Bangladesh war: history on show

By Daniel Nelson

The photographs of the Bangladesh war of independence currently on show in London reveal what happens when a state turns on its own people.

Yet extraordinarily few people in Britain, even including some young members of the Bangladeshi community, know about the catastrophic events of 1971 when the Pakistan army attacked its own countys eastern wing separated from the west wing by thousands of miles in one of the most absurd and damning legacies of British colonialism.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, injured, mutilated or raped in the 1971 conflict, which culminated in the intervention of India and the secession of East Pakistan and its re-emergence as the independent state of Bangladesh.

As Antara Dattas brief, sharp text accompanying the exhibition says, there is a vast literature on the war, yet this wealth of information ends up dramatically complicating the attempt to separate fact from fiction, emotion from reality, and rhetoric from truth in the course of any attempt to construct a nuanced account of 1971.

For example, says Datta, what exactly was Indias role? Was its intervention decisive, or had the Bangladeshi freedom fighters (the Mukti Bahini) already done the job? What was the role of the non-Bengalis (the Biharis), who have been left in limbo ever since? And of the Razakars, the militia recruited by West Pakistan in its desperate attempt to enforce submission? Was rape systematic? Were there 3,000 rapes or 400,000?

Even more boldly, Dattas comments (taken from his article in Nepals Himal magazine) point to post-war disappointments: The Bangladeshi dream has not quite gone the way it was originally envisioned, he says, in the one statement that smacks of mealy-mouthedness but perhaps was intended to be ironic. (I vividly remember talking to villagers on my first visit to the country and being struck by their sense not just of disappointment at the performance of Bangladeshs politicians, but of betrayal.)

The bitterest irony, Datta suggests, is that Bangladesh has spent many years under military rule, as has Pakistan, and its political history has begun to resemble that of the country from which it seceded.

Weve not made the best of it since independence, Shahidul Alam, founder of Drik Picture Library in Dhaka and co-organiser of the exhibition with Autograph ABP, admitted at the opening.

And noting that history is written by the victors, he pointed out that the government had tried to sanitise the exhibition by pressing, unsuccessfully, for the exclusion of a photograph of guerrillas bayoneting a collaborator, watched by a crowd. Most of the prints are rather small, but the images are vivid, painful, moving, historic (some negatives were buried in order to keep them out of the hands of the Pakistani army).

This is an important exhibition about a recent event whose consequences continue to influence Bangladeshi politics. Rich Mix in Hackney is running a programme of films on Bangladesh in association with the show. I hope other organisations will take advantage of the exhibition to spread information, and perhaps even understanding, of what occurred.

And at a time when governments are fanning fears of terrorism to enhance their powers, it is useful to be reminded of what states are capable of doing to their own people.

* Bangladesh 1971, Autograph ABP, Rivington Place, London EC2A, until 31 May. 3BA. Tel 7729 9200/ info@autograph-abp.co.uk/ Autograph

* Rich Mix Bangladesh film festival

* Drik

* Shahidul Alam's blog