“Pak’s intellectual massacre of Bangladesh: The past that Dhaka is forgetting”, The Sunday Guardian, December 14, 2025
“On a cold night in December 1971, Bangladesh suffered a loss that went far beyond the immediate human toll. It lost the foundation of its intellectual future. More than 200 of its brightest minds—professors, doctors, journalists, poets—were systematically abducted, tortured and executed by the Al-Badr militia group operating under Pakistan’s military command. This was not a chaotic outcome of war. It was a deliberate, meticulously planned genocide aimed at obliterating Bangladesh’s intellectual backbone and crippling its ability to govern itself in the post-war era. This dark episode remains one of the most brutal attempts in modern history to annihilate a nation’s thought leadership.
The intellectual massacre was a coldly engineered tactic by a military regime desperate to maintain control at all costs. With defeat imminent, Pakistan sought to decapitate the emerging nation’s leadership cadre—those capable of inspiring, educating and organising the future of Bangladesh. This genocidal strategy employed abduction, torture and summary executions to terrorise and silence a generation. While overall death toll estimates for the 1971 Liberation War range in scholarly accounts from 200,000 to 3 million, the targeted killings of intellectuals form a uniquely vicious subset. They reflect an effort to destroy not just bodies but ideas and hopes. The timing, brutal precision and scale speak clearly of systematic, state-led genocide rather than wartime excess.
The international community’s muted response to this atrocity reveals much about Cold War realpolitik and the selective application of moral outrage. Despite credible evidence and first-hand accounts, the world largely turned away, placing power alliances above humanitarian crisis. This diplomatic silence allowed the perpetrators impunity, and its effects have reverberated across decades. Bangladesh has been left grappling not only with loss, but with eroded faith in global justice systems. The failure to hold those responsible to account has frozen wounds in the national psyche, obstructing healing and weakening the moral authority necessary for reconciliation and long-term stability…..”
Read full article at sundayguardianlive.com
