responsibility to delve much deeper into Zia-ur-Rehman. His abhorrent role still remains a riddle to be solved by Bangladesh’s educated to take the liberation forward.

Decades of military rule and rise of religious extremists have harassed Bangladesh. In the past 4 years on more, reasonable secularist voices dared to come out in the open to claim their space, but some of them, as we know, were brutally murdered by extremists.

Today, vote-bank politics seems to have shrunk the space for free independent thinking and secularism. This is a dangerous trajectory for the nation.

Recently, the Bangla Academy attempted to impose a two year ban on the publishing house “Srabon Prokashoni” till public outrage forced the Academy to step back. The reason, according to Bangladeshi media, was that the owner of this publishing house Robin Ahsan expressed solidarity with writers and activists defending the right to free speech, life and liberty (Dhaka Tribune, January 3, 2017).

Several of these activists including atheists were assassinated by religious extremists like the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). This organisation is known to be linked to the Al Qaida. Investigating into these incidents have been tardy. Regrettably, government entities have warned free thinkers not to provoke those opposed to secularism and freedom of speech.

Sadly, news now comes that 17 topics which dealt with educating school children on various neutral topics including one on Hinduism and another of a travelogue to north India, have been deleted in school text books. It is believed that the government has succumbed to the demands of Hifazat-e-Islam, a Madrassa based organisation that believes in a purely Islamic Bangladesh. The organisation believes that these topics are pro-atheism and anti-Islam.

In 2013, Hifazat-e-Islam held huge rallies in the capital city of Dhaka demanding an anti-blasphemy law and changes to text books.

In recent months attacks on Hindu temples and Hindus have sharply increased. This brings back the spectre of 1971 when Hindus and their places of worship were similarly attacked but on a much larger scale. In the bloodshed of India’s partition in 1947 a huge Hindu migration from Bangladesh (than East Pakistan) took place. The next large scale migration of Hindu population occurred in 1971 during the war of liberation.

Even now, Hindus who can afford it, trickle into India. But many Hindus still feel strongly that Bangladesh has always been their home from an astral times and want to remain there.

The textbook rewriting many become an incremental step towards provoking more Hindu migration. This will change the characteristic and secular credentials of Bangladesh and rooting out the vision of the founding fathers of the nation.

What will it do to future of the youth of the nation? To be a part of globalisation and achieve the development agenda of the nation, this can be a major setback.

The youth, the future leaders of the nation must be educated without bias. Clamping down on intellectuals, independent thinkers and a multi-religious and multicultural people is antediluvian.

The government must do a rethink. Accommodating the pressures of obscurantists even as a tactical political move is self-defeating. They will demand more and more.

(The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at e-mail grouchphart@yahoo.com)

TOPICS:BangladeshForeign PolicyPakistanSouth Asia

SOURCE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/05052016-china-vs-india-the-great-arms-contest-analysis/#at_pco=smlwn-1.0&at_si=5890965555ab088c&at_ab=per-2&at_pos=0&at_tot=1

China Vs. India: The Great Arms Contest – Analysis

Locations of China and India. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

As China and India compete for regional great-power status, their respective defence industries play a key role. China appears to have had more success in modernising its arms industry, by introducing more free-market reforms than India has.

                                                      By Richard A. Bitzinger*

“Rich nation, strong army,” was the adage that drove Japanese modernisation – both civilian and military – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today it is a rallying cry for other Asian countries seeking great-nation status. A corollary to this saying might be that “great nations have great arms industries.”

China and India share this outsized ambition to be a “great power” in Asia, if not the most powerful. The two countries have, respectively, the largest and second-largest militaries in Asia, as well as the highest and second-highest defense budgets. And both have huge domestic defense industries, dedicated to providing their armed forces with the best weapons possible.

Domestic Arms Industries

It should not be surprising to know that both nations – India since independence, and China since the founding of the People’s Republic – have given considerable importance to establishing and nurturing large domestic arms industries. In so doing, both countries took very similar routes to defense industrialization. Both countries undertook a soup-to-nuts approach to defence, manufacturing everything from small arms to nuclear weapons. Additionally, they established huge military research and development (R&D) bases so as to control every stage of armaments production, from initial idea to deployment.

The most important goal was the development and manufacture of a broad array of indigenous weapons systems. If completely indigenous production was impossible in the short run, the licensed-production of foreign-designed systems as a second-best solution, but one to be replaced by a domestic solution as soon as possible.

Moreover, both countries placed their faith in government-owned and operated businesses – state-owned enterprises in China, so-called “defence public service undertakings” (DPSUs) in India. In both cases, armaments production was isolated from the rest of the economy, given special protection from market forces as well as a great deal of autonomy in how they operated. It was all about meeting production quotas, and such considerations as efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and even quality control were usually thrown out the window.

Defence Industry Bantustans

Not surprisingly, therefore, by the late 1990s, both the Chinese and Indian arms industries were bloated, inefficient, technologically impaired, bureaucratic monsters, more dedicated to protecting jobs and industrial fiefdoms than developing and manufacturing the kinds of advanced weapons systems their respective militaries demanded. And while both New Delhi and Beijing introduced far-reaching reforms into the rest of their national economies – generally with remarkable results – their respective defence industrial bases remained mired in protectionist, socialist-style industrial bantustans.

To be fair, both China and India, starting in the late 1990s or early 2000s, undertook efforts to reform and transform their defense industries into modern military-industrial complexes. These included injecting limited competition (sometimes from the private sector), paying greater attention to quality control, and giving the customer (i.e., the military) more oversight over defense R&D.

Interestingly enough, communist China has made more progress than democratic India in introducing free-market ideas into its defense industry. In a strictly comparative sense, China has more (albeit still quite limited) competition in defense projects (e.g., two different fifth-generation fighter aircraft development programs); it has opened up more of its defence industry to private-sector funding; it has developed and implemented initiatives to promote civil-military integration and the exploitation of locally available commercial high technologies; and it has more seriously attempted to make local arms producers more responsive to the needs of its main consumers (i.e., the PLA).

In addition, it appears to have been much more successful when it comes to kick-starting indigenous military R&D, acquiring and developing technologies and weapons systems that approach the global state-of-the art, and therefore putting the Chinese military on the path toward greater autarky in arms acquisitions. More than anything, too, China has consistently and aggressively underwritten the modernisation of the arms industry in the form of steadily increasing defense budgets. This improved arms industry is, in turn, paying off in terms of making China a more formidable force to reckon with.

India’s Nehruvian Muddle: Long Way to Go

India’s defence industrial base, on the other hands, appears to be still stuck in its old Nehruvian paradigm of government-led development and growth. While the rest of India appears to be racing into the 21st century, powered by a dynamic, free market-oriented economy, the defense sector remains mired in the country’s socialist and protectionist past.

[ DISBAND MIN of DEFENCE SAVE INDIA ]

Consequently, the nation is still predominantly saddled with a oversized, non-competitive, non-responsive military-industrial complex – capable, it seems, of only producing technologically inferior military equipment, and even then, never on time and nearly always way over their original cost estimates. Moreover, the defense industry, along with government-run R&D institutes, has been able to fend off nearly every attempt at reform and restructuring undertaken by the central authorities.

Given such longstanding deficiencies in its defense industrial base, it is little wonder why India’s drive for great-power status has been so fitful. And while India might yet be able to turn things around when it comes to defense industrial reforms – and Modi’s recent efforts are certainly aimed in the right direction – past experiences are cause for skepticism.

Of course, China’s defence reforms still have a long ways to go. Compared to Western models of armaments production, the Chinese arms industry remains highly statist in form and function. But compared to India, it is the epitome of efficiency and the state-of-the-art. 

In the regional race to become the Great Power of Asia, China is way ahead on points, and not the least because China’s military is increasingly equipped with very modern and very capable, indigenously sourced armaments.

*Richard A. Bitzinger is a Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Military Transformations Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This Commentary is based on a recent article by the author that appeared in Asia Times, which can be accessed here: http://atimes.com/2016/04/india-vs-china-the-great-arms-contest.

TOPICS:

ChinaEast AsiaForeign PolicyIndiaMilitarySouth Asia

SOURCE:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2016-12-07/modern-siege-warfare

        Modern Siege Warfare

                How It Is Changing Counterinsurgency

                                                    By 
                   Michael Jackson, Lionel Beehner                                                  and                                          Benedetta Berti

The military campaign by the Syrian regime in Aleppo and by the U.S.-led coalition in Mosul reveal a strange new paradox of modern combat: the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reclaiming urban terrain from entrenched rebels or insurgents without paying a high humanitarian price. It is “strange” because at first blush, the offensive firepower of today’s armies would seem to work in their favor. Yet, even in the face of heavy artillery and indiscriminate air strikes, under-armed rebels have consistently been able to hold on to large swaths of cities. And civilians trapped in these rebel-held areas, sometimes against their own wishes, are the principal victims.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, for example, has now retaken 75 percent of the Rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo, but it took several years and Russia’s intervention to do so. The rebel's call for a ceasefire today, to allow for the evacuation of civilians, will either prolong the war, if honored, or cause extreme levels of civilian suffering, if not. (At this point, neither Assad nor Russia appear willing to negotiate a ceasefire.)


Siege warfare, of course, predates medieval times. It occurs when an invading army, unable to capture a castle or city outright, surrounds it as a way to starve one’s enemies into capitulation. The tactic is generally associated with conventional wars between countries of relatively equal stature, in which an adversary besieges a city with particular significance for its opponent in order to tangibly impact the military or government, as well as psychologically affect the population. Think Stalingrad or Warsaw during World War II. Siege warfare has also been used over time by rebel armies as a form of irregular warfare against an established government. Anyone who has seen Hamilton: An American Musical knows that George Washington’s ragtag Continental army effectively employed this strategy against the larger and better-trained British forces in Boston and Yorktown. Siege warfare was also used in other civil wars, including during the U.S. Civil War (Vicksburg), the Spanish Civil War (Madrid), and more recently in the Balkans conflict (Sarajevo)—all to mixed success. 

More recently, we’ve seen an uptick in siege warfare by nations against irregular or rebel forces, such as Russia’s counterinsurgency in 1999 in the Chechen capital of Grozny. Technological advances in warfare would appear to favor modern nations and their armies—precision bombing, better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, and so forth. And it would thus be logical to assume that sieges would appeal most to a militarily dominant nation-state fighting an apparently less capable rebel or insurgent group—but current events reveal the opposite. 

As we've seen in Syria, Assad’s approach to defeating the opposition has indeed relied time and time again on siege warfare which, combined with the manipulation of humanitarian aid, has led to a strategy of “siege and starve until submission.” The logic behind Assad’s approach is twofold. He is reportedly short of the manpower he needs to take and hold territory and has to rely more and more on the assistance of non-statutory local and foreign militias. 

Siege warfare has thus emerged as an apparently attractive asymmetric approach—it is an alternative when an aggressor does not have the comparative strength to sack a city outright. Sieges give counterinsurgents a low-cost way to stay on the offensive, while committing fewer resources. Siege warfare is also appealing for counterinsurgents, especially non-democracies unconcerned with “winning hearts and minds” but looking to avoid direct confrontation, keep casualty numbers low, and slowly bleed the enemy into submission.

The second strategic aim of Assad’s counterinsurgency campaigns has been to downright prevent the rise of alternative governance in Syria. Siege warfare, combined with sustained attacks against the civilian population and infrastructure—hospitals, schools, and markets—can either destroy the opposition’s capacity to govern or create a political alternative to the regime. Moreover, because of their deliberately slow pace, sieges tend not to attract the same unwanted international scrutiny as more lethal forms of warfare.

A siege can also create perverse incentives for the besieged. Sieges are not meant to entirely blockade or suffocate a town, city, or area. Even the Syrian regime, as menacing as it has been, has allowed a narrow humanitarian corridor, in some cases, to provide rebels in the east of Aleppo with a lifeline. (Russian and Serbian forces allowed similar corridors in Grozny and Sarajevo, respectively.) But such outlets generally result in freezing the conflict, rather than tilting it toward any decisive victory. Lines of control rarely shift much, and the battle becomes mostly an all-or-nothing campaign of attrition, not one of gaining ground or shifting momentum. This can allow insurgents the time and space to regroup and rearm. Under a siege, even though food and ammo may be in short supply, there are often pauses of sorts, which allow the weaker side to mobilize their forces and boost morale.

Indeed, even in the case of Aleppo, the static defenses between the city’s east and west took years and a disproportionate amount of force to begin to budge. Until recently, imprecise barrel bombs as well as Russian airstrikes had done little to dislodge the rebels in the east. Even the weaponization of aid, by promising ceasefires and humanitarian corridors in exchange for surrender, may be ineffective at bringing the rebels to their knees. In fact, the rebels may be calling for a ceasefire as a tactic to prolong, not end, the war.

Civilians in cities can weather severe hardships and remain holed up nearly indefinitely, even against their wishes. In Sarajevo, for example, a small core of Bosnian soldiers relied heavily on ordinary citizens to take up arms and protect the city. These ad hoc groups of citizen-soldiers organized around existing social structures. In some cases, depending on a city’s political economy, sieges are sustained via underground criminal networks. The scholar Peter Andreas, for example, has written that although most of Sarajevo’s residents suffered mightily throughout the three-year siege, some prospered from the black market economy.

According to the data on twentieth-century warfare that we’ve gathered, the average length of a siege is just under one year (roughly eight months), but the longer a siege drags on, the more it favors the side under siege. In more modern times, according to the data, siege warfare is less militarily effective, especially in cases of civil war or asymmetric conflict. In Syria, a number of towns and smaller cities fell to Assad’s forces through shorter sieges where the stakes were presumably lower, while larger urban centers such as Aleppo became the center of gravity that the regime has only been able to sway through massive reliance on external support.

So how, then, do sieges end? Here it is important to make a distinction between sieges against a state and sieges against rebel groups or insurgencies. In Sarajevo, for example, it was the Bosnian state that was under siege, and the battle ended with the power-sharing accord reached at Dayton, which was something of a win for the Serbians. It is hard to see how such a resolution could be applied in the case of ISIS or Syrian rebels, who never really “owned” Aleppo or Mosul but rather occupied each in a campaign of resistance. With narrow chances of a grand political bargain on the horizon, sieges in Syria have so far ended either with the opposition breaking the siege or with rebel submission, followed by the regime takeover of the previously besieged town or village. In many cases, this takeover has been followed by a strategy of depopulation of the formerly rebel-held urban centers.

In Iraq, ISIS’ approach to siege warfare has alternated resistance with strategic withdrawal. In Mosul, ISIS rebels have dug vast underground networks of tunnels to maintain some freedom of movement and to continue to function, much like the Sarajevo tunnel built by the Bosniaks two decades ago. Additionally, ISIS commanders have already demonstrated their readiness to carry out mass public executions to deter defectors or informants so that they can maintain enough control of the city to meet their objectives. ISIS’ commitment to its cause presents a more significant challenge than, say, physically retaking the city or the population’s own resistance. Yet, on other occasions, the group has proudly affirmed that it is ready to abandon towns or villages and to withdraw to “the desert”—an expression it uses to indicate a strategic withdrawal to the countryside.

The underlying logic of siege warfare is that localized wars of attrition can end by compelling one side to surrender important terrain. This logic breaks down when localized violence, no matter how extreme, has no impact on an insurgent’s calculations. Indeed, the lesson of modern siege warfare during counterinsurgency operations is that, like their conventional predecessors, entrenched rebels can withstand long assaults while maintaining their hold on the population centers they occupy. Sieges today can persist for a long time and even result in the utter devastation of the city before they end. When Russian tanks rolled into Grozny after its 1999–2000 siege, the United Nations called it “the most destroyed city on earth.” Aleppo may well hold that distinction today.

If nations continue to look to siege warfare as a popular approach to dislodge rebel or insurgent groups, as is apparently the case in Aleppo and Mosul, they should not expect these campaigns to be short-lived or, even, to achieve their goal